Q&A: Evan Hughes, Literary Brooklyn

Posted on August 15, 2011 by Mark Athitakis| 2 Comments

In his new book, Literary Brooklyn, Evan Hughes takes a close look at a handful of writers who have defined the borough, from (naturally) Walt Whitman to Thomas Wolfe, Hart Crane, Norman Mailer, Paula Fox, Paul Auster, and more. Brooklyn’s current status as a literary hub has made it an attractive target for jokes, but Hughes resists both overhyping the place or indulging its critics. “[A] lot of people living in Brooklyn now might look back with nostalgia at the current era of creative ferment,” he writes, and the book’s mix of urban and literary history goes a long way toward explaining why the city has been so consistently attractive to novelists and poets.

If you happen to be in or near Brooklyn, there are a few upcoming events connected to the book. The launch party is August 16 (tomorrow night) at powerHouse Arena, and on August 26 Hughes and Nelson George will host a walking tour of literary spots in Brooklyn followed by a discussion of the book at Greenlight Bookstore. (More dates are on the book’s events page.)

Hughes answered questions about the book via email.

What is your personal relationship with Brooklyn, and how did it lead you to write this book?

I live in Brooklyn now, in Fort Greene, and I first moved there in 1998, after college. When I arrived, I knew only a little about its literary tradition and culture. It was a happy accident that Brooklyn is where I found a cheap apartment. (My own ugly place in Carroll Gardens for $750 a month—those were the days.) The discount from Manhattan is a common first impulse for writers to move to Brooklyn, and it has been for a long time, though the gap in expense has narrowed. But then, so often, a deeper relationship with the place takes hold. And when I get curious about a place, which I quickly did about Brooklyn, I want to know, What are the great novels or poems or memoirs about this place? Who are the key writers? And what portrait of the place have they created over time? Given not only Brooklyn’s rise to literary prominence but also its rich literary past, I was surprised to see that no one had written a book to address those questions about Brooklyn, to trace its history through its literature.

Literary Brooklyn seems to argue that the collected work of Brooklyn writers serves as a kind of imperfect but representative sample of the whole of American literature—Brooklyn is less like Manhattan and “more like America,” as you put it. Certainly there’s plenty about urban life, race, and assimilation in the books you discuss. But are there larger literary trends that Brooklyn doesn’t attend to?

That’s a good question. I can think of a couple examples. Brooklyn has more breathing room than Manhattan, crucially, but it’s still an urban place. Although Marianne Moore, say, wrote marvelously precise poems about animals and plants, Brooklyn lit as a whole is less focused on the natural world than is the literature of the plains states or the South or Texas, for instance. Also, Brooklyn fiction doesn’t have much in the vein of, say, Henry James or Edith Wharton; it’s longer on grit and shorter on the society novel. Then again, you could say the same a number of major American cities, like Chicago; perhaps Manhattan is again more the exception than the rule (Washington Square, The Age of Innocence).

The first chapter of the book focuses on Walt Whitman, who wrote in the mid- to late 1800s, and chapter two leaps ahead to Henry Miller, whose Tropic of Cancer wasn’t published in the United States until 1961. What was happening on Brooklyn’s literary front from the beginning of the 20th Century through the World War I era, when Miller began writing in earnest? Or is it more correct to ask about what wasn’t happening?

Not much of note was being published, but that’s not to say that nothing was being written, and it’s not to say that no books arose, indirectly, from that period. There were pockets of wealth, largely in manufacturing, but there wasn’t much of a leisure class with the time to pursue the arts and the connections that were often needed to get published. But that era saw a massive influx of immigrants from Europe, particularly Jewish immigration, that reshaped Brooklyn’s demographics and gave rise to important literature. Alfred Kazin, Daniel Fuchs, and Bernard Malamud were children of that immigrant wave, and in their work they often wrote about the experience of their own families of origin.

You mention a couple of Brooklyn writers in passing, including Gilbert Sorrentino and John Dos Passos, who didn’t quite rise to the level of his own chapter or chapter section. What criteria did an author need to meet to merit a fuller treatment? Were there writers who almost but didn’t quite make the cut?

