Category Archives: book reviews

Notes on ‘Directions to Myself’

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There are some books you enjoy so much that you immediately and automatically buy the author’s next book as soon as it comes out. Such is the case with Heidi Julavits’s new book Directions to Myself: a Memoir of Four Years, which came out this summer. Her previous book, The Folded Clock, was surprising and delightful. I don’t even remember why I started reading it, but I found it funny and sharp and shorn of narrative cliche. It has the fragmentary scattershot nature of a journal but without the self-justificatory stuffing of a conventional memoir. Plus it’s funny.

The new book is a fragmented journal of her interactions with her son between the time he’s about five until he basically becomes a tween. The time chronology is a little furry. She has two children and the older one, a daughter, has cruised into adolescence, and the youngest, a boy — her baby — is quickly following, and this is her catalog of instruction to that boy. Complicating this narrative scenario is the sexual-political climate of the past decade, the Me Too movement and the cascading revelations of sexual misbehavior both small and large, petty and gruesome, that have come to light, with varying levels of actual consequence, and the book becomes charged. How to raise a man in a world like this?

I agree with Julavits on just about everything in the book and yet I left it feeling lukewarm. The writing is still sharp and sometimes funny, but the book grows static and repetitive, her narrative persona seems to lack self-awareness, and she comes across as overbearing. And it’s not that I’m uninterested in the subject matter. I also have two children, one boy and one girl, and sit there stunned at the kitchen table after another depleted meal wondering how these two humans will make their way through the world once they leave the house, what the world will do to them and what they will do in response. It’s too much, it’s like fractals, I just sit back and hope the patterns come out pretty.

Perhaps as a middle aged parent, I’m simply too close to the material to have enough distance to enjoy it. I found myself saying aloud to the book more than once, “Geez, Mom. Lighten up.” Every interaction with the son is so relentlessly pedagogical. Everything is a lesson about male threat and future behavior. I realize that it’s this way because that’s the very theme of the book, but it makes the reader question if Julavits is this relentlessly one note in life. Let him play his video games, or don’t. But quit giving in to upper-middle class tangible goods while trying to police his behavior on such goods while not also simultaneously recognizing that you’re trying to have it both ways. It put me in mind of Huck Finn and the Widow Douglas who is constantly trying to civilize poor old Huck. This book is from the widow’s perspective, which could be fun, but instead I just feel a little trapped by everything.

A recurring motif in the book is how people mistake the boy for a girl because of his long hair. This happens over and over again, and then a third of the way through the book, the motif expands and takes a slight, incomplete turn. A man has been watching the son play in a park and mistakes him for a girl, and the daughter corrects him. He then proceeds to argue with the daughter that her brother is in fact a girl. Then he walks away in a humph:*

“We watch him hurry away. . . . I could use this as a teaching moment, the lesson reducible to a single sentence. What an asshole that guy is.

Instead, my daughter sees an opportunity to teach me.

You know he wants to cut his hair, right? she says. He’s just scared to tell you.

We’ve had this discussion before.

That may or may not be the case, I say. However, I do want him to keep his hair long. While my reasons might not strike you as good ones, I want to tell you what they are. . . .

Reason one, I say. His hair is like the tree in your uncle’s yard, the one he wanted to chop down because it made his grass brown, which was no reason to cut down a tree, in my opinion, in the same way that strangers’ failures of imagination are no reason to cut your brother’s hair.

Reason two, I say. Which isn’t really a reason but more of a matter of interest. According to the websites I’ve begun to visit, because my old friend has suddenly started to believe in 9/11 conspiracies and the power of “the universe,” and I want to be able to knowledgeably discuss these things with her, the bones of the forehead are porous and allow light to transmit information to the pineal gland, also known as the Third Eye. Hair, according to these websites, should be kept long, so that it can be coiled or otherwise secured, thereby keeping unobstructed the lines of communication with the universe. . . .

Reason three, I say. Again, according to these websites, long hair produces calcium, phosphorus, and vitamin D, which enter the spinal fluid through the top of the brain, thereby promoting greater intelligence, brightened empathy, kindness, intuition, and the ability to sense enemies.

Your brother, I say, is very empathic and intuitive and kind, and maybe this is why.

My daughter rolls her eyes. She believes her brother’s displays of basic humanity are strategic ploys to make me love him more.

She then correctly observes: Her father, who is also empathic and intuitive and kind, is bald. . . .

Reason four: I refuse the implication, made by the uncle on the island [who warned the mother to protect the boy, along the lines of his prettiness and hair could make him a victim], that if I don’t cut my son’s hair, then his risk of being harmed is greatly increased, and so whatever future abuse he suffers is my fault and then, because he’s pretty, it’s also his.

Reason five: I’d recently had a dream in which I was following my son, on my hands and knees, across a ladder pitched horizontally over an abyss, and he’d slipped, and fell and I’d dropped to my stomach, and reached through the rungs, and caught him by the hair, and saved him.

Reason six: my students and I recently discussed what a writer could or could not imagine fictional people, who in no way resemble the writer, to feel. One of my students said, I’m one of those people who believes there are limits to empathy.

I’m one of those people, too. The fact is, most hours of the day, my son is not with me. He might encounter a stranger in a park and, as happened to my daughter and me, would not be believed, would actually be dismissed, if he corrected that stranger’s assumptions. His hair offered him a brief chance to experience what some never do. It helped him sense the enemy, and hopefully that enemy would never be me.”

I find myself becoming exasperated when I read this. I find myself judging Julavits as a mother rather than riding along with her as a narrator. The line between instructing the child and controlling the child is too fine. I find the final idea, that long hair will create a kind of radical gender empathy within the son, dubious. I don’t know what to make of the final clause, where the mother becomes the potential enemy, unless she is hinting at the possibility that her very instruction and protection is a Widow Douglas-like threat. The whole scene strikes me as preposterous, overdetermined, unreasonable, riveting, and maddening in terms of parental logic. I find myself arguing the entire walk home. I can’t tell if Julavits is joking or not, or how much she is joking and when.** Before I read the book, I would have disagreed with the writing student who said there are limits to empathy in fiction, but now afterward, perhaps he and Julavits are correct. Perhaps the problem is that I just don’t understand what it feels like to be a mother, to live under that totalizing atmospheric burden, a lifelong heat dome of danger. So what strikes me as unreasonableness on her part as a parent (a type of controlling, wacky, sentimental to the point of paranoid dream-logic), or unreliability on her part as a narrator (a type of inconsistency in tone and authorial irony), is actually my inability jump over that crevasse of understanding. I just don’t get it. I am just a dad, with short hair.

* I’m trying out a different way of formatting block quotations. The default way it’s done in this theme makes the quoted text too large and, furthermore, italicized, which for some reason today just seems entirely wrong.

** “I was making jokes no one got but me. I was making jokes that weren’t, technically, jokes.” The Folded Clock, p. 191.

Roth in Rehab

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I was about a quarter of the way through the Philip Roth biography when the news of Blake Bailey broke. That is, the author of said biography was accused of raping three women and of grooming his 8th-grade female students while he taught at a school in New Orleans in the 1990s. He kept in touch with them, and later, when they were adults in the eyes of the law, he sexually pursued them. The New Yorker has a good explanatory article. And Slate has published an essay from one of Bailey’s former students, as well as a long article interviewing several others. Each new batch of detail is more damning than the last. Norton, his publisher, has pulled the book out of print, the author has been dropped by his literary agency, and I now own one slightly used, copiously annotated ghost biography of Philip Roth, great American writer, dead now almost three years. 

The book is celebrity gossip of the literary sort. After reading it I feel slightly queasy, as if I had gorged on a bag of marshmallows, and that’s completely independent of the meta-narrative of Bailey’s own moral transgressions. The book is stuffed with facts, names, friends, girlfriends, nemeses. The literary game of pin-the-fictional-tail on the factual person is so rigorous as to be exhaustive and exhausting. 

But in the end it’s not a good biography, if by biography we want more than mere facts but a deeper understanding of the person. The portrait of Roth is exceedingly complex — he was a generous friend, a literary crusader, a stand-up comic in tweed, a Hercules of grudges held, as well as an emotional and sexual terrorist — but these disparate counterselves never congeal into a comprehensible whole. Perhaps my desire for a comprehensible whole is a bourgeois affectation that should have been squeezed out of me by the shrieking relentlessness of Roth’s novels, his insistence that we always get people wrong, that life is nothing but a constant parade of getting people wrong. But still I hold onto a smidgen of belief that Roth, as a person, could be made to make sense, at least a little more than what we have here. 

