strike two contemporary (translated) french literary fiction

This week I finished Laurence Cosse’s A Novel Bookstore, a book I had heard good things about when it was initially released in the US and then came upon at a Border’s fire-sale about a month ago. I was having trouble getting through The Prisoner (Sometimes I have to be in the right mood to read Proust, and lately I have not been in that mood.) and just all around wanting something a little lighter and I thought Bookstore would be a good fit.  And to a certain extent it was, though not in a very enjoyable way. There were definitely good parts in the book, passages waxing poetic about the joys and pleasures of novels and reading, and if you like novels and reading then you too will enjoy these parts — but frankly they’re not enough to sustain Bookstore‘s 400 page narrative, and after about half-way through they go from heartwarming to trite.  It was disappointing because I really wanted to like this book, but by the end I was forcing myself to finish it and now I wish I hadn’t.

A Novel Bookstore is weak and banal, and I don’t recommend it. The plot is supposed to be a mystery, but it’s not. When the “big secret” is finally revealed it’s shocking how anti-climactic and ad hoc it seems — in fact, the antagonist turns out to be someone never mentioned, nor does he have any real connection to anyone in the book. The characters are boring and poorly written, and like in most bad literary fiction they come across as pathetic and unsympathetic. Most I wanted to squash with the underside of my shoe. When one of the main characters finally actually does die in an overly romanticized accident-that-may-have-been-a-suicide, I was sad, not because of the death, but because the death wasn’t as violent and painful as I was hoping (you see it coming).

Bookstore‘s biggest flaw, however, is one of structure — deep structure. The way in which the narrative is organized just flat out fails. The story jumps around way too much, and the biggest continuous chunk is relayed by two of the main characters to a police inspector as a flashback. (“In order for you to understand our problem we’re going to have to tell you about everything all of us were thinking and feeling at every moment since we met,” they seemed to say.) Jumping around in this way is not itself problematic, but Laurence Cosse fails to prove she is up to the task; there are just too many sloppy changes in point of view and clunky, abrasive segues between sections for the reader to form any sort of connection to what’s going on. It’s amateurish and frustrating.

All that being said, at least it wasn’t as bad as the other French novel my post-title references, The Elegance Of The Hedgehog. Both are Europa Editions, and though I read Hedgehog almost a year and a half ago I still get angry thinking about it. It’s been too long for me to write anything interesting about it, so instead I’m going to quote extensively from rctnyc‘s Amazon review, which is pretty spot on:

I really wanted to like this novel, which was recommended to me by a friend. What it is, however, is two hundred pages plus of pretentious, adolescent ramblings delivered by two narrators, a middle-aged concierge “autodidact,” and an self-described “hyper-intelligent” adolescent, each of whom announces at the outset that she is morally and intellectually superior to the other human beings — adults, adolescents and children — in her respective world within the apartment house in which all the characters in the novel reside. All of these family members, neighbors and friends — except, of course, for a working-class maid — are rich, spoiled, phony, stupid, superficial . . . . well, you get the picture. The dogs and cats come off well, probably because they can’t go shopping. Ah, the tedium of the bourgeoisie! The torture of having to hide your exceptional talents and exquisite sensibility from mediocre people who would never appreciate such rare gifts; nay, who would punish you for being special. Such ordinary mortals could not share those special moments with Leo, Levin and Kitty (that’s Tolstoy and the main characters in “Anna Karenina,” folks — just in case you aren’t among the “elect”), or read Japanese comic books in the original. 

As Holden Caulfield would have said, — “What a load of crap.” When the Japanese sage walked in — with his decorator, no less, who stripped the haute bourgeoisie apartment of a dead food critic of all its rich person frou-frou, creating instead a high-end ashram — I was ready to, as Holden might have said, “Puke.” Of course, Obi-Wan Kenobe sees through everyone’s pose right away, feeding the concierge pickled veggies and sushi; unlocking the hearts of our over-enlightened, undernourished heroines, who are able, for the first time, to form close relationships with others — one another, of course (not counting the dog, cats and Obi-Wan) — and thereby to discover the meaning of “life.” 

Guess what happens next? Reader, I won’t tell you. But if you are not enmeshed in the same web of self-indulgent, narcissistic adolescent fantasy as are the so-called characters of this alleged novel (which is really a collection of assertions — god forbid I should call them meditations — about “art,” “life,” and how crummy your parents are) — you will have guessed the trendy post-modernist denouement by page 5. (“Is there a ‘subject’?” asked Foucault; “What is an author?” I pondered these weighty — with pretention, because they are ultimately trite — questions as I placed “The Elegance of the Hedgehog” in my “Donate to the library a.s.a.p.” pile.) 

Yup, that about sums it up.

some more links

I really enjoy reading and writing about reading and writing, which probably doesn’t need to be said but it gives me an opportunity to explain all the links I’m about to share. I’ve had entries dedicated to link sharing before, but then I was mostly making fun of myself. I don’t post as regularly as I once did, but that’s the fault of a sudden up-tick in personal obligations and working on my book. Read: I don’t need a virtual space for creative blow-holing anymore — I’m using all my mind-water to put out fires in “real” life.

