Monthly Archives: March 2015

Rhetorical Question

paper airplanes,

Is the “new” Harper Lee “sequel” to To Kill a Mockingbird a chilling metaphor for the book industry, wherein a publisher is presented with a manuscript that’s a surprise extension of a beloved cultural franchise, a predestined goldmine, written by an author years ago but conveniently “discovered” at a time when the author, though still living, seems to lack all authority with which to speak about the book, except via legally designated intermediaries, and who seems unable or unwilling to edit the book, and wherein said publisher readily admits it also won’t edit said book, but merely package it for sale, so that one’s ultimate impression is that it no longer even matters what the book itself ultimately says only that it exists to be purchased?

Isn’t Go Set a Watchman in a way the Perfect Book? (A blockbuster with blank pages.)

And doesn’t this weird willful marshalling of coincidental forces represent some kind of apotheosis of book publication culture as it’s been known in the postwar U.S. of A.?

No, you’re right, you’re right. Probably not.

Coincidental Religion

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I originally wrote this over on Medium a while back, but for reasons too boring and idiosyncratic to go into, I wanted to post it here as well.

Last spring I finished Libra, Don DeLillo’s novel that imagines the unfolding of the JFK assassination. I read it in disjointed chunks, covering the first half over a couple of months, the second half in one huge gulp. Consequently, the emotion it contains was held somewhat at arm’s length, as if I were growing myopic while reading.

But then, the following Thursday, I came home and followed the police chase of the Tsarnaev brothers in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing. I followed the mayhem — this incident seems actually to earn the word — via Twitter: journalists on the ground, galloping after Cambridge sirens like hounds; police scanner DJs, EQing the static; and the real-time TV critics, embroidering (and eviscerating) the ongoing cable news coverage.

I’ve often thought that Twitter is the ultimate Modernist novel: an ungraspable fragmented mound of human utterance, revealing the consciousness of a culture in the crevices between tweets. And here, during this unfolding terrorist incident, was one of Twitter’s “best” moments, at least in terms of generating (spontaneously, collectively) a real-time Modernist thriller. The event was large enough on a national news-crisis level to magnetize and collate the million shards that is Twitter.

All of this unfolding meta-reality added a ghostly echo to finishing Libra. One of the key formal distinctions of the novel is the way that it unfolds in two simultaneous time frames: the slow accrual of the life of Lee Harvey Oswald and the much-faster unfolding of the plot to assassinate the president, orchestrated by former CIA operatives, disgruntled after the blundered Bay of Pigs. It’s a weird narrative tango for the first hundred pages or so, but you eventually adjust to the rhythm and by the end of the novel, you see what DeLillo is up to: how Oswald is both the agent of his own destiny and simultaneously a cog within a vast plot machinery, how the JFK assassination is an uncanny collaboration between circumstance and the will of various individuals.

And that is what the Boston Marathon and its thrilling boat-in-the-backyard finish felt like — a story of personal grievance that fits within the larger Narrative that None of Us Control.

It’s a cliche at this point to say that DeLillo has predicted what life feels like now. I haven’t read enough of him to argue about this sufficiently. However, I can say that DeLillo is a master of the List: the agglutination of seemingly disconnected, often repetitive detail. Here’s an example from the consciousness of Win Everett, a former CIA analyst forced into pseudo-retirement after the Bay of Pigs and one of the principal architects of the assassination. Here he’s imagining creating someone like Oswald:

An address book with ambiguous leads. Photographs expertly altered (or crudely altered). Letters, travel documents, counterfeit signatures, a history of false names. It would all require a massive decipherment, a conversion to plain text. He envisioned teams of linguists, photo analysts, fingerprint experts, handwriting experts, experts in hairs and fibers, smudges and blurs. Investigators building up chronologies. He would give them the makings of a deep chronos, lead them to basement rooms in windy industrial slums, to lost towns in the Tropics.

What’s fascinating, on a simply novelistic construction level, is how dense the novel feels, how fortified it is with matter, both “real” and invented. One reads the novel with a growing admiration not just for DeLillo’s vision in tackling the material but simply his relentless diligence with the detail.

