Tuesday, December 25, 2007

Thoughts for a New Year: War and Peace

As a holiday present (I'll leave you to guess which holiday), my partner bought me the new translation of War and Peace.

I read War and Peace when I was in high school, after my father told me that you couldn't be an educated person without having read War and Peace and Ulysses. At the time I was a bit daunted by the book's sheer heft as well as the thundering universality of its title. But as I read, I was amazed at what a page-turner it was, how exciting and passionate and wise.

Now, some 17 years later, I'm re-reading the book, and though I'm only up to page 774, I'm convinced pretty much everything you could ever want to know about writing, and much of what you might want to know about life, lies between its covers.

One of the book's big themes is that history and life are a result of a series of accidents, some lucky, even though in hindsight they appear planned or even foreordained. Also, the gap between the reality of chance and the fictions of control and/or fate we live by can lead to dangerous self-delusions.

If only some of our leaders had read and grasped what this book has to tell us. As much as we want to have power over our futures and steer the destiny of nations and peoples to suit our desires, the complexity of human nature has a way of defying even our best-laid plans. Or in our government's case, our worst-laid plans.

For example, I'm aware of a certain euphoria these days about the so-called "surge" in Iraq. It's true that the violence in that nation has been reduced from catastrophic to tragic. And I suppose that as long as we're willing to maintain the tragic levels of violence by paying for it with American blood, we will be able to do so. And yet, it must be asked, was that our goal in invading Iraq? To create a mildly chaotic power vacuum? More importantly, what do we want for that country's future? A theocracy? A corrupt oligarchy? A puppet dictatorship? No one seems to have any idea, least of all the cast of cartoon characters running for the American presidency.

Iraq is only one of a host of problems, including climate change, proliferation of nuclear weapons, economic turbulence that dwarf our ability as individuals to comprehend, let alone think of ways to solve. But Tolstoy can give us some hope here. It's not our responsibility to solve these problems, he tells us. In fact, even if we could think of solutions, the likelihood they might work or be carried out effectively is fairly small. The best thing we can do is to try to see clearly, to always strive to write and say the truth, to be kind and peaceful and unselfish (but not in a stupidly selfless way), to achieve balance.

Not an easy task. But Tolstoy and others like him can point the way. So turn off your computers, your video games, your TVs, for just a few minutes, take a little break, and get thee to a bookstore.

Saturday, November 17, 2007

Lessons Learned from Recent Reading

As a teacher of writing, I often find myself envying my students. I often wish that instead of dispensing advice and criticism, I had someone to consult who could give me some answers when I'm working on a project that's frustrating me. I wonder, is there a creative writing class offered somewhere for teachers of creative writing? Not that I've found.

The closest thing to being in class that I've had since leaving school for the last time has been reading. And in this sense, over the past years, I've had an amazing array of teachers: E. M. Forster, Jean Stafford, L. Frank Baum, Bernard Malamud, Graham Greene, Sholem Asch, Kazuo Ishiguro and now a few others I'd like to mention.

The first is Ha Jin, whose novel Waiting I finished in about two days. It's the kind of story that makes you ache to get to the end to find out how it will turn out. The title refers to a doctor in the Chinese army who can't get the required permission from his wife to get a divorce so he can marry his girlfriend, and so he must wait eighteen years, after which, according to Chinese law, he can get the divorce without permission. (Note: if you're squeamish about plot spoilers, skip the next paragraph.)

When the doctor's wait is rewarded and he's allowed to marry his girlfriend, she wears him out with her voracious sexual appetite. Be careful when you get what you wish for, the book seems to be saying, because you just may get it in a way you don't expect. That's the life lesson. The writerly lesson, for me anyway, was that to avoid predictable endings because the action seems inevitable, is not to change what happens, but rather to let the inevitable happen in terms of action, while surprising the reader with character.

It's a lesson that was reinforced for me (by a somewhat negative example) in the new novel The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta. This new novel is as funny and compulsively readable as Perrotta's last book Little Children, and yet as it got to its inevitable ending (which I won't relate here), I felt let down. I almost wish Perrotta had continued the novel past the point where he stopped, the same way Ha Jin had, and then surprised us with what came next.

