BookFox

Please Visit the New Site!

2007-01-23T15:04:00.000-08:00

BookFox has a New Home hosted by Typepad. It's still in beta, but it'll be improved in good time, in good time.

If you've linked or Blogrolled me, I'd appreciate it if you'd change the http to www.thejohnfox.com. Otherwise, I will hunt you down with Technorati.

Duttons Down

2007-01-18T09:39:00.000-08:00

It's abstractly depressing when you hear the statistics of independent bookstores closing in droves; it's concretely depressing to see favorite bookstores in your town get the axe. First Dutton's of Beverly Hills was forced to shut down; now the news is that the original Dutton's will be remodeled out of existence. The LA Times reports that the landlord, Charles T. Munger, wants to build luxury condos. Apparently, Munger's $1.7 billion net worth isn't enough - he also needs some extra pocket change from rent. The claim is that the condos will be built atop a sleek, modern bookstore, but I have my doubts. One, that a sleek modern bookstore can ever replace the idiosyncratic layout of Dutton's, and two, that once Munger starts remodeling, the plans will change to either eliminate Duttons completely or give it only a token space.

William T. Vollmann and the Principles of Review

2007-01-15T09:43:00.000-08:00

I did not appreciate William T. Vollmann’s review of Anthony Swofford's Exit A in the New York Times Book Review yesterday. It's not that I believe he was wrong about the strengths of Swofford's first book, Jarhead, or even that he was wrong about the weaknesses of Swofford's first novel Exit A. It's because I found the tone of the review to be excessively harsh for a first novel. In my Manual of Book Reviewing Principles (yes, I just made that up), I think it's necessary to reserve different level of harshness for authors in various stages of their careers. For a literary great, if a no-holds-barred takedown is necessary, then so be it. The same goes for a mid-career author, perhaps with employing a pinch more carefulness. But a first time novelist (Jarhead was nonfiction) should be handled with kid gloves. Of course there are flaws in the novel, and Vollmann does the reader a service by pointing out how serious they are, but few first novelists come out of the gate at a sprint (If they do, they are often feted for it). More often, it does take a few novels, as Vollmann points out at the end of the article, to achieve a measure of literary competence, much less greatness.

Now I don't mean that a review of Swofford should be saccharine or cloyingly nice or even avoid saying harsh things. I appreciate a bad review because it tells me not to buy the book (as well as performing the pedagogical task of judging and analyzing types of literary flaws). And since Vollmann obviously didn't like Exit A, I don't mean that he should write empty praises. But his review, through and through, is ruthlessly demeaning (other than the compliments he pays to Jarhead). It's a scarring, eviscerating, decapitation. I think there is some way to express a strong dislike for a novel without a employing such a harsh tone. Ultimately, it's not the content of his complaints that bothers me as much as the dismissive tone in which it is conveyed.

I do appreciate the match-up: Well-established author reviewing beginning author. What I appreciate less is the obverse: beginning author reviewing established author. But both of these unequal match-ups can have their flaws. For the beginning author who is reviewing an established author, the danger is that the beginner critiques the wrong things, misses the point. For the well-established author reviewing the beginning author, the danger is that the review comes from such a high place (with a retrousse nose) that the review feels dismissive.

Vollmann says he "hate[s] to write reviews like this." I believe him. I believe that he was compelled by the poor execution of the prose and the flat characters to deliver a verdict that characterizes the novel as poor quality. But the way and extent to which he did it made first time novelists everywhere cringe over their computers.

Literary Journals

2007-01-10T15:21:00.000-08:00

Most literary journals say they're going to get back to you within 4 months. Some give themselves a little bigger of a window - 4 to 6 months, they say, with that six looming pretty ominously (half a year! What?) Now I know that literary journals are understaffed, underpaid, and near drowning in beige manila envelopes, and on the whole, in a platonic ideal sense, I pay them a great deal of respect. They are holding up the small people, the beginners, the short story world, and that deserves our admiration. Some of the journals, though, do far better in responding promptly than others. For instance, what prompted this post was receiving a rejection slip from Zoetrope - the journal started by Francis Ford Coppola - a high level journal, well respected. I received it yesterday, January 9th. Only trouble is, I sent the short story to them January 5th. That's right, 2006. So they're coming in with a reply at just a couple days over a year. I had emailed them twice during the year, both times at which they told me my story had been logged into the system on March 3rd (two months just to get logged in?) and that the editors were experiencing a backlog. A backlog might be the right term for an eight-month delay. When you take over a year to reply, that's more like an impasse.

You would expect a journal like Zoetrope - one so exquisitely funded, I mean - to be more prompt. Or if they weren't being prompt, to hire more editors. But what I've been observing is that size, reputation, and financial backing have nothing to do with expediency in the journal world. I'll have a tiny journal like Apple Valley Review reject my short shorts in less than a week, while a heavy hitter like Columbia Journal still hasn't responded to a story I mailed out in January 2006 (and neither have they responded to email queries, and my last short story I sent them took a year and a half to receive a reply). On the other hand, Glimmer Train is practically a model for speed. Zyzzyva is another one that has been prompt, and as a plus, Howard Junker's rejection slip is the nicest I've ever read. Kenyon Review and One-Story have both been pretty quick. I've had multiple relative die while waiting to hear back from The Chattahoochee Review (and still have an outstanding story. . .) and Notre Dame Review clocked in at a snail pace of 8 months and 9 months for two separate submissions.

I am aware of all the variables that are at play (and that's why I'm not writing about any journals that I've only sent to once). There's the time of year, there is the quality of my submission (which may take longer if they are considering it), and there is the staffing snafus that leave a journal shorthanded. But the length of time to receive a reply makes barring simultaneous submissions quite a joke, and ultimately, anything over eight months makes me extremely reluctant to send any more submissions.

Return of the Fox

2007-01-09T20:52:00.000-08:00

I'm back from my Belizean honeymoon all fired up for 2007. Whoopee! That's what scuba diving in the carribean and cave tubing will do for you. Now I promised a report on the reading going on down there in Central America, and I always make good on my promises, so here: I reread Richard Ford's Rock Springs (Great short stories set in Montana) started John Banville's The Sea, and got most of the way through Mrs. BookFox's selection, Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. On that last title, I can't remember a time when a non-fiction book threatened my lifestyle so much. I can't eat now. In every little morsel I see Corn: corn starch, corn syrup, and chemicals-I-can't-pronounce-made-from-corn. And even with my organic food, I think (derisively) "this is only commercial organic." Although I couldn't imagine a better book to inform you of all the ways your food is killing you, I can't help but feel sorry for anyone who reads it, simply because they're in for a whole helping of lifestyle-change. And if I thought Mrs. BookFox was picky about restaurants before . . .

One of my readers asked me to report on how the bookstores were down in Belize, so I will. I didn't see any. The only collections of books I found were ones at Hostels and Internet Cafe's and Travel Agents, available on a book-swap basis, and these collections consisted of a heaping mess of irksome pop trash with the occasional tolerable title. Luckily for me, I happened upon quite a good book - a nice hardback of Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss, not only a relatively new title but one that won the 2006 Man Booker prize. I pilfered a loose copy of some James Patterson paperback in my hotel room and traded it for the Desai copy - now that's a great trade.

Mrs. BookFox

2006-12-28T10:28:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow I will double my teampower by marrying a wonderful woman who shall be dubbed Mrs. BookFox (at least online). So please enjoy some of the other book blogs in the blogosphere as I take a honeymoon until January 8th. Best wishes from Belize, where doubtless I will have at least some time on the beach to read, and once I'm back maybe I'll even give a report on what tomes Mrs. BookFox is reading.

What is the Timing?

2006-12-23T13:49:00.000-08:00

Francine Prose gives a very favorable review to Dave Egger's latest novel/memoir What is the What in the Dec. 24th edition of the New York Times Book Review. Unfortunately, Egger's book was released Oct. 25, two months ago. I know they were coordinating it with the podcast interview of Eggers, but isn't two months a bit large of a gap, especially when they're getting review copies? Editor Tanenhaus' taste is quite good, but the timing is kinked.

(Click on the Dave Eggers tag below to read my account of the Los Angeles talk)

Upcoming Books for 2007!

2006-12-22T12:56:00.000-08:00

Not to get too much of a head start on things, but before the Christmas rush I wanted to make a list of books coming out next year.

Anthony Swofford: Exit A [January 9, 2007]. Swofford, author of the memoir Jarhead, turns to fiction in Exit A.

Martin Amis: House of Meeting. [January 15, 2007] For this Gulag-centric book, Publisher's Weekly gave a negative blurb, saying it was "disappointing", filled with "trite cliches" and that his "trademark riffs are all too muffled in his obvious research," while the Guardian review is much kinder.

Norman Mailer: The Castle in the Forest [January 23, 2007]. First novel in a decade.

Chris Abani: The Virgin of Flames. [January 30, 2007] If you don't know this writer, you should. Scroll a few posts down to see what I said about him after going to one of his readings.

Milan Kundera: The Curtain [January 30, 2007]. This is the third part of a non-fiction trilogy on books and reading, containing seven essays, and I've been waiting for it ever since the first of the series, The Art of the Novel. Expect Kundera's trenchant insights into the form and state of the novel - these treaties should be categorized up with Mikhail Bakhtin's The Dialogic Imagination for their ability to categorize and describe the genre.

Jonathan Lethem: You Don't Love Me Yet. [March 07] The Random House blurb makes it sound completely over the top and hilarious. Characters working at a masturbation boutique called "No Shame"? Someone else who steals a kangaroo from the zoo to "save it from ennui?' And it all centers around two characters who fall in love over the phone, one working at a complaint line, the other who calls and complains. How could we resist?