You just mentioned two I would have liked to discuss at more length. There were tough choices, as probably there always are in writing a book. I focused mostly on authors who have not only lived in Brooklyn but also written about it, giving evidence of their relationship with the place. The book is urban history as well as literary biography, so part of my aim was to tell a story that captures the major trends that have shaped the place, and shaped the rest of urban America. So in some cases if I felt a certain theme or historical development was well-covered by discussing the life of work of one author, I would cover another similar writer more briefly.

The overall arc of the book suggests that Brooklyn’s literary culture slowly shifted from a proudly unschooled, outsiderish tribe—you point out that “Walt Whitman, Henry Miller, and Hart Crane together had not one semester of college”—to one more connected with “liberal brownstoners” and the Manhattan publishing world. How has that changed the tone and style of Brooklyn-based fiction? Is it now a more whitebread, “classy” creature that would exclude the likes of a Hubert Selby Jr.?

I think Selby might have a hard time getting published now; it wasn’t easy then, either. Last Exit to Brooklyn’s publication owed a lot to the bravery of Barney Rosset of Grove Press, who also endured censorship battles to bring Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Henry Miller’s work to American readers. And there are writers in Brooklyn today who consider themselves autodidacts and outsiders—and the hard time many of them are having breaking through to larger audiences is the same hard time that Whitman had. It’s part of what we mean when we say “outsiders,” right? When we talk in a decade or five about the Brooklyn writers of today, we might be talking about a different cast than we talk about now. Also, in certain respects Brooklyn’s literary culture is much more inclusive than it was in the past. You have many more women being published now than in the past, and more non-white writers as well.

If it’s true that Brooklyn was a sanctuary for artists looking for cheap rent, how likely do you think it is that we’ll see the ascendance of a literary Staten Island or a literary Queens (something that’s already happening, on the evidence of recent books by Sam Lipsyte and Ha Jin)? What is Brooklyn’s expense doing to its status as a literary hub?

It’s certainly possible we’ll continue to see more literary activity in the other “outer boroughs,” but I think Brooklyn has the advantage of a century and a half of a storied literary past. That attracts literary types. And so do Brooklyn’s trademark brownstone streetscapes where, as L. J. Davis observed, “the 19th century city is surprisingly intact.” But the rising cost of living in Brooklyn is a threat when it comes to drawing writers, no doubt about it. A place that a lot of people want to be is a place that’s more expensive, and writers, as you may have heard, do not typically make a lot of money. I don’t think, however, that the vitality of Brooklyn as a subject is going anywhere. Whether Brooklyn is becoming a better or worse place to live is a matter of spirited and sometimes acrimonious debate, but I think it’s more a question for the newspaper than a question for the novel. Literature can thrive on prosperity and it can thrive on terrible struggle—and on the tension between the two.

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Posted in Alfred Kazin, Bernard Malamud, Daniel Fuchs, Norman Mailer, Paula Fox, Thomas Wolfe

“My diligently constructed narrative”

Posted on August 14, 2011 by Mark Athitakis| 2 Comments

Francisco Goldman‘s new book, Say Her Name, covers real people and events—it’s about a novelist and journalist named Francisco Goldman, whose wife, Aura Estrada, died in a bodysurfing accident in 2007. Say Her Name is presented as a novel, though; the dust jacket calls it the “novel of Aura.” So what makes it fiction? “I didn’t do everything the character does,” Goldman told Publishers Weekly. “I didn’t quit my job. I didn’t live off Aura’s savings.” His answer to the question to the Paris Review is a little more complicated:

I have never liked the memoir form because I tend to think that memory fictionalizes anyway. Once you claim that you are writing a narrative purely from memory you are already in the realm of fiction. I am not claiming that there is not some other side to Aura that I missed. And there is the way I portray myself: a factual account of the kind of widower I was would give a completely different impression. I was a really superb widower.