I do still read a lot, however, and the following annotated links are to articles and essays that I found interesting enough to bookmark in my “for_blog” folder. I originally wanted to turn each of them into their own entry, and I still could, but time, time, and time:

Michael Idov’s article “My Two Days As A Russian Tabloid Sensation” is funny, but the best parts are his insights into modern Russia vis-à-vis its literature. After complaining about the seeming absurdity at the core of so many recent and critically lauded novels, he asks an old friend and well-known Russian author Alexander Garros if he wouldn’t prefer to write a book about something closer to reality. Garros replies: “Sure I do.  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.” Sometimes I think the same think about my country.

This right here is a conversation on E-Books and self-publishing between Barry Eisler and Joe Konrath, and I’m sure lots of people really got a lot out of this.

Leave it to Tom LeClair to ask the oblivious questions: “[I]f New York remains a Great American City, and is the center of publishing, and is the home of many of our most celebrated fiction writers, why haven’t we had in, say, the last decade, a Great New York Novel?” Maybe it’s too hard to write well with your head rammed all the way up your own ass.*

This one is for the hipsters: Guess what? Selling-out has always been an important part of getting published. BONUS: the article includes a beer ad featuring Ernest Hemingway.

Jennifer Egan and the Pulitzer Prize have teamed up to save American literature! The author of this fluff piece talks about experimentalist fiction and how much more accepted it’s becoming, and he mentions Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book: “[H]is latest book sees him cut up Bruno Schulz’s novel Street Of Crocodiles and create a new ‘novel’ out of the remaining words. Vanity Fair called Tree of Codes ’very, very cool.’” I’m not a big fan of Foer, in fact I think he’s a bit of a hack, and to me this sounds like even further evidence that’s he’s still out of ideas, like most people who write literary fiction. It is cool though that Vanity Fair had the courage to say what everyone in this country is thinking: “Where are all the really, really cool books?”

I was planning on using the previous article as an introduction to an entry on Pale King, but I don’t particularly want to write an entry on Pale King. I much prefer Wallace’s short fiction and non-fiction to his novels, and I have no desire to read this one (for reasons I’ve already talked about). Instead, I will talk about this: “Inside David Foster Wallace’s Private Self-Help Library” is an amazing article, and (New Critics be damned!) really gives you some insight into who he was and what he was trying to do with his work.

*Clarification: I’m not singling out Tom LeClair, I’m speaking about the city as a whole.

diy publishing in books and music

Eric R. Danton over at The Hartford Courant recently published an opinion piece about the rise of DIY publishing in the literary world that’s worth a scan if not a full on “read.” As proof of the viability of self publishing he spends a lot of time making parallels with the music industry, which makes sense when you google “Eric Danton” and realize he’s the on-staff “rock critic” for The Courant. Mr. Athitakis’s response on his blog was much more interesting. A snatch:

This is where Danton’s story starts to fail me. His equation of DIY music with DIY publishing fails to acknowledge the culture of discussion, argument, documentation—and, yes, gatekeeping and tastemaking—that’s still installed in DIY music, and doesn’t provide a convincing parallel for DIY publishing. Who’s replaced POD-dy Mouth? Where’s the culture of readers engaged with POD novels in the same way as Pitchfork? Or even the collaborative group of, say, young fantasy writers who’ve built a small cult around themselves by branding the novels they self-publish? Instead, the story’s chief example is Joel Fried, who’s sold a thousand or so copies of his book of essays, Bursts, through BookSurge. How this proves that self-publishing has obliterated its amateur-hour stigma escapes me. If anything, Stewart O’Nan comes off as the most convincing voice in the article, arguing for the old-fashioned publisher: He tells the Courant, “I want to get my book between covers and onto the shelves of as many good bookstores and good libraries as I can, hoping that in time maybe that will translate into it being on the shelves of lots of good readers, and I find the big houses give you the best shot at that.”

He goes on, and if you’re interested you should hop on over and read the whole article. I was going to copy and paste more, but Mark started talking about other things and when I was done editing, I was left with a messy string of ellipses and unconnected phrases, and then this conclusion: “If indie rock is any sort of a model for DIY publishing, it’s not merely in self-publishing—it’s in smart self-publishing strategies that think of the audience before the book.” Yes.

I’ve thought and wrote about this topic for awhile now and though there isn’t really anything new in either of these articles, it’s always egotistically gratifying to find your ideas in the mouth of someone else, especially when that someone else is Mark Athitakis. What literary culture needs is MORE tastemakers and MORE gatekeepers — and therefore more opportunities for readers and writers alike. Get two it, Internet.