Anne Lamott: Grace. [March 07] Who doesn't like Anne Lamott? Honestly, her how-to-write book Bird by Bird is not only practical, it's knee-slappingly funny. Every semester I teach the chapter "Shitty First Drafts" and every semester students laugh and identify. And it's also refreshing to see her new religious reflections, as this book Grace is the third book in her Thoughts on Faith series (including Traveling Mercies and Plan B)

Jim Crace: The Pesthouse. [May 07] Love, love, love Jim Crace. Quarentine was my first introduction, and all his others have not disappointed. I'll also mention The Devil's Larder, simply because it was such an uncategorizable book, a book that his publisher and editor must not have liked the sound of (what? a book all about food with each story from 500 to 1000 words? How will we market it?), and therefore a book that I think he was brave to write, as well as a book that's very entertaining. Here's the first chapter excerpt for The Pesthouse and here's a short summary in Crace's words: "It's set in America's medieval future and is an inquiry into my - and the world's - love-hate relationship with the United States . . . the first line of the book was going to be 'This used to be America'."

Chuck Palahniuk: Rant. [May 07] Okay, other than the fact that the title seems rather suitable for a Palahniuk novel, as much of his prose resembles a rant, I have to admit that the only novel I've really liked from him was Fight Club. There, I've said it. And no, sorry, even with all the inventive sexuality of Choke it wasn't entertaining apart from that sexuality, and I didn't buy the basis premise of Lullaby that an African culling song can kill people. But I'm putting Rant up here because deep down I somehow like Chuck, maybe because he's hyper-masculine, probably because anyone who writes three novels while working as a mechanic before finally getting one published has a lot of pathos going for him. Here's the gist of the book: "Rant takes the form of a (fictional) oral history of Buster "Rant" [who] becomes the leader of an urban demolition derby called Party Crashing, where on designated nights, the participants recognize each other by dressing their cars with tin-can tails, "Just Married" toothpaste graffiti, and other refuse, then look for designated markings in order to stalk and crash into each other. It's in this violent, late-night hunting game that Casey meets three friends. And after his spectacular death, these friends gather the testimony needed to build an oral history of his short life. Their collected anecdotes explore the charges that his saliva infected hundreds and caused a silent, urban plague of rabies...." Definitely working on the same level of violence as Fight Club, only instead of bodies we have cars. Oh, and plus Rabies.

Don DeLillo: Falling Man. [June 07] Other than 288 pages and the ISBN, I don't know a thing.

Annie Dillard: The Maytrees. [June 07] No, all of you who just sucked in a breath hoping for a non-fiction collection, this one is fiction. I know, I really wanted a non-fiction collection too, ever since I read a superb new essay by her in Harper's a few years ago, post "For the Time Being", which gave me hope that a new non-fiction collection was in the works, but alas, not in 07. And not that her fiction is terrible, it's just that her essays are world-class. It was Pilgrim at Tinker Creek that made me want to become a writer (I have such a beautiful 1st edition - one of my most valued books), but I reckon you can only go Thoreau when you're young, without responsibilities, and as you grow older you it's easier to make fictional adventures rather than take them yourself.

Round Up

2006-12-20T13:38:00.000-08:00

Orhan Pamuk's Nobel Lecture.
Conversational Reading's Epiphany on how Walker Percy's The Moviegoer critiques space (or the lack of a defined, unique space).
Syntax of Things makes a list of Underrated Writers.
Lastly, Pinky's Paperhaus comments on After the MFA's post about whether MFAs should take Lit Crit Class.

On that last link . . .
My opinion is that reading books and critiquing them is good (big news flash, eh?) but that Lit Crit, as performed by an English PHD, is very different than reading and critiquing as a writer. PHD programs are so inundated by critical theory nowadays that they very rarely read as writers - that is, they don't read for the things that the author intends to put inside the book, and there is less and less overlap between authorial intention and critical commentary.

After going through a MA program with a heavy dose of literary theory at New York University (but what program doesn't rely heavily on literary theory for literary criticism?) and then transferring to an MFA at USC, I realized that the two ways of speaking were completely different. In essence, I had to re-learn how to use language (I nearly said utilize instead of use - that would be Theory-speak). I also had to re-tool how I read, and start to read as a writer looking to glean technique rather than a critic looking to trampoline off the original text and create a new one that deconstructs the original.

So it's really impossible to talk about Lit Crit nowadays without referencing and dealing with Literary Theory. And since literary theory is so much a part of Lit Crit, a writer is much better off sticking to an MFA rather than a PHD. A writer is also better off not doing Lit Crit classes in an MFA, unless the workshop is run by a writer rather than an academic (English PHD).

Cage Match!

2006-12-19T10:26:00.000-08:00

From Litkicks:

More bad news: in recognizing the "blogosphere", Tanenhaus disparages us (yet again, yet again) as sloppy writers. I insist to the New York Times Book Review staff that the best bloggers out here (and I volunteer to be on the team) can at least hold our own, and could possibly kick the Book Review's ass in a grammar/style face-off. I hereby offer a challenge.

SMACKDOWN!!!

Bloggers VS Tanenhaus and the NYTBR.

In a pay-per-view match, a tag-team from the blogosphere will take on the fearsome establishment of the New York Times Book Review. See Ed, Max and Mark perform syntactical judo moves with arm twists of grammatical rules on Sam and Rachel.

This asskicking will be dirty.

Chris Abani Reads at the Good Luck Bar in L.A.

2006-12-18T15:37:00.000-08:00

Went to see Chris Abani read at the Rhapsodamancy Reading Series last night. I had seen him twice at the UCLA/LA Times book fair last year, and was impressed by the way he spoke - with gravity, authority, and insight into the way that literature works.

What I knew about him before the Rhapsodamancy reading was that he wrote a prodigious amount of words on a daily basis, that he was hired as an associate professor at University of California Riverside before he even graduated from USC with his PHD in creative writing, that he came from Nigeria and wrote poetry as well as fiction, and that his work often contained Catholic elements.

What I quickly learned during the reading was that he played the saxophone, that the saxophone's name was Janice, and that he could make a song called "Iraqi boy" sound soulful.

Aside from his musical talents, we all got to hear several of his poems, as well as a selection from The Virgin of Flames, his novel which comes out in January 2007 from Penguin. The Virgin of Flames displays Abani's encyclopedic knowledge of Los Angeles, especially downtown, as the main character "Black" is taken on a quest around the city by the angel Gabriel, who appears as a pigeon. It's a search for identity for Black, who is a muralist living in East L.A., and somehow this identity will be found through a transvestite stripper and the Virgin Mary who keeps on appearing. Strange sounding, I know, but Abani's got the prose to pull it off.

Mix Tape #6: The Death of 2006

2006-12-15T09:15:00.000-08:00

While everyone else is busy making lists of Best Books of 2006, I thought I'd respond a little differently and make a literary mix tape of selections from a few of my favorites, all united around the theme of death. Why death? Because I'm morbid.

When I was five years old I tried to kill my sister. All day long I tried to kill her. In the morning I put mothballs in her cereal, but our mother woke up and threw them away, not because she smelled the naphthalene, but because she thought cereal was for trailer park kids, and on the days when she couldn't get out of bed in time - a century's weight of ghosts kept her sleeping or staring at the ceiling in her darkened room until noon many days - she would make us fancy omelets.

I took my sister for a walk and tried to sacrifice her on a stone picnic table in the Severna Forest Coliseum. I knew the story of Isaac. I knew the whole of the Old Testament by then. I raised a smooth stone as big as my fist and prepared to knock a hole in her skull. I waited too long, imagining the blood on the stone and the clump of her hair matted to it. A troop of Brownies came rustling through the tall grass - the coliseum was built by a wealthy Baptist with a passion for Greek tragedy and outdoor theater, but once he moved away it was let to fall into disrepair - and Jemma leaped off the table and ran to dance with them around one of the decaying plaster statues.

I tried to drown her in the tub. Our mother was throwing a party for the elites of our neighborhood, which is to say for everybody, since everyone who lived there was odiously rich, the cat-food magnate having established a tradition of exclusivity in this heavily wooded peninsula on the Severn. She sent us together to the tub, and I washed my sister's hair, just as I had been taught to do, and then when she ducked under the water to rinse I held her there. I had never been taught to drown a person, but I knew just what to do. My hands felt old and wise as she struggled under them. I am sending you to Jesus, I told her. But I remember the moment perfectly, and I knew I was not trying to kill her because I thought it would make her happy.

Chris Adrian, The Children's Hospital

They began to come upon from time to time small cairns of rock by the roadside. They were signs in gypsy language, lost patterans. The first he'd seen in some while, common in the north, leading out of the looted and exhausted cities, hopeless messages to loved ones lost and dead. By then all stores of food had given out and murder was everywhere upon the land. The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond.

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Because last week when I'd called my old friend Juliette and said I was coming to the city to see Nana, she said sure I could stay at her place and naturally I assumed I'd be hanging out there a bit when I got in from the airport and we'd catch up and so on. But when I arrived, some guy, Juliette's newish boyfriend, evidently - Wendell, I think his name might be - whom she'd sort of mentioned on the phone, turned out to be there, too. Sure, let's just kill them, why not just kill them all, he was shouting. Juliette was peeling an orange. I'm not saying kill extra people, she said. I'm just frightened; there are a lot of crazy angry maniacs out there who want to kill us, and I'm frightened. You're frightened, he yelled. No one else in the world is frightened? Juliette raised her eyebrows at me and shrugged. The orange smelled fantastic. I was completely dehydrated from the flight because they hardly even bring you water anymore, thought when I was little it was all so fun and special, with the pretty stewardesses and trays of little wrapped things, and I was just dying to tear open Juliette's fridge and see if there was another orange in there, but Wendell, if that's what his name is, was standing right in front of it shouting, What are you saying? Are you saying we should kill everyone in the world to make sure there are no angry people left who want to hurt anyone? So I waited a few minutes for him to finish up with what he wanted to get across and he didn't (and no one had ever gotten anything across to Juliette) and I just dropped that idea about the orange and said see you later and tossed my stuff under the kitchen table and plunged into the subway. When Juliette and I were at art school together, all her boyfriends had been a lot of fun, but that was five or six years ago.

Deborah Eisenberg, Revenge of the Dinosaurs, Twilight of the Superheroes

Told You So

2006-12-13T17:23:00.000-08:00

As I suspected back in October from the vitriolic reviews by Marilynne Robinson and Terry Eagleton, Richard Dawkin's God Delusion is the most overrated book of the year. Here's the list of the other overrated and underrated books (hat tip to Ed)

Addendum: Rake's Progress on Murakami's political involvement

I-keep-finding-great-stuff Addendum: Foer (as in Jonathan Safran fame) World Domination coming soon.