Part of my dissatisfaction with the book is Bailey’s refusal or unwillingness to editorialize about what it all means. There’s very little narrative consciousness here, little if any margin between biographer and subject. The result is almost a collage of quotation and anecdote, mortared together with scant guidance. When Bailey does step forward rhetorically, he blatantly submits to Roth’s view of things. From a footnote: “In most cases I’ve tried to cull only the most telling, pertinent, and perceptive passages in Maggie’s journal, and hence may have inadvertently misrepresented the basic tenor of what is, indeed, a pretty insipid piece of writing.” The consequence of this particular editorial lapse is that we don’t really know if Roth’s first wife Margaret Martinson is, as he would have it, a crazed psychopath, or something more complex and sympathetic. Their tumultuous relationship feels as random and unexplained as a farce. Indeed, Roth’s fictional treatment of the doomed romance in My Life as a Man is more conceptually coherent.

In fine Rothian fashion, the biography is very much a counterlife to previous books, specifically two, the James Atlas biography of Saul Bellow and Claire Bloom’s second memoir, Leaving a Doll’s House, which describes her fraught relationship with and marriage to Roth.1 Both books represent perspectives Roth wants to refute. The Atlas biography is depicted here as a once-admirable project that went off the rails, poisoned by the biographer’s editorializing and his growing disapproval of his own subject. Roth expends a great deal of energy trying to correct Atlas’s portrait of Bellow. He proposes a long interview with the rapidly deteriorating Bellow, who is no longer well enough to fight the rigorous reputational fight that Roth wants him to. Finally, his corrective manifests as an essay about Bellow’s work, which appears in Shop Talk, his late collection of essays and interviews. 

The Bloom memoir infuriated Roth for the rest of his life. It’s amazing to witness what a grudge can do to a person. In addition to his novel I Married A Communist, his most direct fictional counterpunch to his ex-wife, Roth contemplated publishing a line-by-line rebuttal to the Bloom memoir (“Notes on a Slander-Monger”), but was mercifully and somewhat surprisingly persuaded to stand down. (I say surprisingly because Roth seems to have forced his way in so many aspects of his life that the precious few times he is told no, it’s shocking, a rupture in the cosmos.) 

He selects his first biographer, then-friend Ross Miller, in part because he can control the biography. This will-to-control manifests everywhere. All the para-text surrounding Roth-the-writer proves unsatisfactory to him so that he inevitably takes it over, writing the notes to his Library of America editions, writing his own jacket copy, his own photo captions, and even attempting to rewrite Hermione Lee’s Paris Review interview questions. (She bravely fights back.)

For Roth, no one does it right. And when Miller doesn’t make progress on the biography in all the ways that Roth sees fit and when he seems to harbor some ambivalence about Roth’s “florid love life,” he is removed from his post.2 Roth approaches Lee to write the biography but she has other projects that conflict. (She bravely fights back.) That brings us to Blake Bailey, whose book also fails because it refuses to answer the question that his own book poses: is this authorized biography a worthwhile endeavor or merely a grocery list of score settling? He quite clearly lays out Roth’s agenda for a biographer and so the agency of that ultimate biographer is pertinent. But Bailey never admits to how he’s dealing with the problem. 

That said, if this biography is a counterlife to the Bloom memoir and is meant to resuscitate Roth’s reputation, it fails in that regard, too. Though Bailey doesn’t condemn Roth’s behavior with women, for example, the steep pile of detail is itself thoroughly condemning. (One jilted-lover’s suicide attempt might be an anomaly; three indicates a trend.) One doesn’t have to be a woke social justice warrior of present-day Twitter to find Roth’s behavior repellent. He often spoke of the aesthetic project of “letting the repellent in.” In that he succeeded. 

Roth seems unwilling or unable to have a long-term meaningful relationship with a woman, despite the fact at the end of his life he had numerous female friends and professional peers who admired and respected him. Throughout his endless flings and relationships, he seems to harbor a cursed attraction toward psychologically damaged shiksa women with addiction problems and absent or abusive fathers. He attempts to save and correct these women, but their very own all too human neediness and inability to minister to his own often outsized emotional needs overwhelms him. His first wife Maggie is the template, Bloom the top-shelf version, and Sylvia, the pseudonym used for the woman Roth had an affair with late in life and who was the model for Faunia Farley in The Human Stain, is the parodic white-trash version. The other women — the stable, capable, ambitious, independently minded long-term girlfriends — all leave Roth when he refuses to marry and have children. That they often remained his friends afterward speaks to a mutual magnanimity that goes insufficiently explored in the current book. (It would be so much more interesting to read long interviews with these women where they discuss the relationships at length from their own perspectives.) His relationship with Bloom, in particular, is like watching two black holes attempt to foxtrot, doomed in every way possible. Roth, the celebrated novelist who was accused of being a self-hating Jew early in his career, proceeds to have a nearly 20 year relationship with an actual self-hating Jew, who also happens to be one of the most beautiful women in the world. Star-crossed lovers, indeed. 

There is also an unsettling Humbert Humbertian thread running through the book, noticeable even before the news of Blake Bailey. One of Roth’s girlfriends begins to extricate herself from the relationship when he expresses a worry that he might become attracted to his teenage step-daughter, Helen, daughter of first wife Maggie, as she gets a little older. Is this a Mickey Sabbath-like refusal to be constrained by boundaries or is it a moral blindness to those boundaries, which is then spun into artful debate via forceful lobbyists like David Kepesh and Sabbath? Or is it both? I don’t know. What I also don’t know is the line between this motif in the book and the alleged transgressions of Bailey, who, like a Roth character himself, appears to have been exposed as a sexual predator by the very act of writing a book about another, greater writer who has his own morally suspect sexual history.3 It’s almost as if Blake Bailey is a vicious parody of Roth, and of Humbert Humbert, a predator without the fancy prose style, a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. 

“I don’t want you to rehabilitate me. Just make me interesting” reads the epigraph to the book, a direction from subject to biographer. Does Bailey succeed? Honestly, I started reading Roth’s novels so long ago I don’t have enough perspective to tell. I’m not sure if this book will be useful to anyone besides the morbidly curious. I didn’t necessarily find Roth and his life interesting, oh after about page 400. Even the most florid love life eventually grows tedious. I still find him heroic as a writer because of his relentless dedication, the sheer novelistic work he put in, but as a person he seems rather pitiful. So many lovers and yet so irredeemably alone.

  1. And by “fraught,” I mean totally bananas. 
  2. And by “florid,” I mean totally bananas.
  3. To be fair, Roth was never accused of rape or of grooming underage students, though as a college professor he did pursue his (ostensibly legally adult) female students. Though he doesn’t break any laws as far as I can tell with my civilian eye, he does seemingly pursue any female with a pulse. According to Bailey’s telling, Roth allegedly made two passes at a friend of Claire Bloom’s daughter Anna Steiger, the first when this friend was 21-ish and the second when she was 28-ish. Roth, arguing with the friend the morning after the second occurrence: “Come on, how long is it since I made a pass at you? Ten years? What were you then, twelve? What’s the point of having a pretty girl in the house if you don’t fuck her?” Given the present tornado of altercation, allegation, implication, the reader may be forgiven for asking, “Just who is justifying whom?”

Review of ‘Lincoln in the Bardo’

book reviews, The Quarterly Conversation,

Originally published in issue 47 of The Quarterly Conversation

Novel Spirits: George Saunders Goes Long

In her latest collection of essays, Critics, Monsters, Fanatics and Other Literary Essays, Cynthia Ozick discusses Lionel Trilling, who despite being recognized as an esteemed literary critic of his time — a “figure” is Ozick’s word — had written to himself in his journal that he felt under-accomplished and that the road to a lasting literary contribution to the world was simple: it was the novel or nothing. Ozick deems The Middle of the Journey, the one novel Trilling did complete before his death, a good but not great book, an honorable beginning, but what puzzles her is how Trilling was haunted by the Novel, as a literary category in America. To succeed at the novel was to achieve true success; everything else was just pretending.

