All of them. Everything from the Booker prize on down to the Scholastic awards for high schoolers. They purport to measure and reward excellence and they do no such thing. They can’t do any such thing, because artistic excellence is not measurable, can only be measured by approximation, by appreciation. It cannot be ranked. The judges are compromised, the evaluation metrics are compromised, and the purported value of the awards are compromised, and I don’t mean compromised in some kind of “foetry,” Jorie Graham, nepotism-baby, back-scratching way; I mean intellectually compromised, as in they’re lying to themselves, and they’re lying to you, the audience.
Today’s gripe is brought to you by a promotional email I received from a local concert venue. A bluegrassy, Nashville group is coming to town, and they seemed interesting. It’s basically your standard bluegrass quintet, but with tattoos. Lots of beards and denim and the no-longer-ironic trucker hats. In their bio it noted that their fiddler has won several state championship fiddle contests. I immediately opened a tab to write this rant. I don’t know why one would enter a fiddling contest, but why would you remark upon it, and your winning of it, for any length of time past the day of the contest? Who cares who won a fiddle contest?
Prizes are fine, I guess. A group of people wants to get together and award a prize. Good for them. All judgments are essentially autobiographical. They are always more about the judger than the judged. But contests are where it gets icky. You have to apply for the contest. You have to pay for the contest. You have to submit to the contest.
The problem with contests is that they purport to adjudicate who or what is best, when that designation is artificial, ambiguous, constantly on the move. It’s the roadrunner of adjectives. In a soccer game, you know who scored the most goals. In a 100-meter race, you know who ran the fastest. These are determinable facts. But art is not an athletic event. It might make sense if we had contests for the year’s longest novel. It would be much easier, like judging the year’s largest pumpkin. But best?
To continue with my previous gripe, it costs about $3 to submit to a literary magazine via Submittable. I will save the ethical thumb wrestling about submission fees for another day. (For earlier thoughts on this, see here.) But contests are where the costs increase. Typical contest is $25 to submit with the prospect of getting a $1,500 prize, publication, perpetual acknowledgement that you were the winner, etc. Have I submitted to contests in the past? You betcha. Will I do so in the future? Look, I’m only human.
These have been around seemingly forever, and they quite clearly are a way for literary magazines to make enough money to fund themselves. That is, they can’t sell enough issues of the magazine to fund the magazine, so they sell the chance of being in the magazine, “winning” a prize, in order to fund the magazine. I know that there are lots of ways that literary magazines can fund themselves, such as support from the affiliated institution of higher learning, etc., though in these strange times who knows the future prospects of that funding. I am not saying that lit mags are evil or wrong to do this. They are behaving as rational actors. That ship sailed way back.
The problem for the writer is that these expenses quickly add up, and it creates a tiered system for the table of contents within a magazine. You have the “regular submissions,” those contributors who paid the nominal electronic submission fee, or maybe even just paid for old-fashioned postage. And then you have the contest winners, who paid more for better placement, who paid to get a better seat at the show, paid for premium parking, paid for the Fast Pass. It corrupts the editorial vision of the magazine with a gimmick to gin up money and attention. (I am not against gimmicks. I am just against this gimmick.) But the difference for the writer is that when you pay for the Fast Pass, it’s clear what the exchange is. You are paying more money to skip the line. Simple, straightforward. But for the contests, you are paying more money for the ever-dim prospect of winning and having that dubious distinction put upon you. You are paying for the chance to have your name in slightly larger type. And also the prize money, large enough to be nice, not large enough to change your life. The problem is that you’re trading a collaborative editorial endeavor for a chance to sit at the Craps table. At least when you gamble, they bring you free drinks.
It’s a weird admission for a journal or a book publisher because it says, in essence, Hey, we don’t know how to sell enough copies of this print artifact that we’re making, so we need you to fund it. That would seem to be the very reason one would go to a publisher or a lit magazine. They know where the readers are and how to find them, how to marshal them for a party, how to find a space and rent a keg. I don’t know how to do these things. If I strong-armed all my friends into reading my latest story I’d have, what, four readers? The whole predominant reason to submit to a magazine is — I apologize for using this loaded phrase — its network effects, which as far as I can tell actually means “ability to get people to the party.” You can see this with the teens. Some of them have strong network effects. They will often throw parties. Some can throw parties but no one is driving way the hell out there. Some of them don’t even try. (This was me.) Some of them throw parties and can get people to the parties. And we may not like them as individuals, but we know a good party when we see one, and we want our short story to be at that party.
All that’s bad enough, but then the audience is told, “this is a contest winner!” as if I care one bit about who won a fiddle contest. Great, I guess? I don’t know what goes into winning a fiddle contest. Speed? Ability to boot-scoot while fiddling? What I want to know: will the show next week be any good? Is it worth the ticket and the logistical hurdles I will have to lurch myself over? Will I dig the music? Will I go home and save the album to my Spotify library, text it to my friends, contemplate a vinyl? The annual fiddle awards won’t tell me this. The prize-winning poetry collection won’t tell me this. It’s embarrassing for you to have to put this in your bio. I am embarrassed on your behalf. This is not T-ball, and we are no longer children.
We need to grow culture and stop making lists. I propose that other people are like me and don’t actually care about the false fire of contest-winners. The story, the poem, the Americana fiddle performance needs to enchant on its own without the artificial scaffolding. We need culture that can get people to show up to the party, get people excited to party. Culture happens at the party, not at the casino.
Full disclosure: I have never won a contest, except for the watermelon seed-spitting contest I won when I was eight. I killed it! And remember: all judgement is autobiographical.
Category Archives: literary lint
Close reading my rejections
Not too long ago, Ross Barkan posted a terrifying essay on his Substack, which I have read more than once through slitted fingers. It’s called “Pity the Short Story Writer.” The gist is that submitting short stories to literary magazines in the Year of our Lord 2025 is a loser’s game, both in that you will lose by being rejected and you will lose by throwing your work out into the void while you wait for months for a form rejection, if you are lucky. “The void, when you play the short story game, is what you get.” His point is that it’s no way to develop a career, to spend a life.1
Who on earth is submitting their short fiction to lit journals now? Well, I am. Though my diligence has certainly waxed and waned over the years, I have been semi-regularly sending out short fiction to journals, both print and online, for over twenty years. (My genius in the form is currently unrecognized.) I have no idea if this is a wise strategy, a foolish practice, a waste of my time and theirs (whoever they are), or really what I am even doing. I finished undergrad in 2000, my MFA in 2004, and though I started reading blogs right away, the winds of change that altered the aerodynamics of short form publishing in the past twenty-five years have been slow to ruffle my hair, if by “hair” we mean how I think about my work, and if by “think about” we really mean commit to one plan of action in an inspired burst on a Sunday only to completely recant into paralysis by Tuesday. Don’t even talk to me on Thursday. Although AI might indeed be able to replicate my prose style, I doubt it will ever be able to sufficiently duplicate my capacity for corrosive self-doubt.2
Anyway, I don’t read my rejection letters that closely anymore. The best rejection to my mind would be, “Thanks, but no thanks.” There are forms of rejections, forms within the forms. There is the slightly encouraging reject. The best one of these I ever got said, essentially, “Hey, I like this, but we don’t have room.” And it was on actual letterhead! More often they say, “we’d like to see something from you again.” One can dine out for months, nay years, on such oblique encouragement.