There’s also a novelist figure within the novel itself — Nicholas Branch, a retired CIA analyst who has been tasked (again here the weird verbed word seems earned) with writing a history of the assassination. He sits in his home office, under daily assault of data sent by the Curator:

Branch sits in his glove-leather chair looking at the paper hills around him. Paper is beginning to slide out of the room and across the doorway to the house proper. The floor is covered with books and papers. The closet is stuffed with material he has yet to read. He has to wedge new books into the shelves, force them in, insert them sideways, squeeze everything, keep everything. There is nothing in the room he can discard as irrelevant or out-of-date. It all matters on one level or another. This is the room of lonely facts. The stuff keeps coming.

I bought Libra last January during a trip to Boston. It was one of those rare brief spans of time where I was unencumbered by work or children or the little horizonal clouds of impending obligation, just a free afternoon in a strange city covered in snow, walking until my feet got sore, ducking into shops for warmth.

When the bombings occurred, their location made immediate sense. My winter walking had unknowingly encircled the blast site. One floats into coincidence, both historical and trivial, like a kid swimming in a river, as unseen pockets of coldness envelop your legs briefly and then drift away.

There were too many ironies and coincidences. A shrewd person would one day start a religion based on coincidence, if he hasn’t already, and make a million. Yes yes yes yes.

Relevant tweets picked up speed when Boston police released the suspects’ photos after 5 p.m. ET on April 18. A time zone and several states away, I began following the tweets intently via my phone, on the way home from work, while letting the dog out to pee, while prepping my children for bed. After dinner, I checked back in, and there had been a mysterious shooting of an MIT police officer. I followed the tweets for the next few hours, giving up shortly after midnight and the climactic Watertown shootout.

Various journalists get re-tweeted from the scene and are subsequently followed, like Seth Mnookin. What gets reported is ad hoc, invaluable, flawed, riveting. You can feel the exponential unknowability of the moment, the JFK-ification of historical record.

Was it three shots or four? Was there one shooter or two? Did Oswald act alone or was he part of a larger conspiracy? The answer to each is both. And (so it seems) it will always be both, the gears grinding against one another, the friction of data generating narrative heat. A definitive event occurred, but we will never be able to define it, and the more information we accumulate about it, the more unknowable it becomes. It shouldn’t be this way, but it is this way.

He takes refuge in his notes. The notes are becoming an end in themselves. Branch has decided it is premature to make a serious effort to turn these notes into coherent history. Maybe it will always be premature. Because the data keeps coming. Because new lives enter the record all the time. The past is changing as he writes.

When people discuss — I admit few people discuss this — the future of the novel and what comes next after post-modernism (itself a highly dubious term), I think: there will be no next step; the authorship and reading of such a novel has collapsed into the same individual. We are all Nicholas Branch now, all connected to some Curator who is constantly sending us more data to process, and we are all fashioning our own disparate and repetitive novel from the data of the day. Sometimes these factoids magnetize around an event, and sometimes it’s just the ongoing flow — endless and contradictory, collected and composed by us, individually and collectively, simultaneously, every day. Each day we renew the personal conspiracy theory that is our own Twitter stream.

Sometimes he looks around him, horrified by the weight of it all, the career of paper. He sits in the data-spew of hundreds of lives. There’s no end in sight.

Strangers in the night: A note on agents

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A couple of months ago, Stephen Akey wrote an amusing riff for the New Republic’s website about literary agents and the weird control they exert over what gets published now. The premise is that Akey has been shopping around a collection of linked essays about poetry and having absolutely no success at it. As someone who sometimes accidentally forgets to procrastinate and actually writes short stories, as well as the occasional literary essay, I was extremely sympathetic to his plight. And as my little rantlet on behalf of J.C. Hallman’s latest book shows, I tend to enjoy books whose location on the shelves of your typical airport bookstore aren’t immediately apparent. We should have shelves and shelves of books we don’t know where to shelve.