Ozick herself has been the victim of similar curses. Before publishing her first stories, before embarking on her career of literary essays for which she is one of my favorite living writers, she labored for seven years on a novel never published, Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love. She then labored for another seven years on a novel that was finally published — Trust — about which she self-laceratingly brags not one person has actually read all the way through. It was only after getting over this multi-year, multi-novel hurdle that Ozick started to become the writer we begin to recognize today, who did, it must be said, go on to write “successful novels.” But it was the novel as gauntlet, the novel as totem, that cursed her, and seems to curse her still.

We’ve moved past all that, right? We’ve got micro-fictions and flash fictions and autofictions and lyric essays and confessional literary criticism about dildos. Sadly, no. Despite all our new-fangled literary categories, which are often just new names for old things, Parkay for Oleo-Margarin, American literary culture is still haunted by the Novel. It is the monolithic literary form of this country, the category against which all other kinds of writing are measured — a strange thing, because aside from “a prose work of a certain length,” it’s basically impossible to define. There is the persistent myth of the Great American Novel, a book expansive enough to encapsulate our country’s unique breed of idiocy and promise, a collectively envisioned cartoon of what a novel should be. And like American Exceptionalism or home buying as a path to wealth, some myths never die, no matter how crude.

All of this baggage is particularly problematic for the short story writer. I should say the “American short story writer,” since there aren’t many other kinds. The short story, with the requisite Irish exceptions, hasn’t prospered in the same way anywhere else, at least not to become its own codified arena of literature, so that we have several Great American Short Story Writers. Why this form has thrived here and not elsewhere is an interesting topic, but one for another essay. And yet despite this history of success, and despite the infrastructure of support for story writers (and poets!) that exists via the American creative writing complex, the history of the American short story is littered with great writers who aggravated their natural talents by cranking out a novel to satisfy the culture. One can skim the bibliographies of celebrated story writers and see these novels peeking out bashfully, mixtures of literary tokenism and self-imposed self-improvement, as if writing a novel really were like running a marathon — so many hail mary bids to win respect from an absent cultural father.

Novels by short story writers (let’s pretend for a moment that these categories aren’t porous) often feel too long, yet not long enough. One type is like John Cheever’s The Wapshot Chronicle, a collection of linked narratives that aren’t independent enough to be stories yet not connected enough to accumulate into a cohesive narrative. It feels like a bag of marbles rather than a marble sculpture. The other type of story-writer novel is the overbuilt birdhouse: a structure with an extreme amount of planning in which not much actually happens.

Which brings us to George Saunders, arguably the preeminent American story writer of our day. This post of pre-eminent, living story writer is like the Presidency. Only one person can occupy it at a time, and sadly that person is usually male. The requirements of this office are not just writing good stories. And make no mistake, Saunders writes excellent stories. This person must be iconoclastic. He must have imitators, and boy, does Saunders have imitators. This is not his fault. He is very successful at his own shtick, but that shtick contains enough easily identifiable characteristics that younger writers — willingly or not — can imitate him. It’s to Saunders’s credit that vast swaths of contemporary American writing look like Saunders’s discards. Many writers have made entire careers out of being Diet Saunders. I’m not going to name names. Just throw in an absurd premise set slightly in the future, a premise that seems to comment somewhat ironically on our late-capitalistic quagmire, throw in some lightly magical phenomena that function as heavy-handed metaphors, and maybe a pinch of moral allegory, all wrapped up in a heart-on-sleeve-be-kind-rewind sincerity, and you’ve got yourself a sub-Saunders story. And I say all this as someone who finds Saunders’s aesthetic terribly alluring, as someone who has written these stories myself. I’m not blaming people who write like Saunders (or not too much, at least). They might have come to it all on their own. Perhaps Saunders is merely the current apotheosis of a certain angle of approaching the world. Or maybe he’s not. But either way, you don’t have to pull a muscle trying to uncover Saunders’s overwhelming influence.

And this influence is not just on prose style. Saunders is thought of somewhat generically as a saint, as someone who exudes a Jesus-like kindness, about whom Joshua Ferris says, “He seems in touch with some better being.” Tobias Wolff says, “He’s such a generous spirit, you’d be embarrassed to behave in a small way around him.” I have no wish to dispel these excellent thoughts about Saunders’s character, but it’s a little weird how our literary culture turns excellent male writers (again always male) into gurus. Saunders isn’t just the best American writer currently writing stories; he’s the Gandhi of grad school.

But all this adoration aside, Gandhi still hadn’t written a novel. And short story writers who haven’t yet written a novel are treated like spinster women in a pre-war patriarchy: Why won’t they get with the program? What is wrong with them? And so here we are at the beginning of 2017 with Saunders finally walking a novel down the aisle, whether by cultural compulsion or authorial ambition no one truly knows.

Lincoln in the Bardo covers approximately the first 24 hours after the burial of Willie Lincoln, the president’s third son, from typhoid fever. Upon his death, Willie enters a “bardo,” traditionally a Buddhist state between your past earthly life and your next reincarnation. The bardo at the Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown is a crowded place, full of dead souls who won’t admit to themselves that they’re dead and fear moving onto the next plane; whether this next plane is specifically heaven or hell or Buddhist reincarnation is left mysterious. Willie’s eventual realization that he’s dead and that he should move on from the bardo is facilitated by three ghosts — Hans Vollman, Roger Bevins III, and The Reverend Everly Thomas. These ghosts are our heroes in triplicate and function as narrators of the novel, though narration isn’t quite the right word.

The novel is split unevenly between two modes. One mode consists of occasional brief chapters of historical quotations, creating an assemblage of primary sources. These historical clippings give a window onto the context of the time: the depth of the Lincolns’ grief over the death of Willie, the fact that a state dinner was held at the White House on the night immediately preceding Willie’s death, and the growing national rage at the carnage of the Civil War. These historical bits are mixed in the much larger soup of the second mode: Willie’s time in the bardo alongside its many infuriated guests. This portion of the novel, its majority, is rendered like the dialogue of a play, where different ghosts show up and tell their stories or comment on the action (Bevins, Vollman, and Thomas being the most frequent participants). Of course these ghosts, in fine Saunders fashion, are a bit wacky, and are in states that reference how they died. For instance, Vollman, who died the day he was to finally consummate his marriage to his much younger wife, wanders around the bardo with an enormous erection, while Bevins, who committed suicide after being thwarted by his illicit gay lover, is a constant mushroom of sprouting jealous eyeballs. Etc. The result is a goofy parade of souls, each inflamed by the injustice of no longer being alive and eager to tell his or her story. There’s Eddie and Betsy Baron, the foul-mouthed worst parents ever; Lt. Cecil Stone, a racist, antebellum Yosemite Sam; Thomas Haden, a dutiful and docile slave during his life, now consumed with rage at his complicity with his own subjugation; and the Bachelors, a set of three men racing about enjoying their freedom and raining down hats of all styles on anyone who gets in their way. The result is a kind of Richard Scarry’s Busytown of the Undead.

Here’s what happens. The just-deceased Willie arrives in the bardo and is discovered by our three main ghosts as well as many others. Later that same day, the day of Willie’s funeral, Abraham Lincoln returns to the cemetery to see his boy’s body one last time. Frustrated that his father is talking to his “sick-form” rather than him, Willie enters his own dead body, and hears the words his father utters through his tears. The ghosts, when they enter the bodies of the living, can’t quite “possess” them in this novel, but they do feel all of their sensations, as well as the entirety of their past. It’s during this exchange that the elder Lincoln tells his son that he will return again to see him, which is why afterward Willie refuses to move onto the next plane. This is particularly bad because children were not meant to remain in the bardo, even more so than the adults, and Willie is soon ensnared in a concrete-like carapace composed of the faces of grievous sinners (baby killers, incest committers), from which our trio must repeatedly free him. It’s difficult to describe because it’s not entirely clear what’s going on.

Word comes that Lincoln is still on the cemetery grounds, so Bevins and Vollman race off to find him, enter him, and try to convince him to return to the chapel where Willie is interred, which will somehow persuade his son’s ghost to move onto the next life. Finally reunited in the chapel, Willie enters his father and realizes that he’s actually dead and announces this to the ghosts surrounding him, much to their shock and dismay. It’s the one thing none of them wants to admit. With this, Willie moves onto the next realm, the arrival of which is always described the same way: “Then came the familiar, yet always bonechilling, firesound associated with the matterlightblooming phenomenon.”

