since i’ve been gone
Hello!
I’ve decided it would be prudent to write a new post for this site, just in case a random reader should stumble across it and think I’ve given up on it. I am, in fact, simply so busy that I don’t have the time I need to write quality entries. I’ve also, unfortunately, had to put my book on temporary hiatus. Between being a full-time student and two part-time jobs, I barely even have enough time to read for pleasure — though I assure you I still do. I’d choose that over exercise, and bathing probably.
I finished both Mimesis (good in the beginning, great towards the end) and the last volume of Fever and Spear (one of the best books I’ve ever read). I also read The Marriage Plot, a book so prosaic and milquetoast I couldn’t even finish it. One night last week I simply started scanning and skipping, and let me assure you that by the time I got to the end (I did dig in and read the last thirty pages or so — right after the character device Leonard disappears from the narrative) I didn’t feel like I missed a single thing. In fact, I felt like I had made the right decision. And the ending? I couldn’t believe it. The book is not only bad, but it’s also bad in a way that’s representative of everything wrong with contemporary literature in this country right now, so much so that a part of me imagined (hoped?) that was the book’s whole point. But, in light of his previous works, I seriously doubt Eugenides could be capable of pulling something like that off.
So, while I toil away in order to pay for the opportunity to someday have a job that provides a wage capable of supporting me as I write, do yourself a favor and read some Javier Marias, or maybe some Roberto Bolano — anything but the limp dick white-washed crap that passes for high literature in this country now-a-days.
PS — I’ve also temporarily moved all my link-postings to Google Plus.
the holidays are just so busy
I’m taking a brief break from the kind of posting* I’ve been doing lately because of school and writing (of the non-internet variety), and I thought it only fair to mention that here. I’ll probably be back a bit in December when the semester ends, or maybe I’ll try posting something of a different flavor in the meantime. I want to talk more about what I’m working on, but that need has a tendency to satiate/usurp the desire to actually work on what I’m working on.
So I won’t.
*I just haven’t had as much time for reading (literature or literature related things).
jeffrey eugenides in: “swoon-worthy”
Jeffrey Eugenides’ publisher has thrown up his likeness on a billboard for his new book The Marriage Plot in Times Square. This is pretty epic:
That pose is an action-film cliche, but maybe that’s what the book industry needs: a beefy injection of overwrought masculine bravado. Hmm…but what about all those female authors? I wonder what publishers could do to increase the sales of books written by women?
marketing = money = genre = (literary fiction)
Jesse Ball, an author I decided long ago not to read, has new book out called The Curfew. Scott Esposito (Conversational Reading) has a review out in the Los Angeles Review of Books which really hits the nail on the head in regards to what I found so troubling about his fiction:
Of course, we all like authors with entertaining myths attached to them, and they have a particular shine for publishers: at this difficult pass for literature, presses such as Vintage are more than ever looking for marketable quantities. They seem to have found just that in Ball. The biographical note that accompanies The Curfew is a thing of beauty, carrying just the light touch and distribution of detail that the novel itself lacks. It positions Ball as a mysterious, seductive figure, declaring him a writer, poet, and artist who has published a book of drawings as far away as Iceland. The bio also speaks to audiences, noting his acclaim from The Believer (shoring up his credentials with the hipsters), The Paris Review (he plays well with the medium-old New York literati), and the stately Best American Poetry series. It even slips in the fact that Ball is affiliated with the Art Institute, and that he teaches classes in both lying and lucid dreaming. What more is there to writing than to master those two things?
In a climate where bookstores are leaning more on past sales as indicators and granting books less and less shelf time, an author with a marketable persona and quick, easy books is bound to appeal. Ball would seem to be ideal: his books are short and easy to produce, they sell well, and he tends to get lots of media attention and friendly reviews. In interviews Ball has repeatedly claimed to have a suitcase full of manuscripts just waiting to be published. I have no doubt that The Curfew will do well enough for Vintage and that Ball will open his suitcase for them again, and perhaps other publishers as well.
