All posts by barrett.hathcock@gmail.com

Losing Faith with Fiction

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I have been mulling over the news that Philip Roth no longer reads fiction. In a profile in the Financial Times, there is the following exchange:

As we talk, Roth is perfectly courteous, perfectly charming, perfectly defended. Half a century of celebrity, since the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969 brought him money and a turbulent kind of fame at the age of 36, has made him a master of the polite no-go sign. The conversation I’d longed to have with him since I first read him many decades ago, a conversation about fiction itself, died an early death.

“I’ve stopped reading fiction. I don’t read it at all. I read other things: history, biography. I don’t have the same interest in fiction that I once did.”

How so?

“I don’t know. I wised up … ”

And with those three words he gave me a long look from those fierce eyes and then a significant glance at my notebook, as if to say: that’s what I want you to write down.

So what did he wise up about? On a superficial level, and probably long ago, about the inadvisability of giving anything away when answering journalists’ questions, that’s for sure.

Aside from this moment, the profile is otherwise redundant. All of the information has been so thoroughly catalogued before that the accumulation of words seems unnecessary. No wonder that this statement by Roth received the most attention. But aside from this fleck of gold in an otherwise dry creek bed, the statement seems, if not declared, at least edited to be supremely tweetable. That is, mildly scandalous, gnomicly brief, invested with the shelf life of organic yogurt. And it dutifully sprouted its week’s worth of online mold.

But I’ve kept thinking about it because I think, in its truncated outlandishness, it so disregards Roth’s actual writing. He may no longer read fiction; he may in fact find reading fiction a waste of time. (Geoff Dyer has a great line somewhere where he says that all men eventually only read military history.) This statement actually isn’t that much of a surprise. In interviews over the past several years, as Roth has become an old man, Roth’s said that he’s rereading the classics, perhaps for the last time. A premonition of death seemingly haunts every move he makes–the books he writes, the ones he reads, the plots of his novels, etc. So one doesn’t really expect for Roth to have an informed opinion on that story collection by Miranda July, or the amount of depth to be plumbed in Téa Obreht’s novel.

(Incidentally, I have’t read either of those authors either, but I feel the atmospheric contemporary pressure to have done so.)

But the statement seems to negate what he has done with this life, the way that the news Salman Rushdie is going to work on a TV show and that he thinks TV can be panoramic and sociological in ways the novel no longer can (old news, that), somehow seems to negate the very validity of fiction.

But Roth’s fiction is thoroughly devoted to the fictional, to the idea of the fictional. Or to be more clear: his works are all about making stuff up and about characters who make stuff up, or read books and try to live according to those books, and suffer because of the miscalculation. So much of his mid-career work (the three novels and one novella that comprise Zuckerman Bound) are about the life of an accidentally celebrated author. And his late work takes on various American totemic myths and braids them with individual lives. And one of his best books, The Counterlife, is all about lives re-writing each other, except here it’s not new characters corrupting other characters, but the same characters re-written in multiple ways. The book is a novel bursting into several different novels, characters playing out different versions, different fates. That is, his fiction has been primarily dedicated to this kind of energy, a character’s ability to fictionalize. All of which is a long way of saying that Roth himself may no longer read fiction but the fiction he’s actually written is argument enough for fiction’s value. And not just because it’s “good” fiction, but because the novels argue on behalf of the inescapable need for people to fictionalize. It’s metafiction in the deepest way. It’s not the lighter John Barthian side of fiction, purely investigating the structural conventions of narrative.

I would say that Roth treats fiction on a religious level if he hadn’t stated so clearly that he considers God himself the most supremely harmful fiction.

MFA = Mother of Failed Arguments

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Laura Miller wrote a nice piece in Salon not that long ago, capably outlining the recent flare up in the To MFA or Not To MFA debate, this time describing Mark McGurl’s latest rebuttal in the L.A. Review of Books to Elif Batuman’s takedown of his book The Program Era and MFA programs in particular. (DG Myers, author of The Elephants Teach [which everyone considering an MFA should read], also has an interesting afterthought.)