Dave Eggers reading "What is the What"

2006-12-11T08:03:00.000-08:00

Dave Eggers has a strong streak of social consciousness, as can be seen through his 826 Valencia writing program for kids, the content of You Shall Know Our Velocity, where the character travels the globe looking to give people money, and in the 2005 book Surviving Justice: America's Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated, a book of interviews with people saved from the death penalty. The topic of his new book, What is the What, doesn't swerve from this socially conscious path. It's a novelized biography of Valentino Achak Deng, a survivor of the Darfur genocide, who is part of a group of children known as the Lost Boys because they walked for months trying to escape to Ethiopia. In another example of Egger's social activism, all the proceeds from the sale of What is the What are going to Deng, who has a set up a foundation to use the money to educate the Sudanese.

When I went to the Hammer Museum reading with Eggers in LA last night, I expected an interview with Eggers, but it turned out Eggers was interviewing Deng. The talk was modeled after the three years Eggers had spent interviewing Deng, amassing all the information needed for the book, and seemed to have two purposes: First, to promote What is the What, of course, but secondly, and more importantly, to raise awareness for the genocide continuing in Darfur. Eggers perpetual hand-wringing did not interfere with either of those purposes, although it did make me wonder whether his fingers and palms would start bleeding by the end of the hour long talk.

The novel/memoir follows Deng as he flees Sudan, joins with other boys, escapes lions, heat, starvation, and persecutors, finally escapes the country, spends ten years at a refugee camp in Kenya, and then is resettled in the US just after 9/11, where he endured beatings for being Sudanese (Osama Bin Laden spent a number of years based in Sudan). As Eggers was reading passages, I found his prose was much more minimalist than his other books, very straight-forward and spare, probably trying to match Deng's natural voice.

In the discussion with Eggers, Deng's religious bent also came through as he thanked God for his transfer to the U.S., talked about forgiving those who had tied him up with a phone cord and robbed him, and said that all things work together for a reason. His specific faith orientation was never mentioned, but when I read the book I'm curious to see how much of his spirituality made it in.

A note on Egger's genre straddling: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was a memoir, yes, but with fictional elements. And What is the What is a biography, but it has been novelized, which means Deng and Eggers recreated all the conversations that Deng couldn't possibly remember. Publisher's weekly calls it a "fictionalized memoir" while Booklist says it's "mostly true." In bookstores it's being categorized as a novel, but its marketing strategy is highlighting the real-life basis. In fact, Wikipedia has a colon after What is the What with the addition, "An autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng." What's ironic is that a common technique in creative non-fiction is to re-create plausible dialogue, and those books still are categorized as non-fiction. In fact, what memoir doesn't have re-created dialogue? Unless entire scenes or characters are created, I would think it would still fall in the non-fiction camp. In fact, I would guess that especially in pre-James Frey days, many creative non-fiction books took more license that Eggers takes. But in the aftermath of Frey, we now categorize the book as fiction while selling it to readers by assuring them it's all true.

The Loudest Voice with Glen David Gold

2006-12-07T11:26:00.000-08:00

My good friend Bryan Hurt organized the second Loudest Voice reading at the Mountain Bar in Los Angeles last night. We packed out the second story, despite the sweltering conditions (management refused to turn down the heater) and a bouncer who continued to harass everyone even after they'd been carded. Cody Todd read a number of excellent poems, one of them Pushcart nominated; Katherine Karlin, a Pushcart winner, read a short story inspired by one of the poems read at the last Loudest Voice; and Andrew Allport crooned some tunes.

The highlight of the Evening was Glen David Gold, author of Carter Beats the Devil, who read from his new, as-yet-unnamed novel. He said it had been "kicking his ass for the last six years", and read us the first chapter, which included a lighthouse-manning mother who wished for a disaster to relieve the monotony, her son as a rebellious idealist, and the sighting of a man in a sinking craft at sea who appears to resemble Charlie Chaplin. Afterwards, Gold said that because of the editing process and the period before printing, the novel won't be out for another two years, give or take six months, which is too bad because we all can't wait.

Wendell Berry's New Book

2006-12-05T15:11:00.000-08:00

The irony of writing about Wendell Berry on a computer, especially for a blog, doesn't escape me. Since Berry refuses to own a computer, and has widely (and trenchantly) written about the negative repercussions of technology, there is almost a note of friction simply by covering him in such a technological medium. Nonetheless, it's time to talk about him because he just released a new title, Andy Catlett: Early Travels, his sixth novel set in Port Williams.

I've read little of Berry's fiction, but a lot of his essays, and I have to say I enjoyed his essays more. Since I was introduced to him by way of his essays, it was interesting to read his fiction later and see his ideas of the world embodied in concrete stories. As far as his essays, I've spent a few years teaching various essays of his, especially Feminism, the Body, and the Machine, and students either see him as visionary or moronic, both reactions that mean he's imprinted himself on them.

Berry has been claimed, to some degree, by the Christian community as a writer of their own, because of his familiarity with Christian culture and knowledge of the Bible, but I think he stands a bit outside the Christian camp. What I mean is that he utters a rather prophetic message, or at least the best we can get in these days. As a prophet, he doesn't fit into neat societal grooves. A prophet is always a loner. Despite his religious convictions, or rather because of them, he's had no problem vilifying the Christian community for their complacence in permitting and even condoning environmental degradation. On that note, the richness and complexity of his view of the world is refreshing, albeit uncomfortably challenging. We all need to be challenged though, as iron sharpens iron. Berry's done that for me.

If you're new to Wendell Berry, I would suggest starting with this collection of his essays: The Art of the Commonplace

There aren't many reviews online that I've found of Andy Catlett (readers - any suggestions?) but here's a link to a brief synopsis.

Ask and You Shall Receive

2006-12-04T15:41:00.000-08:00

So since I had scored on a copy of Hear the Wind Sing (unavailable in the States) I thought why not go for broke and ask my loyal readers for a copy of Pinball 1973? It was mostly tongue in cheek, but lo and behold, Viktor JaniÅ¡ emails me the Pinball text. Mucho thanks, my friend, mucho. Also, a grateful nod to The Literary Saloon who directed him to my site. Now to start reading . . .

Haruki Murakami: Hear the Wind Sing

2006-11-24T15:03:00.000-08:00

One of my Loyal Readers, knowing of my penchant for all things Murakami, was able to procure an English copy of Hear the Wind Sing from a drugstore in Tokyo. The novella is perfectly pocket-sized, at four by six inches, and extremely slim, with 127 pages - a format I would like to see more in the States as a way to encourage portable reading. Hear the Wind Sing, along with Pinball 1973, are two early Murakami novels that aren't available in English, so I consider myself lucky to have a copy of one of them (and if anyone wants to send me Pinball 1973, I will reciprocate with all the publicity love I can muster).

When given the novella, I was looking forward to seeing what Murakami themes were present at a nascent stage of his writing career. Since so many of his other novels have shared themes (classical music, cats, coincidence that is actually fate), I wondered if many of these were already formed when he was just beginning to publish, or whether he had progressively developed them as he'd grown as a writer.

One aspect of Murakami that has certainly not changed over the years - although he certainly has refined it - is his tendency to use animals in his stories. The animal that appears most frequently is a cat - in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, a search for a missing cat launches the protagonist on a neighborhood odyssey, while in Kafka on the Shore, a character is cat-telepathic. That's not to say that other animals don't drop into the story, just that a single animal often plays a pivotal role in the narrative and it's often a cat. Even his book titles reflect the preoccupation with animals, with mentions of birds, sheep, and elephants.

When Murakami wrote Hear the Wind Sing, it seemed he had latched onto the notion that animals were key for his fiction, because he gave us a virtual menagerie, but hadn't quite decided that for narrative reasons it might be better to give a single animal a key and recurrent role. So this story moves through someone writing about elephants, a car crashing near a monkey cage, lyrics about giraffes, a story of a man-eating leopard, a psychologist's parable about a rabbit and a billy goat, a cow painted on a car hood, a character named The Rat, and the biologist protagonist who dissects cats. Those are just the main references, and all in 127 very small pages.

There are also a number of similarities with Murakami's later work that don't need excessive explanation: The protagonist is identical to most of Murakami's later protagonists - male, rather isolated, laconic, operating on cruise control, and jobless. The girl that becomes the protagonist's girlfriend has a twin - a familiar motif to the doppelganger-happy Murakami. There is even a couple-page bit on Martian wells on that transport you through time, which will be familiar to readers of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles.

One of the things absent from Hear the Wind Sing, though not the most remarkable thing, is plot. If you're wondering why I didn't give the plot up far sooner - such as in the third paragraph - it was because there wasn't much of a summary to give. The book is about eighteen days in a boy's life before he returns to college, and although events occur, they don't seem very significant (although they are interesting). Each passage in the book is broken by trios of asterisks or a numbered heading, and each passage seems like an anecdote that follows the last chronologically but not in terms of escalating conflict. There are mysteries that are never solved, such as a high school girlfriend that he borrowed an Elvis record from and never returned, and relationships that don't do anything. His relationships with The Rat, his friend, and the love affair with the nine-fingered girl, are not so much resolved as they are abruptly broken off as he resumes his schooling.

The lack of plot felt odd because Murakami novels and short stories usually have a fairly strong plot, even if in some of his longer books like The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle he will venture off to a side-story for a while. Kafka on the Shore is plotted precisely and tightly. Even Dance, Dance, Dance and Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World give the protagonist a single problem, a quest to solve that problem, and a solution at the end. Which tells me that at an early stage of his career Murakami had an excellent grasp on characterization, prose, and relationships, but his talents for structuring a storyline came later.