Another book that's taught me about managing predictable endings is Angela Carter's short story collection The Bloody Chamber, which recently I had the pleasure of finishing. Carter is known for taking fairy tales like Little Red Riding Hood or Beauty and the Beast and re-telling them while amping up the sex and violence. Again, these are stories with endings we as readers can see coming a mile off. So why do we keep turning the pages so eagerly? I think because Carter gives us such a visceral tour of the castles and forests and cottages these fairy tale characters inhabit, which were always a bit nebulous in the stories we read in childhood. For example, who knew Beauty's Beast kept an S & M chamber in his castle? Who could have guessed Red Riding Hood's Wolf was so good in the sack?

The last book I'll mention, Mystery and Manners by Flannery O'Connor, is actually a collection of lectures by this classic American writer, some from creative writing classes she'd taught. (So it's no surprise the book transported me back to being a student.) From her cantakerous yet brilliant essays, I get the sense I wouldn't have liked to be a student in one of her workshops, though I wouldn't have minded eavesdropping from the hallway. O'Connor herself would be the first one to acknowledge the inherent limitations of trying to teach writing, and warns her students to beware of any teacher who claims to have all the answers about how writing works, who "appear overenergetic."

Still, O'Connor's definition of what writing is about, the art of persuasion through the senses, seems as good as any I've ever come across. So is her description of the writing process, "during which the hair falls out and the teeth decay... It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system." And yet she finds it also a hopeful act. "People without hope not only do not write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them."

And maybe that's the best reason of all to read novels, especially in this Internet-text-messaging-video-game-playing age: as an act of hope.

Monday, September 03, 2007

Back to Work

Summer is ending. Tomorrow, my roster of fall classes begins. I'll be teaching a creative writing class at Columbia, three ESL classes at NYU, and working with graduate students in Columbia's MFA program as well as the Stonecoast MFA program in Maine (by correspondence).

At the same time, I'll be keeping up my freelance writing and working on a new draft of my novel (yes, the Berlin one). Somewhere in there, I hope to have a life.

This past year has been one of the more difficult ones for me as a writer. I think one of the hardest lessons I've had to come to terms with is that you have to keep growing and moving forward with your work, and yet it's not a good idea to try to do something that you're not suited to either. Knowing where that line lies is not intuitive, at least not for me anyway.

Maybe the greatest lesson I've had to learn is humility. It's nice when you produce a book or a story or an essay, but sometimes the work you do may not result in some product you can share with the world. And that's part of being a writer too. As a writer, your job is to do the work. The hard part is that you don't know for sure what your work really is. I never understood before how it could take some writers years to produce a book. I'd think, just write the thing. Now I get it. They were writing, for all that time. For writers there are different kinds of success. This past year I've been very successful at getting myself to my desk and doing work. What's eluded me so far is another kind of success, and whether I can attain it is not something I know how to control or predict.

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

A Break

Those of you who check this site regularly may have noticed I haven't been posting the past month. The reason is that I'm working very hard on wrapping up a novel and I just can't think of anything else to say lately!

Anyway, enjoy your summer, and please check back here in September, when I will also be back in cyberspace.

Best,
Aaron

Friday, June 01, 2007

The Aesthetics and Economics of Sexuality

I'm the kind of writer who likes to work on two books at once, so I've been playing around with the beginnings of my fourth book, while finishing my third. One of the decisions I've been recently struggling with is whether to make the protagonist of the book gay.

My first book, a collection of stories, had roughly half gay main characters, half straight, a ratio that apparently made the entire book gay because it was larger than the ratio of gay to straight people in the population as a whole. My second book, a novel, had two protagonists, one gay male and one straight female. Again, the book was considered "gay" and not "straight" or "female" for similar reasons.

I'm not complaining, though it is a bit silly to think of a book as having a sexuality or a religion or an ethnicity. No one says, "Oh, Chekhov, that's just for Russians." I love to read Anne Tyler, Mary Gordon, Mary Gaitskill, Lorrie Moore, and Jean Stafford. Does that mean I love "women's writing"? I thought the point of literature was to expand the range of what we know, not to confirm what we already think we know.

But I've been wrong. If a book is identified as "gay" or "Jewish" or "black" or "female," chances are readers who pick it up will fit into one of those categories. Therefore, if I make the protagonist of my new novel gay, I need to be aware that this is the audience I'm most likely going to be writing for. And given the number of straight people out there and the number of gay people out there, this may not be the wisest decision in terms of marketing.