But the one I got today was a real winner, a real punch in old dunlap. It read in part, “We’d like to thank you, sincerely, for giving us the opportunity to read your work. Though it doesn’t meet our needs at this time, we’re so thankful for it; now more than ever, the arts feel as necessary as they are fragile, and it’s up to each of us to keep them going.”
Let’s take this one sentence at a time. “We’d like to thank you, sincerely, for giving us the opportunity to read your work.” I think it’s the “sincerely,” fenced off by commas, that grates so. “Like to thank” is linguistic phlegm. “I’d like to thank the Academy.” They’d “like to thank” me. Well I’d like to be 6’3” and drive a G Wagon, thanks. I’d like you to accept my novella.3 I’d like to quit paying three dollars to Submittable every time I want to send a story out. The world is full of actions I would like to do. The most direct way to say thank you is just to say it: “thank you, name, for doing X.” “I’d like to thank” is a performative thanks, a thanks with a smirk and a blink, eyeing for extra credit. Just because people say it in their award show acceptance speeches doesn’t mean you should say it, too. In fact, that’s the reason you shouldn’t say it.4
Now, were their previous expressions of gratitude for reading my work insincere? Do they really mean it now, since they’re saying “sincerely”? I hate cloying language. Do me the honor of directly telling me you don’t like me. Dump me to my face.
The second half of the next sentence reads: “Now more than ever, the arts feel as necessary as they are fragile, and it’s up to each of us to keep them going.”
Really it’s this portion after the semi-colon that bothers me. Some people don’t like semi-colons; I myself don’t mind them. I do realize they are pretentious. As I’ve already confessed, I was technically an adult when 9/11 occurred so the phrase “now more than ever” has been filed in my memory as a reflex — a kind of moral gravitas mantra, uttered unto meaninglessness. Could “now more than ever” signify anything at this point aside from a Warholian series of Dick Cheney snarls? Do they really think that me writing stories is important now more than ever? Really? I mean, I think I’m moderately decent, but even this strains the elastic of my ego. Is this second sentence about He Who Will Go Unnamed? Look, I don’t like him either, but this makes me feel like we’re glass blowing or something. I don’t think literature is fragile. I just think it’s unread and unappreciated, because reading is harder than 99% of the other activities we could be doing. The period of mass literacy that lead to a mass literary culture seems to be a temporary accident of education and technology.
“Necessary” here, like in other literary contexts, strikes me as one of those trendy gesture words or phrases, like “he understood the assignment,” or “so-and-so is doing the work.” They evoke adolescent-level in-group signaling. Are poems and short stories “necessary”? I mean, they’re great, but food and shelter they are not. Remember: poetry makes nothing happen, and thank God for it. We should quit pushing stories and poems through some kind of utilization review. Just let them be free to delight and instruct.
Also, I am not writing short stories to keep the arts going. I am doing it because it’s fun, and I’m good at it. It’s pleasurable on a deep intellectual level that’s somehow not entirely intellectual. I don’t want to get all woo woo on you, but it provides the pleasure of artistic craft, an iterative practice of exploratory variation, with the pleasure of discovery of meaning, the feeling of stumbling over what you yourself are going on about. Writing is an act of thinking, of a kind, that is then presented after the fact as a form of thought, like lava cooling.
Should I just throw these stories up on Substack and pester my few subscribers? I think about it a lot, which means I change my mind about eight times a week. It’s exhausting. I have been trying to figure out my hesitancy in posting my stories online the same way I occasionally post these little grumbles. Part of it is that I want to be accepted. You submit. They accept. They reject. You re-submit. BDSM echoes, etc. I want to be chosen. I think I am good, but my belief in myself is flimsy, worth nothing, a currency in a failed country. I need those crisp dollars of approval from somewhere better, some new world. Look, all I want is an unending string of praise from strangers. Surely that will make me feel whole.
Part of it is the context. Max Read wrote something interesting in his Substack when he talked about what makes successful writing on that platform different. He writes: “. . . while what I do resembles journalistic writing in the specific, the actual job is in most ways closer to that of a YouTuber or a streamer or even a hang-out-type podcaster than it is to that of most types of working journalist. (The one exception being: Weekly op-ed columnist.) What most successful Substacks offer to subscribers is less a series of discrete and self-supporting pieces of writing — or, for that matter, a specific and tightly delimited subject or concept — and more a particular attitude or perspective, a set of passions and interests, and even an ongoing process of ‘thinking through,’ to which subscribers are invited.”
This makes sense to me, as I listen to my favorite podcasts more for the voices of the hosts than any guests or topics. But what are short pieces of fiction if not discrete textual artifacts? They are by definition not me, not perpetuations of a single authorial persona.5 It’s difficult enough getting people to separate the fiction from the author without that fiction being surrounded by other bits of more directly personal essayish grumbling. We’re not Within the Context of No Context but rather in the Context of Too Much Context. Emily Gould had the right idea way back when she named her own website/blog “Emily Magazine.” Each site is a Marvel Cinematic Universe of one.
The final problem is one of audience. Outside of school, reading short stories is a minority pursuit. It ain’t where the fish are. I could probably post TikTok dances and get more viewers/readers than I could publishing short stories, and I’ve got a body built for radio. Why do I keep working in this form where there is so little audience and I have had so little success?6 Is it delusion? Compulsion? An inherent lack of creativity? Is my notion of “good writing” hopelessly narrow and stuck in 1994? Do I just not know what to do with myself otherwise? Am I lying to myself in that I haven’t actually been that diligent in my submitting and really what do I expect from such meager effort? These are questions both rhetorical and real.
