Category Archives: The Quarterly Conversation

Michael Martone Interview

The Quarterly Conversation, ,

Originally published in the Summer 2008 issue of The Quarterly Conversation, Martone has published several more books in the time since this interview took place.

Michael Martone’s most recent books include Racing in Place: Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins; Unconventions: Attempting the Art of Craft And the Craft of Art; Michael Martone, a collection of fake contributor’s notes; and The Blue Guide to Indiana. Quarry Press has also recently published Double-wide: Collected Fiction of Michael Martone, which includes five of his earlier books: Alive and Dead in Indiana, Safety Patrol, Fort Wayne Is Seventh on Hitler’s List, Pensées: The Thoughts of Dan Quayle, and Seeing Eye.

Martone’s work is hard to classify — Racing in Place reads like a series of experimental essay-like memoirs (or memoir-like essays); Michael Martone is a collection of fake contributor’s notes, except that they were all published as real, true contributor’s notes; The Blue Guide to Indiana includes tours for landmarks and attractions that don’t exist in Indiana, but should. Taken as a whole, Martone’s work doesn’t so much explode convention as expose it and then re-arrange it, as if literature were some vast modular housing structure, so that everyday when you came home from work, someone had re-arranged not just your furniture but the layout of the rooms, the architecture of the house, everything. Today you enter through the front door, tomorrow through the chimney.

— Barrett Hathcock

Barrett Hathcock: You write fiction that imitates nonfiction and nonfiction that at times resembles fiction. How are fiction and nonfiction different from you in terms of composition/approach? How are they different in terms of a reader’s expectations (as to what is or isn’t true)? (In Racing in Place, you write of Bob Knight: “There is a kind of slippage in the viewers’ perception that results in the registering of real horror, not its simulated aesthetic twin.” Is this slippage something to be lamented? Enjoyed? Pursued?)

Michael Martone: More and more, I think less and less of those kinds of differences. More and more I think of myself as a writer. Or as a maker of written things. Like this thing now. This interview. I think that finally we all have to sort and arrange and categorize and install what we come across in the world in order to order it. Order it to make sense of it. But I am less and less involved in that now. I will write something and allow others to make do, make due, make dew with it. That is one danger, I think, of the writer or artist in the university that is really nothing more than a massive sorting calculator of knowledge. My writing students enter a workshop to write but their main function over the 16-week semester is to function as critics for other writers’ writing. They may produce two or three stories over that time and have the stories talked about for maybe one or two hours in all that time. More often than not they are operating as sorters, assigning quality standards, assaying value and worth, labeling genre. It is work that has to be done but it is a dangerous habit to get into if you are wanting to be a writer. To distinguish. To sort. To even make sense of what one is doing before one is done doing it. So, I am hedging your question. I want to think of what I do as writing and let the speciation to others. Many artists draw, use watercolor, pain in oils, sculpt, construct, assemble, paste. They mix their media but it is all seen as art and issues of its fact or fiction seem beside the point to me. Well at least beside the point when the thing is in the making. I am in the fabrication business and there are different gradients on that scale of fiction and non-, I suppose, but none I worry about as I am doing them. I have a fiction in the voice of Dan Quayle who is writing an essay; a book about Michael Martone written by Michael Martone in the voice and form of his, Michael Martone’s, biographer; I have an essay in the voice of Michael Martone on the fictional creation of a character named Bobby Knight. To me the differences are in the details at a microscopic scale not at the much larger one of genre.

BH: Related to the first question, what do you make of the semi-recent memoir craze and the more recent false-memoir craze? Do you read memoirs? Do you have any observations about why these are so popular? What do you think the value of memoir is? Is there such thing as a true memoir? (Or are they examples of another kind of slippage?) (There seemed to be a lot of memoir in this book, and combined with Michael Martone, the two books formed not a definitive memoir but a sort of jazz-like theme/variation version of a “standard” memoir.)