Akey says the sad truth seems to be that unless a book has the broadest appeal possible or comes attached to one’s already-cemented, celebrity-level reputation, most agents are not interested. Now I haven’t had many interactions with agents, but even my scant anecdotal data bears this out. Anyone who’s sat in the audience for one of those agent panel presentations — where they talk about how they charmingly wandered into their current gig, how much they love literature, etc. — knows just how quick the whole talk can turn grim. In my limited experience, it seems like what most agents want are, to borrow a quip from Lorrie Moore, abbreviated film plots — a book that is easily summarizable, with well-delineated genre signposts (literary or no), and above all an easy sense of taxonomy. What they want is a novel that has the easy conceptual grip of a piece of nonfiction, something that cannot only be discussed as a marketable entity but in a way comes predigested, pre-understood, pre-sellable because already sold.

A synecdoche of this phenomenon is the activity of pitching your novel to an agent, something I have only done a couple of times and an activity at which I am (admittedly) atrocious. What’s interesting in the lit agent woo-o-sphere is how each interstitial bit of copy is its own genre, with its requisite learning curve. Pitching a novel is exceedingly different from writing a novel. (Personal aside: I still find it hard to pitch something I’ve written without feeling like I have also simultaneously turned into a gigantic human booger.) After another failed attempt at pitching my novel, it’s difficult not to craft pitches for various canonical works of literature:

Absalom, Absalom! is a riveting story of a boy, confused about his station in life, who returns to have a heart-to-heart with his old man, an old lady, and a room full of dust motes. A searing portrait of a family, a region — a world! Also, there’s an unexplained Canadian roommate. Sequel potential!

If a pitch sounds like jacket copy, then all the better because what it is (again: I’m guessing!) is pre-written jacket copy. How would I sell this, the agent wants to know, not entirely unreasonably. How will this be packaged?

Of course, as a civilian reader, I never read the jacket copy, that distracting, wet mound of verbiage second only to blurbs in its manipulative uselessness. In my dream world of book publishing (eerily like France), there would be no jacket copy at all, no blurbs, no marketing, frankly. Just the author’s name, the title, and no more than three words of taxonomic information. I liked it when books just included a nice fat representative paragraph on the back cover. If this little glop of words rings your bell, then you might like this book, which you can also open and peruse even further right here in the store — still after all this time the best way to ascertain if you’re going to like a book. But all of this other marketing copy is just word noise. The single greatest benefit to buying hardback editions of books is unpeeling that noisy cover off and lining the recycling bin with it. Yes, yes, I realize that we are paradoxically in an era of unprecedented book cover mastery (Mendelsund, Kidd, et al.). But still, nothing speaks better than the mute opaque dignity of a clothbound book.

Of course the larger problem here is that I’m thinking of this endeavor as an English major, and in some ways a major in English is the worst thing one can get if you want to write contemporary novels. I’m including the MFA degree in this as well, though I don’t want to rehash the whole To MFA or Not To MFA debate — surely the Coke v. Pepsi of the literary world. What I mean is that what you end up studying in your English lit class/creative writing workshop is not the most representative American novel from the 1930s, but the most exceptional novel from the 1930s. That’s what the canon is: a litany of exceptions, a library of shaky notions that for some reason sing to the culture. In fact you could argue that many of our greatest novels work despite the fact that in many ways they are hot steaming messes, in terms of being immediately comprehensible narrative devices. You don’t have to reach all the way back to Melville to see the inverse ratio between novelistic and/or historical greatness and total commercial nightmare, as far as a publisher is concerned. And so after several years of studying the exceptions to the rule — despite the fact that Faulkner or Melville or Munro or whomever would get totally murdered in workshop — you as a writer want to write something that is also exceptional. Nicholson Baker said it well. What you are trying to do, as a writer, is be as completely different from everyone else as humanly possible. But this is precisely what literary agents are not interested in. This to them is commercial suicide (and they’re right!), and they don’t want to assist you. Because of the way agenting works, there is no path to success except to acquire clients along a conservative aesthetic trajectory.

What does this mean? In terms of fiction, this means they are interested in big chunky novels that can be labeled “literary thrillers.” They are not interested in metafiction, short stories, essays, poetry, fiction that eschews plot, anything that tries to address the history of the novel, etc. (Though Hallman’s book found a good home, so I very well might be totally bats.)