Maybe these blog posts are just failed short stories.
1. Of course the word “career” has layers upon layers of implied scare-quotes around it. Perhaps a better way to say it is that it’s not a wise method, under current conditions, to publish a body of work.
2. Just to be clear, I am not whining about being rejected. I expect to be rejected. I welcome being rejected. I just want to be rejected more swiftly and thoroughly and unambiguously. The whole endeavor of short story publication has a slight BDSM whiff about it.
3. I know, I know, what did I expect? If there is any form more hopeless than a short story, it’s the novella. I will spare you any attempts to define the novella. Yes, I have always had a soft, hairy spot for the novella. I refer to it as my Jim Harrison Spot. I think poetry actually has a larger audience, because poetry still lives in mutant form, both high and low. You’ve got Hallmark cards, still. And what were Tweets but poems of rage? For a while there, the Tweet was the perfect poem because it was birthed from an actual technological constraint. And then once that fence was lifted, people kept the 140 character limit. The formal properties persisted! People actually like formal poetry. They just don’t like school.
4. Whoever writes those speeches for the celebrities should be banned from the profession for life. It’s like watching someone pat themselves on the back while giving themselves a hand job.
5. Read also writes insightfully about self-publishing on the internet as a vector for shame.
6. I acknowledge that this isn’t the best word here. Is it a form? A mode? A genre? What is a short story? Just a prose narrative subject to an artificial length constraint.
Author profiles are bunk
There was a fascinating profile of writer Lauren Groff in last weekend’s New York Times, “How Lauren Groff, One of ‘Our Finest Living Writers,’ Does Her Work.” Groff is an excellent writer in the middle of an already distinguished career. Though I prefer her stories to her novels mostly for idiosyncratic personal reasons, she is on my mental list of people to always read. Even if it’s just a little bit of the latest novel, I will read some of it to see what she is up to now.
First, a tenet: profiles are a hoax. I realize that there are some profiles that are “good,” both good journalism and good writing, perceptive, useful, aesthetically pleasing, not completely dishonest and fraudulent. But most profiles are fraudulent. All celebrity profiles are fraudulent, and the New York Times profiles of writers are a specific breed of fraudulent. One could say there’s a long tradition of fraudulence with respect to this category at the New York Times. The fraudulence comes from the two-step conspiracy between profile writer (in this case journalist Elizabeth A. Harris) and profiled subject. You have a journalist desperate for a story, any kind of story, any kind of angle toward something interesting, combined with a writer who by necessity must spend the majority of his or her time inside, alone, listening to voices inside their head. Not the most fertile ground for interesting journalism. Combine this fraught set up with the need to do some myth maintenance. Who can forget David Foster Wallace asking Frank Bruni, “Do you have my saliva?” in that very same august publication? That profile also had Bruni going through Wallace’s medicine cabinet. On the one hand this seems like a creepy invasion of privacy. On the other, this seems like a desperate young journalist looking for anything they can find to hang a paragraph upon. (Upon reread, that old profile has a heroic amount of persona-building from both journalist and subject.)
That’s a long way of saying that profiles of writers are the softest of soft journalism and are usually filled with gargantuan mounds of self-aggrandizing BS, and the Groff profile does not disappoint. In fact, it might win a medal for the highest frequency of raised eyebrows from this humble reader. I realize that profiles like these are basically commercials for the writer and commercials for the sensitivity of the reporters. But even so, this one is an everlasting gobstopper of weirdness.1
“The outing was unusual for an author interview — and, given the pace of the hike, not an insignificant amount of exercise. Typically, these conversations take place over coffee or lunch, at a publisher’s office or maybe in a writer’s living room. But Groff had chosen something different: a five-mile hike through the woods and a swim in a pond, followed by a lunch of chickpea salad and a beet slaw with pistachio butter, all of which she made herself.”
Where to even begin? What a disappointing lunch. Why would you do that to those poor pistachios? And she “made it herself”? What is this, the Ladies Home Journal from 1983?
Groff knows exactly what she is doing, taking your lazy ass on a five-mile hike and swim. She’s giving you the Hook, which simultaneously frames her as a flattering combination of writer/athlete. It’s like something out of Veep. She’s not like these other writers, etc. She is not just accomplished and talented but also athletic and cool with her “goofy sense of humor” and she knows her way around the kitchen when necessary and above all seems like someone you would want to hang with, or barring that someone you would at least look up to.
“A former college athlete who still runs, swims and plays tennis regularly, Groff, 45, has a physicality about her that is central to how she lives and writes.” We also learn that Groff’s sister was an Olympic triathlete, so the jock is strong with this one. One can only imagine how intensely competitive the holiday sessions of Pictionary are up in New Hampshire.
“Groff and her family remain close. Though she lives in Gainesville, where Kallman (her husband) owns and operates off-campus housing for University of Florida students, she spends every summer in New Hampshire, close to where her sister and her brother live, and where her parents have a house.”
First thought: that’s a good job. Second thought: that’s an excellent job for the spouse of a writer. Solidly remunerative and filled with interesting stories. I can only imagine the horrors that greet her spouse daily as he deals with the living consequences of the standard male UF undergraduate. Just think what has been done to all that carpet.
“When Groff starts something new, she writes it out longhand in large spiral notebooks. After she completes a first draft, she puts it in a banker’s box — and never reads it again. Then she’ll start the book over, still in longhand, working from memory. The idea is that this way, only the best, most vital bits survive.”
Really, Lauren. Really?
“It’s not even the words on the page that accumulate, because I never look at them again, really, but the ideas and the characters start to take on gravity and density,” she says.
Her “really” is doing a lot of work in that quotation. Seems like the hardest way to climb that mountain but what do I know?
“When Groff agreed to move to Florida 17 years ago, she did so conditionally. She’d relocate, she said, only if she could travel as needed — for writers’ retreats, for book tours — and if Kallman agreed to reassess periodically. There’s a physical contract stating those terms, signed by her and Kallman, somewhere in her files. The document also delineates some of their child care plans — an arrangement that allows her to wake up at 5 a.m. and disappear into her writing for hours, without having to manage the routine of getting two children fed and out the door.
“Groff and Kallman wake up together, they said, but the morning is not a time to chat
“‘I get so mad at him if he tries to talk to me,’ Groff joked about her husband.”
