Author / Edward Champion

Posts by Edward Champion

Edward Champion is the Managing Editor of Reluctant Habits.
by Edward Champion

Colson Whitehead Responds to YA “Controversy”

whiteheadThe blog A Lil’ Sumpin’ Sumpin’ recently posted an item from an appearance that Colson Whitehead made at The New School. At the event, Whitehead was reportedly asked about whether his latest novel, Sag Harbor, could be classified as YA. And it was reported that he got “huffy” about the issue. This surprised me, because Sherman Alexie and China Mieville have both written specifically for a YA crowd. And it might also be argued that David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time could swing both ways as a YA and an adult title. If Whitehead had indeed said these things, it seemed counterintuitive to reduce his novel’s possible audience.

Curious about Whitehead’s side of the story, I contacted him by email and he responded to my questions quite quickly. Here is his answer:

Thanks for letting me address this “controversy.”

I remember the exchange. Do you have a transcript of it? Anyone who knows me will tell you that I don’t do “huffy,” but I do roll my eyes in exasperation, as I will when asked at a writers conference about “how will it be marketed?” I’ll talk about writing, how I got started, my work process, what have you, but marketing is boring and not what a writer should be asking about. Write the book. Make it the best book you can make it. All the other stuff is crap. So if I seemed “huffy,” that’s the reason: I’d rather talk about the work. I’m not hawking Flowbees here. I don’t “target” my work to a “demographic.”

Labels bug me. My first ideal reader was a teenage version of myself; someone who might randomly come across my book and be changed by it, the way I was changed by so many books in that key time. Then I started publishing, and the people who came to see me read were so varied – old, young, black, white, redheaded, balding, etc. – that it seemed dumb to have a mental picture of my ideal reader. It’s a blessing if anyone reads your book at all. But if she or he is a “Young Adult,” great. With braces & a bad slouch, even better.

If I had my way, there wouldn’t be any categories at all. For me, it’s all just “writing.” Is The Colossus of New York non-fiction? Not strictly, but it has to go somewhere in the bookstore, and if it’s in Essays or in the About New York section, I don’t care. I’m just glad that it’s getting out there. But we need classifications, I guess, and this has to go here and that has to go there. If Sag Harbor is in YA tomorrow, I wouldn’t care, as long as people who want to read it can pick it up. In some bookstores, I’m in African American as opposed to Fiction; this is a category failure, but it’s out of my control and in the end I’m glad that I’m in the store at all, and hopefully the savvy consumer who is looking for me will find me. What I’m saying is that we write, and then the world categorizes us, and the next day we get up and start writing again.

I’m publishing in the age of the web. You don’t have to go far to find that I’m not a snob about genres, and go out of my way to say that I came to writing by loving comic books and Stephen King, because that’s how it happened and you should read what you want to read, and not what someone else thinks is proper for you to read. Frankly, I don’t really know what YA is. Does that mean it features kids or teenagers and is only intended for kids and teenagers? I’m sort of out of the loop about these turf battles. They seem kinda dumb. If it’s a good story, I don’t care what section I find it in.

(Photo credit: Melissa Hom)

by Edward Champion

The Novelist as Used Car Salesman

There is a type of novelist who saddens me: the kind of novelist who prefers the status of having written instead of the consistent joys of writing, the type of author who only communicates to people if he wants something instead of being curious in other viewpoints. This novelist’s primary subject of interest is likely to be himself, but he’s capable of cloaking this solipsism by suggesting to others that they are just as much a part of his process. The novelist, in cues straight out of the Dale Carnegie playbook, will remember one specific detail about the other person that nobody else has and thereby create a greater impression.

Now this novelist may be talented, but he is so quietly convinced of his own apparent superiority to others that he refuses to listen to any person conveying the truth to him. And because a good deal of the literary community is wise enough to know about the novelist’s narcissistic temperament, even those who feel that the novelist’s latest work isn’t up to snuff will never go on the public record about how lacking it truly is. This is an understandable impulse, because the novelist has probably written at least one book that is amazing. And there remains the hope that he will write something that good again. And there also remains the hope that the novelist will grow out of this self-centeredness. Except that the novelist is probably over forty, and the novelist may have entered into the period of permanent emotional calcification.