Which again, all of this would be fine as wine except for the fact that all of the major publishing houses are inaccessible unless you already have an agent representing your work. They simply won’t accept unagented submissions. And so what happens is that literary agents become subeditors before the great gods of the publishing houses. I’ve heard of writers whose agents go through multiple revisions of a manuscript before sending it out, all of which is fine, good lord one wants to be edited, one needs the help, but what is interesting is that these agents are acting as editors without access to a publication. If your story is edited by an editor at a literary magazine, it makes sense. You are both collaboratively working on the manuscript to make it better for eventual publication in that editor’s periodical. Same thing with an editor at a house. But the agent is an editor without an outlet and no real control over whether or not any house will publish it, so he or she is editing it not to any kind of house’s vision of excellence (or even marketability or commercial viability) but to their imagined chimera of commercial viability . . . somewhere. It’s a weird declension of the editorial function.

But the disintermediation first of manuscript acquisition and then of initial editing from the publishing house to the agents seems like an unfortunate historical accident. Amidst all of the Harper Lee brouhaha over her “sequel” recently, there was a nice long investigative piece about the book, and it showed the editorial records of how To Kill A Mockingbird went through several versions and how the editors at Lippincott helped her revise the book. I was amazed at the level of energy they expended on Lee’s as-yet-unrealized novel. All of this happens now at the agent level, though to be honest I have no idea if it still happens at this kind of back-to-the-studs renovational depth.

Another consequence: I’ve known writers who have done the agent revisions dance and had the novel submitted only to have it rejected by the houses, after which the agent shrugs and asks when he will have an entirely new book manuscript ready to go. That is, the manuscript goes off to agented-but-unaccepted limbo, like all the babies who died before being baptized. The only person who has lost here is the author, who’s spent four years writing the book, then another two revising it, then another one waiting for people to respond. And that’s a sad situation. It’s a situation that could easily waste someone’s life. The only solution then is to remove the book from the agenting universe and send it yourself to the markets that the agents aren’t interested in — the university presses, the small presses — to try to give your book a life. The agent isn’t interested in these markets because the money’s not big enough. Suddenly the prospect of selling your book is like working with a trial lawyer. Unless he can get a large sum of punitive damages, your case is not worth it to him.

Akey is not against agents. He says they serve a crucial gatekeeping function and that there’s a lot of hokum out there to sift through. (This blog post is probably a prime example.) I see his point; my historical query is why the houses outsourced this gatekeeping function to agents. It seems like the logical next step would be for agents to start publishing writers themselves. If they do indeed already do the heavy editorial lifting and if they do indeed have the keys to the marketing kingdom, then why don’t they call up a printer? They would seem to have more leverage than the behemoth publishing houses.

But then again, in terms of the business transaction, the agent doesn’t put forth any risk, at least relatively speaking. The agent didn’t take the time to write the book and the agent isn’t going to put $40,000 down to market it, and the agent isn’t going to make the trains run on time to have it in stores on the designated day. The agent is merely the conduit for two insecure and bewildered parties who for some unforeseen reason can’t find each other on their own in this contemporary cultural megalopolis. The agent is a pimp.

It seems as if publishing houses could acquire new books and their authors more cheaply without agents, since using them drives up the price, though I’m sure there’s a PowerPoint presentation somewhere showing how in the long run it’s cheaper to do it this way. Why else would the publishers do it? But despite this numerical advantage, it distracts from the unseen cost of eroding the publishing house’s editorial authority, which in the end is the only authority it has.

Once, at another entirely different panel discussion, I heard an older, more successful writer quip that agents need writers more than writers need agents; it just doesn’t feel that way. And really that’s about the most intelligent statement I’ve ever heard regarding the agent situation. I wonder if it would make Faulkner feel any better.

J.C. Hallman on Nicholson Baker

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I’ve got a review of B & Me: A True Story of Literary Arousal in the newest issue of the Quarterly Conversation. The book is an exploration of Hallman’s infatuation with Nicholson Baker and is similar but meaningfully different from Baker’s own book, U & I, which chronicled his infatuation with John Updike.

Hallman describes what he’s up to better than I can:

What needed to be done, I’d been saying, what no one had ever done, was tell the story of a literary relationship from its moment of conception, from that moment when you realize that there are writers out there in the world you need to read, so you read them.

The resulting book is totally, enjoyably, maddeningly nuts and I couldn’t put it down. Before you read the review, just go ahead and buy it. Here is a link.