Here’s where the profile goes from strange to fascinating. First, I bet the “getting mad at” is not actually a joke, no matter how jokingly described it was to the reporter. You don’t have to be Derrida to detect the undulating reservoirs of resentment at being drug down to north Florida to live out her adulthood, a compromise that in all likelihood also financially allows her to write full time. Now, I don’t know that for a fact. I don’t know how much money she makes from her writing. It is not my business and I don’t care. However, I am fascinated by “literary writers,” that is people who write novels and stories that attempt to be art, rather than say genre stuff or TV stuff, and how those people also make enough money to live. It’s the age-old double question: how do you pay the rent? And who takes care of the kids?
To be clear, I don’t care who does what in any kind of gender-role sense. Please. Every family is its own island. A Dr. Moreau-like island, to be sure, but still an island. My hands are too full of grocery bags to throw stones. But one does want to know (per the headline) how the work gets done; one wants details. This profile has the depth of nail polish. Who packs the lunches? Etc.
Second, a good journalist would have asked to see that contract. This is the most provocative part of the profile. She is a mother of two kids and doesn’t have to deal with getting them out to school every morning? I’m a middle-aged father of two kids and I can attest that getting people to school in the morning is a scene, a daily steeplechase of bad yogurt, missing laundry, and rolled-through stop signs.
I wonder if she has hired help around the house. No judgment. Strictly a logistical financial curiosity. Is there a nanny figure?
“‘I like the morning because it’s empty of people and ideas and you’re still sort of in a dream state until the caffeine kicks in. It’s the best time of day, for sure. It’s a very gentle time of day.’”
It’s only a gentle time of day if you’ve got a contract saying that your husband will deal with all that crap so that you can write! It’s not a gentle time of day! It’s a nightmare time of the day! It’s like Wes Craven’s Busytown! If you think morning’s are calm, you’re either medicated or isolated or childless. Just think of the routine caffeine-doped gridlock on the interstate loop of a mid-sized US city. Those people are driving to work — fortunate enough to drive to work. It’s a lot of things but it ain’t gentle.
“She estimates she reads about 300 books a year.”
Don’t believe it. Sorry. And I’ve read press releases with a more developed sense of skepticism.
“Her editor . . . said that Groff reread all of Shakespeare so she could write a version of The Vaster Wilds in iambic pentameter ‘just for fun,’ as a way for her to master Elizabethan rhythms.”
Lauren, honey. Sweetie. You’ve got all morning. Every morning. Please don’t waste it on crap like this. Want to write 30 pages of iambic pentameter, 50 pages, okay fine. But the whole novel? Come now.
Then, the reporter gets a quotation from Hernan Diaz, one of Groff’s friends who she provided a blurb for and who went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. His bit that praises Groff is hyperbolic and cliched, overwritten and underthought (“to make the syntactical edifice as sound and capacious and beautiful as possible”) and shares many of the same problems outlined in my ranting against blurbs. First, Groff should not be spending the valuable remaining hours of her life writing blurbs. (She writes them in the afternoons when “Groff deals with the business of being an author.”) No one should be writing blurbs, but we can be hierarchical about it. If Obama wrote you a letter saying how much he dug your novel, you don’t have to write blurbs any more. They are beneath you. And you shouldn’t have to give logrolling quotations to publications about your writer friends either. Jesus. What are we doing here, people?
Groff’s not any good at this either. In a Lorrie Moore profile from earlier this year (I know I know, stop reading them if they make you so mad) by Dan Kois, a writer who should know better, Gross says of Moore’s famous kid cancer short story, “It’s so complicated and brutal. . . . You feel her great reserve is gone, and she’s bearing down with all her might.”2
“Bearing down with all her might”? What is she cracking walnuts? I realize we can’t grade all of a writer’s language output with the same eye we might take to her novels, but level up a smidge.3 & 4
But back to the praise of Groff by Diaz. What else is he going to say? He’s certainly not going to say anything critical, but the larger disappointment is that he’s not going to say anything interesting. I’ve seen more hard hitting reportage from the CBS Sunday Morning Show, in segments about, like, birds. This is embarrassing just in terms of journalism. (Harris, pay attention, I am talking to you.)
Well you’re just jealous, one might say. You’re goddamned right I’m jealous! Granted, I don’t know who the intended audience for these profiles is if it’s not mildly embittered, middle-aged failed novelists. But yes, I am jealous. I’m also jealous of Heidi Julavits’s life, as cataloged in both The Folded Clock and Directions to Myself.5 She summers in Maine! People, I live in Mississippi, the very seam of Satan’s jockstrap. Do you know how much I would give to summer in New Hampshire or Maine? I’d even take up hiking if necessary. When summer arrives I just do what I do during the entire rest of the year except a) the structure provided by school vanishes completely, and b) it’s so hot even the lizards are frightened.6
So yes, I am jealous, but not just of the success and the talent. I am envious of the relentlessness and the discipline and the ruthless vision. To have those oceans of time to focus on your writing. And to actually get it done. The profile is correct in its Hook. Groff does approach writing like an athlete: regular, intense training, and religious routine. Let’s do some math. She’s 45. She made this contract 17 years ago when she was 28. 2006. Her first novel, The Monsters of Templeton, came out in 2008. She already knew, before that book came out. Or what’s more likely, she had the faith. She had the belief in herself to say this is what I’m going to do and you’re going to help me. You’re going to deal with the kids. And I’m not going to have another job. It’s this confidence in one’s own abilities, this self-validation that impresses me. And then the follow-through, actually getting the work done. Making the time for yourself and then using that hard-won time. Think of the arguments. Think of the familial judgment. Think of the clucking that happens at their kids’ school. Think of the strain of having to hack out that path over twenty years and then having to maintain it. People are always talking about how books are “brave” and “necessary,” literary criticism made of styrofoam. But Groff actually did what was brave and necessary. You want to see actual bravery by a writer? That’s bravery. Saying I am good at this and I deserve this time, this freedom.
All of which is to say that I suppose this profile works, because I do admire Lauren Groff, novelist. Props are due.
- The most honest writer profile I have ever read was written by Boris Kachka, published in New York magazine, of novelist Claire Messud. It’s a collaboration in frankness.
- Kois, a sophisticated journalist for Slate and a novelist in his own right, has all the guile of Bambi in that profile. But then again, it’s Lorrie Moore!
- She does drop the valuable intel that Moore is “very, very good with [men],” which totally tracks.
- The story, “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” was devastating when I read it as a 20-year-old childless idiot, and the story was devastating when I read it as a 30-year-old father of a baby, and now that I am a mid-40s parent of two teen-ish kids, you could not pay me enough money to reread that story. I can’t handle it. It’s like an emotional Gatling Gun. Just give me another 20 years to recover. Jesus. Leave me alone.
