Tag Archives: Open Letters Monthly

Review of Adam Begley’s ‘Updike’

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I’m happy to announce that I have a review of Adam Begley’s biography of John Updike in the new issue of Open Letters Monthly. The Begley bio recently came out in paperback. My take on the book was . . . oh, I don’t know. It’s complicated. I can’t come up with a pithy re-cap. Just go read the review.

Anyway, as with all reviews, there were scraps of thoughts I couldn’t include. Here are some of them:

Updike as great compartmentalizer
It’s difficult to read a biography of a writer and not come at it with a self-help kit. There is always the banal but necessary question of how did he get the work done? Aside from the talent, from the special blend of circumstance, and the capacity for endless hard work, was there some special “trick” that this writer used?

I feel like this whole line of inquiry is shameful, like I should know better than to read a biography in this vampiric way, but I can’t seem to help it.

Anyway, Updike’s trick, if it can even be called that, was that he had a talent for compartmentalizing his life from his work — this in addition to all of the other myriad talents he possessed. He seemingly could work anywhere, under any circumstance, with no sense of procrastination or doubt.

While writing the review, I was tipped off about this video of Philip Roth, who briefly muses on Updike’s greatness. He says Updike “could find the sentences for anything.” And he’s right, I think. The one thing that’s missing in Updike is any real sense of doubt, or fear, or insecurity, or exhaustion, or mute perplexity, or cosmic paralysis that he was wasting his life amidst a pile of empty signification, that maybe he should have taken up something — anything — else, or any of the other routine gales of doubt that the contemporary writer is heir to. (Not me, not me, naturally.) Whatever doubt he felt, he filed it away and got to work, and this lifelong ruthlessness seems extraordinary.

Lorrie Moore as the anti-John Updike
Or the sequel to John Updike, or the contra-Updike, or Updike from the other side of the marital bed. In the review I muse about the possibility of a biography of Mary Updike, the author’s first wife and seemingly the true hero of his writing career. But in the meantime, while that book (hopefully) gets written, we will have to make do with the stories of Lorrie Moore, who I was re-reading coincidentally while working on the review.

If Nicholson Baker, in his inimitable way, continued the diamond-cutting progress of Updike’s prose, Moore continued the subject of his stories — the ruination of the modern American marriage, especially when its victims are well-educated and employed, that is, on the surface, winners in the lottery of first-world experience. (Call it “The Postwar Ruins of Prosperity and The Pill.”) Except the difference is that Moore creates the opposite protagonists, stories told from the point of view of the wry female who’s been sentenced to the domestic hell of dealing with men who are emotional terrorists.

Moore also, interestingly, even daringly, has not written any autobiography. Though many of her stories smell faintly of veiled memoir, and though she has one brilliant, famous story about a baby diagnosed with cancer that mirrors her own son’s diagnosis with cancer, she has not rushed into the contemporary trend of memoir writing, confessional essay penning, or “autofiction,” to use a term I read about just yesterday. (Why, sweet lord of the library, we must come up with yet more idiotic nonce words to re-decorate the endeavor of literature I’ll never know.) After first reading her latest book of stories, Bark, I toyed with the idea of writing an essay about Moore called “The Lost Memoirs of Lorrie Moore,” because though she had been through various “life material” (to use a crude phrase) that seemed ideal for memoir (a pediatric cancer fight, a subsequent divorce, a long-in-the-making but ultimately great novel), she chose to keep writing fiction, albeit fiction that dealt with some of the biographical ingredients that were easily visible from her author interviews and other bits of promotional flotsam. That is, she kept at the old Updike strategy of re-translating her lived experience into fiction.

Obviously, I haven’t worked all of this thought-soup out yet, but the point I’m moonwalking toward is that through this commitment to fiction, and the short story in particular, Moore’s work provides a rebuttal to many of Updike’s stories, not in a point/counterpoint way, but in a way that let’s the Mary Updike–like figures have their say against the blind, reckless, and remorseless force of the male ego-libido.

Postscript: I can’t bring all of this up without linking to this fascinating review she wrote for the New York Review of Books a few years ago.

Mechanisms of prestige

literary lint,

Yesterday, I was reading this excellent post from Rohan Maitzen at her Novel Readings blog, which led me to another excellent post where she succinctly describes the predicament of literary criticism at the present time. Namely, where should a professional critic publish her criticism in the age of easy online self-publishing, aka blogs? Should one publish via the slow, vetted, and prestigious venue of professional scholarly journals? Or should one publish via their own personal blog? Or somewhere in between?

Maitzen quite calmly and intelligently says it should be a mixture and that different forms of writing are better suited to different contexts, but that each has its place. She neither traffics in blog triumphalism or in professional old-school, rear-guard defensilism. Blogs are neither the only place for literary criticism or merely a venue for networking and personal commercials. They are another avenue for writing and thought, and the practice of regular blogging can be its own valuable contribution to literary culture. What’s more, writing via a personal blog in some ways fixes the problems of professional scholarship: its slowness, its almost autistic inability to deal with a non-professional audience, its theoretical architecture and prior-scholarship throat-clearing, its restriction to printed journals located only in college libraries, etc. (Of course, many of these problems are also intentional benefits; such is life.)