It’s hard to tell, taking those quotes together, whether Goldman played loosely with the facts or is just such an honorable stickler for accuracy that he’s more comfortable calling his memories a fiction. The book itself suggests that something closer to the latter is going on. “She died because I was being myself, an eternal adolescent, a niñote. She died because, bursting with love, I decided to join her in the water. But all of that is also an evasion of the TRUTH, against which my diligently constructed narrative collapses like a huge wave of nothing…. The utter freakishness and meaningless of it—there is the TRUTH.” The all-caps fact of the matter, for Goldman, wouldn’t fill a page; he wants to find meaning in all this, which means getting into the imprecise business of memory and feeling.

Yet however justified Goldman is in calling Say Her Name a novel, it still feels like a memoir, both for practical reasons (the real names, the lack of an any-resemblance-to-persons-living-or-dead legal boilerplate that accompanies works of fiction) and structural ones—it has the arc of somebody acknowledging and then working through his grief. That disconnect has understandably frustrated critics. “The result is somehow the worst of two worlds, a memoir you can’t trust and a novel that lacks complexity and reach,” wrote Dwight Garner in the New York Times. “[T]he incongruity distracts; questions disrupt the novel’s dream,” Kassten Alonso wrote in the Oregonian. “At what point does the fabrication of even picaresque or piddling details outweigh major plot drivers cemented in fact?”

I suspect Alonso means to say “picayune,” but “picaresque” is actually a handy word here, because it helps get at why it’s frustrating to think about Say Her Name as a novel, which has a little to do with what we expect out of memoirs too. The book is messy, alternating short chapters with long ones, heart-in-throat proclamations of grief with plainspoken details; it shifts back and forth in time, and its foreshadowing can be awkward. “Aura put her quilt away in the closet and came back into the bedroom and finished packing for her death,” he writes, and that “packing for her death” grates—it’s a needless bit of overdramatization. Every good book finds its own rhythm; Say Her Name starts out hyperventilating and has a hard time settling down.

So there’s something seductive, even calming about the book’s latter pages, which detail the circumstances of Aura’s death. There, things do settle down: Because it’s the climax the book has been working toward, there’s a clarity to those scenes, as if it were easier for Goldman to account for the moment of his heartbreak than to deal with everything that’s happened since. The 250 or so pages leading up to it are indeed a sort of picaresque novel—episodes about random meetings, romance, fights, family, and travel. The closing pages thrust its lead character into a reality that, however “constructed,” make it a different book entirely.

That makes Say Her Name a frustrating book, but it might have been more frustrating had Goldman gone ahead and called it a memoir, because the book doesn’t play by the rules that grief memoirs are expected to abide by. In books like Darin Strauss‘ Half a Life and Joan Didion‘s The Year of Magical Thinking (and her forthcoming Blue Nights), all excellent memoirs, the tone is prim and straightforward—the raw, heaving emotion that accompanies losing someone isn’t addressed head-on so much as it erupts out of the Strunk & White precision of its sentences. Even in a book like Meghan O’Rourke‘s The Long Goodbye, which is longer and more digressive, thinking takes priority over feeling—in describing her search for the right ways to think about her mother’s death, she asks the reader to work to notice all the emotional flailing underneath.

Goldman is having none of that—he simply lets his feelings fly open, from moment to moment, unafraid to let himself come off as foolish or Aura appear childish. (One of the book’s narrative arcs is Aura’s growing as a writer, tracking her literary history from adolescent diary entries to more mature MFA work.) The disorder of much of the narrative doesn’t make it any more charming, a glimpse into the blasted mind of a grieving husband or some such—a messy story is a messy story, in fact or in fiction. But it does have the benefit of sincerity, however fictionalized, and the benefit of Goldman’s willingness to question how much of the grieving process has to do with all-caps truth and how much with the narratives we invent to get through it. Any book that wrestles with that question will be hard to categorize.

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Posted in Francisco Goldman

Links: Short Subjects

Posted on July 29, 2011 by Mark Athitakis| 1 Comment

Paul Kincaid has a thoughtful post at Big Other about the distinctions between the novel and the short story: “Over the duration of a novel, duration being time spent in composition or in reading or simply the passage of time within the fiction, there has to be time enough to seek explanation, to make sense…. Within the compass of a story, on the other hand, the unbidden, the whole, there need be no more than that moment that makes no sense, because it is adrift from history and from future, seen separated from what went before and what comes after which are in their turn what gives it context.”