- I know these footnotes are annoying, but I have a lot to say. In both Groff’s story collection Florida and in Julavits’s memoir Directions to Myself, there is much metaphoric soup made from tide pools and the young boys who play in them. There is a nature/nurture, maternal presence metaphor in both, and both lean into the idea that “my boy won’t be like that.” The that in this case is the predatory adult male, the bully, the chauvinist, the rapist, the assaulter, the vicious threatening male presence that we all know and love. There is much forced wishing and hoping going on in these passages. A mildly unnerving parallel thread of parental paranoia.
- To have the financial and logistical wherewithal to summer in New Hampshire? To have the imagination to even begin to think of summering in New Hampshire? I didn’t even conceive that was something you could do until I was 40. Talk about a failure of imagination.
New York Review of Book Design
Most book covers are terrible. Most book design is terrible. It’s terrible in that it’s over-designed. Too many words trying to describe, capture, sell what’s inside. Too many overly literal cover images. Too much goddamned art. Are there instances of visually complex covers that successfully complement the book? Absolutely. But in my more curmudgeonly moments, when I see covers for books that I like, I think they would have looked better had they looked plainer. They would look better if they’d had the cover removed, if they were left with the stark honesty of the title page. Honestly, I like the example established by French publisher Gallimard. Plain cover, title, genre, publisher, author name. Leave everything else off. I am compromising by allowing any genre indications. Everyone’s life would be more interesting if readers were forced to figure out the genre themselves. There is too much overt, aggressive, front-end explanation and style categorization of art these days.
And I hate blurbs. They are marketing copy coerced from the author’s friends and acquaintances. Or (if one is extremely lucky) they are quotations from reviews pulled out of context. The blurb forces writers to become ad copywriters, and I don’t know if it’s lack of skill or resentment at the unpaid labor, but the blurbs aren’t any good. They fail as description of the work contained inside, and they fail as provocative enticements to read the work inside. And they turn writers of literature (briefly discarding the quotation marks that typically shackle that word) into harvesters of clichés. It’s worse than a grade school awards ceremony, because we are all adults and theoretically should know better. Do blurbs even work? Has there been one reader pulled in by the canned hyperbole of some secondary author? It seems like by now there should be some data on this question.
And no, I don’t like author photographs either. And I think the downfall of American literary journals is tied to when they, collectively, began including author photographs alongside their essays and poems and such. What is this, high school? Facebook? Have a little pride. America, let your writers be ugly and at peace!
And since I’m being thorough here: I also hate contributor’s notes in literary journals that list anything more than where the author is from and if they have an interesting job. (No one has interesting jobs anymore. They all teach.) The contributors’ notes now are so bloated they read like a more insufferable version of LinkedIn. If the blurbs are a kind of inter-personal logrolling, the contributors’ notes are a kind of institutional logrolling. I realize that logrolling occurs. I’m not that much of a Pollyanna. But I just wish it wasn’t so glaringly obvious, boring, and poorly written. Not even your mother cares about all those awards!
Are there exceptions? Sure. The black-and-white, windswept-yet-embalmed, deb-in-heat photos of Marion Ettlinger are, of course, provocative, making even the most agoraphobic sweater-covered humanoid temporarily alluring. The Vintage Contemporaries series from the 80s was wonderful, bright, surreal, associative covers that are instantly recognizable. And yes, I think Chip Kidd and Peter Mendelsund are brilliant. They’re great, but they can’t design everything.
Really what I want is the covers of John McPhee. He’s written 40-ish books, and the majority of them have been published in paperback editions by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and they all look the same. I love the stark uniformity of all these McPhee titles, even more so because the topics he covers in his somehow non-boring nonfiction is so sui generis. Rural inbred pine tree people living in the inner wilds of New Jersey? The smuggling of Russian paintings? The historical attempts to control the Mississippi River? If you line up all your McPhee titles on the shelf, they are wearing their uniform, unassuming, diligent, neat, immediately identifiable. Yes, I know the front covers typically have some kind of art smear that hint at the thematic contents inside. Don’t be pedantic and ruin my point. These books look good and they look like they belong together.
I realize that if all the new books adopted a McPhee-like minimalist approach and paranoia regarding graphic design change, the world would grow that much plainer, without all that shouting cleavage everywhere. Perhaps I would grow bored when I entered the bookstore. But I’m willing to give it a try. Someone somewhere figured out a visual language for McPhee and stuck with it through the decades.
I should further confess that I prefer paperback editions to their more stately hardback older brothers. I find the hardbacks too nice, trying too hard to be museum quality. I have a love-hate relationship with the dust jacket. With my purported attraction to plainness, one would think I would simply throw the cover away, and yet I can’t do it. Chip Kidd once described his dust jacket work as designing grocery bags — a temporary container that’s destined to be discarded. I can’t decide if this self-evaluation is mature or nihilistic, or both. I also resent the time window variations between the hardback and the paperback editions. I realize this is a historical legacy of publishing, but the heart wants what the heart wants, and what I want, apparently, is for all books to publish first run as a mid-90s era Vintage International paperbacks. Matte cover, usually abstract, trade paperback width, paper quality just this side of feeling cheap. I never got on with mass market paperbacks, though I like the ideology. They’re too thick to hold comfortably, and there’s not enough margin to write down comments, and I am still trying to make a decent grade. I realize that by discovering my latent favorite what I might be asking for above all is to be young again. You know: back when they did things better.
Currently, here in the Middle Ages, Fitzcarraldo Editions is close to my idea of perfection, one color for nonfiction titles, another for fiction titles. It’s simple and calming, and all of your books from that publisher can wink at each other smugly from the shelves.
But whatever you do, book designers of the future: no deckled edges.
Notes on ‘Directions to Myself’
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.
All plots move toward adultery
I first read White Noise the year I was fresh out of college. I remember being perplexed. It didn’t rise and fall like I anticipated. It more or less just hummed. I had come to White Noise directly from David Foster Wallace’s essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” where he quotes long sections from the novel to illustrate how DeLillo was an important monument of postmodern fiction who dealt directly with dominant U.S. televisual image culture, a rock who everyone had to flow around. Several years passed, and I found myself in Boston and picked up a copy of Libra. Then began a yearly routine of reading a new DeLillo each year. A couple of years ago I reread White Noise and loved it, now as a middle-aged father. It struck me as wonderfully funny and prescient in its treatment not just of news as data but as the family as “cradle of misinformation,” and the father’s role as ad hoc arbiter of that misinformation. “Ask your father,” etc. The scenes of family chaos dialogue are the best parts of Baumbach’s movie — the detail I was most thrilled to see embodied on screen.