As someone who has both attended an MFA program (Alabama ’04, roll tide) and has taught undergraduate workshops, I am tempted to weigh in on the matter. But all of this back and forth has made me realize the perennial exuberance of this Down with MFA/Up with MFA debate. I realized only recently that you could spend more time reading about books on the internet than you could spend reading the actual books, so that at the end of the day, you are already too full on digests before the real literary meal. (Yes, it’s taken me a while to discern this.) But there’s more: you could obviate the need for even that digest-like reading by spending all of your time reading about MFA programs, and whether or not they are in fact the bud of all that’s evil.

So consider this a personal devotion to avoid all MFA program essays, rants, and articles in the future. They never solve the problem; they never settle the debate; they’re almost all ahistorical posturing; and they only provoke another onslaught of comments; and these discussions, peculiarly, seem to diminish their participants and make them sound less cogent, reasonable, and/or sane than they otherwise might actually be. Batuman is a better writer than her MFA LRB article (and yet she keeps returning again and again to kick the shins of creative writing programs, protesting too much). And McGurl’s original rebuttal to the LRB, which he posted in full on his website, was a stronger, more succinct response than his latest LARB essay.

So, enough. It’s the worst kind of discussion–rants traded within the cave of an institutional navel.

David Foster Wallace Symposium Makes Waves

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Hello. I am happy to announce that the latest issue of the Quarterly Conversation has been published and it contains a gigantic symposium/where-are-we-now collection of essays on David Foster Wallace. And I’m happy to be included.

My essay is about Consider the Lobster, Wallace’s second collection of essays. I talk about how Wallace’s nonfiction is, in general, just plain great, but also how his nonfiction fits within the current ecology of literary writing that is not fiction or poetry, i.e., creative nonfiction, literary journalism, literary fiction, the Essay, New Journalism, Lyric Essay, or whatever handy or not-so-handy moniker you prefer. I also talk a bit about everyone’s favorite manifesto from last year, David Shields’s Reality Hunger.

I don’t remember if I mentioned this in the essay but it feels worth being redundant: we seriously need two types of Wallace books to be published. And by Wallace books I mean posthumous collections of his work. First, we need a book of his uncollected nonfiction. There are a couple of late, great pieces: the Federer piece, the graduation speech. (Yes, I realize they published that last one, but I’m talking about publishing it in a version for actual grown-ups, rather than the annoying, cloying, exploitive, one-sentence-per-page edition that’s out now.) But there are also lots of early book reviews that are languishing in forgotten back issues of various journals. I had a phase during graduate school when I would obsessively locate these essays either within the bound back issues or through Interlibrary Loan (ILL!), typically during the times when I should have been collecting scholarship for my academic papers. There is one out there about fiction and the “conspicuously young” that’s a wonderful explication of the difficulties of graduate creative writing programs and how they affect teachers, students, and the publishing industry in general. It actually adds nutritional meat to the whole MFA Good/Bad debate. Anyway, before I go hunting through my files to start quoting from the thing, my main point is: there’s a good-sized book there and an audience who would appreciate it and buy it.

Second, we need a Portable Wallace, a la the Portable Faulkner. I realize that Wallace’s reputation is not foundering; he needs no Malcolm Cowley to call attention to his greatness or to marshall the forces of culture to keep him in print. I say this instead as someone who has taught college. The problem is Wallace is hard to teach–not in terms of explication/analysis (though, I mean, that too), but in terms of just having a usable edition of his work. Because his greatest piece of fiction is Infinite Jest, and because the most conveniently teachable pieces of his short fiction and nonfiction are scattered between various editions, it would be awfully nice to have a 500-paged paperback with a handful of essays and a good chunk of his fiction. That way you could show what Wallace was up to in various genres without having to dedicate an entire semester to it simply because of the books that one would have to buy.

Before I get too full of myself and start rattling off all the other books I think we need published (a collection of Cynthia Ozick’s essays on Henry James? an updated edition of Peter Taylor’s Collected Stories?), let me also mention all the other great DFW-related essays in the issue: my main man Scott Esposito on Infinite Jest; Edie Meidav on A Supposedly Fun Thing; CJ Evans on Brief Interviews; Lance Olsen on Oblivion; John Lingan on The Pale King; and Andrew Altschul on “The Suffering Channel,” among other things. I’m happy to be a part of this symposium, especially since after the initial publicity wave for The Pale King crested and dissolved, Wallace-related criticism seemed to dry up. Also, finally finally, there is still the regular round of reviews and interviews in the issue.

Fighting Words

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Benjamin Kunkel writes:

Jess Row calls me “dogmatically bigoted” for supposedly characterizing writers from “backward” — his term — countries as formally “backward.” These are fighting words.