It also may not be the wisest decision for me technically as a writer. I've done my fair share of gay protagonists, and straight female ones too. Shouldn't I (gasp) attempt the unthinkable, and branch out a bit by trying to write a straight man?

Then again, no one says to Philip Roth, shouldn't you try to branch out a bit and try to write about the goyim? What is it that people find so "limiting" about writing about gay people, but for any other identity group you're "finding the universal through the lens of the particular"?

Anyway, thinking about the economics of book publishing in this climate is like counting grains of rice. What's the point?

I haven't made up my mind about Davey, the main character of my new novel, who might be straight or might be gay or something in between. (In any case, I see him as a guy who doesn't get it on very often, with either sex.) The funny thing is, I thought I was going to end this blog with a ringing endorsement for exploring new themes in gay literature, which is only in its infanthood, and has plenty of new territory left to explore. Yet as I get to this point, I keep wondering, "What would happen if...?" Who knows? Maybe I'd just better write the damned thing both ways and figure out which works best.

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Saints and Sinners

This past weekend, I attended my second Saints and Sinners Literary Festival in New Orleans. The chief topic on most of our minds was not literature, however, but the state of the city post-Katrina. It's nice to see that much of the French Quarter and other areas frequented by tourists are in good shape and look as if relatively little affected by the hurricane. However, there are other areas of the city, where tourists don't go (except on specially organized "Katrina tours") where the full extent of the damage is still visible and still fully felt, even two years later.

One of the biggest changes in New Orleans (besides the signs advertising buildings for sale everywhere) is the lack of tourists. During my stay, I noticed a significant drop in the crowds that used to throng Bourbon Street and Jackson Square. It's easy to walk right in and get a table at high-end restaurants that used to require a reservation made weeks in advance just to look at you. At one very toney restaurant, a customer sitting next to me turned to me and said, "Thank you for visiting our city." I heard the same refrain repeated everywhere.

One wonders why our president has not taken advantage of the famous "bully pulpit" our leaders are supposed to be so fond of, and does not exhort Americans to visit New Orleans and bring their tourist dollars. In his place, let me offer a plea to anyone who happens to read this blog. Please try to visit New Orleans, not just for them, but also for you. It's still a beautiful and special city where you can have a great time, and now is a great time to see it before the hordes of tourists inevitably (one hopes) return.

On a happier note, the Saints and Sinners festival was its old fun and inspirational self. Besides meeting and renewing acquaintances with other queer writers, I really enjoyed and learned a lot from the panels I went to. One highlight was a talk on creating character through the senses by novelist Jim Grimsley, who is always erudite on fiction and prose. He referred us all to two essential essays by Flannery O'Connor from the collection Mystery and Manners, which I ran out and bought. In it, O'Connor argues that fiction depends on recreating specific sensory impressions to convey experience and meaning to a reader.

I asked Grimsley, who teaches writing at Emory, what he might say to students who argue that they don't want to create a specific character or use specific language in their work. "That's just dumb!" he said. "When you eat a bowl of soup, you don't want it to taste like dishwater. You want it to taste like something, not nothing."

I'll be sure to remember that one for a long time.

Tuesday, May 01, 2007

PEN'd out

Dear Readers,

For the past week or so, I've been a guest blogger for the PEN World Voices International Literary Festival. For this entry, I'm inviting you to check out my thoughts on some of the panels I attended, including conversations on travel writing, immigration and Europe, and the state of Iraq.

These can all be found at: http://www.pen.org/MemberBlog.php/prmProfileID/19249

Happy Reading!

Best,
Aaron

Sunday, April 15, 2007

Why Books?

Things aren't looking good.

Book sales are down, down, down. Book review coverage in magazines and newspaper is down. More and more books are being written, put on the front shelves of the stores for a month or two, shuffled to the back, then returned to the publishers for eventual pulping.

Is anyone reading out there?

I've been trying to do my part. Recently when I was going my taxes, I added up all my receipts for book purchases last year, and, well, it was a lot. And these aren't from used bookstores, either. I make it a point to buy new. So much for books bought.

But as for the number of books I've read recently, that number is going down. With everything I have going on in my life these days, with teaching, with writing my own work, with trying to find time for my partner, for my friends, for the gym, for my soul, I've been finding that reading books has been working its way to the bottom of my list of things to do. These days, if I pick up a book and it doesn't demand my attention pretty quickly, I'll think of almost any excuse not to go on reading it. These excuses include watching Golden Girls re-runs and playing solitaire on my mini iPod.