I’ve been reading Steven Millhauser‘s book of new and collected stories, We Others, which comes out next month, and he made a similar point in a 2003 interview with Jim Shepard in Bomb: “But shortness encourages certain effects and not others. It encourages, for instance, the close-up view, the revelatory detail, the single significant moment. In the little world of the story, many kinds of desirable effect are inherently impossible—say, the gradual elaboration of a psychology, the demonstration of change over time…. As for novels: in their dark hearts, don’t they long to be exhaustive? Novels are hungry, monstrous. Their apparent delicacy is deceptive—they want to devour the world.”

Also at Big Other, which I really should’ve been keeping up with regularly a long time ago: A word-hoard from Annie Proulx‘s The Shipping News.

“1. Mow lawn. 2. Get rid of that fucking hose.”

Novelist David Carkeet recalls a lifetime’s worth of resonant words and phrases that have a way of worming their way into one’s everyday thoughts. Or, as he puts it, “the crap in my head.” (via)

Michael Dirda considers the literary heritage of his hometown of Lorain, Ohio, and invites readers to share their own hometown authors. (To my knowledge, my hometown of Lyons, Illinois, has produced only one author of note, Jack Kerouac biographer Gerald Nicosia.)

Regarding The Tragedy of Arthur and other novels in which the author is a character: “The game element of art, the puzzle of the construction, distances us from what really greets us every morning, as opposed to that we confront in the turning of the page. These fictional autobiographies flag a form of deception and collusion between reader and writer.”

Frank Wilson isn’t sold on the third rule for book reviewers in Robert Pinsky’s much-circulated Slate piece. The rule in question: “The review must tell what the reviewer thinks about what the book’s author says about that thing the book is about.” Wilson writes, “Certainly reviews that focus exclusively or even principally on Pinsky’s third rule are a waste.” I agree it’s a difficult thing to pull off, especially in a tight word count, and it risks opening the door to off-point political readings and other ramblings. But it does have the benefit of putting the reviewer’s opinion in context. Perhaps it’d be more helpful to revise the rule or add a corollary to it: “The review must tell what the reviewer thinks about how well the book’s author addressed the thing the book is about.” (Or just dump Pinsky’s rules and go with Updike’s.)

Ezra Pound: “Make it new.” John Barth: let it go.

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Posted in Annie Proulx, David Carkeet, Jack Kerouac, Jennifer Egan, John Barth, Steven Millhauser

Down Living

Posted on July 26, 2011 by Mark Athitakis| 1 Comment

David Guy‘s “Ardent Spirit, Generous Friend,” is largely a tender remembrance of novelist Reynolds Price, who died last January. But it also sheds some light on the insecurities that can haunt even the most accomplished writer. Guy recalls finishing his first novel, 1980′s Football Dreams, and having Price gently but firmly let him know the disappointment that comes along with getting that first book out:

“Publishing a first novel is a down,” he said.

I don’t know whether I was more surprised by the sentiment or by the ’60s locution. We’d known each other back in the hippie days.

“Really?” I said. The past 10 years of hard work had been for nothing?

“You’ve spent your whole life thinking that if you can finally publish a book, everything will change,” he said. “You’ll suddenly be good looking and everybody will love you, the world will throw itself at your feet. Then you publish the damn thing and nothing happens. You’re the same social misfit and compulsive masturbator you always were.”

And Price was saying that as somebody who had the best first-novel launch a novelist could hope for: 1962′s A Long and Happy Life received plenty of acclaim and was simultaneously published in its entirety in Harper’s, the first (and last?) time the magazine did such a thing for a novel.

Guy’s portrait of his mentor is so fawning it’s a little hard to trust, but if he doesn’t delve too deeply into how the down-ness of novel writing affected Price, Guy willingly exposes what it did to him. Writing a novel, in Guy’s vision, is a kind of compulsive act—something that’s going to wound you in some way or other, but so necessary you can’t resist doing it. And so important you’re willing to assent to requests to talk about it in public: The essay ultimately turns to a panel Guy moderates featuring Price, Anne Tyler, and Eudora Welty that might as well have been called “Four Authors Who’d Rather Be Doing Something Else.” Tyler is prickly, Welty is bemused (“All these people. What do they expect of me?”), Guy is terrified, and Price rolls his eyes when an attendee asks, “Why do you publish?” But Welty answered that question well: “I publish for the same reason I want somebody to be on the other end of the phone when I talk into it.”