The most striking absence in the story is the magical realism for which Murakami is so well known. He remains, without much genre-blurring, in the concrete real of bars and bedrooms, cars and restaurants, and doesn't step outside to mess with character's shadow selves or discover parallel universes. In fact, the only hint of something outside "realism" is when the protagonist feels his "body overflowing with some strange energy" after sleeping on the beach with the Rat. Yet this energy is never brought up again. The lack of magical realism, interlaced with a number of familiar themes, makes the novella seem simultaneously Murakami-esque and Un-Murakami.

It is worth a read, especially you're a die-hard Murakami fan, but your only chance to land it might be inter-library loans in the US (and that's a long shot). As far as details to help you on your quest, it was translated by Alfred Birnbaum and published by the Kodansha English Library (originally designed to teach the Japanese how to read in English - which is why the last forty pages have an English/Japanese translation key). It was originally published 1979, but translated in 1987. Good Luck finding it, although Murakami doesn't believe in luck, only fate - so here's hoping you're destined.

Books I'm Thankful For

2006-11-23T07:49:00.000-08:00

In the spirit of thanksgiving, I'll make a quick list of books I'm thankful for. First of all, the red book of poetry my grandfather wrote - it was a book that let me know writing was in my blood; an inspiration, so to speak. Also, Vito Aiuto's collection of poems Self-Portrait as Jerry Quarry, because he was the first friend of mine who published a book, and the poems were funny, irreverent and just plain good. Also, for the book that originally got me writing: Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. It gave me the measure of how much beauty could be created by arranging words on a page.

Remember the beauty in your life this thanksgiving, and give thanks.

Pynchon: Against the Day

2006-11-21T15:42:00.000-08:00

If you haven't yet been seduced by Pynchon mania (or even if you have been unaware of the blogosphere intensity), you should go to the The Elegant Variation and check out all the links and commentary on old Pynchon, New Pynchon and all of the infinite conections.

There. I've thrown you into the pit. Enjoy or die.

Richard Ford's enduring voice

2006-11-21T15:20:00.000-08:00

Richard Ford has been well covered in the blogosphere recently, with the third installment of Frank Bascombe in The Lay of the Land, and that's not territory I can one-up, so I'll cover slightly different ground.

Reading Ford alongside Raymond Carver, as I've been doing the last few months, has been a lesson in the power of minimalism. How the sparse word is potent. But what has stuck in my head from Ford (among many things of course, but some things really stick, you know what I mean), has been the pronouncement he made when announcing the winner of the Story Quarterly contest (I know, rather odd). This was back in 2003, issue 39, and the contest was the Robie Macauley award for fiction. Sylvia Sellers-Garcia won for A Correspondence. This was what he wrote:

A Correspondence' is excellent and is my selection. This story is sustained and serious, and the complex fictive world it reveals is entirely persuasive and pleasingly under the writer's authority. Importantly too, it is a very interesting story to read.

I must have read it twice, perhaps by accident, and it kept with me through the next few days. Those passive verbs! Five in three sentences. By using so many he inverted their usual weakness into a strength. And the trio of adverbs - what a mistake . . . that works.

It has to be a testament to the power of his voice that even a paragraph announcing a contest winner remained with me, haunted me, and echoed about in my head until I gave in to its cadences.

Literary Mix Tape #5: Words

2006-11-21T15:10:00.000-08:00

The devotchka sort of hesitated and then said: “Wait.” Then she went off, and my three droogs had got out of the auto quiet and crept up horrorshow stealthy, putting their maskies on now, then I put mine on, then it was only a matter of me putting in the old rooker and undoing the chain, me having softened up this devotchka with my gent’s goloss, so that she hadn’t shut the door like she should have done, us being strangers of the night. The four of us then went roaring in, old Dim playing the shoot as usual with his jumping up and down and singing out dirty slovos, and it was a nice malenky cottage, I’ll say that. We all went smecking into the room with a light on, and there was this devotchka sort of cowering, a young pretty bit of sharp with real horrorshow groodies on her, and with her was this chelloveck who was her moodge, youngish too with horn-rimmed otchkies on him, and on a table was a typewriter and all papers scattered everywhere, but there was one little pile of paper like that must have been what he’d already typed, so here was another intelligent type bookman type like that we’d fillied with some hours back, but this one was a writer not a reader.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

My legal name is Alexander Perchov. But all of my many friends dub me Alex, because that is a more flaccid-to-utter version of my legal name. Mother dubs me Alexi-stop-spleening-me!, because I am always spleening her. If you want to know why I am always spleening her, it is because I am always elsewhere with friends, and disseminating so much currency, and performing so many things that can spleen a mother. Father used to dub me Shapka, for the fur hat I would don even in the summer month. He ceased dubbing me that because I ordered him to cease dubbing me that. It sounded boyish to me, and I have always thought of myself as very potent and generative.

Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

Right ‘bove my head some’un whisped, Name y’self, boy, is it Zachry the Brave or Zachry the Cowardy? Up I looked an’ sure ‘nuff there was Old Georgie crossleggin’ on a rottin’ ironwood tree, a slywise grinnin’ in his hungry eyes. ¶ ‘I ain’t ‘fraid o’ you!’ I telled him, tho’ tell-it-true my voice was jus’ a duck-fart in a hurrycane. Quakin’ inside I was when Old Georgie jumped off his branch an’ then what happened? He dis’peared in a blurry flurryin’, yay, b’hind me. Nothin’ there . . . ‘cept for a plump lardbird snufflyin’ for grubs, jus’ askin’ for a plunkin’n’a spit! Well, I reck’ned Zachry the Brave’d faced down Old Georgie, yay, he’d gone off huntin’ cowardier vic’tries’n me. I wanted to tell Pa’n’Adam ‘bout my eery adventurin’ but a yarnin’ is more delish with broke-de-mouth grinds, so hushly-hushly up I hoicked my leggin’s an’ I crept up on that meatsome feathery buggah . . . an’ I dived.

David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

NYTBR Podcast Highlights w/ Sam Tanenhaus

2006-11-18T17:38:00.000-08:00

Sam Tanenhaus on the efficacy of the New York Times Book Review:
"Welcome to our podcast, with the caveat that this sick crew long ago abandoned the illusion that we have any insight to offer or even have a clue what we're talking about."

The distorted-guitar quasi-punk theme song opening that tries so hard to be cool (lyrics: "I’m reading for the New York Times Book Review." No, seriously.)

Rachael Donadio, on the sordid love affairs between writers at writers' colonies:
"Yaddo is better for sex, but MacDowells is better for work."

The "jokes" that are so obviously read from a script (perhaps some timing or emphasis might help?)

Rachael Donadio, on how former writers didn't have writers' colonies to motivate them:
"Doestoesky had the firing squad, not the writer's camp."

Edward Champion offers this advice: "Had I been the producer, I would have demanded that all the on air talent have a good glass of wine. Or perhaps I’d pass around a bong."

National Book Award 2006

2006-11-15T22:06:00.000-08:00

So Richard Powers just won the National Book Award for fiction for his novel The Echo Maker. In a field without the literary power-sluggers of the year (like The Road by Cormac McCarthy and Everyman by Philip Roth), Powers was the early favorite (and Mark Danielewski's Only Revolutions was the oddball). Can't wait to read it.

Unbearable Lightness of Being out in Czech!

2006-11-15T14:25:00.000-08:00

I thought our patience was tried by having to wait two years for the translation of The Curtain, but it took the Czechs twenty-two years of waiting to get the Unbearable Lightness of Being translated.

(Via The Elegant Variation)

Salman Rushdie's Defense of Fiction in Haroun

2006-11-15T13:44:00.000-08:00

When you become doubtful of the impact of stories upon culture, Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories will cheer you up. Not because it is so clearly a book that has had an impact on the world (no, The Satanic Verses will fill that role), but because it's a book that discusses, through the vehicle of a magical, childlike story, the power of stories and how easily they can be corrupted. I suppose the corrupted part shouldn't cheer you up - but every book needs to have a villain, and the villain happens to occupy the role of story-corrupter, which cheers me because those who corrupt stories aren't often portrayed as villains, they are feted by marketing agencies and earn millions. Plus, a book for children that also entertains adults is a cheery prospect, not often enough enjoyed.

What makes this book even more entertaining is reading it parallel to Rushdie's life. Haroun's father - the Shah of Blah - is a master storyteller who is co-opted by the politicians to support their political campaigns (Compare to the enormous pressure put on Rushdie after the fatwa to say the Muslim profession of faith - there is no God but God - pressure exerted by the British government) The attacking army in the Sea of Stories wins by promoting freedom of speech between the ranks, for they all argue and their arguments make them stronger (The fatwa was placed on Rushdie's head in the first place because dialogue about the validity of Islam wasn't permitted - instead, an Imam threw down a death sentence for blasphemous speech) The anti-stories that are poisoning the sea of stories are there to control (the law invoked to condemn Rushdie was, ultimately, about controlling his freedom of speech)

The underlying question of the value of fiction - What's the use of stories that aren't true? - is repeated throughout the narrative and finally answered: stories bring his mother back, stories sustain the world (especially the older stories), and this very story is the one that Haroun's father the Shah of Blah wins back the people with.

It's a quick read, and ultimately, one that not only entertains but reminds us how much is at stake for writers and readers.

Will Self: The Book of Dave

2006-11-14T16:19:00.000-08:00

So the latest hyper-idiosyncratic vision of Will Self is out in the form of The Book of Dave. Summary: Deranged cabbie pens manuscript, buries the metal tablets in the backyard, and five hundred years later, after the apocalyptic flood, the tablets are unearthed and become the template for a new religion (sounds Mormonistic, but in the interview in the Telegraph he cites Christianity as his target). Self has always been excellent at creating worlds, whether in the short stories of Grey Area, where in Chest a man slowly dies from a poisonous atmosphere, or in Great Apes, where all of humanity is replaced by apes, and Book of Dave is no exception as he creates an entire world, language included. The language, however, sometimes goes over the top: consider this sentence excerpted by the NYTRB: “Mì awdas R onlë 2 tayk U sarf 2 Wyc, ware U R 2 B landid. Eye no nuffing uv oo U R aw wot U av dun, mayt, so folla ve rools uv mì ferrë an Eyel giv U no aggro.”

Right. Let me run out and buy more of that.