This is the very first comment hanging like internet fruit from the ending of Row’s recent essay, “The Novel Is Not Dead,” which appears in the latest Boston Review. I don’t want to explicate, summarize, or disagree with Row’s essay (which I skimmed while eating something crumbly over my keyboard), but I find this mutual raising of backhair interesting and noteworthy.

Because, despite my skimming, my eyebrows did perform a slight uptick of pleasure at the phrase “dogmatically bigoted.” I have always been a fan of the bumptious punch of the adverb-adjective combo. The skimming, by the way, doesn’t really have anything to do with Row’s particular essay. It has more to do with the life/death articles that prey upon various limbs of literature. (There is one even today about the short story at The Millions.) The novel or the story or the epic poem may in fact die, but surely these vampirish little think pieces will live forever. They are the cockroaches of literary culture.

But what’s noteworthy is how I forgot, while reading, that Benjamin Kunkel was an actual person; that is, I forgot that he might not enjoy, much less agree with, Row’s characterization of his literary point of view, that in fact he might even consider Row’s characterization as not just wrong but openly hostile. And yet, despite this, I could see Row’s clear pleasure at deploying a neat phrase, perhaps without a clear vista onto how his punchy eloquence was morphing into fighting words. Maybe he forgot he was actually talking about a real person. Or maybe he knew exactly what he was doing and meant every morpheme.

Either way, it’s an instructive little reminder that Benjamin Kunkel, as well as many other writers we might mischaracterize, is himself emphatically not dead.

Reptile Time

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Here is Michael Chabon, substitute blogging for Ta-Nehisi Coates over at the Atlantic, blogging about blogging:

Novelist time is reptile time; novelists tend to be ruminant and brooding, nursers of ancient grievances, second-guessers, Tuesday afternoon quarterbacks, retrospectators, endlessly, like slumping hitters, studying the film of their old whiffs. You find novelists going over and over the same ground in their novels—TNC was talking about Gatsby last week, Fitzgerald’s a prime example—configuring and reconfiguring the same little set of preoccupations, haunted by missed opportunities. That may be because getting a novel written, or a bunch of novels, means that you are going to miss a lot of opportunities, and so missing them is something you have to be not only willing but also equipped by genes and temperament to do. Blogging, I think, is largely about seizing opportunities, about pouncing, about grabbing hold of hours, events, days and nights as they are happening, sizing them up and putting them into play with language, like a juggler catching and working into his flow whatever the audience has in its pockets.

That’s wonderfully said, methinks.

Accumulated Baggage

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Hello.

The good thing about never posting is that you eventually accumulate something worth posting.

And so it is with great pleasure that I link to a list of Ten Essential Southern Novels I wrote for Conversational Reading. Boiling down that list was instructive, revealing. So much gets left on the floor. For better or worse, there’s nothing too terribly idiosyncratic in my list, except for the fact that my list of novels includes four collections of stories. No matter, the collections are novelistically expansive, panoramically interesting. But it made me think of the paucity of my list-making ability. Get thee to the library! And it made me appreciate D.G. Myers’s energetic listing over at his excellent A Commonplace Blog. Here’s my favorite list he’s done thus far: Five Books of Professors.

In addition, I am happy to report that a short story of mine is in the newest issue of Louisiana Literature (27/2), available now in better bookstores and libraries everywhere. The story is called “Popular Baggage” and is included in the story collection that will come out next year. The story is my, ahem, High-School Prom story. Every writer who’s read Hemingway attempts a hunting story, and likewise, everyone who was a child in the 80s, or has seen too many John Hughes movies, has a High-School Prom story in them. My Prom story is a bit more like Carrie than Sixteen Candles, except there’s no blood, or telekinesis, or John Travolta, but there is dancing, by god.

Here’s how the story begins:

Continue reading Accumulated Baggage →

From Updike to Baker to Wallace

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Hello.

I am happy to report that my essay about the cross-pollinations between John Updike, Nicholson Baker, and David Foster Wallace is up at the Quarterly Conversation. It’s part of the newest fall issue, which also includes essays and reviews covering Stefan Zweig, David Shields, that new “alternative history of the novel” by Steven Moore, and, as Nabokov might say, much, much more.