All this is complicated by the novelist going out of his way to befriend every known person in the literary community so that he can secure positive coverage of his book. Again, it’s never really about writing the novel or even having a pleasant conversation with another person without any quid pro quo. It’s all about feeding the novelist’s narcissism. And when certain people have granted him the coverage or the bookstore appearances he so desperately craves, the novelist then dismisses and ignores them. For he never really wanted to know them. Even though he pretended to be nice. But, hey, he got what he wanted. And through numerous princely gestures, these people become useless to him. And he gradually moves up the totem pole and does the same thing. And anyone who has been used in such a manner has to bite her tongue. Because if you tell the truth, you’ll look like an asshole. Because those people who are presently being charmed by the novelist will never understand. The novelist is just so gosh darn nice.

This novelist is so fundamentally insecure in his own work that he must resort to these dishonest maneuvers. And indeed the novelist may play up his background or his circumstances in an effort to secure more press coverage or garner repeat mentions from a litblogger. But he lacks the spine or the smarts for civil disagreement or natural evolution.

These actions really aren’t too different from having to endure a charming yet sleazy used car salesman who won’t go away. But the literary world is so peculiar that it very much enjoys and inveigles these passive-aggressive hucksters. It wants to be told that what it’s doing is worthwhile. And while used car dealerships don’t face the same degree of marginalization that the literary world has, and while it is indeed possible to find a good used car at a decent price, wouldn’t we be more suspicious of the used car salesman than the insecure novelist who preys on the good will of other people in the same way?

Fortunately, most novelists aren’t like this at all. And I should probably remove the type of novelist who is an unapologetic publicity whore. For that type of novelist, at least, is honest about the fact that he’s shilling. But the type of novelist I’m talking about here not only seems to be cluelessly unaware of the grief he gives to publicists, booksellers, other authors, and those who wish to help them. He seems to actually enjoy it. And why shouldn’t he? This novelist is a legend in his own mind. If only he knew what people really thought of him.

by Edward Champion

My Services Elsewhere

Two pieces have been recently cajoled out of me. Chris Robbins recently acquired the domain, embarrassing.com, through some legerdemain that I won’t inquire about. (It seems more interesting, anyway, to keep it all a mystery.) When he told me that a number of writers had suggested that they might write pieces for him — in the same cowardly way that a casting director tells you that he will call you or an accounts payable person tells you that the check is in the mail — I felt compelled to offer him this entry for why I presently feel embarrassed.

I was also very honored to be asked to contribute to the Philly Inquirer again — courtesy of some kind lobbying from a few considerate souls who still seem to think I can write — and you can read my review of Thomas E. Ricks’s The Gamble in today’s edition. I must say that I came away from this book respecting General David Petraeus considerably more than I had in the past. It’s easy for any liberal-minded individual to get caught up in the crude sentiment that the war is wrong. It certainly is wrong. But the book challenged and informed my perceptions about Iraq in a way that I think any good thinker should consider. On this basis alone, the book is worth your time. We’re content to look at the situation with a sense of detached removal. As if it will go away. Like some obnoxious uncle with a drinking problem at a family reunion. But it’s not going away. It’s a scenario that we must understand and that we must take responsibility for. And perhaps that might involve looking hard and less superficially at the Baghdad clusterfuck.

by Edward Champion

The Roots of Insomnia

I had proceeded thus far, when I found I had been lying awake so long that the very dead began to wake too, and to crowd into my thoughts most sorrowfully. Therefore, I resolved to lie awake no more, but to get up and go out for a night walk – which resolution was an acceptable relief to me, as I dare say it may prove now to a great many more. — Charles Dickens, “Lying Awake”

In 1885, Henry Munson Lyman reported that one doctor’s cure for insomnia involved placing tourniquets around certain parts of the body to increase blood circulation to the brain. But if I had the choice between constricting my blood flow and going on one of Dickens’s predawn walks, I’d certainly choose the latter. Yet presently, as I face another one of these damn bouts, walking seems like too much effort. For does this not take you further from the bed? And is not the purpose of the pursuit lost?