Concern with bottom-lines has driven publishers to a place where they value marketability and brand over literary merit, but it takes two to tango. Ball once said:
“In general, great artists are individuals, to be an artist is to gather an aesthetic that’s going to be the whole about yourself. It is a very complicated process and it can brook no admission of another person. It is a single process concerning an individual who’s often excluded from society at that point in their genesis.”
People write for a whole host of different reasons, but to write for the sake of being a writer is surely the most hollow and immature of them all. Ball has always struck me as more interested in the idea of becoming (and being seen as) a writer/poet/artist than actually being a writer/poet/artist, and that attitude shows in his fiction.
It is, I think, one of the core faults of contemporary literary fiction that too many of its exemplary texts seem more concerned with how they seem rather than what they say, and it’s indicative of the current publishing/literary climate that these are the kinds of books that are not only being put out, but are selling.*
For too many people literary fiction is no longer about serious prose, it’s about group identity, and that’s a real shame.
*Case in points: Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. I’ve decided not to write about it, though I will say this: Franzen has talent, and there are many passages and portions where his brilliance shines, but holding these segments together is a web of bland, boring and contrived prose that does a better job illuminating what Franzen believes the Great American Novel should be than actually getting down to the business of being a Great American Novel — and his characters (and the book [and the reader]) all suffer for it.
eugenides and marriage
Jeffrey Eugenides has a new book coming out: The Marriage Plot, and there’s an excellent write up about it at The Daily Beast:
“I don’t think people can really write autobiography,” Eugenides said. “I think it’s innately fraudulent. When you try to describe your own life you inevitably fictionalize it and change things. So it always has seemed more honest to me to write fiction than to write memoirs.” Fiction, he says, gives him the freedom to invent. To college friends who’ve read the new book and corrected him, saying “It really happened like this,” he responds, “My intention wasn’t to make it like it really was.” His intention, he explains, “was to write a novel about three young characters, one of whom happens to be obsessed by the 19th-century novel.”
That character, Madeleine, is writing her senior thesis on the “marriage plot,” the organizing principle of so many 19th century novels, in which the author’s chief objective is to marry off the characters. She understands that her subject is quaintly archaic: in the jaded, brainy 1980s, it’s the chilly logic of literary theory that enthralls campus seminars, not warm appreciation of classic books. One of her professors declares that the novel “reached its apogee with the marriage plot and had never recovered from its disappearance;” adding that such plots only can be found these days in “non-Western novels involving traditional societies.” Half agreeing, Maddy nonetheless tumbles headlong into her own marriage plot, falling for arrogant, troubled Leonard, and shunning Mitchell, a “smart, sane, parent-pleasing boy,” whose obvious eligibility bores her. Eugenides deconstructs their interconnection during one fateful year. And though that year may have occurred three decades ago, to the author, it feels “contemporaneous.” “I didn’t feel any different writing this book than I would writing a short story set in 2010,” he said. “There are just a few technological differences, like cell phones and the internet and email.” He started before he had a title in mind, he said, “with this idea, the line that says ‘Madeleine’s love troubles had begun at a time when the French theory she was reading deconstructed the very notion of love.’ That’s where the story began.” He knew modernists might consider his focus on the marriage plot passé, but suspected they were wrong.
I’m looking forward to this one, though I’ve yet to finish any of his previous books. Neither of them (Virgin Suicides and Middlesex), however, have really managed to hook me, which is how I usually pick what to read. I’m a book dowser.
literary fiction according to d.g. myers
D.G. Myers on literary fiction:
The term literary fiction was popularized by the New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani, and it has become standard usage for distinguishing fiction of deep and earnest intent from bestsellers and “genre fiction.”
The distinction is bunk. As Catie Disabato pointed out in a wonderful little piece at Full Stop last week, genres are not the niche markets that publishers have cultivated in order to sell books to readers who want to know in advance just what they’re getting: a genre is a “literary tradition that has thrived longer than the modern construct of ‘literary’ fiction.” The tradition of the novel includes mysteries, fantasies, science fiction, romances, horror, even Westerns. The question is not to what subgenre a book belongs. The question is whether it is any good. And if it is good only according to the conventions of a subgenre, and not in the larger tradition of the novel, then it is not any good at all.