MM: I do think of Racing in Place as a collection of experimental memoirs. The memoir’s problem is that it needs to find, to narrate a kind of death in order to make sense of life. I think of it, the constructed death, as a parentheses, an artificial parentheses, that the writer must draw around a life, or this part of life, to be able to stand outside of it and see it for what it is and isn’t. Hard to make sense of a train wreck that is still happening. So you have “childhood” as such a closed period. “My junior year abroad” is another. “My marriage” or “my divorce” — all this works I think. Memoir for me is always about also the act of memory, the drama of remembering. So, I guess, that is why there is such anxiety about the veracity of the memoir. If it is a function of memory, and it seeks to make sense of the fluid dynamics of a life still being lived, how could we expect it to be accurate in any real sense? The memory is a flawed instrument for record, as we know. Even though other residue of event, evidence of happening such as letters, news reports, photographs, tape recordings, witness statements, etc., can be faked, we certainly trust those more than our own memories. I guess I think the memoir’s real purpose is for the enactment of remembering, the performance of that. That is, I am not so much interested in event per se but in watching the individual writer write and, in writing, remember. My role as audience for the memoir is that of priest confessor or Freudian analyst. I like to attend as the writer surprises him or herself with what gets dredged up once one decides to remember. Freud was a great fiction writer. I would love to have invented the character named the Unconscious. What an invention! This fiction makes memoir possible. It is the drama acted out between a consciousness and its unconscious. How thrilling that so much of what you thought you were is hidden from you. We sit and watch that other side, that deeply buried other you come out and play. I guess in that sense it is all fiction, a staged drama of many possible and simultaneously running lives in one, none of them the “real” life, all of them, however, real.

BH: You have concentrated on Fort Wayne, Indiana, throughout your career; it’s this constant well of ideas and information. For example, I was delighted to learn that the Charlton Heston character from Planet of the Apes is from Fort Wayne. In the book you write, “In geometry, we know that a finite plane bounded on all sides still contains infinite points.” Do you ever run out of Fort Wayne ideas or worry that you might? Also, since you’ve lived much of your life not in Fort Wayne, what is it like writing about it from a distance (specifically writing about it from The South)? (I’m a bit interested in how writers as professional academics often end up living away from the places they write about, and I’m wondering how that affects the writing.) Also, in that same passage (page 100 of Racing in Place), you say, “the more tightly bounded, the more restricted a work is, the richer we find it.” How do you “bind”/organize/structure your essays (or your fictions, for that matter), when the conventional structure — a plot — isn’t used?

MM: Short answer is no, I don’t think I will run out of Fort Wayne–centric ideas. And I certainly don’t worry about it. The distance helps and hurts. My “Fort Wayne” is Fort Wayne of course. I am interested in the possibility of many Fort Waynes, of many Michael Martones. I like the notion of parallel dimensions, many trains running. The distance allows, well, for distance between realms, a buffer buffering. The great drama of America is between place and staying put and movement. To say you are a writer of “place” also implies you are a writer of and about moving. What makes Saturn Saturn? Sure, it is the gas giant planet but it is also the rings. The rings around Saturn are more Saturn than Saturn. As for structure when one abandons plot, one simply realizes that the structure of plot is simply an arbitrary collection of rules, suggestions, protocol. So you just find another set of arbitrary armature. Number. I often use numbers — the hours in the day, the weeks in a year. The number of planets. I am writing a whole book of short fiction now based on the number four. Fictions employing the four seasons, the four winds, the four corners, the four chambers of the heart, the four humors, the 4H Club, the Fab Four, the Fantastic Four, the four railroads on the Monopoly Board, Four Calling Birds. There is nothing natural or normal or elemental or essential in the structure we call plot — setting, vehicle, rising action, climax, dénouement, ending. All is artifice.

BH: How has teaching creative writing affected your own writing? In your students’ writing, do you notice trends or areas of interest that morph over time?

MM: I teach different kind of creative writing courses. Forms course and workshops. In both, I don’t pretend to know anything. I am not that kind of master teacher where I know something and transfer that knowledge to students who don’t know. Instead, I guess, I teach curiosity. I try to create in the classroom interesting environments and then, with the students, discover things that, perhaps, we already knew or know but didn’t know we knew. I think my other job as a teacher is really to resist the bias bred into the institution where I am housed. A university is by nature a critical institution. I want to resist having my students learn to be critics. Instead I want to inculcate the habit of writing and in doing so I think one has to defuse the tendency to judge quality of work, to even resist asking the question, “Does this work?” Students come to me ready to think of the classroom as a place of battle. They have already been naturalized into thinking that a workshop, say, is a simulation of the way the world works. You write something and an editor or reviewer beats up on it. So students have come to think of workshops as a way to create calluses, to out think the critics. Instead, I like to invite them to remember the intrinsic pleasures of the business, the act itself of sitting down and writing, not the ritual of self-sacrifice. My students’ writing have, for a long time, been quite timid and, as they love to say, traditional. The many classes many of them have taken have led them into an aesthetic that is by design static. The realistic narrative — once a highly experimental form — has produced a series of stylistic rules that can be taught and my students have learned — don’t use exclamation marks, underlining, or any graphic measure to intensify emotion, for example. Those kinds of rules are set in stone. What is to vary realistic story to story is the content, the local, the details. You can in that kind of aesthetic do things wrong. And the critical institution we work within loves that kind of knowledge. I have seen recently more and more students attempting fiction outside that particular drama. More interest right now in the fantastic, irreal, the magical. Also a growing interest in more things lyrical, meditative, associative, and less linear.