Maybe books have outlived their usefulness as a cultural object. Maybe with all the phone calls and emails and Internet sites there are to check and return and write, taking the time to wall off the world with the covers of a book doesn't make sense anymore. I recently saw an interview with Philip Roth in which he predicted the novel would be dead within fifteen years.

Still, I can't help hoping he's wrong. Another way to see things is that we're living in a time of transition, in which we're trying to figure out how to live in this bravest of brave new worlds. When the dust settles, maybe we'll find our lives somewhat emptier than we would like. And then we'll turn back to books, just as we've turned away from them recently, to look for a way into our souls.

This isn't just Pollyanna talk. I've seen evidence of it in my own life. A student of mine recently gave me a copy of a wonderful story called "Boys" by Rick Moody. I was in the middle of a thousand other things, but the words of that story forced me to stop what I was doing, sit down, and pay close attention. "Listen to me," it whispered. "Shut out the rest and just listen to me for a little while." So that's what I did.

Friday, March 30, 2007

Why Should I Call You By My Name?

A new first novel, titled Call Me By Your Name, has been getting some attention lately because of its frank and highly erotic sex scenes between two men. That a novel features two men having hot sex isn't shocking. But that this trenchant portrait of consuming homosexual desire was written by a man who is married and has children, as its author Andre Aciman is and does, may come as a bit of a surprise.

The structure and style of the novel can't help but invite autobiographical thoughts. The narration is in a heavy, breathy first person. The tone is memoiristic, suffused with nostalgia for lost desire. The book's lovestruck narrator is an Italian man looking back at when he was a teenager and had an affair with a slightly older American guest who'd come to stay with his family for the summer. Much of the book consists of the young narrator's fantasies about the things he'd like to do or have done to him while in the loving company of his American friend. When the narrator's desires are consumated, (one memorable scene involves a peach flavored with an unusual marinade) the scenes are recounted in the kind of intimate detail that seemingly you'd have to have lived to know about.

"How can a straight man have written THAT?" As I began reading the book, this was also the question I kept asking myself. It's only natural. We live in an age in which we suspect our non-fiction writers of lying and our fiction writers of telling the truth.

Having just finished the book, I have no way of knowing whether Aciman is gay, straight, bi, or Martian. I do know that Aciman has convincingly captured moments of homosexual desire, but this in itself does not signify that the author shares the feelings he writes about. Haven't there been women who've written convincingly of men's sexual desires and vice versa? Whatever happened to the concept of the empathetic imagination? It's possible for a man to write from the point of view of a woman without being accused of being a woman himself. So why is it that when heterosexual writers write from the point of view of homosexual characters, (or for that matter when heterosexual actors play homosexual characters) we don't call these people talented artists, but instead closet cases?

What troubled me about Aciman's novel was not the sexuality of its author, but the unacknowledged psychosis of its main character. Aciman wants us to believe that his narrator is haunted by his brief teenager summer affair for years after it took place. Fine. What I'm not willing to buy into is that we as readers should somehow celebrate an adult who clings to an adolescent romantic fantasy version of reality (in this case, a short but sweet infatuation fulfilled) to a point that goes beyond obsession to psychological dysfunction. Many people have intense physical or spiritual relationships that ended. Occasionally we look back at them and feel regret, even loss. And then we go on with our lives. If we can't let go of the past, it isn't because the past was so wonderful. It's because there's something wrong with who we are in the present, and so we feel the need to assign a value to the past that it doesn't have. Our lives are more than our lost loves, or even our lost lusts. This is the insight that I found troublingly absent in Aciman's highly-charged but ultimately sentimental novel.

It's interesting that in this novel, Aciman references Wuthering Heights, a classic of romantic literature that featured as its hero and heroine a couple of good candidates for the loony bin. The fact that Bronte shows us that Heathcliff and Catherine were not in full command of their senses doesn't make their love story less powerful, but more. By contrast, the hero of Call Me By Your Name's lifelong obsession with his first fuck seems not only disproportionate but also worthy of dissection by a qualified shrink, rather than the lovingly detailed tribute that Aciman has created.

Sunday, March 18, 2007

Gossip or Critical Debate?