The result, as you might have intuited, is one extremely goofy book. The novel isn’t bad per se, but it’s a decidedly lumpy reading experience. In part it’s highly enjoyable, a kind of Saunders-does-Dante romp. The book, with its copious white space and snappy dialogue and hardly any detailed narration, reads quickly enough, though it seems to take forever to get anywhere. The gears never really catch to achieve that coasting downhill feeling.

The most effective parts of the novel are when we see President Lincoln grieving over his son. Perhaps my reaction was a little too personal, but as the father of small children, I found these sections almost intolerably moving. Here’s a moment of such grieving from when Bevins and Vollman enter Lincoln in their attempt to persuade him to return to the chapel:

          First time we fitted him for a suit.

          Thus thought the gentleman.

          (This did the trick.)

          First time we fitted him for a suit, he looked down at the trousers and then up at me, amazed, as if to say: Father, I am wearing grown-up pants.

          Shirtless, barefoot, pale round belly like an old man’s. Then the little cuffed shirt and buttoning it up.

          Goodbye, little belly, we are enshirting you now.

          Enshirting? I do not believe that is even a word, Father.

          I tied the little tie. Spun him around for a look.

          We have dressed up a wild savage, looks like, I said.

          He made the growling face. His hair stuck straight up, his cheeks were red. (Racing around that store just previous, he had knocked over a rack of socks.) The tailor, complicit, brought out the little jacket with much pomp.

          Then the shy boyish smile as I slid the jacket on him.

          Say, he said, don’t I look fine, Father?

          Then no thought at all for a while, and we just looked about us: bare trees black against the dark-blue sky.

          Little jacket little jacket little jacket.

          This phrase sounded in our head.

          A star flickered off, then on.

          Same one he is wearing back in there, now.

And here is the moment when Lincoln first visits the chapel and Willie becomes so frustrated that his father can’t see him that he enters his own dead body:

The lad threw one arm familiarly around his father’s neck, as he must often have done, and drew himself in closer, until his head was touching his father’s head, the better to hear the words the man was whispering into the neck of the —

Hans Vollman

His frustration then becoming unbearable, the boy began to —

Roger Bevins III

The lad began to enter himself.

Hans Vollman

As it were.

Roger Bevins III

The boy began to enter himself; had soon entered himself entirely, and at this, the man began sobbing anew, as if he could feel the altered condition of that which he held.

The Reverend Everly Thomas

As the quotation illustrates, when Devins, et al., speak, it’s sometimes their speech and sometimes straight narration, and at other times even reported speech of other characters present on the scene and presumably capable of talking on their own. The effect is something like a Moises Kaufman play, a collage of voices, and while this can be quite powerful on stage, here the device often makes for awkward reading. Who is speaking and why? Plus, the way the attributions are handled, with the speaker’s name given after what’s been spoken, and the rapid back-and-forth between our three narrators — though not so much between each other as between themselves and the reader — render the who question mute. It doesn’t seem to matter, and this reader let the individual narrators bleed together in his mind with no apparent side effects.

Another effective part of the book is the mass possession of Lincoln’s body, which is an attempt to keep him from leaving the chapel. Our three heroes call for help and the ghosts, excited by the presence of a living being walking around, jump into action. “What a pleasure,” Bevins says. “What a pleasure it was, being in there. Together. United in common purpose. In there together, yet also within one another, thereby receiving glimpses of one another’s minds, and glimpses, also, of Mr. Lincoln’s mind. How good it felt, doing this together!” This moment of joyous unity — this “serendipitous mass co-habitation” — removes the remaining scars from their recently departed lives. (Vollman loses his erection; Bevins has a normal number of eyeballs, etc.) In a way the bardo, outside of Lincoln’s body and its magnetizing purpose, is a kind of libertarian hellscape, a compendium of self-interested ghosts spouting their self-justifying narratives.

At the end of the book, the specter of history infiltrates the narrative, more so than the contextual primary source quotations sprinkled throughout. Lincoln’s final visit with his son’s ghost and his possession by the bardo’s other ghosts imbues him with a sense of resolve regarding the Civil War and how to win it. He walks away realizing it’s a fight that must be won at all costs, despite its guaranteed, immense bloodshed. Willie’s death in a way represents all of the young soldiers who have died. This moment of resolution ends with a great huzzah to the optimistic promise of America, worthy of an Obama speech, where “all of that bounty, was for everyone, for everyone to use, seemingly put here to teach a man to be free, to teach that a man could be free, that any man, any free white man, could come from as low a place as he had . . . might rise, here, as high as he was inclined to go,” as opposed to “the king-types who would snatch the apple from your hand and claim to have grown it, even though what they had, had come to them intact, or been gained unfairly . . . and who, having seized the apple, would eat it so proudly, they seemed to think they had not only grown it, but picked it, and invented the whole idea of fruit, too.” I didn’t intend to finish reading this novel on the last day of Obama’s presidency, but that’s what happened. There I was, the day before King Baby was sworn into office, reading about liminal states and the need to face one’s fear and go into the light, children. But by the time you read this review we will all have jumped the fence of that particular bardo, where no Tangina can save us.

Despite the novel’s echoes with our current national trauma, I miss the humor of Saunders’s earlier work. There are no zombie grandmothers screaming “show your cock!” here, and the moments that are obviously intended to be humorous come across as mostly goofy. This also might be a personal preference: funny writing is great; goofy writing is not as great. There is a fine line between them, one that I’m not wholly capable of defining. I apologize for lapsing into know-it-when-I-see-it-ism. In the Saunders’s stories, the jokes have teeth. But this feels more like an extended Saturday Night Live skit, characters paraded onstage one after the other. They’re amusing but they’re not bruising. 

In hindsight, Saunders’s main talent — of his many talents, let’s be honest — is how he reduces his worlds via (paradoxically) ramping up various twenty-first century phenomena. He’s able to do so much with so little because it’s grafted onto our shared experience. His stories are only slightly off from reality. And while the predicament of the ghosts is interesting and occasionally moving, one nears the end of the novel wanting them to get on with it.

Finally, despite Saunders’s enthusiasm for the bounty and potential of America and the felt resonances between his historical novel and our present time, I feel a little cheated by his retreat into the past. One hates to trot out Henry James’s old imperative that the novelist deal with the “present, palpable intimate,” but we’ve had plenty of writing about Lincoln. What we need is eyes on the now. Now that he’s satisfied the cultural obligation to produce a novel, perhaps Saunders can return to focusing on his satirical short stories. Lord knows we need to see what kind of story Saunders will write when life itself has turned into a Saunders story.

Review of ‘B & Me’

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Originally published in issue 39 of The Quarterly Conversation

B & Me: A True Story of Literary Arousal
By J.C. Hallman

There’s a conspicuous history of books that simply should not work: books that, when described, sound like surefire failures, or simply bad ideas, books that any sober acquisitions editor would shake his head authoritatively over. There are also books that should simply not work at the conceptual, blueprint level. Something about their intellectual architecture just can’t be right, simply cannot provide support for the proposed building. But then of course these books do work, and then one spends the rest of the afternoon walking around delighted and confused.

Books like U & I by Nicholson Baker, a book-length exercise in “memory criticism,” where Baker traces Updike’s influence on his own writing life while studiously not actually re-reading any of Updike’s books. Or books like Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer’s book that procrastinates away from writing a book about D.H. Lawrence, which then of course becomes a very funny explication of and homage to D.H. Lawrence. Now we must add to this trickster pile J.C. Hallman’s B & Me: A True Story of Literary Arousal, which reads like some gene-spliced combination of the two, a description which, I confess, makes the book sound like no fun, but if you can quit raising your left eyebrow long enough and get a few pages in, it’s about the most fun reading you’ve experienced in years.

And thank the good sweet lord for it. Please no more post-apocalyptic allegories about the perseverance of the human spirit in the face of environmental catastrophe, or historical epics depicting moist, psychological tenderness inside the trenches of WWI, or memoirs of conveniently Aristotelean personal transgression, or thousand-page landfills of prose written by and about sexy Nordic men who are never not photographed not smoking. Give us something messy and unfilmable and weird and slightly embarrassing. Give us J.C. Hallman. Instead of some artfully rendered enactment of cultural sensitivity that flatters my own sophistication, Hallman has written a book that’s both enthralling and unnerving. Praise be.