In 2009, the dead do not rise in New York. They are doing just fine being ignored, even as they scream like frightening banshees clinging to bars inside express trains momentarily hitting local stops during the construction period. The normal rules of sleep do not apply. The regular laws of the universe do not apply. You wouldn’t ask the dead to go for a walk during the day. Because you don’t want to see them. You’d rather tie tourniquets to prop them up on the subway where they can deliver their frequently fabricated stories announcing their names and situations to mostly deaf and bankrupt travelers. But if they were permitted to walk and they were allowed Dickens’s privilege, then I suspect the world might learn a few things, unsettling though these truths may be.

In 1999, I was in San Francisco jumping from one glum galleon to another that promised to utilize my apparent killick-slinging skills. I was a dead man who had to walk. Dickens noted that Ben Franklin made the idea of procuring pleasant dreams sound so easy. No amount of pillow-beating could cause me to fall asleep. But I did jump. And a few leaped with me.

In 1984, the Reagan presidential campaign insisted that it was morning again in America. Twenty-six years later, the video is creepy and excessively sedate and phony. Who wants to stay awake when so many white people have been told precisely how to be happy? What happened to the 6,500 young men and women who were married then? Can they say that they experienced confidence in the last twenty-six years? Did their marriages last? (Hal Riney, the man who wrote and narrated the ad, died last year. He lived in San Francisco. When I took a voiceover class five years after I knew I could sling a killick, I was given a lot of Riney’s ad copy to speak before a microphone. My voice appeared briefly on a local radio commercial. This disturbed me.)

In 2009, Hal Riney does not rise in San Francisco. San Francisco itself is not dead, but it was never really allowed to stay awake. Between the hours of 2AM and 6AM, there is very little to do other than hole up in houses and seedy motels and 24-hour diners. There you may find acceptable relief, which is not spelled with the seven letters provided by Madison Avenue. There you may walk the streets if you can’t sleep and sleepwalk in the morning.

In 1880, an insomniac named Joshua Norton passed away. He was replaced by Frank Chu 120 years later. But in New York, they do not often let the insomniacs take the dais. If they do, they are heavily supervised or ignored.

In 1904, Henry Munson Lyman died in Evanston, Illinois at the age of sixty-eight. He had been ill for four years. He had started off in Hawaii and spent most of his professional career in Chicago — located 1,863 miles from San Francisco and 714 miles from New York. Whether Dr. Lyman felt any closer to the dead in New York who now do not rise remains open for scholarly debate. But if he suffered poor health for four years, presumably he suffered acceptable relief upon his death. There is certainly an acceptable relief in discovering him 105 years after he stopped gracing the world with his presence.

by Edward Champion

When Will You Be Available For Me to Pick Up My Hat?

From Jerry Felsheim’s “New York Literary Tea,” part of the aborted America Eats project that was never completed by the Federal Writers’ Project, but that is thankfully collected in Mark Kurlansky’s forthcoming book, The Food of a Younger Land:

Literary teas are constantly in a state of flux. The uninitiate gravitates toward the author, the author toward the editor or publisher, the publisher toward the reviewer, and the reviewer, in desperation, toward another drink. Since the general rule of conduct is to seek out those who can do one the most good, magazine editors and big-name reviewers enjoy much popularity.

If the party happens to be given in honor of a new author, he is almost always completely ignored. In fact, there is a tradition among veteran literary tea-goers to put the young author in his place as soon as possible. They accomplish this by pretending vociferously not to know for whom the party is being given. The young author usually stands awkwardly in a corner, surrounded by a few dull old ladies, with his publisher frantically trying to circulate him among the “right” people.