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Posted in Anne Tyler, David Guy, Eudora Welty, Reynolds Price

Links: Cleaning Up

Posted on July 22, 2011 by Mark Athitakis| Leave a comment

A handy database of what appears to be all the fiction that has run in the New Yorker. Have fun with the tag function: “Dogs” appears 82 times; “Cats” 38 times; “prisoners” seven times; “littering” once.

I haven’t read a romance novel in forever, but I’ll read anything Jessica Tripler writes about the genre. She considers A Visit From the Goon Squad though that filter: “It struck me that the dominant emotion in VGS is one not so often encountered in romance: shame…. [T]he kind of abject shame so many of VGS characters inhabit is not one that makes for a romantic read. I think the difference is that in romance, the shame is either (a) not really earned (it’s really a virtue in disguise), or (b) centers on a character flaw that gets fixed in the narrative (the cop who is afraid of commitment, for example). The shame in VGS is, at one and the same time, both unique to the characters and universal.”

Gertrude Stein gets an iPhone: “Stopping everything is something. Stopping everything and stopping all of that thing is something. Stopping everything and then doing nothing in stopping everything is something.” (via)

Egyptian translator Hala Salah Eldin Hussein: “I have recently been contemplating the value of literature in these times, where your step in Tahrir Square—protesting and demanding civil rights—should be more valuable than translating fiction. Can fiction really take second place after revolutionary activism? How can fiction help us in a time of political unrest? Should I stay in my office finishing this marvelous piece by Susan Straight, or should I just go out with my fellow countrymen, six hours or more every day, in the square? It seems that translating political articles will be of more use to the revolution, but for the time being I’ll keep the belief that a day translating Lorrie Moore or Edward P. Jones will teach me how to be a better human being, I’ll get to see the world in its true colours, I’ll learn about myself, others and humanity.”

Andrew Seal isn’t blogging these days, alas, but his very busy Tumblr, Fuck Yeah, Historiography, is stuffed with gems from texts on American literature, sociology, political history, and more.

Catch-22 at 50. (via)

Lynne Tillman: “I think it’s true that unless human beings experience something, they simply don’t understand what people are going through. Now that I am conscious of the world of chronic pain, when I see somebody walking down the street who’s having trouble, I feel a sadness for them. I notice. I’m very lucky that I could get a hip replacement.” (via)

“If you really want to publish a book one day you will publish a book. The time that you spend getting there is kind of wonderful. Don’t cut it short. The emotional range is valuable.”

Robert Pinsky unearths a document listing three reasonable rules for writing a book review.

On Tobias Wolff‘s debut novel, 1975′s Ugly Rumours, which few know about and which the author himself is disinclined to discuss.

Defending Herman Melville‘s poetry.

We will always want narratives, but will we always want endings?

John Steinbeck‘s affection for Arthurian England.

Dept. of Sausage Making: Stuart Dybek and an editor discuss whether the name of a public housing project in one of his stories needs some additional explanation. (via)

Well put, by Rae Bryant: “One of the masteries in Nabokov’s stories, what I admire so much, is how smoothly the stories turn readers into accomplices.”

Somewhat less well put: “Maybe Vladi­mir Nabokov wasn’t referring to America’s favorite confectionery on a stick when he wrote Lolita,’ but he should have been.”