Instead of tracking Baker’s influence upon him as it has accrued throughout his life, which was Baker’s modus in U & I, Hallman tracks his interest in Baker from the moment he begins reading him. “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 result is the lifecycle of readerly affection, from first covert glance, to first date, to first consummation, to the inevitable blown-out elastic of routine. And these romantic/sexual metaphors are not mine. They’re all Hallman’s. In fact, the crisis that precedes Hallman’s interest in Baker is a depletion of his enthusiasm for literature as an endeavor — as something to write, or to teach, or to read. He’s worn out from his teaching job and lost his mojo, and he feels intuitively that Baker might hold some funky tonic that will rejuvenate him once again.

One of Hallman’s complaints with the teaching of literature is how it’s an inherently artificial approximation of the readerly event — sexual discussion as opposed to sex itself, which leads him to a book-long extended metaphor of reading as intellectual arousal, which sounds a lot more outlandish than it is. What he’s doing, on the one hand, is returning “creative writing” back to its original, life-giving, Emersonian grind party, where reading is a randy Whitmanesque erotic throwdown. What he’s also doing, more cleverly, is tying this Emersonian idea to Baker’s writing, specifically his “sex books,” the trilogy of novels consisting of Vox, The Fermata, and House of Holes, which some critics consider essentially porn and a waste of Baker’s talents and which others consider a whale of a time. (I’ll confess that I’m in the talent-waster camp, though Hallman has made me reconsider my position mightily.)

One of the amazing things Hallman does in the book is tie all of Baker’s work together at the microscopic, or Bakerian, level. For instance, he shows how holes have been a pivotal motif throughout all of Baker’s book. (Holes!) He does the same thing for washing machines, or anything with a centrifugal force, as well as sunbeams, and music, and stopping time, and punctuation. If you’ve read Baker, you know that much of his alien charm is connected with his ability to stare at everyday objects with a mad intensity and report that intensity back to you in language that defamiliarizes the mundane. He’s like a roving MoMA exhibit in prose. Escalators simply aren’t the same after you’ve read Baker — same with drinking straws, vinyl records, footnotes, sprinklers, ereaders, peanut butter jars, radio dials, liquid crystal displays, spoons, metrical poetry, etc. What Hallman does by reading Baker chronologically and supremely intensely is annihilate all categories from Baker’s oeuvre and see it as a complementary whole.

The result is a multifarious critical biography of Baker, who comes across as a shy, nervous, fundamentally happy author who is hijacked by two intellectual crises, both born from civilization’s inability to appreciate detail. The first crisis is the duplicity of unnecessary technological innovation at libraries (with its concomitant amnesia toward history and willfully blind bureaucracy), which culminated in the polemic Double Fold, about the conspiracy of libraries around the country to move from technologically secure paper books to dubious and buggy microfilm. The second crisis, both personal and literary — the distinctions here also annihilated — is the Iraq war, and the awakening of Baker’s latent pacifism, which leads both to Checkpoint, the novel-in-dialogue of one Baker-like stand-in convincing another Baker-like stand-in to not assassinate the president. Hallman convincingly argues that the book is an argument on behalf of pacifism, despite the fact that most of the reviewers at the time wildly misread the book in a rose-colored jingoistic rage — “a kind of high-water mark in the history of reviewers getting it wrong.” The other book that comes out of Baker’s aroused pacifism is Human Smoke, which is a collage of quotations taken from primary sources that purports to show that WWII was not inevitable, that the persecution of central Europe’s Jewish population was not a surprise, and that this war, despite the hazy mists of nostalgia, was in no way a “good war” waged by the “greatest generation.” 

But this book is not just an explication of Baker’s work. The literary analysis is embedded within a narrative of Hallman’s own journey as a writer, from one location to another, all in the company of his partner Catherine, who is his lover, his confidant, and his foil. The book chronicles the arc of their love as well, sometimes in visceral detail. His love for Catherine mirrors his love for Baker; the two arousals are intertwined. There is no separating bookish love from romantic love or sexual love — they are all hopelessly mixed — and in showing the reader this hopeless mix, Hallman re-solders literature to the fuse of life. Hallman doesn’t just analyze Baker or explicate how the books work. He dramatizes his reading of them and his discovery of how they work, how they are all connected. Book marketing jacket copy is always claiming some new novel is a “literary thriller,” but what Hallman has written is actually literally a literary thriller: it’s a thrilling depiction of him chasing the rabbit of his interest through Baker’s books. How will he put it together? How will the next book rub against the grain of his lived experience? Hallman has covertly written one of those “this is why we read” books, except you will actually want to read his version, because rather than arguing that literature is good medicine or a token of cultural prestige or even just a whole lot of fun, he convinces you that literature is a fundamental facet of life, as requisite as sex, and he convinces you by showing you. “That’s what we should be when we read,” he says at one point, “a precise point of prolonged and intense sensitivity, caught in time and reading.”

If I have one complaint about the book it’s that even though we get plenty of biographical data about Hallman and Catherine, I still feel oddly uninformed at the end. There are moments where the details of their sexual goings on are amply offered, but their relationship remains opaque. The result is a paradox, which has become a frequent trope in much current creative nonfiction. That is, there is a shameless sharing of information, usually sexual activity, and yet there are wide elisions of character. Maggie Nelson’s Bluets had the same mixture of sexual frankness and utter opacity. Reading these books I feel like I’m watching some premium cable Sunday evening program: plenty of distracting flesh but very little inner life. For instance, Catherine awakens in a rage one night over the prospect that Hallman isn’t staying on his side of the bed. She seems hysterical and the relationship feels as if it’s at a boiling point of aggravation. Just what is going on? Hallman escapes to surreptitiously read Baker. But this nocturnal provocation never bears fruit. It just sits there, narratively inert. Likewise, the couple moves from their urban apartment to a former bed and breakfast located in some unspecified rural location because Hallman has acquired a new teaching job, and the general impression is that Catherine hates it there. But why exactly? (Is she teaching there also? What specifically about the place is so bad? And just where on earth is this place? And why so sketchy about seemingly pertinent details?) And at the end of the book, they decide to move to Brooklyn. (Brooklyn!) It seems as if Hallman has given up teaching, but it’s hard to say because the biographical details taper off rather drastically, and so there’s no narrative explanation to why they are moving, what has happened with their careers, and how their various inchoate psycho-romantic complications have resolved themselves, if at all. Are they now equitably sharing the bed? They seem happy at the end of the book, after visiting Baker in person; in fact they seem happy as a consequence of seeing Baker, an apotheosis of their Baker-fueled love — and an apotheosis for the book we’re reading. But, aside from a convenient metaphorical parallel, one doesn’t really understand the true nutritional density of their happiness.

I’m not trying to be hopelessly literal here, but I feel slightly cheated by all of the biographical build-up throughout the book. Perhaps this is one reason why the parts where Hallman is reading and interpreting Baker are vastly more interesting than the biographical bits, even the sex parts. (Perhaps this says more about me than about the book under consideration, but after the initial impressive Emersonian metaphor, the harping on the sex stuff gets slightly boring.) In short, it feels like a cheat, like a tease, like the personal information from Hallman’s life is used as a decoy, as a hook into the analysis of Baker, and then discarded, which is the best case scenario. The worst case scenario is that some of the information is deemed worthy of communicating to the reader (e.g., their bowel movements in Paris) but other information is not. It raises the expectation that we should care about these characters as people, and then all of the detail that we feel we are owed narratively is withheld from us. In the end, Catherine is opaque, and Hallman, for all his forthrightness, still seems selectively inclusive, which is fine. I mean, these are people out in the world. They have their own lives. They don’t have to tell me everything! And yet, I was given the false impression that they were telling me everything.

My own narrative greediness aside, this is a wonderful book, a brave book, which would still succeed even if you’ve never read Baker. To read Hallman read another writer, to participate in the arc of his infatuation, is a delight: it’s what dissertations should be, or as Hallman has it, literary criticism should be “a public display of affection.” In losing his manners and displaying his affection, he makes reading thrilling and necessary. Nick should be proud.

Notes on ‘Moonglow’

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I’m happy to report that I have a review of Michael Chabon’s latest novel Moonglow in the inaugural issue of the Hoxie Gorge Review.

The review is the result of a friend recommending the novel to me. Somehow I had gotten into my 40s without actually ever reading Michael Chabon, despite his work being semi-ubiquitous. For a short period, it was almost a kind of literary cultural truancy to have not read any Wallace, Franzen, Lethem, and Whitehead.* (Rough guess: this moment perhaps ran from around 1996 until 2008.) But now I’ve finally broken the seal. Here are some leftover notes.