Watching his screen adaptation of White Noise this past weekend brought back a simple observation from my years of incremental DeLillo, one that I don’t think has been remarked upon, though its simplicity makes me think that surely someone has remarked upon it somewhere. I fully confess I’m not up on the DeLillo criticism. Nevertheless, original or not, here is that observation: a significant number of DeLillo’s novels are structured around adultery. For all his deserved postmodern importance, with the placeholder caveat that “postmodern importance” is itself definitionally fraught, many of his novels are structured around a woman cheating on a man, just like in Madame Bovary, Ulysses, as well as countless other more historically vanilla novels. One could argue that the central plot of realistic fiction for the first half of its existence is the marrying of young women, and the central plot of the second half of its existence is adultery, that secret within a marriage, a room inside a room. The building of this secret and its inevitable discovery forms the theme and the structure of so many novels that it’s unremarkable, like streets laid out in a grid in a city.
And though I’m not arguing that DeLillo’s novels are really about adultery, I am struck how this simple and even rote plot device is used over and over again. In White Noise Babette is sleeping with Mink in order to obtain Dylar, the experimental drug that might combat her fear of death. Gladney discovers the truth and embarks on an absurdist revenge scene, complete with gunfire. The Names, ostensibly about international insurance markets and hidden language cults in Greece, turns on the discovery of adultery. It’s a hinge that turns the plot forward, such as it is. Cosmopolis, arguably, is structured around the protagonist’s extramarital liaisons, culminating in coitus with his actual wife at the end. Obviously the novel is not about adultery, but the day is organized, punctuated really, by the trysts. And most importantly, Underworld, the massive, most DeLillo of DeLillo novels, that’s about so, so much, ends with the protagonist confronting his wife’s lover in the wastes of Kazakhstan during a nuclear test. Despite all of the human history and technology that are depicted in DeLillo’s novels, there is so often the secret, the revelation of the secret, the male jealousy, and the enactment of revenge. That old plot technology ain’t obsolete yet.
All of which is to say this is not what we come to DeLillo for. Ex cathedra utterances defining our contemporary life, yes, absolutely. But not this. And yet, there it is, lying beneath the tires.
Yet Another John
When I was in my twenties, I bought the Everyman’s Library edition of the Rabbit tetralogy by John Updike, and I resolved to read one of the novels each year. I got through the first two before becoming distracted by life, but this winter, for some unknown reason, I pulled the thick book down and finally read novel number three: Rabbit is Rich.
I found it astounding. Perhaps it had simply been too long since I had read an unashamed American realist novel, but it seemed like Updike at his best. Yes, I am aware of the myriad criticisms of Updike: relentlessly prolific, old fashioned in his political and sexual views, his protagonists entirely oversexed, etc. All of those criticisms could still be lobbied at Rabbit is Rich, but as a chunk of fiction, as an installment in the broader panorama of Harry Angstrom’s life, it’s exemplary. Like the other Rabbit novels, the third volume functions as an almost-instant retrospective look at the American decade just passed, and that decade’s excesses, inhibitions, and sins become embodied in the characters.
All of which is great, but what I was impressed with was how effortlessly he seemed to pull off the regular old novelisms: the set pieces, the implacable situational conflict, the behavior of characters that’s simultaneously evocative of time/place/personality and also plausible — significant but not screamingly so. The novel feels both richly descriptive of a lived American reality and also richly imagined as a fictional landscape, and this ratio of observation and invention is controlled throughout. I realize these are merely characteristics of a well-done, old-fashioned realistic novel, but as someone who has intermittently attempted to do that very same activity, to see it pulled off with this level of apparent effortlessness is astonishing. It’s like watching an Olympic athlete flip and twist across a padded floor, their hummingbird breathing at the end nearly hidden by their beaming smile. I understand enough about novel writing to know how hard it is to do what he’s doing without it seeming hard. Perhaps I’m just a bad novelist. It’s possible! But still: I’d kill to be able to write like this.
For Christmas, I received a newer novel: Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads. I was in my 30s when I broke down and finally started reading Franzen’s novels. I had read his essays, a less intimidating backdoor into his oeuvre, but The Corrections received so much praise when I was in grad school that I studiously avoided it. As if I were picking sides in the Twilight saga, I was devoutly team DFW. But finally I broke down and read Freedom and then the floodgates opened: The Corrections, then Purity, and now Crossroads. In the meantime, Franzen has become a metonymy for the sins of postwar American male literary success. At least, I think that’s what’s going on. Something about his public persona and his success annoys a certain kind of online literary young person, and the result is that every time he makes any kind of public utterance, or every time he publishes a new book, there is an endless amount of commentary about how wrong Franzen is. And I partially sympathize: he can be insufferable, humorless, at his worst a kind of deliberate troll regarding environmental issues. He’s the kind of person who thinks he’s got an excellent sense of humor. Is this the kind of person he really is, or is this just how he comes across in the pinhole understanding we have of him via his nonfiction writing and his interviews?
My answer is another question: who cares? Having a strong opinion on Franzen’s latest media utterance as a replacement for actually being well-read is unhealthy. Sorry. It would be easier to be a literate person if they removed the blurbs, the fetching author photographs, and the online interviews, the noise pollution of publicity. Until that day, we have to be more rigorous in our attention. The author is not dead, but it’s sometimes easier to pretend he is.