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Posted in Gertrude Stein, Herman Melville, Jennifer Egan, John Steinbeck, Joseph Heller, Lynne Tillman, Rae Bryant, Stuart Dybek, Tobias Wolff

Anti-Fiction

Posted on July 19, 2011 by Mark Athitakis| 2 Comments

Adam Goodheart‘s review in Slate of David S. Reynolds‘ Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America gets at what’s so appealing about the book: Reynolds shows not just how influential Uncle Tom’s Cabin was in American life (though whether it actually sparked the Civil War is debatable), it explores how culturally omnivorous Harriet Beecher Stowe was while writing the book. “Appearing at the moment of America’s—indeed, the world’s—first great flowering of mass popular culture, Uncle Tom’s Cabin drew on minstrel shows, pulp fiction, abolitionist broadsides, temperance propaganda, and evangelical tracts,” Goodheart writes.

For me, the most fascinating part of Reynolds’ book was the discussion of the “anti-Tom” novels that sprang up in response to Stowe—defenses of slavery written by people indignant at the book’s message, and the traction it was getting. According to Reynolds, 29 such novels were published before the Civil War, and the University of Virginia’s comprehensive Uncle Tom’s Cabin website includes selections from most of them. The creepiest, easily, is Little Eva, Flower of the South, an 1853 children’s book in which the title character is saved from drowning by Sam, a slave. Its last sentence: “Eva’s parents were so pleased with Sam for saving Eva, that they gave him his freedom; but he never left them, he loved them all too well.”

I don’t know of a novel that’s inspired so many retorts in novel form. (Is there a shelf of anti-Grapes of Wrath and anti-Jungle fiction somewhere?) Part of the reason for that may simply be that there’s little chance a single book of fiction could now move the culture politically the way Uncle Tom’s Cabin did—“faction” has a way of preaching to the converted, and nobody would want to read a novel about, say, the debt ceiling. (The jobless recovery novel is there for the reading, though, if you want it.) But Reynolds points to something that distinguished Stowe’s novels from other political fiction: An acknowledgment of the other side’s beliefs, which blunted any critique of the novel. Reynolds writes:

[N]one of the anti-Tom novels came close to selling as well as Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The main reason was that Stowe had preempted them on virtually every point. Racism in the North? She had memorably captured that in her ironic portrait of Ophelia. The miseries of white workers, often as great as those of enslaved blacks? She expressed this proto-Marxist idea compellingly through St. Clare, who spoke of a forthcoming working-class revolution. The kindness of many Southern slaveowners? She granted that…. Stowe was thus a frustrating writer for proslavery novelists to rebut, since she agreed with them on many points—except the central moral issue of slavery.

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Posted in Harriet Beecher Stowe

Links: A Familiar Story

Posted on July 15, 2011 by Mark Athitakis| 6 Comments

My first thought when I began reading this article about how literary experimentation has been abandoned in favor of plot was Tom McCarthy‘s C. John Lucas then mentions the book, only to assign it the role of an exception that proves the rule. But isn’t that just as true of William Gaddis‘ The Recognitions, the novel that inspired the article in the first place?

Related: Gravity’s Rainbow was exceptional enough to be rejected by Pulitzer Prize board despite the strong support of the fiction committee. Charles Johnson riffs on that and a few other problems, particularly involving race, with that prize.

Also related: “[R]egardless of the pleasures afforded by novels, was there ever a time when most readers turned to them for a refined aesthetic experience rather than the narrative?”

A fine essay on the unlucky life of writer Allan Seager, author of the much-borrowed short story “The Street.” (via)

Reasons to eagerly anticipate the forthcoming film version of Lionel Shriver‘s We Need to Talk About Kevin.

“The top 80% of all published stories in the [Best American Short Stories] 2005 through 2010 as well as notable stories mentioned in the back pages came from the same 42 journals.”

Colson Whitehead: “The terror of figuring out a new genre, of telling a new story, is what makes the job exciting, keeps me from getting bored, and I assume it keeps whoever follows my work from getting bored as well.” (via)

Connecting the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case with Dinaw Mengestu‘s 2010 novel, How to Read the Air. (Lloyd Jones‘ very good forthcoming novel, Hand Me Down World, hits at some similar themes as well.)

Patrick Kurp on the virtues of reading widely.

“[T]he book review will undoubtedly survive. So will screeds against it, which is only fair: our age is one of constant comment, and the book review must take its lumps as stoically as the books in its pages do.”

On William Burroughs‘ ongoing ill will toward Truman Capote. (via)

A novelist-psychologist argues that “the more fiction you read, the better you are… at understanding other people.”