The book is way more fun than whatever exercise in cultural sensitivity is currently being given the critical thumb job. For instance, while I’m just being recklessly opinionated here, instead of buying Ishiguro’s latest bland beast, save those hard-earned bucks and get this book instead.

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In related matters, my one small teensy beef with the Hallman book is what I’ve come to call the Bluets Problem. That is, an illusory commitment to full disclosure on the part of the nonfiction author, which then gets elided at some point of ultimate narrative convenience. Certain details one has come to expect are withheld from the reader. It’s the false promise of total honesty, which on the one hand totally makes sense. No author can or should tell you everything. But this completely reasonable sentiment is trapped within the autobiographical confessional mode, which subsists on the promissory premise of “I’m going to tell you everything.” What happens is that by the end of these books I feel chagrined that I’m not told more about these characters’ lives, and then I feel guilty for wanting to know everything, and then I feel like I’ve been manipulated into being a voyeur.

This also goes into my personal file of what fiction can get away with vs. what nonfiction can get away with, and actually a useful insight into this comes from none other than Jonathan Franzen.

Quick aside: I know, I know. “Jonathan Franzen, blah blah blah.” I’ve given up on the mission of having an opinion on everything Franzen does or says and whether or not he is Good or Bad for literature. Seemingly, a whole generation has substituted having a ragey opinion about Franzen in place of being well read. Love him, hate him, I do not care. (But props where props are due: the first section of Freedom is a magnificent panoramic Steadicam of novelistic goodness, even if you don’t dig that kind of thing.) (Update: See below.)

Susan Lerner: Given that you’ve written novels as well as personal essays, do you find these two forms suited to different types of exploration?

Jonathan Franzen: I think fiction is the genre better suited to exploration. Essay is reporting, in a sense. There are artistic, tonal, and structural challenges in doing an essay but I don’t feel as if, in an autobiographical essay, I’m necessarily exploring. I’m trying to take what I already know and make it interesting, palatable, not icky, and possibly instructive. And it’s true that in journalism and reported essay I am exploring something. I go to China because I want to know what the environmental situation is like in China. But for internal investigation there’s nothing like fiction, because you have so much more freedom to go to places that would be too personally compromising either for yourself or for other people. You’re essentially putting on a mask, various masks, in the form of these characters. The demands of a novel are so much greater in terms of narrative propulsion, that you are really forced to poke around deep inside yourself to find strong enough emotional drivers to get you through five hundred pages of the book.

The emphasis is mine (obv).

Now, lord knows I’ve had my own critical beef with some of Franzen’s nonfiction (short version: much of the time it reads like a failure of narrative persona), but this idea of fiction as an arena that allows you to mercilessly explore what would be too compromising to explore in nonfiction — isn’t this just the essence of my Bluets Problem? Because aren’t the rocks that these nonfiction books run up against actually the shores of fiction? Isn’t the solution to the convenient narrative blurring that happens at key points in these types of books — sort of like narrative blind spots — for their authors either to throw caution to the wind and fully exploit their friends and family, or to fully fictionalize their experiences and thereby discard the booster rockets of the factually verifiable and either make up or mine and shape experience as needed? Where “need” is defined here by the necessary steps that a book has willed itself into taking? Isn’t this similar to what Lorrie Moore said in her essay a while back in the New York Review of Books, where she reviewed three memoirs and did a sort of punchy eloquent shrug at the contemporary memoir as a phenomenon and said that the books under review acted like they wanted to be novels but didn’t give themselves over to the full reckless imagination of becoming novels? In other words, these works of nonfiction come across as somewhat post-novelistic but their apparent limitations paradoxically point back to the benefits of fiction. There’s gold still in them thar hills.

Of course all of this is in my wheelhouse of self-justification because I’m constantly looking for some kind of genre legitimacy for my own work. But my main point is that authenticity, full disclosure in prose, is always a pose. And a pose is the beginning of a mask.

Update: Today, March 19, 2015, FSG released the book cover for Franzen’s next novel Purity, which won’t come out until September 1, and people are losing their everloving minds.

Come on, people. We’ve got bigger Franzens to fry than this.