BH: For your nonfiction (or your fiction?), is the instigation for the writing a request from an editor or some publication, or do you think up the essay ideas first? Traditionally, “occasional writing” has been used in a pejorative sense, as in it’s not a writer’s “true” or “best” work. Do you agree with this? Any thoughts about this dichotomy?

MM: More often than fiction, nonfiction springs from a request from an editor, a prompt. The essay, “Racing in Place,” for example was the result of a request to contribute to an anthology called A Year in Place. Twelve writers were asked to pick a month and a place and write an essay about that connection. I got Indiana and the month of May. Most of the essays in the book Racing in Place were products of such requests, challenges, prompts, what have you. I do think that usually writers are self-prompting. They create first their own problems or sets of problems they then solve with their fiction, nonfiction, poetry, etc. So in that sense I feel that all writing is “occasional” in that it flows out of a particular set of circumstances created to create the work. I know what you mean about “occasional” being used to in such a way to diminish a piece. I think often we like to maintain this notion of complete parthenogenesis — that everything is the work of the solitary genius when, it seems, for me it is much more collaborative an enterprise. Much of my favorite work is “occasional,” derived from suggestions, musings, dares received from friends or editors — most of them friends — readers all. To switch it around for a minute: I have often in the past edited volumes of fiction or essays where I have come up with a writerly problem I hope is interesting to a writer I am asking to contribute to my anthology. Since often I cannot pay for the original work, I like to think an interesting challenge is a kind of remuneration. Writers like to work something interesting. I asked a group of Midwestern writers to write about the township square they grew up in — the township being a very visible part of the Midwestern landscape — and the results were stunning. Not one of the writers thought that his or her contribution was of a lesser order because he or she didn’t have the initial idea. Instead I think they were quite excited to make the idea into something special.

BH: Do you read blogs? What do you think of blogs? Does online publishing — or self-publishing — change what you do, or how would you start out differently if you were a young writer given this blogging, online self-publishing surge that is taking place?

MM: Are you kidding? This, this what is happening now, is revolutionary, profoundly revolutionary. The whole electronic apparatus is simply redefining who and what an “author” is. The categories of “book,” “editor,” “publisher,” “audience,” “reader,” are in flux at least if not collapsing, transforming before out eyes. Much was made of high literary theory’s pronouncement of the death of the author, but the paltry deconstruction that went on in a few English Departments was, is nothing to what is going on now with this machine — the one I am tapped into at this moment. Universities are, by nature, so conservative. My colleagues don’t get, don’t want to get post post-modernism. Meanwhile, their students, their children are in the midst of the real deconstruction of the entire culture and it has not, will not take place at the university but here out there. I love the way the web has worked around anything thrown at it, especially the desire of universities, publishing, etc., to re-impose the gates for gate-keeping of quality and the maintenance of hierarchy. Just work around it. The machine easily ignores it. The author is dead all right but long live writing. This is the end of the Johnsonian Age, the end of the Romantic, Modernist Individual Genius. I think that blogs actually are retrograde — the last attempt of the old-fashioned author to hold on to old-fashioned authorship. I think very soon blogs might evolve to the point where most will be unsigned or the same blog will be written by several people together or separately and also posted without a name of a shared name. The blog lives but the idea that it is written by any one person or consciousness will be so over. It is nothing but net baby. Out of many one. Resistance is futile. Prepare to be assimilated.

BH: How did this book come together as a collection? It consists of pieces written over the past several years. Did you always envision them taking this form or is this incarnation of the book how things fell into place?