Lastly, if you’re in the D.C. area, tomorrow marks the very first Indie Lit City Summit, an all-day gathering of indie presses, magazines, and other literary folk from the D.C.-Baltimore region to talk shop and share ideas. The keynote speech will be given by Electric Literature‘s Andy Hunter; more info at the website.

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Posted in Allan Seager, Colson Whitehead, Dinaw Mengestu, Lionel Shriver, Thomas Pynchon, Truman Capote, William Gaddis, William S. Burroughs

Real Life

Posted on July 12, 2011 by Mark Athitakis| 3 Comments

Vendela Vida‘s second novel, The Lovers, is coming out in the UK (it was published here in the United States last year), prompting a lengthy profile of her in the Guardian. Much of the piece focuses on the work she does with her husband, Dave Eggers, at the Believer, 826 Valencia, and cowriting the screenplay for the 2009 film Away We Go. But the piece squeezes in some discussion of her novels, which the reporter oddly describes as “works of realism.”

I haven’t read Vida’s debut novel, And Now You Can Go, but I’m an admirer of her two follow-ups, The Lovers and Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, both of which display a spiky, spare prose style that highlights the inner turmoil of their female protagonists instead of cloaking it. What they aren’t are works of realism. In both books (and the debut, I gather), the leads make snap decisions to disappear for a while in a new, unfamiliar locale—Lapland in Northern Lights, Turkey in The Lovers—and Vida dwells little on the sightseeing aspects of those places. For her, the exotic settings are ways to erase familiar comforting routines, forcing emotions up to the surface—nobody’s doing a whole lot in these novels, exactly, but they’re expending a great deal of energy.

Vida discusses her internship at the Paris Review, where she began thinking about how she’d approach her fiction: “I’d borrow a back issue every night, read it on the bus home, and pick up another the next morning. I didn’t have any friends in New York; I sat inside and read my Paris Reviews. I was particularly interested in female writers, because I was trying to figure out how to be one.” That in turn influenced the heroine of Northern Lights—though Vida’s statement could apply to the heroine of The Lovers too:

“I wanted to make her real,” Vida says. “At the time, I was tired of reading novels by women in which the men could act as badly as they wanted, while the female characters had to please and enchant. I wanted to try something different. A lot of the responses I got were negative: ‘unlikable’ was the word I heard over and over, which drove me crazy—why do you have to like a character? But it was a conscious thing: I set out to make sure she wasn’t trying to flirt with the reader.”

(A little more on Vida and her style from last year.)

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Posted in Vendela Vida

Links: Through the Cradle of the Civil War

Posted on July 8, 2011 by Mark Athitakis| 10 Comments

Graceland versus Rowan Oak.

I read Alex Shakar‘s debut novel, The Savage Girl, in 2003, but I have no strong memories of it. (I had to consult I note I scribbled in an endpaper to remember when I read it.) Regardless, he spins a great yarn about how the best-laid promotional plans for the novel collapsed.

Edwidge Danticat on editing the story collection Haiti Noir: “We don’t always have to create pretty pictures around Haiti, but we are obligated to reflect or create fully realized human beings and that’s what our seventeen fiction writers did. I am really proud of that book. It’s not a rosy picture of Haiti, but it is nuanced and complex one. We are neither angels nor savages. Maybe that’s what fiction does best, define that middle ground.”

“While a full account of the role God plays in [David Foster] Wallace’s writing would probably take a monograph to flesh out, I’d like to point to a few moments in his work that one should pursue if one were to write that monograph.” (Chapter 22 of The Pale King welling up again; seriously, it should be sold as a Byliner-ish excerpt, or novella, or some other standalone publication.)

Jim Shepard talks up some of his favorite short-story collections, and his own work: “[W]riting about other things, if you’re doing so in the right way, is a great way of tricking yourself into writing about stuff you most care about. It can be a back door into difficult emotions. Especially if you’re a guy, you might have difficulty dealing with particularly vexed emotions to begin with. And particularly vexed emotions are the sort that power literature.” (via)

Harvard University Press has freed up the Ernest Hemingway chapter from A New Literary History of America, which discusses the influence of a family cabin in Michigan on his work.