I was intrigued by how WWII and the Holocaust were used as a device in this novel. I have another friend in a book group and it seems that all of their novels have something to do with WWII and the Holocaust. That is, the novels rely on WWII in some large expositional way. The books get their narrative or moral momentum somehow from the war, even if the books aren’t otherwise about that historical event or time period. I am of course generalizing massively and will shirk the duty to cite actual books here. (This is just a general feeling, dig?) Sometimes I have the snarky half-thought: It would be interesting to read a contemporary American novel that didn’t use WWII as a source of exposition.

Freud and WWII: one could argue that these are the hidden engines in the postwar, American novel, the first as an explication for any character’s motivations, and the second as history’s Big Bang: the atrocity from which all characters and family histories spring. I am exaggerating, naturally. I fully well realize that WWII was a cataclysmic historical event; I am not trying to diminish its actual historical importance. But the way it is used as an Allen wrench of explanation in so many contemporary novels is astonishing. It steadily drives past the main street of historical dutifulness and enters the suburb of helpless reflex. It begins to feel like a curse of contemporary narrative — a hex key indeed.

Regarding the overwhelming narrative legacy of Freud, see contemporary children’s movies. No one character is ever intrinsically a jerk. They are a jerk as the result of some childhood trauma. It’s a device that’s used jokingly but taken seriously, perhaps the most dangerous type of device because it means that screenwriters — if that’s who we could pin this on — believe in it. Humorous use of backstory is recognized as a device, hence the jokiness, but it’s still routinely, desperately deployed, as if it’s the only explanation for why people misbehave. Turns out Iago was once left out of dodgeball. Furthermore, these explanatory backstories often become movie sequels themselves. It’s a kind of narrative cancer, these endlessly replicating tentpole explanations. Stories never finish. Nothing is ever whole. Each new movie simply a software update.  

The surprise in Moonglow is that the grandmother is not simply a Holocaust survivor but someone who appropriated the biography of a Holocaust survivor. The grandmother is a grand trickster figure. She tells the young Michael stories while shuffling a deck of tarot cards — grandmother as fortune teller/author.

While I had my quibbles, I definitely think this is an interesting use of WWII/the Holocaust. It’s certainly not invoked one-dimensionally, though, to be sure, the scenes where the grandfather is in the battlefield strike me as the most generically filmish. They remind me too much of Wes Anderson. The details seem chosen too much for their innate quirkiness. (For example, as the grandfather makes his way through post–D-Day invasion France, he’s attacked by a man with a bow and arrow. And the preacher who provides him shelter just happens to share all of the grandfather’s non-invasion related astronomical interests, etc.) All the details seem cute in an overly symmetrical way. Rather than existing as artifacts from the world of these characters, the details seem chosen to alleviate some inner need for alignment within the mind of the creator. I realize this can be a legitimate artistic mode, but it tends to leave me cold and it seems to suffocate the possibility of actual drama. Perhaps my disagreements with Chabon’s choices for the WWII bits are a consequence of simply having seen too many films and TV shows about war, so that unless I am confronted by a raging hellscape of verisimilitude, I don’t really believe any of it. Or perhaps this narrative trail is just so well worn that it’s hard to make the sites look interesting again.

In a way Chabon’s use of WWII is a recognition that the war functions as a narrative trope. There is a John Barthian or perhaps Paul Austerian black hole in the center of the novel: the grandmother is not a clean embodiment of 20th-century horrors but a kind of narrative mirage. Part of my beef with the novel is that the narrator’s discovery of this mirage doesn’t seem to have any consequence, so as a reader I am uncertain what to make of it. Is it one of those self-referential gestures who’s central point seems to be It’s all make believe! or Isn’t make believe wonderful? or Aren’t we all tremendously silly for believing such a thing as this very novel?! I have always hated gestures like this — not self-referential moves in and of themselves but moves that seem to exist for the primary purpose of calling attention to themselves.

For me of course the ur-text of self-referentiality is “Duck Amuck,” the cartoon where Daffy Duck argues with and is tormented by his creator, who turns out to be Bugs Bunny. The cartoon starts as a joke, turns into a riddle, and ends in a black hole. The joke is that Daffy has beef with his creator. The illustrator is a cruel master preventing Daffy from doing his show. The fundamental revelation of any kind of self-referential move within a narrative is to remind the audience that all of this is chosen, placed, controlled and not in any way natural. The riddle is the revelation at the end of the cartoon that Bugs Bunny is the illustrator — the master of Daffy. This makes a kind of cosmic sense, since Bugs is the central trickster character in the Looney Tunes cartoons and slyly controls all of the other sub characters, who are always made into fools because they think they can control their own destinies. The black hole part is the infinite mirror reflection inherent in the idea that all of the animated characters are the projection/illustration/creation of another animated character, that the entire series is occurring within Bugs’s mind or as the result of Bugs’s controlling, artistic will. But then, who has created Bugs? Who is the illustrator’s illustrator? Once you have peered downward there is no end to this spiral staircase.

I realize that I have strayed a bit too far into bong-logic turf now, but such is the consequence of self-referentiality within any kind narrative art. To this artistic impetus, one wants to say, we get it. It’s make believe. We accept the premise that this is all happening in a book (or a movie or up on a stage or in a painting). We understand the invisible handshake inside the transaction. Repeatedly underlining this point, no matter how eloquently, will only grow tiresome. (See, e.g., the endings of most Nabokov novels).

In Chabon’s defense, Moonglow doesn’t go Full Referential. But it’s far from straight mimetic realism. For that I am grateful, and it’s that middle-distance aesthetic ambiguity on this self-awareness spectrum that has stayed with me the longest and has given me the most to think about afterward. Now on with the show. 

*Full disclosure: I regret to say I still have not read any Whitehead.

Note on Richard Ford

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I’m happy to report that I have new review in the world — of Richard Ford’s memoir from last year Between Them: Remembering My Parents — though to be honest, it’s an awfully long review, so perhaps this qualifies as one of those “review-essays” like the ones they run in the NYRB, a size and level of seriousness I’ve always coveted. Anyway, I was surprised to see Ford come out with a memoir for reasons I explain in my review, and so it was rewarding to do some full-contact chin-scratching over the book.

Typically, when I review a book, I don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about the author — what he or she might think of what I am writing. This is not to be callous to their feelings. It’s just that book reviews, and especially the kind of review-essays that I try to write when I can pull them off, are not directed at the authors themselves. As a piece of writing it’s not really for them even though it’s in dialogue with or is riffing off of something they have written. It’s instead, of course, for the strangers out there who didn’t write the book but who might read it, on the one hand, and on the other, it’s aimed toward the sidecar oeuvre of literature about literature. Though it seems less romantic in a movie kind of way, there is a thriving body of literary commentary, some of which is more rewarding than the primary sources it purports to explicate (see, e.g., my beloved Cynthia Ozick on almost anybody). And really, more than anything, this is the distant bucket I am trying to pitch my little critical ping pong ball into — my Grand Prize Game of literary commentary.

That being said, I did think momentarily of what Ford would make of my review because the memoir at hand seems to be so revealing, though not in ways one typically encounters in a contemporary memoir. There are no scandalous confessions of sordid family drama. This ain’t Mary Karr. This ain’t The Surrender. And yet it’s still revealing, again for reasons I explain in the review. And to level criticism at the book skates almost too closely to leveling criticism at him, which of course I didn’t intend to do in the review. It’s just: the book is personal.

Plus another reason I was more aware of Ford’s imagined reaction is that Ford has established a reputation for reacting strongly to negative reviews of his work. When Alice Hoffman wrote a negative review of his novel The Sportswriter, Ford’s wife took a copy of Hoffman’s latest work out back and shot a hole in it. And then Ford shot a hole in it. And then he mailed it to her. (“People make such a big deal out of it — shooting a book — it’s not like I shot her,” he’s said.) And then when Colson Whitehead wrote a negative review of Ford’s story collection A Multitude of Sins in the New York Times, Ford spit on him at a subsequent literary party, calling Whitehead “a kid.”

One might — might — chalk this up to a more youthful impatience with public judgment (if one were being so charitable as to pull one’s back out), but then in 2017 Ford published an essay in Esquire where he both recounted these incidents and said he feels the same way now that he did then: “I realize that how I feel about my bad treatment is only one compass point among several legitimate ones. But I can tell you that, as of today, I don’t feel any different about Mr. Whitehead, or his review, or my response.”