MM: I don’t think it was very conscious that way. I am a writer who, I think, likes to celebrate chance and accident and happenstance. No plan. I think of revision as not so much working drafts of the one story but that each new story is another draft of the one story I wanted to write. I liked to think that I write “trying” fiction, that my essays, “essay.” Everything I write is an attempt at getting at the something I am attempting to get at. I like collage for that reason. I can write a fiction, say. Made up of 24 sections of prose, and by cutting and pasting I can get many different permutation from the same piece of writing, gain different effects of juxtaposition in the changing composition. I don’t think I write or read for that matter with an idea of an ideal out there. I am not much for finding the best word, or the best order. I am more for all words in every order at once and all at once. I think this desire to plan, to have things come together in what is assumed to be the perfect way, the best way, is wrong for me. In that sense the metaphor of the workshop — asking if a piece “works” — makes no sense to me. Everything “works” in its own way. When I am finished with that one arrangement, I am on to the next one. The book is pretty much arranged in chronological order of the time of their writing. I am happy with that. I am not wedded to it. The truth is our existential reality of the media we use, language, is sequential, but I am not a slave to the linear nature I am working. I don’t really believe in progress — I don’t think I am getting better or worse. I’m just different moment to moment to moment.

BH: In Michael Martone, your book of contributor’s notes, and in the introduction to Racing in Place (not to mention The Blue Guide to Indiana), you call attention not just to the form of the writing but also its specific genre or context, and you play with the types of expectations a reader might have because of this context. Could you discuss how you came to this aesthetic point and where do you see it going next? Is there another text or context that you see is a fertile place to play and subvert in this way?

MM: When I was working in the English Department at Syracuse University, I began thinking about those things. Syracuse was the high tide of what is called “Theory” and its deconstruction of “English” and “English Departments” for that matter. It was there and then when everything, it seemed, in the world began to acquire “quotation marks.” Many of my colleagues who were creative writers at first were scared of these “scare” quoting manifestations. There were many fronts on which “Theory” was advancing, but probably the one most telling was along the lines of the “Death of the Author.” Many “authors” wanted to resist that. I found it interesting and came to think of theoretical writing as just another genre of creative writing in any case. I should have put those in quotes. Not to go on too long with this but the death of the author (and the less quoted following thought that writing lives) seemed to me to be about the making of meaning of a piece of work. Creative writing had always bestowed the making of meaning exclusively into the hands of the author. The then-current ideas questioned this and suggested that the reader too is involved in the making of meaning. To me this seemed incredibly liberating. A writer no longer needs to worry about such control. Instead, it seemed to me, the writer’s job became more that of an arranger of interesting environments that could be made available to the now very active reader. Or another way of thinking of it is that all of those categories — writer, reader, editor, critic, publisher — were now destabilized. I could be all of these things at once as the readers too could be all these things at once. You said it above. This was “play” in the sense that everything every time was to be re-invented. Nothing in this art, in this aesthetic is fixed — meaning in place or stable — or can be fixed — meaning to aspire to an ideal form. It seemed to me my job was to do just as you said above, to break open these fixed categories, expose them constantly for the constructions they are, and allow the reader to participate in the making of art, not simply its passive reception. Where is this heading? I think one line to follow is the actually disappearance of the signature. The author of a piece authoring the piece, maybe not truly anonymously, but without the audience of the piece really caring who the author is. In that way, the Internet is already deconstructing the “author” far better. So much of the Internet is “written” (you got to love those quotation marks) but who is its author?

Charles D’Ambrosio Interview

The Quarterly Conversation, ,

Originally published in the Winter 2007 issue of The Quarterly Conversation

Living Near the Wound: An Interview with Charles D’Ambrosio
By Barrett Hathcock

The following interview with Charles D’Ambrosio took place on October 2, 2007, in Birmingham, Ala.

D’Ambrosio is the author of two books of short stories, The Dead Fish Museum (2006) and The Point (1998), as well as two collections of essays, Orphans (2004) and Loitering: New and Collected Essays (2014).

Barrett Hathcock: These days, the vast majority of writers also teach, and because they’re in teaching as a profession, they tend to move around a lot, and I think it’s interesting how people have to move away from where they’re from and how that then affects their writing. They’re moving away to sustain a career and the writing refracts that in some way. But you grew up in Seattle and now live in Portland, and I was wondering how has that return to the west coast affected your writing? Because it seems like some of your stuff is so specifically tied to the west coast, but then some stories, like “Screenwriter” — it takes place in Manhattan . . .

