Quick Roundup
Written by Edward ChampionPosted on September 23, 2008
Filed Under Roundup
- There are many films that must be ingested and/or masticated upon today. Coffee is currently brewing, and it is decidedly autumn outside. And here are a few bagatelles to tide you over.
- The 2008 MacArthur fellows have been announced. On the literary front, there’s Chimamanda Adichie, who you can listen to on The Bat Segundo Show. There’s also Alex Ross, a competent mainstream critic whose inclusion suggests that the MacArthur people are either (a) playing it safe or (b) are having difficulties finding idiosyncratic voices.
- Well, one must admit that the way these folks have set up their operation does read like a Nigerian scam job. (via Maud)
- I’m with Orthofer on this. I’m presuming that a writer as wise as Jim Crace was kidding to some extent when he suggested that he feared going out of fashion. I’m not suggesting that we continue to celebrate those who remain quite willfully ignorant and out of touch, but is not the point of literature to embrace those ideas that are out of fashion or that challenge our most basic assumptions? Perhaps the only solution here is for all writers to wear black, which should stave off most of the fashionistas.
- The Emmy Awards have reached a new ratings low, which suggests that people have wised up to the needless self-congratulatory wankery that the television industry engages in every year. Based on some descriptions, I’m glad I spent those five hours I could have wasted on “five amateurish reality anchors” doing fruitful things. Hoping you did the same.
- Levi’s been in solid form lately, taking on the hypocrisy of Boris Kachka’s article and suggesting that Philip Roth is “the Oliver Stone of fiction.”
- Michel Houellebecq has declared war on Bernard-Henri Levy.
- Does [Insert Escapist Blockbuster Movie Here] [Represent/Contribute to] Our Age of Terror? Please contact the New York Times’s op-ed office for the appropriate form and fill in the blanks. If you are a distinguished novelist, publication is expected in two weeks.
- Daniel Green on Thirlwell.
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Books To Jump Up and Down Over
Beyond Heaving Bosoms by Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan. The famed writers behind Smart Bitches, Trashy Books have written a very funny and thoughtful volume about romances, both Old Skool and New Skool. Here is a book that any smug and humorless literary manboy beating his flabby passive chest over Banville or Bolano should probably read pronto, if only for the distant possibility that he might get over himself. While the Choose Your Own Adventure segment at the end caused me to have a very disturbing dream involving Shelley Long (don't ask), Sarah and Candy did have me rethinking many of my own misperceptions when I wasn't busy laughing. They're not afraid to take on the New York Times Bok Review or even the groupthink within certain sectors of the romance community.
Alice Fantastic by Maggie Estep. This wild and highly enjoyable narrative involves two sisters (presumably, the third one was still being rented out by Chekhov), a hippie ex-junkie mother who lives with seventeen dogs, a murder, gambling, and libidinous Hollywood actresses who live in Woodstock. But this is the wonderful Maggie Estep we're talking here. And what seems at first like a quirky yarn becomes something unexpectedly moving about connectivity. What I love about Estep's work is the way that she'll juxtapose an extremely astute observation (now that you mention it, why do cab drivers always have somebody to talk with on the phone past midnight?) with an often outrageous story development.
Generosity by Richard Powers. It doesn't come out until September 29th, but Richard Powers's latest will have anyone committed to books reconsidering their literary fervor. I foresee some animosity from the vanilla critics hostile to idea-driven novels, but book bloggers, YouTube chroniclers, and MFAs would do well to plunge into this chance-taking narrative, which introduces vital questions about what the reader's relationship is with media, scientific dissection, and "creative nonfiction." Are we rats fleeing to happy cities? Or can we find the humanism within the purported plague?
Pieces for the Left Hand by J. Robert Lennon. Lennon is one of the most underrated fiction writers working today. Much as On the Night Plain proved that Lennon had a lot more in the toolbox than heartfelt (and often very funny) suburban satire, this slim but fascinating volume juxtaposes 100 small-town anecdotes -- arranged by category -- in a manner that reads, at times, like Nicholson Baker's passions for minutiae and, at other times, Stewart O'Nan's concern for psychological detail. The result is fiction that makes us wonder about whether one person's subjective view of particulars can entirely be trusted. This book never found a publisher in 2005. But thankfully, Graywolf has released it in the United States, along with Lennon's latest novel, The Castle.
Wonderful World by Javier Calvo. This wonderfully raucous volume has been completely ignored by the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. But it's probably one of the most delightful reading experiences I've had this year. Calvo cavalierly mashes up multiple genres and manages to mix up familial subtext with larger-than-life, almost cartoonish characters. (Indeed, one might argue that one mobster's penis is a character of its own in this sprawling novel.). This is not an easy thing to pull off, but Calvo makes it work. And it's helped immeasurably by Mara Faye Lethem's idiom-specific translation. (See longer post.)
The Means of Reproduction, Michelle Goldberg This thoughtful book tackles the complicated (and little discussed) subject of reproductive rights from numerous angles, which includes a number of unpleasant but necessary ones. The upshot is that there isn't a quick fix solution for declining birth rates and fundamentalist abuses. Just about every political faction has contributed to the friction. But you'll want to read this book anyway to refamiliarize yourself with the topic, but also to understand just what's occurred during the past several decades to get us where we are today. (See also podcast interview with Goldberg.)
“In my opinion, Philip Roth is the Oliver Stone of fiction. We are drawn to him because he creates strong characters and has a knack for plots and situations that catch our interest. But he is hopelessly heavy-handed, single-minded and irritatingly consistent. He’s been writing the same story since the 1960s, showing no growth or maturity and never developing an interest in the world outside East Coast USA.”
This is such a zesty explosion of Philistine catharsis that it’s hard not to chuckle (after suppressing the urge to vomit). The “same story” since the 1960s? Really? You mean because there’s always a *Jew* involved (like that old fraud Tolstoy and his tiresome fixation on Russians), I suppose.
The novel truly read is a collaborative experience. Anyone who can’t read any difference between “The Counterlife” and “Sabbath’s Theater” and “The Ghost Writer” and “The Human Stain” and “Everyman” and “Patrimony” and “I Married A Communist” and “American Pastoral” and “Operation Shylock” and “The Anatomy Lesson” and “The Plot Against America”, et al, and, further, who can’t discern the inlaid beauties of language/precise recognition of humanity in all those pages … would be a disappointing partner for *any* writer’s serious effort.
A writer need not be a reader’s cup of tea to deserve said reader’s respect; Mr. Henry James does not often curl my toes but I am capable, nevertheless, of honoring the overall achievement by refraining from claiming that his writing blows chunks. The problem with nuanced, fair-minded, ambiguity-rich (re)appraisals of canonical novelists is that they’re far less fun than shotgun-cocking takedowns.
The righteous fallacy implicit in all this, of course, is that with Roth chopped down and out of the way, the space will be cleared for all those *real* geniuses to come pushing up through the shade-etiolated undergrowth.
Wrong.