Speaking of, in case anyone is interested I’m still developing my concept for a Pitchfork-esque book review website/community hub for literary fiction (plus the occasional/ironic one-off genre review). If you are interested in donating ideas or (more importantly) investment capital, please get in contact with me.

o o o o those sprawling big ambitious novels – they’re so elegant, so intellegent

It’s common for me to feel a strong compulsion to finish things, especially books. In fact, when affiliated with the literary realms, these compulsions gain a great amount of momentum from the double-headed heft of guilt and shame, feelings I think (hope) most regular readers have had, at the very least, when struggling page-after-page with books they think or feel they should be reading. I’ve struggled with these feelings in the past, but for the most part they don’t bother me much anymore, or so I thought until I came to Broom Of The System, a book by David Foster Wallace that I really, really wanted to like. But, after more than 200 pages in, I hit a wall. I couldn’t take it anymore. So I quit.

I put down Broom for reasons best explained by James Wood in his review of White Teeth, “Human, All Too Inhuman.” Quote:

“The big contemporary novel is a perpetual-motion machine that appears to have been embarrassed into velocity. It seems to want to abolish stillness, as if ashamed of silence…Stories and sub-stories sprout on every page, as these novels continually flourish their glamorous congestion. Inseparable from this culture of permanent storytelling is the pursuit of vitality oat all costs. Indeed, vitality is storytelling, as far as these books are concerned…[This is] hysterical realism. Storytelling has become a king of grammar in thee novels; it is how they structure and drive themselves on. The conventions of realism are not being abolished but, on the contrary, exhausted, and overworked. Appropriately, then, objections are not made at the level of verisimilitude, but at the level of morality: this style of writing is not to be faulted because it lacks reality–the usual charge against botched realism–but because it seems evasive of reality while borrowing from the realism itself. It is not a cock-up, but a cover-up.”

So just what is it in “reality” that these stories are so desperate to avoid? Several paragraphs later, Wood gives us the answer:

An excess of storytelling has become the contemporary way of shrouding, in majesty, a lack; it is the Sun King principle. That lack is the human. All these contemporary deformations flow from a crisis that is not only the fault of the writers concerned, but is now of some lineage: the crisis of character, and how to represent it in fiction. Since modernism, many of the finest writers have been offering critique and parody of the idea of character, in the absence of convincing ways to return to an innocent mimesis. Certainly, the characters who inhabit the big, ambitious contemporary novels have a showy liveliness, a theatricality, that almost succeeds in hiding the fact that they are without life: liveliness hangs off them like jewelry.

Broom committed the cardinal sin of being boring. It was interesting, at first, and it was certainly lively. There were even parts that flew in the face of everything I’ve just quoted, that had pathos and character and life. It was these bits that kept me going as long as I did, but the further I pushed into the novel the less and less they popped up, and eventually I lost the patience necessary to wait for them — I read without investing anything of myself. There was nothing pulling me forward.

I still admire Broom, and I appreciate what Wallace was doing with the story, though I use that word loosely. In fact, I think in this case perhaps “structural exercise” would be a more appropriate choice. I’m tempted to talk specifics, but there’s really nothing too distinguishing to detail, or rather there’s too much to detail — everything is saturated with the most precise and exacting details, and none of it satisfies. It’s like drinking sugary soda when you’re thirsty. You keep drinking and drinking but your thirst never abates, and eventually you just go and get a glass of water.

Structurally it’s good, but dated. Wallace makes a conscious effort to be postmodern, with non-traditional narrative forms and more meta than a grad school student can shake a heavily underlined volume of Lyotard at, but what once was new and exciting is now old-hat and dated. Too many people in the intervening years since Broom was published have used similar tricks of play to attempt at serious meaning or literature without having the actual talent or skill to do so, and the results have been a mixed bag of scrambling authors and watered-down novels, some successful and most quickly forgotten. I liken these writers to the Wizard of Oz, with his curtain and machine, or perhaps the vain Emperor who’s new clothes are fit to be seen by only the worthy (enter: the literary industrial complex).

There are some readers out there (evidenced by sales figures) who enjoy these books for themselves (Amazon’s user reviews are evidence that Broom has a large following of ardent fans), and I think that’s great. Everybody reads for different reasons and everybody has different things that keep them reading. Structural play is, however, insufficient to maintain my interest when it isn’t new, and nothing in Broom is new.

I’ve heard that Infinite Jest is a quite different beast from Broom altogether, and I really hope so. I’m still planning on reading it soon, but after Broom I needed a break from Mr.Wallace, and I found my much needed respite in the arms of Mr. Javier Marias and his novel Your Face Tomorrow. It was great, but not genius, though I feel I should read the other two volumes before I allow my opinions to solidify. I’ll write about it then.

zadie smith a go go

Finished  Zadie Smith’s Changing My Mind the other day. It was a nice, enjoyable read. I’ll leave you now with a David Foster Wallace quote that Smith quotes in her essay on Brief Interviews with Hideous Men:

Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being. If you operate…from the premise that there are things about the contemporary U.S. that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction’s job is to dramatize what it is that makes it tough. the other half is to dramatize the fact that we still ‘are’ human beings, now.”

Though they aren’t her words, that first line of the quote pretty much sums up her book’s message for me.