Charles D’Ambrosio: But [it’s] always in the back of my mind. I mean, if I set a story in Manhattan, it’s probably some version of — I’m probably taking the weather. I’m dipping into that palette and putting rain there, and the rain I know is the rain in Seattle.

You know I’ve moved around some. I’ve lived in New York and Chicago and Los Angeles and Iowa. Montana. I’ve bopped around a little bit but always for my own purposes, whatever [. . .] they were. I like being in the northwest. I like being close to family. I like being close to the people I know. It’s partly just personal. I have an American life so that means I have a very broken continuity — a fragile relation to my own history. And so the northwest represents the best chance I have of having a deep relation to place.

And also you know on some level, Seattle’s partly my wound. I want to be near it. Whatever that is, and I don’t know what it is, but I find it kind of important and exciting and vivid in a way I don’t find other places. Not to say — I mean, I love other parts of the country. It’s strange being down here because the narrative about the South and the narrative I’ve constructed about my life in America is a very different narrative. It’s western. It’s got a bit of Ellis Island and the Italian immigrant side. That kind of thing. But very different than down here.

Place matters a lot to me though, as a writer and as a person. I don’t know if it’s true or not but I feel like once I cross the Mississippi going west, I kind of know where I am. I lived in New York and Los Angeles, and I have to say that I understand Los Angeles better. I felt more at home. I understand getting in a car and driving two miles for a quart of milk, you know? And Manhattan was very interesting, but it was just too different for me. A place I like to visit but would not want to live there.

[…]

It’s interesting thinking about the South because I don’t know anything about it really outside of books, southern literature, and thinking about Seattle as a place, and place is very important to me, but it’s really because [Seattle’s] sense of place is tenuous because it doesn’t have the same deep history, and I imagine the sense of place in the South could almost be oppressive because of its thickness and the reality of the history.

Thomas McGuane has this quote — Out west you need a shovel to find history. It’s just nowhere available.

[…]

BH: So this is kind of a dork’s question, and the only reason I’m asking is because of “Drummond and Son,” which has so much great writing about typewriters. But and so, well: do you actually use a typewriter?

CD: I do. I mean, I use the computer too. I wouldn’t want anyone to have the impression that I’m like anti-, but I do. I’ve got tons of typewriters at home nobody wants. The main one I use now is an Olivetti — just like the story, an Olivetti Lettera 32. And actually I got the idea for that story after I’d been to my typewriter repair shop in Seattle getting that one cleaned. I got home and wrote a single-spaced page of notes for a story that I didn’t write for another three or four years but on that typewriter. But the typewriters I have are kind of a 50s and 60s, very usable, portable manual. But they’re not collector’s items so I get them for nothing. The Olivetti I got in Republic, Washington, for $1.99. Pristine. I don’t know why they decided it was $1.99 but they did. And they’re very usable.

BH: On the one hand I think it’s kind of a dorky question, but on the other hand, I think it’s actually really interesting, because I’m curious: How does that affect the actual composing?

CD: You know to me it’s the switching around. I also use a pencil and paper, and a pencil specifically, not a pen. I like the scratchiness of a pencil and the sort of delible quality. It’s not indelible. It’s not being put down for all time. And rather than turn around and erase, I just scratch stuff out. Its lack of permanence actually feels freeing. I do that a lot for dialogue. I like to arrange things with pencil on a sheet of paper, something off in the right hand corner and then down on the bottom — so you have a [spatial] change.

The same is true with a typewriter. I feel like with a computer you get into that left-to-write down into the void, that bottomless void, too easily, and I feel sometimes you think you’re writing but you just fall into word-processing tricks. But with the typewriter, I just roll a clean sheet in and you’ve got to start writing sentences. They’re not there on the page and you get into a rhythm and throw things down, and you don’t back space and delete. If you make mistakes or don’t like the sentence, you have to start writing it again. So I like the work of it.

I think of all those things as kind of layering into a story. A lot of the times if I get stuck, I turn to the typewriter, too. I do compose some on the computer, but if I get stuff, I’ll just kind of turn my back on that and just type and throw out things and not worry about misspellings and all that stuff that the computer tracks for you, but it’s annoying and distracting at the same time.