What I care about is the fiction, where all of his faults and excesses coalesce and reverse into a greater rhetorical artifact. It must be said: Franzen is an exceptional novelist. Is he essentially an old-fashioned realistic novelist according to generally acceptable terms? Yes. Are there a conspicuous number of tried-and-true novelistic plot conventions in this latest novel? Namely, accidental pregnancy, psychological breakdown, drug use as character revelation and plot instigator, similar use of crisis of faith? Yes. One thing is sure: he’s not writing fragmentary autofiction that questions its own status as a work of linguistic artifice. What he’s doing instead is much simpler and much more pleasurable: a double-decker sodbuster of a family saga. This is obviously Franzen’s forte. And sections of Crossroads succeed as powerfully as any other novel of his that I’ve read. The novel-length first section, “Advent,” is remarkable. The novel concerns a pastor experiencing a midlife crisis, his four children, and his wife. Everyone except the youngest child (10) is barrelling toward a reckoning, and it all collides two nights before Christmas in a suburb of Chicago in 1971. Updike’s brand of routine excellence also manifests here. Franzen’s ability to juggle multiple plot strands and make it interesting and relevant and pull you along, so that it feels less like you’re reading and more like you are succumbing to some tidal undertow of events, is overwhelming. I would kill to be able to write like this. He doesn’t have the same level of prose as Updike, whose mission it seemed was to describe everything on the planet in his eloquent high-def style. At times, that style is perfect for what is being described, and at times it’s awful, insufferable, tasteless. Though I understand this criticism of Updike, I am sympathetic because it seems essentially instinctive. He’s got this Paul McCartney–like helplessness before the staggering plenitude of his own talent. The dog will always roll in the stink; it’s how he proves he’s alive. Franzen’s prose is different and has changed since The Corrections. It’s less fussily aware of itself as language. It’s clearer. It doesn’t dance as hard as it used to. It’s not particularly voice-driven, either in terms of its author’s own constant God-like baritone, or in terms of a more Faulkner-like deep-character ventriloquism. It’s more of the transparent window pane rather than the swirling disco ball. There are nice phrases, to be sure, but one rarely slows up attentionally to ponder them. But at the same time it’s not cliched. It’s not sloppy, it’s not breezy, and it’s not filmic. He’s not a benign prose stylist in this novel. And that middle ground is itself incredibly difficult. Though I don’t agree with Martin Amis, that a good novel is exemplified by a long marginal line of excitement drawn down the page cheering on each innovative utterance (moderation in all things, Marty), I do enjoy the shock of new language. But this goal of sentence-level innovation is often antithetical to moving a novel along, to submerging oneself in the novelistic dream of the characters. In Crossroads, the dream is everything.
Does it get a little rickety, plot-wise toward the end of the first section? Yes. Does it feel a little too much like a P.T. Anderson movie where everyone’s storm of pain happens to rain on the same exact evening in a way that seems a little too conveniently dramatic? Yes. Does the novel ultimately hinge on a couple of characters’ deeply held beliefs that remain unpersuasive to this reader? Yes. Are the primary members of the Hildebrandt family all weirdly destructive moral absolutists, none of whom have a restraining thread of common sense? Yes. Pastor Russ’s break from his family’s Mennonite faith, his love of Navajo culture, his difficulties with his own faith all seem slightly less than convincing. He has an orientalist fascination with “authentic” blues records, an affectation which is lightly ironized at one point in the novel. But his larger infatuation toward the Navajo people, which seems like a deeper version of the same search for a more authentic culture distinct from his own, doesn’t have any irony attached to it. Perhaps I am just misreading. Likewise, the novel-binding affection between Clem, his oldest son, and Becky, lone sister, seems rather baffling. At the end of the first section, which essentially occurs over one long day, there are so many confrontations and crises that they lose emphasis. Like a group of streakers at a football game, it becomes difficult to distinguish which revelation sprinting across your field of vision is important. In its attempt to braid together so much narrative information, one loses a sense of proportion. But then, who said novels were about proportion? That sounds like the griping of an envious short story writer.
Aside from the complementary excellence between Updike and Franzen, there is an interesting plot device parallel in both novels: they both are primarily concerned with a middle-aged patriarch’s adulterous fantasies. In each there is a focal point for this fantasy. For Rabbit, it’s Cindy Murkett, the youngest wife in his country club golf set. For pastor Russ Hidlebrant, it’s Frances Cottrell, the foxy, young, widowed parishioner. Though of course there are many other elements, the wished-for consummation of this desire forms the spine of the plot, and the night of reckoning coincides with (and metaphorically seems to bring about) a crisis with their sons. In the case of Rabbit, his hoped-for rendezvous with Cindy doesn’t happen. The climactic wife-swapping-in-the-islands gambit lands him instead with Thelma Harrison, who it turns out is as obsessed with him as Rabbit is with Cindy. He awakens the next day post-coitus (yes, exhaustively described) to find out that his son Nelson has abandoned his own just-married and very pregnant wife back in the States. For Russ, he manages to bed his infatuation (in the the most depraved and pitiful and ick-worthy of circumstances), which coincides with his son having a cocaine-abetted psychological breakdown (plus some fire). Of course the sons’ crises refract the patriarch’s self-absorption and excesses. Though both novels hail from more liberal, more gently Protestant neighborhoods, this essentially simultaneous retribution strikes me as remarkably Southern Baptist, as plot devices go.
To further complicate matters, the novels also share marriages that endure in spite of the wayward husbands and wives. In each, both spouses are conflicted, adulterous, or at least adultery-adjacent. Neither split but are somehow stronger despite being each other’s rusty foil for most of the novel. There is a strange resilience to their antagonisms, as if the antagonism between husband and wife strengthens their bond. These chronicles of wayward females and libidinally distracted men somehow transmogrify into odes for marriage. It echoes an observation from the real world: That many long-term successful marriages are opaque, unknowable accomplishments, like obelisks appearing in the desert. At the right angle and distance the marriages almost seem like cults of two. The most surprising part of each novel in the end are the portraits of these conjugal cults — cults that exist at the center of the family island, beating the drum of civilization.
Despite Franzen’s role as despised Literary Man, the novelist he currently reminds me of is yet another John — John Irving. He also wrote plot-stuffed, continent-spanning, energetically goofy novels that are essentially unputdownable if one submits to them. (Thank God Franzen avoids bears and wrestling.) I’m not saying it’s the highest aesthetic achievement in the bookstore (though all ranking is bunk), but it ain’t nothing either.
Roth in Rehab
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.
- And by “fraught,” I mean totally bananas.
- And by “florid,” I mean totally bananas.
- 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?”
Canon Fodder
Caitlin Flanagan tweeted this question Saturday. Usually, I am able to resist such provocations, which inevitably lead to sincere suggestions, too obvious jokes, and ideological arguments vining down the comment thread. (I know, I know: get off Twitter.) But I was provoked enough to come up with my own sincere suggestions:
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
The Diary of Anne Frank; Night by Elie Wiesel; The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick
Black Boy by Richard Wright
The White Album by Joan Didion
The Things they Carried by Tim O’Brien
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and Pastoralia by George Saunders
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Short, brilliant, bracing. I think of the detail about Douglass as a boy sleeping in a corn sack, his feet poking out, cracks in them deep enough to hold a pen. A country’s trauma written on his body.