Furthermore, and even more damning, he expresses a total misunderstanding of the function of criticism:

Whenever I think about reviews of my books, I usually only think about the bad ones — the ones, again, that drive readers away, take bread out of my children’s mouths, devalue half a decade of honest effort, steal money out of my pocket, and cast a dark shadow over my future … I wonder if those bad-review writers would do it if they knew the chain reaction they’d set in motion. If they would, then they deserve what they get both here and beyond. I wouldn’t want to know too much about these people’s personal habits — how they treat their spouses and pets. I know, I’m way too sensitive.

Aside from being simply wrong, this is amusing because I don’t think Ford has any children. He has boasted on several occasions of choosing not to have any. (Sample quotation: “I hate children.”)

For a more detailed analysis of why his opinions about book reviewing are wrong, read Steve Donoghue’s take.

The literary feud info isn’t really in the purview of my review of his memoir, which is why it’s not included there, and why I am riffing on it here in this little note. I’m not interested in adjudicating every author’s interpersonal failing — casting stones in glass houses and all that — but this behavior is shameful, both morally and intellectually. All of which is to say: I don’t think Ford would like my review very much, though of course it’s much gentler than many others he’s received. That is, I don’t think my review is spit-worthy.

Despite all this, Ford still has composed many interesting textual documents, one of which is his essay “In the Face,” which was originally published in the New Yorker way back in 1996. It was subsequently reprinted in the following year’s Best American Essays, where I first encountered it. I wish I had a copy at hand because it seemed like such an interesting explication and exemplification of a mode of male thought vis-a-vis violence. Would it shed light on this feud stuff? Perhaps, but I’d have to locate my New Yorker subscription log-in credentials to find out for sure.

Another piece of nonfiction by Ford, which I’ve just now discovered in assembling this note, is an essay that appeared in the New York Times Magazine eons ago, where he chronicled his trip down the Mississippi River with Stanley Crouch, the novelist and jazz critic — yet another person who also hates bad reviews of his work. (He slapped his reviewer Dale Peck after coming face to face in a restaurant. What is it with these people?) Anyway, I have printed it out to read over the weekend, like the fogey I am. It’s pitched as a modern-day reenactment of Huck Finn, which sounds like one of those ideas only a roomful of trapped magazine editors would love. But given the two participants, it’s worth investigating. Here is the Crouch essay. And here, just now discovered (the internet really is amazing) is a letter-to-the-editor in response to both pieces by none other that Pat Conroy. Whoo-boy.

Finally, being a Jackson, MS, native who has returned to live in the city here in middle age, I got a tremendous kick out of a particular portion of the Ford memoir. When he was a teenager, Ford’s father got the itch for life in the suburbs. This being the 1950s in Jackson, they cruised north of town to look at the treeless scrub brush of new lots and barely finished houses down by a crook in the Pearl River. They looked at houses in neighborhoods with dubious names such as Sherwood Forest, Audubon Park, etc. I enjoyed this immensely because I live in Sherwood Forest. In fact it’s the neighborhood I grew up in, or one of them at least. And what to Ford back in the ’50s was a backwater, almost the country, to me in the mid ’90s was an old neighborhood, with established oak trees that rained down their terror of leaves each autumn. Now, when I take my kids north of the city, out past Madison, to visit friends, those are the houses with small, leafless trees and new un-moldy brick facades and yards still carpeted in their original layer of sod. At the end of the cul-de-sacs one’s sure to find the raw red clay of some radiologist’s future dream home. But I live “in the city.” So the burbs are just as contingent on time as anything else. Wait around long enough in any one spot and you become established.

Notes in the Bardo

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I’m happy to report that I have a long review of the George Saunders novel Lincoln in the Bardo in the latest issues of the Quarterly Conversation. In it I express many thoughts and feelings, not just about Bardo in particular but about the demilitarized zone between writing short stories and writing novels. I had so many thoughts and feelings that here are some fragments that didn’t make it into the review.

###

It’s an American cultural truth universally acknowledged that you can spend a lifetime writing brilliant short stories and be all but ignored — by publishers, critics, readers — while one mediocre novel with more soft spots than a week-old pear will make people’s heads turn. It takes a short story writer 40 years of highly praised work and an 800-page collection to garner the same level of attention that a garden-variety, 400-page, family melodrama receives. It makes no sense. Pile it upon the pyre of garbage that makes no sense.

The Novel is the Stanley Tape Measure of literary categories — the measurement by which all forms are measured.

Even books that are thrown together and simply labeled novels garner more acclaim than prose classified as anything else. It’s essentially neurotic. For example, you can see the yearning grasp for status in the label “nonfiction novel” that Truman Capote applied to his book-length reportage In Cold Blood (though, to be sure, that alleged work of nonfiction contains plenty of fictional wiggle) — this from a writer who never wrote a successful novel.* Of course I’m not counting Breakfast at Tiffany’s, at most a novella, which can be otherwise defined as a piece of literature publishers won’t publish as a stand-alone book.

Often what’s missing in these story-writer novels is the crucial ingredient of time; not enough of it passes. Whereas stories distill moments from a life, which is why they are hard to remember afterward and harder yet to use in larger cultural conversations, novels gain strength as they gain pages, enough time passing to show the gears of fate or character grinding out its pattern. Think of how the multiple generational narratives in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! overlap in a way that feels accidental and yet utterly unavoidable. This might be one of my favorite feelings a novel can generate. Obviously, there are many others. But the expansive treatment of time helps the novel work its magic, or a type of magic. Novels end up creating their inhabitable worlds not so much by overbuilding them with characters and information, as the short story writer is wont to do, but just by letting time pass. Think of One Hundred Year’s Of Solitude, and how that town feels like a known place simply because so many fictional feet have trod through it as the pages pass by. It’s a kind of sleight of hand. Think of Lolita, when the word “waterproof” is uttered at the end, and the reader’s attention-over-time is either rewarded or tested, and the unseen pattern emerges. Maybe a novel is just a prose work that contains more than one season. As I write this list, exceptions fly toward my face like asteroids.

Why do story writers feel pressured to write novels? Why is the novel so dominant? I don’t know, but I suspect the reasons are fairly plain: money, for starters. There is a splinter of a chance that people will actually buy your novel. After all, people once read them! And they still might turn them into movies, or an extended Netflix series, or whatever new entertainment package they’ve invented before I publish this. Second, and relatedly, it was the genre of the heyday of mass literacy, a historical coincidence we will never be able to forget. They didn’t line up on the docks of New York to hear about the death of Bulbasaur. Finally, novels are like milk jugs; if they reach a certain size, they contain their own handles; novels are simply easier to talk about, can be picked up and passed around a culture, can be used for all manner of misunderstanding. Meanwhile the short story sits inert, implacable, and glowing. The novel’s trickster shadow, never to be fully caught and sown back on.

I’m mixing my metaphors. And I sound like an old man.

It’s a little weird that our most popular shorter contemporary literary genres are the graduation speech and the advice column. The former has now become how we recognize deep thinking writers and the latter is now a legitimate way to build a body of work. It’s like a more soulful op-ed column. All of which is fine, I guess. What do I know? But are we that starved for love and instruction that these are the greatest hits of the age? Have we been that abandoned by our parents, figurative or otherwise? Rather than another novel, it seems like what we all really need is a big hug.

They won’t publish a novella as a standalone book but they’ll publish a graduation speech, each sentence blown up like a billboard slogan.

These thoughts are just practice swings before stepping to the plate. Overworked but underbaked taken as a personal aesthetic.

All of these fragments come from a short story writer who’s been thrashing within his own drafty, overbuilt novel for longer than he’s willing to admit, and who has become desperate for explanation as to why novel-writing is so consistently defeating. He’s hoping it’s not simply a failure of imagination.

*Other Voices, Other Rooms is a mess. Sorry! The Grass Harp is too much a book for children, and Answered Prayers is unfinished. There’s nothing more judgmental than a novelist working on his novel.

Bass guitars & Barry Hannah

book reviews, essays, ,

Update #1
It’s summer. It’s hot. It’s time for a new essay. Consequently, I’ve got a new essay out (or is it “up”?) at The Collapsar. It’s called “The Bass Guitar as a Mode of Being,” and it’s about that wonderful activity of playing the bass guitar. You might think there’s not much to say about playing the bass, but you would be wrong.