[…]

BH: You’ve written two collections of short stories and a collection of essays, so my perception of you before I met you was, That’s what he does. He’s a Short Story Guy. But you are now working on a novel and have worked on one previously, and I’m curious if the progression or transition between stories and a novel has been deliberate or simply more circumstantial?

CD: What happened is that I started writing something I realized that it wasn’t a short story. Really, I think among the many mistakes I’ve made over my life one of them was caring so much about the short story. I mean really until I went to an MFA program, I didn’t care about the short story. I had no prior interest in it. But then you’re in a program and the very format of the program is sort of biased in favor of the short story and against the novel or longer things. And you know, I think I maybe a little bit lost sight of my primary interests. I’m not primarily interested in the short story as a form. I never was. But I think I got steered in that direction and maybe that was one of the bad consequences for me [coming from] a MFA program.

[…]

One of the things I’ve done this time around in writing a novel is that I am treating it like I treat short stories. With a short story, I’ll work on it, change it, let it evolve. But I never feel like there’s some truth, some ideal form of that story that I have to be true to. It evolves. It evolves quite a bit. And if I pick it up a week or two weeks or a year down the road and start writing, I let it change in search of the story.

And I think with the [first] novel I kind of froze up and got kind of architectural like there’s some pre-existing form I had to measure up to or find and now I’m treating it more like a story and letting it change.

BH: But do you think the stories are at their ideal form now that they’ve been published and collected? Or is this just the point where they’re like fish and they’re caught and this is how they are?

CD: This is how they are, but some of the ones that I’ve rewritten and rewritten and rewritten off and on over the years, I know that if I had another whack at them, I’d probably start writing and change them again. 

[…]

With the short story, no matter how many drafts, I believe man once you write that first sentence, you are in the business of trying to shut it down. That’s how — and even though I write fairly long stories — I’m always thinking, How am I going to get all this in? I start thinking that right away. It’s like a dense ball of gas that just explodes but it’s right there in that first sentence to first paragraph. If it isn’t in that, then there’s no story as far as I’m concerned.

Maybe it’s partly because in a short story, you feel the whole thing inside you at once. I think a novel you look out, you see kind of a broad feeling, but some of the internal mapping of the story or how you progress from little point to little point is unknown to me, as I’m working.

BH: If you’re thinking about how you’re going to shut it down when you begin it, does that mean you know what the ending is?

CD: No, no. In fact, I don’t like to know what the ending is. Very often you have a provisional ending. You have an idea of a temporary ending. You just kind of erect this idea because you think you’re going in some direction. It usually changes. In fact I sort of have this thing where if I, at a certain point in the writing of it, if I see the ending, then by definition that’s not the ending. It gets eliminated as a possibility. It’s too conscious and I’ll start steering toward it and it’s too arranged. If I can see it that easily, then it’s not subtle enough. It’s not even worthy of being an ending. I have to be a little bit surprised by where it goes.

BH: That’s interesting, because a lot of your endings in The Dead Fish Museum initially frustrated me because of their open, unresolved quality.

CD: It’s one of the questions I pose to myself. There are times in certain stories [. . .] I was purposely doing that and I wondered to myself if that was the way to go. Some of the endings are really open-ended and all the tightness is in the first two-thirds, and then there’s this last couple of pages that are very, very unresolved. I don’t know. Well, life doesn’t resolve itself, but stories are different. But I was right in that place between how little can I do this, how open-ended can I be?

[…]

Am I doing something that’s right within the story or am I abandoning the story’s need? There are two endings to every story. There’s the one that’s the story, the tidy, and you could push it toward a morality, but then there’s the need to resolve it aesthetically and my question is: I don’t care about resolving the tidy moral life of a story, but did I end it aesthetically?

BH: I was curious about the amount of restraint in the stories. There’s no formal self-consciousness, and the prose doesn’t reach for extravagance, though that’s not to say that the prose isn’t beautiful in places.

CD: You know, I would never do that in a short story. For instance in my essays, in my book of essays, a lot of the writing in there is slightly show-offy and people have asked me, Why don’t you write your stories like your essays? And the essays, they’re obviously me in a way, and I’m just stepping out, but in a short story it would just seem undignified.