Although I usually like Will Self, I’m warded off by some of the early feedback about Book of Dave – a common complaint seems to be that certain sections are unreadable and that the rants against organized religion are hardly new critiques. But since Self has steadily produced work that I like over the years, I will probably end up reading it at some point.

Extra tidbit: Quote on writing from Self in a Telegraph interview:
“I think that what blocks so many writers is a platonic view of the text - the need to write an ideal. I've always subscribed to the other view that everything is a version. The best I could do at the time.”

On the whole, what he's produced so far has been good enough.

Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners

2006-11-08T15:18:00.000-08:00

I'm very taken by Kelly Link's new collection of short stories, Magic (for beginners), not the least because the title implies the genre: she writes otherworldly, magical stories, lying somewhere between Amiee Bender and Haruki Murakami. To read a story from the collection, check out The Faery Handbag (which won the 2005 Hugo and Locus Award). It has whimsical humor and keeps the magical realism grounded in the concrete details of a tangible world - absolutely bewitching.

Her website (well done - especially like the moving dinosaur!) has info on her touring schedule as well as a thorough bibliography.

Lastly, (seriously, the last link) is a piece of advice Link wrote for the newsletter of the Online Writing Workshop, telling students to write eccentrically and bravely.

The Curtain: Milan Kundera

2006-11-07T18:25:00.000-08:00

Publisher's Weekly couldn't give a more enthusiastic thumbs up for Kundera's last book in a trilogy on the poetics of the novel:

"It's not often that a work comes along that so perfectly distills an approach to art that it realigns the way an art form is understood."

For early takes, check out this early review from a French prof. at UCLA.

Also, Chekhov's Mistress has a short blurb on the New Yorker Oct. 9th edition that featured an excerpt from Kundera's Curtain.

Nota Bene: the date of release from Harper Collins has been moved up to January 30st, 2007.

Richard Dawkins The God Delusion

2006-10-30T14:31:00.000-08:00

So Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion is #4 on Amazon.com right now and #8 on the New York Times Bestseller list. His shill is simple: Belief in God is irrational and religion has caused irreparable damage to society. Unfortunately, his ideas are a bit too simple. Marilynne Robinson, in an essay in the November issue of Harper's, thoroughly dismantles the idea that Dawkins possesses even an undergraduate-level grasp of logic. Her review can be found here, and please, please, do your critical reasoning skills a favor and read her critique before you make the mistake of purchasing his book.
Or, here for a similarly scathing review by Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books.

Mix Tape #4

2006-10-27T15:43:00.000-07:00

An irony, of course, was that as soon as he’d surrendered – possibly as soon as he’d confessed to his depression, almost certainly by the time he showed her his hand and she put a proper bandage on it, and absolutely no later than the moment at which, with a locomotive as long and hard and heavy as an O-gauge model railroad engine, he tunneled up into wet and gently corrugated recesses that even after twenty years of traveling through them still felt unexplored (his approach was spoon-style, from behind, so that Caroline could keep her lower back arched outward and he could harmlessly drape his bandaged hand across her flank; the screwing wounded, the two of them were) – he not only no longer felt depressed, he felt euphoric.

Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

Inside the back room, the woman has crawled out from underneath the man. Now fuck me like a dog she tells him. She grips a pillow in her fists and he breathes behind her, hot air down her back which is starting to sweat and slip on his stomach. She doesn’t want him to see her face because it is blowing up inside, red and furious, and she’s grimacing at the pale white wall which is cool when she puts her hand on it to help her push back into him, get his dick to fill up her body until there’s nothing left of her inside: just dick.

Aimee Bender, “Quiet Please”, in Girl in the Flammable Skirt

But once I’d gotten him to speak out on the open water, once I’d heard our story in his words, there’d been in me my own desire for this, so that as I lifted my skirts to him, helped him myself with his jeans buttons and gently lifted the suspenders off his shoulders, then felt him inside me for the first time in all that while, there rose in me the low moans, the sounds I’d heard our first night together in a hotel in Hattiesburg. There rose up around us the ghosts of my momma and daddy, the sounds they two made, and I couldn’t help but remember our wedding night, couldn’t help but recall the fear I’d felt, the trembling I’d made at his touch, the two of us finally alone. He’d been seated on the edge of the bed, me standing before him, and he undressed me with careful hands, my dress taking months to find its way free of buttons and clasps, his big hands fumbling, trembling of their own. He was young then, only a boy, me only a girl, our bodies new and unexplained, and when finally my dress fell away from around me, and then my petticoats and slip and underclothes, he’d leaned back, taking me in with his eyes. And then I undressed him, and we started in on the long and beautiful task of learning each other.

Bret Lott, Jewel

The Road of Cormac McCarthy

2006-10-24T19:55:00.000-07:00

So I just finished McCarthy's The Road last night. I didn't mean to finish it last night, I meant to start it, but by midnight I was convinced that it was good enough to lose sleep over. And the rest of the book certainly didn't disappoint. Here's a few bullet-pointed thoughts:

The most common dialogue between the son and father is "okay." Rather ironic for such a hauntingly dark postapocalyptic tale.
The book's obsession with food - missing it, finding it, describing it, eating it - turns every meal into a sacramental act, laden with the symbolism of memory and love.
What is most intriguing about this novel is not what is included, but what is excluded - McCarthy writes with enviable restraint. In a lesser novelist's hands, it would have doubled in size to include much more backstory, internals, and explanation of the plague.
The religious element is pronounced - both anger towards God and the child associating his father with God - but mainly at the beginning and end of the novel. God is slipped in subtly in the middle - as curses referencing Christ or as references to Job: "Curse God and die."

The story is told in fragments, and here's an excerpt:

There was a skylight about a third of the way down the roof and he made his way to it in a walking crouch. The cover was gone and the inside of the trailer smelled of wet plywood and that sour smell he'd come to know. He had a magazine in his hip pocket and he took it out and tore some pages from it and wadded them and got out his lighter and lit the papers and dropped them into the darkness. A faint whooshing. He wafted away the smoke and looked down into the trailer. The small fire burning in the floor seemed a long way down. He shielded the glare of it with his hand and when he did he could see almost to the rear of the box. Human bodies. Sprawled in every attitude. Dried and shrunken in their rotten clothes. The small wad of burning paper drew down to a wisp of flame and then died out leaving a faint pattern for just a moment in the incandescence like the shape of a flower, a molten rose. Then all was dark again.

Twilight of the Superheroes: Deborah Eisenberg

2006-10-23T14:58:00.000-07:00

In Deborah Eisenberg’s latest collection of short stories, Twilight of the Superheroes, the reader is always catching up. In more than half of the stories she starts by throwing you in the middle of a scene, sometimes by way of a line of dialogue, and introducing three or more characters in the first sentence or two. For instance, she starts Revenge of the Dinosaurs with five characters:

Hi, Barbara, I said. You’re Barbara?
Eileen, said the nurse who answered the door. Nights.
I’m the granddaughter,” I said.
I figured, Eileen said. Barbara told me you’d be showing up. So where’s that handsome brother of yours?
Bill? I said, I beat Bill? That’s a first.

Or this opening for Like it or Not:

Kate would have a little tour of the coast, Giovanna would have the satisfaction of having provided an excursion for her American houseguest without having to interrupt her own work, and the man whom everyone called Harry would have the pleasure, as Giovanna put it, of Kate’s company: demonstrably a good thing for all concerned.

By the time you’ve unraveled the relational matrix of the original characters, Eisenberg has sped off to fill in back story, to add two or three more names to the many-spoked wheel of relatives and friends, and to ruminate on generational responsibilities (Flaw in the Design) or political repercussions (Twilight of the Superheroes). If you believe, somewhere in the middle, you have finally caught up, there will be a POV shift or flashback to stagger and surprise. If this disorientation of the reader were all she offered, Eisenberg would merely be a difficult writer, not necessarily a talented one. But she ensures that by the end of her stories, you have caught up, which makes the endings resonate.

Although her endings certainly aren’t a neat bowtie. In Window, a woman moves in with a man who has a small child. When the man becomes abusive, she runs away, kidnapping his child, yet the ending forecasts nothing – whether she gets away with it, where she’s going. In Like it or Not, Kate is taken (not entirely willingly) on a sight seeing tour with Harry, but the climax doesn’t even involve her. And it ends on a soft note, which does not wrap up the story as much as it simply portrays the end of an emotionally heightened span of time in her life. With stories this long, you would expect endings to make it towards the pot-of-gold side of the narrative rainbow, to reveal a twist or character turn. But they don’t. These endings don’t cater to plot, they cater to the emotional states of the characters, nipping at a sensitive region of a character’s motivations or state of mind, commenting in an elliptical way on the essence of their internal struggles.

For example, look at the end of The Flaw in the Design, a story about a disgruntled son who blames his father for the corporate greed ruining the earth, told from the perspective of the wife who has an affair. This last paragraph shows the scene just before the first paragraph, on how they came to be having an affair:

We had taken the taxi, had stood at the desk; we had done it – the thought kept tumbling over me like pealing bells as we rose up in the elevator, our hands lightly clasped. And we were solemn, and so happy, or at least I was, as we entered our room, the beautiful room that we might as well have been the first people ever to see – elated as if by some solution, when just minutes before we’d been on the metro platform, clinging fiercely, as if before a decisive separation, the way lovers do in wartime.

Between the beginnings and endings, these six stories are extremely long, although that isn’t a criticism. It’s just that they are longer than what is conventionally expected for short stories, which means they are in the no-mans-land between short stories and novellas. In this space Eisenberg still fleshes out remarkably complete human beings, welts, warts and all. Her characters often belong to the jet-set demographic, trafficking in the exclusive regions of the country, like plush lofts in Manhattan or sight-seeing along unnamed coasts. They often are disenfranchised – from their families, from knowledge of themselves, from hope. Bearing names like Giovanna, Matsumoto, Lucien and Alma, they seem to have their complete histories and futures implied inside a few scenes, a few bits of dialogue. In Some Other, Better Otto, the protagonist Otto is a gay musician and grammar nazi who cares for a sister so brilliant she had an episode and was institutionalized, and interacts with a little girl, Portia, who refuses to talk except to the microphone of her fist. Add in six or seven additional personas with character tags of their own, as well as a thanksgiving dinner, and you have an inter-relational maelstrom of delightful proportions.