In the essay I argue that Baker is a kind of stylistic midpoint between Updike and Wallace, and that all three writers can be understood as stylistic sequels to one another. Finishing up the essay got me thinking about writer-on-writer influence in general and stylistic overlap in particular. At the same time I was teaching some of Henry James’s stories, and it was while reading “The Jolly Corner”–that long, digressive, thickened, dark night of the self–that I thought of Wallace’s prose, especially the prose in Oblivion, his last story collection. Does Late James have something in common with Late Wallace? There’s a more substantive, quotation-filled post there. But, as Hemingway might say, I’ll fish that swamp tomorrow.

The Portable Son: it’s officially forthcoming

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Hello! I am happy to to announce that my first short story collection, The Portable Son, has been acquired by Aqueous Books, a wonderful new independent press brought to you by the same great people who run Prick of the Spindle. It will be published in the fall of 2011 both as a paperback and as a Kindle eBook. It’s difficult to write this blog post without sounding like a total spaz; I’m so excited I could spit.

The book is a collection of nine linked stories, all following a single character, Peter, from his Mississippi adolescence to his conflicted adulthood bouncing around the South, trying to figure out how to be a grown-up, which, if you read this past Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, is not merely a random authorial confabulation of upper-middle-class ennui, but is in fact an actual verifiable trend. (Ah, if we only had that “emerging adulthood” line back when we were twenty-four and sleeping in our childhood bunkbed. Back then they just called us Slackers.)

Anyway, three of the stories — “High Cotton,” “Timber Walking,” and “Nightswimming” — have already been published in print and online mags, and two more of the stories got picked up over the summer and will appear within the next several months.

So, in short, lots of excitement, and I am sure to actually begin posting something to this blog as my inevitable PR campaign of total devastation cranks its engine.

And I love that word — “forthcoming.” Good, good word.

New Interview, New Review, New New New

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Hello. There is much to link to today.

First, I am happy to report that an interview I conducted with novelist Sam Lipsyte is up and ready for reading over at the Quarterly Conversation. This interview is another particle in the overwhelming wave of positive press surrounding his latest novel, The Ask, which, as I’ve said before in this space, you should read ASAP. (For a more thorough convincing, please go here.) Lipsyte has also written the novels Homeland and The Subject Steve, as well as the short story collection Venus Drive, and he is much, much funnier than this blog post.

Also, I’m happy to report that the latest issue proper of the Quarterly Conversation is also up and ready. This issue contains: essays on Nobel laureate Herta Mueller, Jonathan Swift, and Per Petterson; 19 book reviews, including appraisals of William Gaddis, Jose Manuel Prieto, Gilbert Sorrentino, and Roberto Bolano (yes! who has published another novel; he’s the busiest dead man I know); and an interview with David Shields, author of Reality Hunger, which is also going through its own wave of review, interview, and internecine online appraisal.

Plus, among the other reviews and interviews, there is, finally, my review of Joey Comeau’s novel Overqualified, a book told through a collection of employment cover letters sent to various corporations. Fun fun.

Finally, finally, there are two news blogs worth mentioning: the first is The Constant Conversation, which is (as the name implies) the new blog arm (leg? elbow?) of the Quarterly Conversation and a sort of harmonious, collaborative voice of its editors. It’s only like a week old and already there are heated intellectual volleys occurring daily. Plus, there is the new Paper Trail, the latest book-specific blog from the fine people of Bookforum. This is in addition to their already excellent curatorial wonder Omnivore.

All of this means that you will never run out of stuff to read, and that you will never get any work done again, unless the power goes out. You’re welcome.

Winter Review Goodness

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Hello.

Christmas has officially come early, as the winter issue of the Quarterly Conversation is now up and so excited and running down the stairs in its pajama-clad feet.

In addition to my review of Sam Lipsyte’s latest novel The Ask, the issue is a stuffed-stocking of reviews and essays. It includes essays on Pynchon’s three California novels, Coetzee’s three post-Nobel autobiographical novels, and the fight/friendship/fictive-philosophical debate between William Gass and John Gardner, those two poles of postwar fiction whom we ideologically scrimmage in between whether we realize it or not.

What’s more, in addition to the standard slate of reviews, there is the epic Translate This Book! panel, where a huge roster of translators, writers, and publishers describe what contemporary works of literature have not yet been–but desperately need to be–translated into English.

See the whole splendid spread here.