Moby-Dick. Look, no one said high school was going to be easy. Do I think America would be a better country if everyone was forced to read this novel? Yes, I do. That’s just the kind of snob I am. Part buddy-comedy, part opera, part Emersonian sermon, part revenge thriller, elastically plotted, brilliantly written. Putting more sugar into the cup paradoxically doesn’t make the coffee overflow. It just makes the country sweeter.
Huck Finn. Is this novel, published to controversy back in 1884, problematic by today’s standards? Yes. Are those problems emblematic of America as it was in the late 19th century and as it remains today? Yes. Look, no one said being an American was going to be easy. What is going on with the central relationship between Jim and Huck? What is going on with the ending?
The Age of Innocence. You could sub The House of Mirth probably just as easily. And there’s a valid argument to be had between the Henry James camp and the Edith Wharton camp for general milieu. One of those elegant society novels that folds together like a perfectly constructed piece of origami. Despite this, I almost want to counter-nominate anything by Willa Cather.
The Great Gatsby. Another obvious choice, but it’s still a worthy novel, from both a literary perspective and a historical one. Maybe one of the only “perfect” novels, though that adjective is problematic. Its characters’ political and racial grievances are sadly perennial.
Absalom, Absalom! Look, no one said high school was going to be easy. I get it: this is a beastly difficult novel. But, really, is it that bad? Is it any more abstruse than, say, pre-calculus? Besides if it’s not the great American novel (sorry, Melvillians), then it’s at least the greatest southern novel. You could probably sub The Sound and the Fury but I still think this is the better novel, especially if you’re going to force the entire country to read just one Faulkner. What can I say? Sometimes rewarding experiences are inherently difficult. It doesn’t just describe the racial schism of the country. It dramatizes it.
The Diary of Anne Frank; Night by Elie Wiesel; The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick. Yes, this is three books. I was never good at math. Here you have the anticipatory paranoia of the atrocity, the horror itself, and the attempt to reconcile the horror via art afterward. In terms of introducing students to the Holocaust, it’s barely a start, but it’s probably heading in the right direction.
Black Boy by Richard Wright. One could argue on behalf of Native Son instead. However, the memoir is the one I remember as being evocative and piercing, like Frank’s diary in a way, nauseatingly immediate yet terrifyingly foreign.
The White Album. You could sub Slouching Towards Bethlehem, I suppose, but I find The White Album to be a better book overall. The way the long title essay mixes so many modes, cross-pollinates the personal and the cultural. Are we learning about Didion or the culture at large? Both? Where does one end and the other begin?
The Things They Carried. I am beginning to break a tacit rule: only dead people on the list. I realize not all of these authors have passed, but in general it seems like a canonical list such as this, and most of a high schooler’s literary syllabus, should be made up of dead writers. When else are they going to read the dead people? They can read the fun contemporary stuff outside of class. You know: for fun. Perhaps we can’t learn from the past unless people force us. Anyway, O’Brien: I think this book has become a classic. Students should read the entire book, not just the title story. Aside from being overwhelmingly well-written, an MFA in a book, and aside from the historical importance of the Vietnam War, it’s the metafictional elements that are also important: how the characters create stories, use stories, deploy stories — the manufactured nature of stories. The way the book rewrites itself as it proceeds.
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and Pastoralia. Saunders thankfully is very much alive and well. And really a better book would be a not yet extant Selected Works. Aside from the humor and the fact that the stories are wonderful, Saunders is on the list because of the way he productively satirizes strands of contemporary American life, the ways the country thinks of itself, talks to itself. One could make the argument that stories such as “Sea Oak” are not appropriate for our nation’s youth, but, really? Have you been on TikTok? I think the teens can handle grandma’s ghost.
Is this list more than three books? Yes. Is this list enough? No. Does this list sufficiently cover the panoramic scope of the American experience? No. Is the list demographically representative enough of America? No. Is this really a good list? No. All would-be canonical lists are inadequate, a blanket that can’t reach all the way to a nation’s feet. There is no list that will ever be good enough. The entire question is deliberately absurd. It should be 30 books. No, it should be 300. But I can’t resist Flanagan’s implicit trolling.
I am not just trying to be vaguely provocative. I genuinely think these are good books that the country as a whole would benefit from reading. For such a list, the books need to capture some ineffable aspect of the history of the country while also equipping the reader, if only slightly, for life as a citizen in 2021. And whatever list one creates is merely a start. It can’t cover everything.
And some of these books are more adult. So what? I resisted the temptation to put Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian on the list. If you want teens to act more like grown-ups, then start treating them more like grown-ups. Nothing in any of these books is as weird as the stuff they’ve seen on any given episode of The Bachelor. And let’s not condescend to the nation’s youth by failing to adequately describe U.S. reality, either as it is now or as it was historically.
Finally, a high school graduate should not only read these books. This should just be the spine of what she reads. It doesn’t even have to be part of a class. Give the student the last two years. Tell them to read at least six books a year. Come in every six weeks during the school year and talk with a teacher for 15 minutes about the latest book you’ve read, proving via talk that you’ve read it and have some loose grip on why it’s important. You could make them write brief response papers but it would be easier and quicker and less prone to plagiarism if you just made the students talk one-on-one about the book. You could do it during lunch. Why do you think the ash heap is important? Why is Shreve in this novel? Why does Didion catalog the contents of her closet? Etc. and so forth. Push the details. Shove them into the students’ arms. Here. Deal with this.
As might be apparent, I am no high school teacher. I’m no school administrator. I have no degree in education. I taught writing for a short time, but that was years ago. I have floated completely free from the boat dock of American education. I don’t think these books are the only necessary ingredients in a better educated populace but I do think they’re important. The country has been telling itself a story about itself for a long time. We might as well try to listen. And like some weight training instructors, I think the students should be pushed toward muscle exhaustion. That’s what makes muscles grow. Is your average 17 year old ready for Faulkner? Probably not. And that’s one reason it should be on the list. It’s a worthy lift.
Footnote
As I get older, and as I continue to write, I change my mind about the value of artistic intention, particularly related to how it was discussed in college. Back then, we said writers made aesthetic choices. Style was the result of the author’s intentions. And to be sure, there is some choice that goes into it. Artists do have free will. But lately I have begun to think that a writer’s style is equally if not more the result of that person’s limitations. A finished book equals these limitations plus whatever the publisher could be persuaded to print. Deliberate aesthetic choice runs a distant third. Perhaps Hopper simply couldn’t paint faces well. Perhaps Rothko struggled with perspective. The tree grows around its infection.