After the essay went up, a friend notified me of this old Kids in the Hall bit, which I hadn’t seen before (which is probably for the best; their jokes are better than mine).

And then, last week New Yorker writer Matthew Trammell had a piece about the musician Thundercat, and Trammell has some interesting things to say about the bass as well.

And finally, finally, though I am not in the market to acquire a new bass (sadly), if I were, and if I were dishing out bass-buying advice, I would first watch this video and then I would buy one of those Sire basses.

Update #2
I’ve also got a review in the latest issue of The Quarterly Conversation. It covers Michael Bible’s novel Sophia, which I enjoyed, and which I sorted into the long line of literature that trails Barry Hannah. As a premise for the review, I argue that there is a Hannah tradition now. Hannah seems like one of those writers whose large, almost overbearing influence isn’t acknowledged in current literary criticism, while being constantly acknowledged among writers. Though perhaps there’s tons of discussion of this and I’m just not reading in the right places.

There wasn’t room in the review to mention Padgett Powell, but he is the preeminent Hannah writing today, perhaps even eclipsing Hannah himself. His sentences are beautifully ugly and create their own vernacular; he manages to write eloquently without slipping into a fussy, overly self-aware mode of high writing. I don’t know how he does it. It sounds like someone speaking but not in any way anyone has spoken before.

Another stray thought: the original Hannah was probably Beckett.

P.S. Adam Dorn is awesome.

Note on Marilynne Robinson

book reviews, The Quarterly Conversation,

I’m happy to report that I have a review in the latest issue of The Quarterly Conversation, this time of Marilynne Robinson’s new collection of essays The Givenness of Things.

And now here is a little thought fragment that did not make it into the review: In the review I joke briefly about the idea of Robinson running for president and dicuss the interview/conversation between her and President Obama that appeared recently in the New York Review of Books. In that talk, which is more than anything a chance for Obama to interview a writer he admires, Robinson discusses her parents:

The President: Were your parents into books, or did they just kind of encourage you or tolerate your quirkiness?

Robinson: There was great tolerance in the house for quirkiness. No, it’s a funny thing because on the one hand, I’m absolutely indebted to my origins, whatever they are, whatever that means. On the other hand, with all love and respect, my parents were not particularly bookish people.

The President: Well, that’s why you have good sense along with sort of an overlay of books on top of good sense. What did your mom and dad do?

Robinson: My mother was a stay-at-home mother. My father was a sort of middle-management lumber company guy.

The President: But they encouraged it.

Robinson: You know what, they were the adults and we were the kids, you know what I mean? Sort of like two species. But if they noticed we were doing something — drawing or painting or whatever we were doing — then they would get us what we needed to do that, and silently go on with it. One of the things that I think is very liberating is that if I had lived any honest life, my parents would have been equally happy. I was under no pressure.

Now, compare this parental residue to a real-life presidential candidate, whose parents are a known entity: Jeb Bush. A few weeks ago, Jeb! had this exchange:

The next morning in Manchester, after a child asked what it was like to grow up the son of a president, Bush told a room full of kids that his father’s approval weighed on him.

“All he had to do was say, ‘I’m disappointed in you,’ and it would send me in a deep, spiraling depression,” he said.

I’m struck by the overwhelming sadness of that statement — how haunted and trapped he must feel. Think of having to run for president in order to alleviate your father’s disappointment in you, or perhaps to preempt it.

And then think, on the other side, the Robinson side, of the freedom that she received instead, a freedom that comes from a kind of love, almost a careless love, almost a form of inattention. As someone who is now a parent myself, I am haunted by these two anecdotes. It could be argued that Jeb is the much more successful adult in many contemporary, measurable ways, and yet one doesn’t have to pay much attention to perceive who the more seemingly content figure is, spiritually or otherwise. In that race, Robinson wins by a landslide.

Beefier hands and more of them

book reviews, ,

All of the Moore–Updike ping pong from last week has me thinking of Moore’s descriptive powers. Updike is rightly praised for his indefatigable eye. Moore is praised for her “zingers,” her jokes, her unseen sideswipes into the absurd. And yes, she does have those (and great paragraphs, too!), but she also has great descriptive powers. Her descriptions are not of the pointillist nature of Updike’s, but they are metaphorically richer. Here is an example from A Gate at the Stairs:

I began working in my father’s baby greens field that very week. My job was to run in front of the shaver, a special attachment on the thresher, which he had contrived himself and which he was amused by and drove proudly like a car, though our field was so small that it was hard for him to make the turn-arounds. I ran ahead of it with fake feather and plastic hawk-wing extensions on my arms, whacking at the greens to scare the mice so they would not get into the mix. (If we had to take the greens to the triple-wash facility, it ate into the profit.) My father had actually designed my outfit for this, partially from a kite we had once brought to the Dellacrosse Kites on Ice festival. The costume had an aquiline-beaked mask and long wings I slipped my arms through, dipping them as I ran, brushing near the ground, beating the leaves, to resemble an actual predator and to encourage rodents to run from the shaver: nobody wanted sliced mice in their salads. At least not this decade.

[. . .]

Sometimes in the afternoon, upstairs in my room and still with my hawk outfit on, I would get out Ole Upright Bob, the double bass, dust him off, his bow quiver clipped at the tail beneath the bridge, like a scrotum, and we would rustle up a tune. There was a kind of buoyancy in making these four low strings sing something that was not a dirge. It was a demanding instrument, the stand-up bass — by comparison, my guitar, with its buttery, mushy fingerings, was a toy — and sometimes I just played it with open strings, Miles’s “Nardis,” which was basic, and which spelled starry backwards in Latin, or something, and which I loved, and which didn’t take a lot out of me. I had once, in the state music tryouts, played a solo from a double bass concerto by Sergei Koussevitzky, who in 1930 had been on the cover of Time magazine. That’s about all I knew about him. But either I wasn’t that good or the sight of a girl standing beside this huge wooden creature, grabbing its neck and stroking its gut, pulling the music out of the strings by force, made them ill at ease, and I was not selected. The faces of the panel listening were the very embodiment of skepticism made flesh, as if they were all saying Get a load of this!, and I had never experienced the weaponry of such expressions before. Subsequently, I drifted away from classical entirely, needing to leave behind the memory of that event. It was an aspect of childhood adults forgot to think about when they encouraged their children to try new things.

My mother came to the doorway once, seeing me winged and wrapped around my bass, one hand moving squidlike down the neck of him, the other bouncing the bow in a kind of staccato, and she said, “No wonder I couldn’t sleep. Look at you. What a sight.” There I was, I supposed, a bass-faced bird, embracing the sloped shoulders of another bird whose long-necked wooden crested head, like a knight in chess, hovered over my head as if it were a fellow creature advising me what to do. Still, she smiled. I was playing “Bye Bye Blackbird.” She thought that it was my own arrangement, but it was one I had copied, or tried to copy — if only I’d had beefier hands and more of them — from Christian McBride.

“Your grandmother used to sing that song!” she exclaimed, and then went back to her room to rest.

I’m sure that with a little digging, I could come up with an equally metaphorically interesting string of paragraphs in Updike’s work; it’s not so much that as how Moore gently ladles her absurdities so that they somehow reharmonize into touching evocations of character. I’m mixing my metaphors terribly; my thoughts are all aflux. Moore is able, in her best moments, to be both absurd and terribly sympathetic.

Perhaps another way to cast this would be to think of Updike as a musical virtuoso, and like a virtuoso, he is sometimes unbearable; he never relents from being a virtuoso, in reminding you of his talents, whereas Moore is the type of singer (go with me) who is someone you actually want to listen to.

Yet another way of saying this is that I have often thought — and this is a point that James Wood has made in a much more substantive way — that part of Updike’s “problem” was his eloquence. He could never not be eloquent, and his irrepressible verbal felicity was a handicap, especially in some (some!) of his fiction. You, as a reader, were never allowed to forget that you were being dazzled by Updike’s brilliant prose. Of course, whether or not this is “good” or “bad” for fiction depends on the kinds of effects one is after, whether you want the reader to forget the author for a while, etc. But, to continue a mental comparison with Nabokov that I’ve got continually running in my head, Nabokov encountered this same problem, and he seemed to tame it somewhat by always conspicuously positioning his narrators or framing them in some way so that their eloquence was a feature of the narrative itself, rather than just there in the air like water vapor.

To put it even another way (aphoristically, reductively), to become a virtuoso is to deny taste.