Mad Men, John Updike‘s Maple stories, same diff.

Reader’s Almanac, the Library of America’s blog, recently turned a year old; it tallies up some of its most popular posts.

J.D. Salinger, 1994: “I work on. Same old hours, pretty much.”

Roger Ebert is in a huff about an ESL version of The Great Gatsby; Jessa Crispin doesn’t see what the fuss is about.

Dinaw Mengestu goes to the Greek isle of Patmos and finds a waystation for migrants.

On Louisa May Alcott‘s brief stint as a Civil War nurse.

How Vladimir Nabokov stage-managed his interviews.

In defense of Jonathan Franzen‘s underappreciated second novel, Strong Motion.

“[Larry McMurtry] described The Last Picture Show as a ‘spiteful’ book that took three weeks to write and was intended to ‘lance some of the poisons of small-town life.’”

Arthur Phillips on Moby-Dick: “When we…went out to sea, it was something in between a realistic sea adventure and some other dreamlike lunacy – then I felt like I was in the hands of somebody who was inventing the novel as he wrote one. That same wonderful feeling. This is not exactly a sea adventure or a sea melodrama with an evil captain. There’s something much weirder going on.” (Nathaniel Philbrick‘s forthcoming Why Read Moby-Dick? has some thoughtful observations on these points, about which more soon, probably.)

Some elements by which to judge the success of an expat novel.

Legislators are trying to make a Mark Twain commemorative coin happen. No word on whether it’ll be embossed with the phrase, “Within certain judicious limitations we trust in God.”

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Posted in Alex Shakar, Arthur Phillips, David Foster Wallace, Dinaw Mengestu, Edwidge Danticat, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Herman Melville, J.D. Salinger, Jim Shepard, John Updike, Jonathan Franzen, Larry McMurtry, Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, Vladimir Nabokov, William Faulkner

A Persistent Minimalism

Posted on July 6, 2011 by Mark Athitakis| 4 Comments

Ann Beattie recently wrote in New York magazine about how at 17 she’d ride in a friend’s car and harass other drivers with a bullhorn. It’s a short piece, meant to be a light bit of space-filler in a “summer fun!” package. But MobyLives’ Dennis Johnson is troubled by the piece’s ending, in which Beattie admits her shenanigans led a driver to crash into a tree.

The obvious question, of course, is what did she get away with? One assumes not manslaughter, although causing a car to go “crazily out of control” and crash into a tree isn’t exactly comforting language in regards to that possibility, nor to the likelihood that passengers in that pre-airbag car were at the very least seriously injured. Equally astonishing is that rather than tell us that dreadful reality, and what she thinks now, years later, about her lack of compassion and why she left a crime scene, she resorts to the most unfortunate type of minimalism—the kind that withholds information for cheap effect.

It is a troubling scene—the only defense I can think to muster up is that the ending hints at the shame that attaches to adolescent hijinks, and that a tragedy, had one occurred, would have served the theme of the piece. (Though of course it wouldn’t be much of a “summer fun!” piece then. For what it’s worth, a Nexis search on Beattie’s name and “bullhorn” comes up empty.) Contra Johnson, her willfulness and lack of compassion come through loud and clear; what’s lacking is a sense of the consequences of those feelings (or lack of them).

But the sketch, as Johnson suggests, does promote the idea that minimalism has its limits, particularly in nonfiction. In the New York Review of Books, Meghan O’Rourke recently argues that Beattie’s style has evolved more than her critics give her credit for. The essay is an excellent introduction to Beattie’s style, and why its combination of detail and indirection are so seductive. But O’Rourke gives frustratingly little space to Beattie’s more recent work; she writes that “the work she has written over the past ten years conjures fleshier visions of domestic life and loneliness than she had previously allowed herself,” but the examples of this “fleshier” prose aren’t particularly convincing. On the evidence of the New York piece and her recent disappointing novella, Walks With Men, the differences between Beattie’s old minimalism and her new one can be hard to detect.

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Posted in Ann Beattie