Literary fiction — or what the British novelist Linda Grant has taken to calling LitFic — ought to be a haughty way of saying “good fiction.” But that’s not how the term is used. What, then, is it? Easy. Literary fiction (like 98.5% of poetry these days) is written by and for the entrenched bureaucracy of the creative writing faculty in the universities. There is good fiction, there is bad fiction, and there is fiction written in creative writing workshops.
Myers — a critic I don’t always agree with but respect — recently switched over to a new blog, “Literary Commentary,” hosted by Commentary magazine.
sorokin’s ice trilogy
“But you see, when you start writing out the details of everyday Russian life, the absurdity just overwhelms you. At some point, you give up. Your characters start flying around, they sprout fangs and tails. Because that’s the only way to stay true to the material. Russian reality is too phantasmagoric to fit into realist logic.”
–Alexander Garros
I just finished Sorokin’s Ice Trilogy, and I’m having some trouble forming my impressions about it into coherent thoughts. There was a lot in these books that I really, really liked, and overall I really enjoyed this book. It’s superb, in fact. And though there was also a lot that didn’t work — parts are repetitive, chaotic, flat — it was these parts that added so much to the overall story. If it was a more “conventional”novel (and a lot of the reviews I read online seemed to wish for this) with a more compelling/linear plot, better and richer dialogue and more complex and identifiable characters, it would have been nothing, boring.
As it stands — with all it’s foibles — it is a maelstrom of a book, a force, and it’s this force that pulls you through the story. The repetitiveness and foreign-nature of the book make it work. There’s a necessary distance there, from both the world and the people, that creates room for the satire that under-girds the whole triptych structure (and this book is very much a satire in the Swiftian tradition).
My only two complaints are — and this one is more of a regret — that I don’t know more about Russian cultural history. There’s a context that feeds many of the themes in this book that I, as an American, was ignorant of, and I feel like a lot of the story was wasted on me. This did not diminish my ability to enjoy the book, however, but it did leave me feeling a bit frustrated. (I spent a lot of time on Wikipedia.)
My second criticism is specific, so I won’t go into too many details, but towards the end of the third book 23,000 there’s a series of three related chapters having to do with three different-but-connected individuals, each written from their own point of view. Though the first of these is great (written like a stripped down noir), the last two are borderline unreadable, written from the point of view of a crazy person and a small child. Though interesting to see how Sorokin conceptualizes the internal voice of both these characters, their story does not benefit from the repetition and abstract prose, and the two chapters struck me as a borderline unreadable mistake.
The ending is, perhaps, the most confusing, perplexing, and ultimately rewarding part of the trilogy. As the tension grew more and more intense the closer I got to the denouement, I found myself growing increasingly anxious, something I don’t often experience with books. I was torn between the antagonists, the humans and the Brothers of the Light, simultaneously rooting for and against both sides, unsure of how I wanted things to end.
The force of where Sorokin takes you is unsettling, and once I reached the end all I could do was sit down and catch my breath.
here i am
I haven’t posted in awhile, and I’m sorry for that. Mostly truly. School has been incredibly busy, and it’s taking me some time to adjust to the workload. I’ve got several posts waiting in the wings, and I think about them every time I sit down at my computer desk because I write down things like that on sticky notes and stick them to my computer desk.
I also re-shelved Augie March, which is the second time I’ve failed to read this book. And it’s not about the book. It’s not. I think it’s great. Super great. It’s just a timing thing.
Instead: I am now reading Ice Trilogy by Vladimir Sorokin.
a promise
I finished reading Freedom last week, and I’m still digesting it a bit. It’s an incredibly interesting book, for several important readerly/writerly reasons. I’ll talk about it soon here, probably. Promise. In the meantime, here’s a fun video of DFW and Franzen talking about the future of the novel on the Charlie Rose Show (from 1996 — look at that hair!).
And here’s an article on writing that didn’t make me want to chop off my fingers.
1 comment