It was challenging to wrap my head around these stories. They are difficult, but that is their virtue. These are the type of stories you must read at least twice: once just to get abreast of their accomplishment, the second time to try to unravel. To truly give them justice, they deserve many more readings than that.

Janet Fitch Reading in LA

2006-10-20T15:03:00.000-07:00

Despite that Paint it Black is a book with suicide at its center, the talk at the Los Angeles Central Library was refreshingly funny. Rachel Resnick kept it light by cracking jokes and by her repertoire of hyperbolic expressions (laughing face, shocked face, impressed face). Janet Fitch was composed, thoughtful, wearing a black leather skirt with high heels, and her mother and father were there to support her (her mother was listed as "Mother Fitch" on the reservations list). Other than an audience member that demanded to know whether White Oleander was based on Fitch's relationship with her mother and subsequently inquired about her marital status, the night went smoothly. Here were some of my favorite quotes from Fitch during the evening.

On developing characters:
"I am a very ear-driven writer; I hear a character before I see them."

On the order of writing:
"Plot comes last. Hearing the character comes first. The ending is also last because the ending is what shapes the meaning."

On how just-published writers claim not to have unpublished books in the drawer:
[pantomimed a growing nose] "That's just a crock."

On her inspiration for depressing tales:
"You don't get to decide the substance of your creative source. I just seem to have come from a dark place. When I was young, my brother would read me Edgar Allen Poe. So I didn't sleep from when I was six until I was twelve."

On making suicide realistic:
"One thing I did was to go to web sites for bereaved people every day or two, to remind myself, this is happening right now and I need to get it right."

On how she picked a type of suicide for her character Michael:
"I really went through the metaphorical connotations of suicide: someone who takes pills wants to sleep. Someone who hangs themselves is suspended. Someone who drowns wanted to drown themselves. Michael - with profound self-hatred, and because he's an intellectual - shoots himself in the head."

On having a moral obligation to her readers:
"How do you reconnect people to the entire range of human possibility? They want to play happy all the time and when they feel something else they feel like they're doing something wrong. So we need the whole range of human emotion. My moral obligation is to reconnect people with being human."

(Not) The Best Christian Short Stories: Bret Lott, Editor

2006-10-17T22:36:00.000-07:00

I kind of liked some aspects of Bret Lott's Jewel (the lyrical voice, the emotional connection to the characters), so when I saw he had edited a collection, I decided to give it a try. The title made me wonder if anyone was creating good literary works that dealt with transcendent themes, but Lott terrible selections responded with a resounding no. What he promises, in the introduction, is literary fiction. What we get is half-craft moralistic fluff. Why is it that so many religious authors resort to the moralistic fable? Why is it that they refuse to make characters actually do something evil? (unless they are roundly punished in the end) What can't they curse like real human beings? (saying that a character said a word beginning with "D" and ending with "it", is not, as one of these authors assumes, transgressive) Where are the Flannery O'Connors of today?

In fact, Lott picked such horrible selections (on some of these, the prose sounds like something straight from a young adult series) that it made me wonder whether the publisher wanted only to capture the evangelical market, rather than anyone who is near literate. The answer did lie in the publisher: WestBow is a publisher for "Christian" novels, which means they did want him to select goodie-goodie stories free of any nasty elements that might ruffle conservative feathers. Westbow even sponsored the contest that one of the included stories won, for which they promised a book contract. The question then is why Lott would agree to put his name on a collection like this - perhaps his taste is not quite as good as it seems. In the end, I guess to get a real anthology of Christian stories, you need a secular publisher to publish it.

Joyce Carol Oates: Landfill

2006-10-16T15:25:00.000-07:00

So Joyce Carol Oates based her fictional story Landfill, published in the October 9th issue of the New Yorker, on the real-life death of a student attending The College of New Jersey (TCNJ). So what? Professors at TCNJ have flamebroiled her with charges that she felt no pain in reawakening the trauma of the family. Regina Kene wrote in an email to Oates: "You so flimsily disguised the true College of New Jersey story upon which your fictionalized account is based, and used your imagination so cruelly, that it can only add to the overwhelming pain the [Fiocco] family has already suffered." She added in a later interview: “It could not do anything but bring back horrible memories." So Regina, do you read much fiction? I’m guessing not, because you teach for the department of sociology and anthropology and publish articles with titles like: "The Colored, Eco-Genetic Relationship Map (CEGRM): A Conceptual Approach and Tool for Genetic Counseling Research." Which leads me to believe you’re sincerely concerned about the condition of this poor family in your community, but perhaps you’ve maybe missed all the recent fiction books about 9/11 (check out six novels about 9/11 here). You'd think books like that could bring "bring back some horrible memories." But maybe you'd like to condemn all those too.

Of course, JCO doesn’t escape all blame. The problem is not that she used her imagination cruelly, just that she didn’t use it enough. Her defense of herself is likewise pitiful: "Most of my short fiction appears in literary magazines like Virginia Quarterly Review, Yale Review, Conjunctions, etc., which are read by a small and exclusively literary audience," she said. "If the story had appeared in one of these, it would have passed unnoticed." Oh, so it’s just if someone finds out and gets angry? Great ethical reasoning; your attempt to preserve public image will surely win you the Nobel. The worst response from JCO came from an email she sent to the Associated Press just after the affair broke, in which she compared the school’s criticism to the Muslim fundamentalists who issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie for his “The Satanic Verses.” Sorry Oates, but there might be a few small differences here. You hardly have to hide in safehouses for the next decade. You don’t have the federal government demanding an apology to release international tension. You aren’t fearful for your LIFE.

Although, on the whole Oates is right about this. She should be able to take a real-life event and fictionalize it, even if a few people who see the connections get miffed.

Mix Tape #3

2006-10-13T14:07:00.000-07:00

On offering to help the blind man, the man who then stole his car, had not, at that precise moment, had any evil intention, quite the contrary, what he did was nothing more than to obey those feelings of generosity and altruism which, as everyone knows, are the two best traits of human nature and to be found in much more hardened criminals than this one, a simple car-thief without any hope of advancing in his profession, exploited by the real owners of this enterprise, for it is they who take advantage of the needs of the poor. When all is said and done, there is not all that much difference between helping a blind man only to rob him afterwards and looking after some tottering and stammering old person with one eye on the inheritance. It was only when he got close to the blind man’s home that the idea came to him quite naturally, precisely, one might say, as if he had decided to buy a lottery ticket on catching sight of a ticket-vendor, he had no hunch, he bought the ticket to see what might come of it, resigned in advance to whatever capricious fortune might bring, something or nothing, others would say that he acted according to a conditioned reflex of his personality.

Jose Saramago, Blindness

The next day Slater did not answer his telephone and I became concerned that he really might have died. Then, on the off-chance, I checked with the desk and discovered he and his luggage had departed the hotel. No message. Just gone. ¶ I immediately felt like someone who has been passionately seduced, fucked, and abandoned. This is not a pleasant feeling at the best of times and all my old animus against Slater came surging back. I was far too angry to read and far too agitated to sleep, and this was how I came to be inspecting the Indian haberdashers on Batu Road.

Peter Carey, My Life as a Fake

The boy’s mouth was set angrily. “I hope you don’t think,” he said in a lofty indignant tone, “that I believe in that crap! I may sell Bibles but I know which end is up and I wasn’t born yesterday and I know where I’m going!” ¶ “Give me my leg!” she screeched. He jumped up so quickly that she barely saw him sweep the cards and the blue box into the Bible and throw the Bible into the valise. She saw him grab the leg and then she saw it for an instant slanted forlornly across the inside of the suitcase with a Bible at either side of its opposite ends. He slammed the lid shut and snatched up the valise and swung it down the hole and then stepped through himself.

Flannery O’Connor, “Good Country People”, A Good Man is Hard to Find

Man Booker Prize

2006-10-10T16:21:00.000-07:00

Kiran Desai won the Man Booker Prize for her novel The Inheritance of Loss. She's 35 - the youngest writer ever to win, but youngish-ness is what you have after eliminating David Mitchell and Peter Carey. The Indian-born writer's mother, Anita Desai, had been shortlisted three times but failed to win. Now we've seen examples of judges privileging certain books because an author's last shortlisted book failed to receive the prize, but not so often have we seen generational debt repayment - they didn't give it to her Mom, so she might as well receive it. But perhaps I'm being overly callous - I haven't even read the book. Ah well. For those of you curious of her style, here's a short excerpt:

Sai, sitting on the veranda, was reading an article about giant squid in an old National Geographic. Every now and then she looked up at Kanchenjunga, observed its wizard phosphorescence with a shiver. The judge sat at the far corner with his chessboard, playing against himself. Stuffed under his chair where she felt safe was Mutt the dog, snoring gently in her sleep. A single bald lightbulb dangled on a wire above. It was cold, but inside the house, it was still colder, the dark, the freeze, contained by stone walls several feet deep.

Brits imitate NY Times

2006-10-10T16:00:00.000-07:00

The New York Times poll-cum-popularity-contest that elected Toni Morrison's Beloved as the winner now has an copycat. The Brits couldn't resist the allure of staging their own survey, and canvassed famous authors for their "best of" between 1980 and 2005. Here's the Guardian article. Much as I think the contest misses the mark of nailing down a hierarchy of talent or "goodness", it still manages to reveal our cultural preferences and valuations, so here:

First place: Disgrace (1999) JM Coetzee

Second place: Money (1984) Martin Amis

Joint third place: Earthly Powers (1980) Anthony Burgess

Atonement (2001) Ian McEwan

The Blue Flower (1995) Penelope Fitzgerald

The Unconsoled (1995) Kazuo Ishiguro

Midnight's Children (1981) Salman Rushdie

Literary Mix Tape #2

2006-10-06T14:29:00.000-07:00

As I watch her now, three hundred and ninety-three pounds and gaining by the day, her frame so vast she has not been able to pull it upright in more than two months or to fit through any doorway without first having to take the door off its hinges, her breath so stormy it makes the dogs bark all the way up and down the street where she now lives with her sister in Los Angeles, and sets the piano in their neighbor’s house playing mad tunes at odd hours of the night, it is impossible to believe that my mother, Roxanna the Angel, was once a young woman with watercolor eyes and translucent skin, that she could stop the world with her laughter and compel men, my father among them, to follow her across an entire city without knowing why they chased her or what they would do if ever she stopped and answered their calls, that she had been so light and delicate, so undisturbed by the rules of gravity and the drudgery of human existence, she had grown wings, one night when the darkness was the color of her dreams, and flow into the star-studded night of Iran that claimed her.