What piqued me personally about Maitzen’s post is how so much of it articulates for me thoughts I’ve felt but have been unable to articulate regarding the publishing of short fiction. As someone who is not in any way a “professional literary critic” but who was, for a brief time, a teacher of creative writing, many of the mechanisms of prestige and professional publication for literary criticism are mirrored in the world of creative writing. In fact, since fiction and poetry writing became activities of instruction within the English department, the publication of those types of works (via literary journals often run by graduate students at large universities) has modeled itself off of scholarly peer-reviewed articles. The consequences are sometimes similar: extremely long publishing cycles, prestige from publication combined with a kind of sequestration from day-to-day literary life, creating a kind of slow moving museum of prose, etc. To be sure, not all literary journals are like this; many of the journals that are more lively are disconnected from university life entirely, or they are run by a permanent series of editors. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the journals with better editorial consistency aren’t changing out their student mastheads every 2-3 years. (Of course there are exceptions to my exceptions, but go with me.)

But what this means is that literary fiction and poetry are even further decontextualized from everyday literary life. They exist solely on the reservation of the campus. (And they’re extremely hard to get into! At least, I’ve found them extremely hard to get into, but perhaps I’m simply not talented or diligent enough — a distinct possibility.) It becomes a country club of staid fashion and values.

And all of this professional rigmarole is rendered even more ridiculous when you take into account the absurd ease of online publication. Why take years of submitting a 14-page story so that it will be published in a modestly respectable print journal that will (under the most wildly optimistic of circumstances) be read by 1,500 subscribers, if, in the span of one afternoon, it can be fairly nicely presented on the world of worldwide webs, where it can be read by anyone (or no one!) for as long as you’re able to effectuate the maintenance of the software? The answer, of course, is the prestige of the print publication. It means something to publish in State University Quarterly, where it means almost nothing to publish here at my blog, even though the words themselves could be the exact same. The problem here, which is I think even more acute for so-called “creative work,” as opposed to literary criticism, is one of context. To determine its value so much of art depends upon its context. A urinal in a bathroom is something you piss into, but placed sideways in an exhibit and signed, it’s a sculpture. In a realm of no context, it’s both, but there is no realm without some kind of context. But what the context of prestige provides is legitimacy. In fact these mechanisms of prestige often take the very place of having to read a story. It’s in the New Yorker; it almost doesn’t matter what it says. The container is more important than what is contained. Or take the Harper’s “readings” section which picks and chooses pieces of found text and re-contextualizes them within the well-justified columns of that magazine. What a fortuitous changing of context!

(I feel like I have said all this before, probably just to myself but also perhaps in some form on this website. Here’s hoping I can turn redundancy into a charming quirk.)

But until online self-publication is afforded the same attention to each iteration’s own self-generated context and potential worth, online writing will exist in the eyes of professionals as a type of neverending graffiti.

I think that this will end or at least develop when some kind of literary critical version of Jason Kottke comes along, who will not publish the good literary criticism but will draw attention to the worthwhile, already-published literary criticism. Publishing will come to seem less important and the drawing attention to, the congealing of attention around, what is already available will become much more valuable. The context will become being picked up by Kottke, or some such.

Of course, with all of the rapid linking going on now and the fact that many lit blogs have been running strong for ten years, we’re already in that world; it’s just that it’s not recognized as the primary distinction. Getting in print is still the primary distinction, when it should be the attention of a respected editorial attention, a Kottke of the literary world, or a Maitzen, or a James Wood, or a Dan Green, etc.

My Life as a Mannequin

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Dear friendly people of the Internet,

Are we still capitalizing “Internet”? I refuse to hyphenate “email” and feel increasingly gooby capitalizing “Web.” Surely all linguistic acceptance leads toward lowercase.

Anyway, I have a new essay out in the world. It’s called “My Life as a Mannequin” and it’s about Philip Roth, getting lost, Washington, D.C., good bookstores, and more Philip Roth. It’s in the latest issue of Open Letters Monthly.

I originally read part of this essay at the Roth@80 Conference in Newark, NJ, this past spring, an event that was put on by the Philip Roth Society in honor of Roth’s 80th birthday. You can read more about the extravaganza in this New York Times’ article.

Do I feel smug linking to a New York Times’ article? Yes, I do.

Anyway, this essay wouldn’t have made it out of the gate if it weren’t for Roth scholar extraordinare and friend and all around badass David Gooblar. If you want to know more about Roth, you should read his book, The Major Phases of Philip Roth.

p.s. For the extra diligent, here is David Remnick’s recap in the New Yorker of the same Roth event.

p.p.s. The essay in Open Letters features perhaps my second favorite Roth photo of all time. My first favorite is the Hot Dog Photo, which I can’t find in my preliminary internet searching (little “i”), but which was definitely included in the recent photo exhibit in the Newark Public Library.