In the stories, at a certain point only the story matters and everything serves it and I find myself in the latter stages just subservient to what’s there. Like in “Drummond and Son,” at one point in looking over and editing that story it referred to the boys having to put down their dog or give it to the pound, and I had given the dog a name and the dog’s name was Pookie, and it was a little bit of a jokey name and I just kept reading it and thinking, You know what? I’ve got to pull that name out. Because it’s a little joke I was having [with] myself in the moment of composition. I was going to give it a silly name, and I didn’t want any of that story to seem clever or self-conscious. But just a little thing like that. Would a reader ever know? Maybe not. Probably not. It’s just a story. [. . .] I pulled that name out. I knew it was slightly self-conscious. You start serving the story. That’s all that matters.

Flannery O’Connor says somewhere in Mystery and Manners that you kind of have to absent yourself in order to see more clearly the thing that needs to be seen — the writer does.

[…]

In the short stories — if I can make a very lumpy contrast — in the shorts stories, I feel like the lives of the people have a kind of prior desperation and a prior need and my longing is for the story and their lives to somehow come together, even if not finally or forever, to face some thing; and it felt like a lot of the time with the essays, I was wading into situations where there was an assumption of finality of understanding, and I felt like I could wade into any understood moment and tear it apart and make it fall apart. So in the short stories, I want have such a deep drive to have things come together, and in the essays I have an equally strong desire to make things fall apart. Whether it’s political understandings or moral understandings that seem readymade and seem too pat or too easy, even by good-thinking people, you know. I like taking on public issues.

[…]

The accent in the essay might be: This is how I figure out what I’m thinking. In a story: this is how I feel out what I’m feeling. Just slightly different emphasis.

BH: I read that your wife is in a band and plays drums, and so I was curious about music and its relation to stories. I think it was in the 2004 Best American Short Stories, the one from 2004 that Lorrie Moore edited and which includes “Screenwriter.” She has this bit in her intro where she says that short stories are similar to songs; they have the same sort of interests in compression and carrying emotion, and I was just wondering if — being married to a musician — do you see any relation between songs and stories or music and stories, or is it a separate animal?

CD: Yeah, you know, I’m so musically illiterate. I can’t hold a tune. I can barely sing “Happy Birthday.” But I always loved music. Short stories are like a song certainly in the writing. I work a long time to get the sound right, and I feel a lot of time until I get that sound right — it’s the sentence by sentence sound — that I can’t go forward in the story, that actually the sound contains a good part of the narrative, and it won’t unlock until I find the note. And also I think short stories, like songs, have an associated feel. That’s me now speaking as a reader. There’s certain stories that I can just turn to even though I’ve read them a dozen times, I want to have that feeling, like you’d turn on some oldies song or some song you’d listen to in college.

For short stories, the experience is different. A friend of mine pointed this out to me. Tom Grimes, a writer and teacher who runs a program down in Texas. He said, I went into class and asked everybody: Who are your favorite characters in literature? And of course people say Nick Caraway or whatever . . . I don’t know. And then he says, What’s common there? Everybody’s like quiet. And he says, None of them are from short stories. Name a character from a short story — No one can. You never can. I mean there are some. Johnny Hake, “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill,” John Cheever. There are a couple that you can name, but you don’t remember them. And that’s not what’s important. And it’s partly the music that’s important, it’s maybe the narrative, but it’s not the character. Lorrie Moore’s a great example in “The People Like that Are the Only People Here” — they don’t have names. You don’t need them for the short story to come alive. We participate, we sync into it in a different way. Just like a great song, you almost don’t need the lyrics.

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’

book reviews, The Quarterly Conversation, ,

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.

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.

Note on Marilynne Robinson

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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.

Review of ‘Loitering’

book reviews, The Quarterly Conversation

I’ve got a review of the new Charles D’Ambrosio essay collection Loitering in today’s new issue of the Quarterly Conversation. It’s been a while since I’ve had a review in QC and it feels great to be back.

Are we living through some kind of surprise golden age of the personal essay, or at least the book-length collection of personal essays? Beats me, but after reading books like D’Ambrosio’s, it sure feels like it.

DFW: The Last Interview, Reviewed

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David Foster Wallace, The Last Interview

There’s a new issue of the Quarterly Conversation out. Not only does it have my review of David Foster Wallace: The Last Interview, it also contains Andrew Altschul on Wallace’s posthumous collection of nonfiction Both Flesh and Not, David Winters on Sam Lipsyte’s new story collection, and Dev Varma on Azareen van der Vliet Oloomi’s novel Fra Keeler. I included that last one because Varma is a friend and I enjoyed getting to type all of those letters. Enjoy!