Gina Nahai, Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith

To assuage Tereza’s sufferings, he married her (they could finally give up the room, which she had not lived in for quite some time) and gave her a puppy. ¶ It was born to a Saint Bernard owned by a colleague. The sire was a neighbor’s German shepherd. No one wanted the little mongrels, and his colleague was loath to kill them. ¶ Looking over the puppies, Tomas knew that the ones he rejected would have to die. He felt like the president of the republic standing before four prisoners condemned to death and empowered to pardon only one of them. At last he made his choice: a bitch whose body seemed reminiscent of the German shepherd and whose head belonged to its Saint Bernard mother. He took it home to Tereza, who picked it up and pressed it to her breast. The puppy immediately peed on her blouse.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

In art school a decade ago I learned that the best way to memorize a landscape is to close your eyes for several seconds and then blink in reverse. That is, open your eyes just briefly, allowing those images before you to burn themselves onto your retina in an instant rather than with an extended gaze. I mention this because this is essentially the same principle that is in operation when one’s world is illuminated by the nuclear flash. ¶ This flashing image is a recurring motif in both my everyday thoughts and in my dream life. My most recurring flashing image is of me sitting on the top floor of a 1970s cement apartment building along the ocean waterfront of West Vancouver, on the 20th floor, looking out over the ocean. One of the people in the room with me says “Look,” and I look and see that the sun is growing too large too quickly, like a Jiffy pop popcorn foil dome, glowing orange, like an electric stove element. And then I am awake.

Douglas Coupland, Life After God

Allen Ginsberg's Martifice

2006-10-06T13:57:00.000-07:00

On November 1st, the 50th anniversary of Howl, De Capo Press is releasing poems and journals from Allen Ginsberg. If nothing else, they've chosen a provocative title: The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice. The title came from a notation on one of Ginsberg's notebooks that combined the words Martyrdom and Artifice into Martifice. The book is rich with comments and analysis of Ginsberg's friends, literary and otherwise, including this bit about Jack Kerouac that's intriguing because of his estimation of Kerouac and himself:

"I think Jack is the greatest writer alive in America of our own age - yet Harcourt rejected his first version [of On the Road] as being too personal and subjective - not worked out in objective story - which feeling I went along with. Now this second version seems to them a garble of unrelated free associations. I think I will stick by Jack, though I haven't seen the pages yet, only snatches in his letters. He understands me - so he must be great."

Poetry buffs and dilettantes, check it out - there's 65 poems that haven't been published elsewhere and the book clocks in at a hefty 515 pages.

Literary Squabbles

2006-10-05T23:45:00.000-07:00

Salman Rushdie lashed out at John Updike in a recent interview from The Guardian:

"I don't subscribe to the very predominantly English admiration of Updike. If you take away Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest, and some of the short stories, there's a lot of ... slightly ... garbage. Think of The Coup! The new one [Terrorist] is beyond awful. He should stay in his parochial neighbourhood and write about wife-swapping, because it's what he can do."

To be honest, all the enmity at the top echelons of the literary world becomes quite tiresome. Why do writers always have to denounce other writers, dismissing their skills as illusory and their oeuvre as crap? It's obviously an ego thing, especially in this case, as Updike had unfavorably reviewed Rushdie's last book Shalimar the Clown. I mean, it makes for great fun for us on the sidelines, to watch literary greats spar in the ring, but sometimes it feels less like sparring and more like an alley fight with groin shots and sucker punches. Which can also be fun, albeit eventually wearisome.

Of course, Rushdie seems to be a lightening rod for this type of thing. In July it was the Brick Lane fracas with Greer. And V.S. Naipaul virtually denounced any sympathy for Rushdie during the fatwa. I could go on.

Literary Mix Tape #1

2006-10-04T13:18:00.000-07:00

This is the first installment of a new feature on BookFox. From time to time I'll select a chunk of prose from several writers along a particular theme and post it on the site. The goals of this project are the same as the musical mix tape - to introduce my readers to new voices, to revel in the skill of well-known writers, and to play with ironic, complementary, and paradoxical juxtapositions. Read for kicks and giggles, read as exploration.

Literary Mix Tape #1: Bodies

The sticks flashed, the players hurtled past him, grunting and cursing. He stood there in the weather, a physical presence, chilled, his hair wet, yet he wasn’t there at all. He was reliving an episode from the previous year when his son had been the star player on the team, a moment like this one, the field slick, the players’ legs a patchwork of mud, stippled flesh and dark blooming contusions. Chris had the ball. Two defenders converged on him, and Jimmy – the coach, the father – could see it all coming, the collision that would break open the day, bone to bone, the concussion, the shattered femur, injury to the spinal cord, to the brain. The sound of it – the sick wet explosion – froze him so that he couldn’t even go to his son, couldn’t move. But then, a miracle, Chris pushed himself up from the icy turf, stiff as a rake, and began to walk it off.

T.C. Boyle, “When I Woke Up This Morning, Everything I Had Was Gone”, in Tooth and Claw

My father’s right arm ended not in a hand but, at the elbow, in a bony swelling. Think of a pollard tree in silhouette. That was my father’s stump. Its skin was drawn tight across the bone and tucked frowning into the hole left by the missing lower joint. The indented scar was like those made in the ice by boys with stones – a small uneven puncture, wet with brackish pus. The arm was rarely dry or free from pain. As he grew older it would seem (he said) that his wasted and unsummoned semen had found less rewarding outlets from his body than he would have wished. He picked it rolled and spongy from the corners of his eyes after sleep. It gathered on his tongue and stretched into stringy tresses when he laughed or spoke. It formed white blisters on his lips, on his thighs, between his toes. It dried and hardened in his nostrils. And it formed pools of sap in the vents of his severed elbow.

Jim Crace, The Gift of Stones

Months of injecting this stuff have given my body an odd aspect, as with every shot more chalk is deposited along the walls of my veins, much in the manner of earth being piled up to form either an embankment or a cutting around a roadway. Thus the history of my addiction has been mapped out by me, in the same way that the road system of South-East England was originally constructed. ¶ To begin with, conscious of the effect, I methodically worked my way through the veins in my arms and legs, turning them first the tannish colour of drovers’ paths, then the darker brown of cart tracks, until eventually they became macadamised, blackened, by my abuse. Finally I turned my attention to the arteries. Now, when I stand on the broken bathroom scales and contemplate my route-planning image in the full-length mirror, I see a network of calcified conduits radiating from my groin. Some of them are scored into my flesh like underpasses, others are raised up on hardened revetments of flesh: bloody flyovers.

Will Self, “Scale”, in Grey Area

Janet Fitch's Sophomore Effort

2006-10-03T17:57:00.000-07:00

Janet Fitch is a very nice woman, although she's a bit too particular about her tastes in literature (It's one thing to dislike E.L. Doctorow, it's another to insist he can't write a sentence). On the sentence level, however, we find a key distinction between her bestselling White Oleander and her newest book Paint it Black. White Oleander had luxurious prose, sentences to cuddle up with at night. But Paint it Black sports much starker writing, words stripped raw by grief. Although the new voice fits the topic (a suicide and the aftermath), it's simply not the voice she excels at.
The content of PIB doesn't feel as strong as WO either. In the first few chapters of PIB, the protagonist vacillates between sorrow and fury so often that the intended effect finally wore off. This vacillation might have been pitch-perfect for what happens in real life, but it just didn't work on the page.
Oprah probably won't pick this one up, but that's okay. Fitch has gotten past the sophomore hump and can start on her next offering. And besides, PIB hit 19 on the New York Times hardcover bestseller list. She could be doing worse.

Update: Fitch just rose to #1 on the L.A. Times bestseller list on 10/8 (from five last week).

Edward P. Jones: Live in L.A.

2006-09-22T13:06:00.000-07:00

Last night, I saw Edward P. Jones at an ALOUD event across from the Disney Concert Hall in downtown LA. For a man who grew up poor in Washington D.C. with a mother who couldn't read or write, and yet won literary acclaim later in life, including a MacArthur fellowship and the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Known World, he dressed the part: he wore crinkled blue jeans with black socks and dress shoes. On the whole, Novelist Susan Straight did well at using humor and personality to keep the talk interesting, except that she had a few too many cappucinos and on occasion verbally bulldozed the taciturn Jones. Here were some of my favorite quotes from Jones.

On why he makes up stuff rather than using stories people told him:
"I was born with an imagination so I might as well use it. When I'm old and addled, then I'll steal from other people."

On love:
"I am a pretty pessimistic person."

On (not) growing up:
"We never get over being children."

On Writing:
"There are days when I am feeling sad, but if I get in a good two or three pages, the rest of the day is sunshine."

His latest collection of stories, All Aunt Hagar's Children (The title came from an old term for black people) was released September 1st.

The Rein of Michel Houellebecq

2006-09-19T17:09:00.000-07:00

It's been four months since the French writer Michel Houellebecq's latest novel, The Possibility of an Island, was released in English, and eight years since his first novel Whatever appeared on the scene. In that time he's managed to make quite a bad boy image for himself, primarily by the excoriating insults in his novels (in Platform a character asserts that Islam "could only have been born in a stupid desert, among filthy Bedouins who had nothing better to do — pardon me — than bugger their camels.") In addition, he's managed to act like an ass in person, even in his own documentary (in one interview he got smashingly drunk and demanded sex from the female interviewer, and in his documentary he's always alone, swigging off a bottle.)
But not since Camus has a French novelist received such widespread popularity, and the sales come partially because of his willingness to sacrifice every sacred cow. He debases women (only slightly more often than men), critiques religions (especially Islam), and offers a selfish, despairing view of the world, but that's precisely what people find attractive about him. His ideas are attractive because he tries so hard to be unattractive. His ideas are also attractive because no one else is saying them.
He's been characterized wrongly as a nihilist. It's simply not true, and what disproves it are two books that form the pillars of his work. The Elementary Particles, which was his first big hit, and his last book, The Possibility of an Island. These two books are hitting on the same theme: that technology cannot save us, and we should return to a primal state. This repeated theme (among many other reasons) is why he's called a novelist of ideas. Platform and Whatever are minor books, deserving a reading only if you're a die-hard fan, but if you want the heart of this misanthropist, read the two pillars. He's acerbic, difficult to swallow, and often offensive, but his original training in poetry comes through in well crafted prose and his ideas, told entertainingly, should be dealt with.

Milan Kundera: The Curtain

2006-09-08T16:56:00.000-07:00

Milan Kundera's new treatise on the novel - The Curtain - is being published in English in February 2007. Don't miss this. Because not only is Kundera a master of the novel himself (Unbearable Lightness of Being, of course, but what about the Joke and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting?), but his analysis of the state of the novel is uber-insightful. I read The Art of the Novel about five years ago . . . and then read it again . . . and again, (speaking of that - I need to reread it again) and passed it off on my brother and anyone else who ventured within earshot. I'm just surprised, given Kundera's fame, that they've taken so long to translate it. It was originally published in French in April 2005, and is available in Spanish, German, Polish, Greek and Croatian. Croatian? I didn't know they had such a lively literary community that they beat out the English speaking world. Probably contract wrangling and stiff-necked publishing houses at fault, but at least HarperCollins is leaving all that to history.

Gilead

2006-09-04T07:22:00.000-07:00

I found Marilynne Robinson through an essay she wrote in Harper's critiquing evangelical religion. It was so dead-on I just had to read her second novel, Gilead. She pulled off a lovely voice, from a man at death's door writing letters to his son, and also managing to have quite a few theological rumorings and speculations. It's written in snatches, like Veronica by Mary Gaitskill, and somehow a large percentage of sections left me teary eyed. Other than Bret Lott (I've read Jewel) and perhaps Anne Lamott, I don't know of many other Christians who are writing literary fiction - there are slates of them churning out "religious" thrillers and romances, but those disgust me.

The Man Who Told Oprah She Chose "Shmaltzy, One-Dimension Books"

2006-08-28T16:19:00.000-07:00

This September, Jonathan Frazen breaks new ground with a memoir: The Discomfort Zone. I'd like some more fiction from him, but perhaps since much of his fiction (especially The Corrections) came from personal experience, there really isn't that much of a difference in terms of themes. I've read excerpts from the new non-fiction, most notably his story of high school shenanigans regarding the flagpole, but rumor has it from GQ magazine that in this memoir he describes losing his virginity . . . as a college senior . . . writing in the third person. More power to ya, Frazen, for transparency, but I bet it'll be nice to hide behind the curtain of fiction after this book tour.

The Silence of Gunter Grass

2006-08-18T13:36:00.000-07:00

The New York Sun published a two-part open letter to Gunter Grass in response to his recent admission that he was a part of the Waffen SS during World War II. The open letter is heartwrenching; never have I read a letter so full of choken tears and resentment. Daniel Johnson, the author of the letter, takes Grass to task for his hypocrisy over these last 60 years, as Grass has maintained an anti-Western attitude, an anti-Israeli attitude, and remained a public intellectual figure while never admitting his role in the Nazi regime.

Grass' silence, certainly, is reprehensible. But I certainly understand it. I can fully understand why he has kept silent. As he says, shame has been responsible. Less clear, however, is why he chose to reveal it at this time. Or, perhaps, this is too clear - he wishes to maximize sales of his new memoir.

I do take issue with the way people have condemned him: they look back at the atrocities of WW II, which has become less a historical event than a metonymn for evil, and unilaterally condemn anyone even tangentially connected with that evil. I think that is the wrong approach. In judging others, you must look at it from an existential perspective: Gunter Grass, at that time a seventeen year old, full of the propoganda of the Nazi party, wished to defend his country, and was probably unaware of the scope of the holocaust (if not its existence). A wicked decision, yes; but could we, in that place and at that time, and at such a tender age, chosen differently?

It gives me even more sympathy for him as I read The Tin Drum. In what sense is Grass the dwarf/child Oscar, pounding away on his drum as the atrocities go on? And how badly must his secret have been burning within him all these years, as he pens character after character with secrets of their own?

Man Booker Prize

2006-08-15T14:30:00.000-07:00

The Longlist (19 books) is out for the Man Booker Prize, and boy do I want David Mitchell to win (he's given a 6 to 1 chance by betting companies!). Peter Carey's won it twice already, so honestly - that's enough. And besides, he's often overrated (sorry Carey fans). Even though Mitchell's Cloud Atlas is much better than his latest, Black Swan Green, he's a fantastic writer and should be honored as such.

For more info, check out The Millions or The Literary Saloon.

Harper's Serialization of J. Robert Lennon

2006-08-14T12:14:00.000-07:00

It's been fifty years since Harper's Magazine published a serial novel, and an abridged version of J. Robert Lennon's novel Happyland has won the honor. Although Harper's has fiction in every issue, at least a single short story, it seems serialization gives more weight to fiction, a weight desparately needed after most magazines have relegated fiction to little-read journals and the Atlantic Monthly has recently decided to drop their short story slot. And I admit - I'm intrigued by Lennon's story of a doll-maker's takeover of a small town. Installment #3 just came out in the September issue, and I can't wait to read the rest.

On the webzine Being There Lennon admits that as he wrote it the story turned into a satire on the current political climate, with the protagonist Happy Masters representative of Karl Rove. In the interview he says, "It’s about people feeling powerless against someone who is a leader that they feel they did not choose." The political interpretation, however, I feel is one that he has projected on the storyline because of his admitted obsession with hating the Bush administration. The novel could be read just as well by interpreting the corporations as the evildoers - the business conglomerates that can refurbish the landscaping of a city according to their own desires, making it as fake as dolls and dollhouses. This Walmartization of America, I think, it what Happy Masters represents, and it's an interpretation according to Occam's Razor - it's much simpler than the political take. But of course, this is only how I read it, and better books often allow for more interpretations. This is why Jose Saramago's book Blindness was excellent and his follow-up Seeing hit below the mark: because Blindness allowed for so many metaphorical interpretations while Seeing hammered a single refrain. So perhaps it's better that Lennon allowed some space for interpretation.

Question for my readers: Anyone out there know how many more chapters there are in the novel?

Pynchon Update

2006-08-12T17:48:00.000-07:00

The new Pynchon book, Against the Day, comes out December 5th. And not to mix metaphors, but it's Russian-Novel/Ayn-Rand sized, weighing in at the sumo-like bulk of 1040 pages. The description of the book - which he wrote himself - betrays his idiosyncraticities:

With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.

As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it's their lives that pursue them.

Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they're doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction.

Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck.

--Thomas Pynchon

Pynchon Mania

2006-06-21T12:48:00.000-07:00

Ed has verified (with multiple unnamed and secret sources, because he's the literary version of a John Le Carre character) that Thomas Pynchon is publishing a new book in December. Let's hope it's not another Vineland. By the way, if you're new to Pynchon, here's the first three books you should read (in this order):

Gravity's Rainbow
V
The Crying of Lot 49

I've always liked Gravity more than V, because it's more accessible and funnier. Crying of Lot is just the short bit they give to high schoolers to let them know what good writing is, but I'm assuming you (my loyal reader) are a bit more advanced than that. Crying isn't bad, it's just brief. So get to it third. Slow Learner -his early collection of stories, isn't his best work, but if you want to give it a go, start at the end with "The Secret Integration."

Black Clock

2006-06-19T18:12:00.000-07:00

Edition Five of Black Clock is out, and despite the journal being relatively new, it's commanding some well-known voices (David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Lethem, Rick Moody, Aimee Bender). The editor and creator of the journal, Steve Erickson, talked at the LA Times book fair in a panel on LA Fiction (hosted by Janet Fitch), and now Black Clock is now targetting Los Angeles fiction. This focus on LA fiction is great for LA writers, because guess what? Not all the writers in So Cal use FinalDraft.

Anyways, here's the event: Black Clock Reading - at Skylight Books in Silver Lake. June 22, a Thursday, at 7:30 pm. LA Times Post

And, if you haven't read Steve Erickson's latest and greatest - Our Estatic Days - do so now at Powell's Books.

Product Placement

2006-06-19T17:19:00.000-07:00

As if we aren't innudated with enough advertisements - even at the beach, the dry drone of a bi-plane is followed by a banner - now comes product placements in novels (LA Times Article). Brands of lipstick, brands of cola, brands of T-shirts. Despite the poverty that attends the writing profession, I simply can't swallow it. Or rather, I wouldn't want it as a reader, and I wouldn't want to foist it upon my readers as a writer. For one, the author is not attending to the craft, he/she is attending to their pocketbook. For two, nothing dates your novel faster than name-brands.

2006-05-21T17:41:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Safran Foer

2006-05-21T17:23:00.000-07:00

Went to a reading at Duttons in Santa Monica last night to hear Jonathan Safran Foer. I didn't expect him to be so nice, so calm and so soft-spoken. It would have been convenient if he had been a prick, since then I could have hated him (him, his books and all his accolades) but no - he was ineffably courteous, not stuck up in the slightest. He handled offensive and/or stupid questions with grace, and gave incredibly insightful answers to many of the good questions. So, despite all feeling of jealousy, I have to say he's a decent guy with mind-numbing talent.

Postscript: One thing I keep on remembering from his talk is that he didn't believe he had to be a writer. He could have been anyone that builds something. He just believes that for now (for now!), he enjoys building things with words. Well, build on. Because he'd probably suck as an architect.