Recently I was at a panel about literary gossip, and one of the examples brought up was l'affaire Freudenberger, about a young short story writer working at the New Yorker who managed to publish a story in the magazine, and then earn a six-figure contract for an as-then unwritten story collection. The scandal? That Freudenberger's work wasn't really all that good.

Sure, a lot of the sniping in that case was motivated by jealousy. But some of it was also motivated by genuine distaste for Freudenberger's style. Isn't that allowed? Which leads to my question, is a discussion of the merits of a writer's work just jealous gossip, or is it a discussion worth having? Especially in public?

Writers can be quite frank with each other about whose work they admire and whose stinks. But always with the stipulation (often not necessary to spell out explicity) that their opinions are not meant to be shared with others, particularly not in print.

Indeed, writers will often decline to review a book they've read and hated rather than write a slam review. I won't do it because books get so little attention these days that it seems pointless to point out the flaws of a work that probably won't sell more than five thousand copies anyway. But I know a number of writers who feel writing a completely negative review is bad karma, that it could earn them an enemy for life, and for what? The hundred dollars they might be paid for writing the thing?

Still, there are so many books out there that get praised for the wrong reasons while others get overlooked, it seems like a discussion of what deserves praise and what doesn't isn't just "snarky" gossip between friends. Debating the merits of different books is an important, even necessary part of literary life. It reminds that there are literary standards and what they are supposed to be about. As long as the discussion is about aesthetic merit, not book advances or top ten lists or other silly and reductive nonsense. I think it is also helpful to bear in mind the context of the work you're talking about. If it's a book from a tiny press that put it out as labor of love and that few people are going to notice anyway, is it necessary to pile on by slamming it? If it's a book that's made a big splash, is it necessary to snipe out of resentment?

My feeling is taking down a book, even in public, isn't necessarily bad form. The question is can you do it to make a larger and necessary point about literature in general?

Sunday, March 04, 2007

Barbaric AWP!

I'm a little delinquent in posting this week because I've just come back from a weekend conference of writers, writing teachers, and writing students in Atlanta. The conference, run by AWP (Associated Writing Programs), meets once a year, and features panels, a book fair, and much schmoozing.

When I was a writing student, it never would have occurred to me to go to a conference like this one, but among the roughly 5000 attendees of this conference (which is probably also the number of people who regularly buy and read literary fiction in America these days) there were throngs of not only MFA grad students who aspired to be writers, but also laypeople who aspired to become MFA grad students.

Indeed, as the number of MFA programs seems to increase every year while the number of books sold decreases every year, you have to wonder, what are all these programs for? Even if every graduate of an MFA program were guaranteed a publishing contract, there simply aren't enough readers out there to buy all these books. And since the only direct career path that an MFA degree might be useful for is a job teaching creative writing to other creative writing aspirants, the question emerges (as it did many times this weekend), do all these programs exist merely to breed more teachers to work in more programs that breed more teachers to work in more programs and so on?

At a couple of programs I went to, I sensed a real sense of resentment and anger on the part of MFA students who kept asking questions along the lines of, "What am I supposed to do with this expensive, useless degree?" One answer is quite simple: write. You get an MFA degree because you want to be a writer, a career with few guarantees of anything. But the real question these students were probably asking was, "Why did your program agree to admit me and take my tuition dollars knowing that even when I got out, the chances of my succeeding at this were pretty small?" My answer is Caveat Emptor, let the buyer beware. If you decide to get an MFA to become a writer (and there are still many other ways of becoming one), you ought to do your homework in advance about what kind of programs you're applying to and if they might suit your needs. An MFA is no guarantee of publishing anything, so I wouldn't go by how many published writers a given program has churned out, but rather whether its faculty and courses seem to be the kind of thing that might help you grow as a writer and reader.

Related and not related to these matters, the theme I heard repeated most often over the weekend was: "Embrace Failure!" One panelist told an anecdote about how the company 3M requires its scientists to spend ten percent of their time on experiments that they think probably won't work. That's how the post-it note was developed (an invention I couldn't live without). The larger message of all this is that the surest way to fail at something is to do all that you can to avoid failing at it. "A bad draft is better than a good idea," another panelist said.

Here's another way of looking at failure. Compared to Shakespeare or Tolstoy, we're all failures. We can only hope to, as Beckett said, "fail better." The question isn't should I get an MFA or what should I do with it if I get a degree and not a publishing contract, but rather how can I pursue my dream as boldly as possible?

Thursday, February 15, 2007

An American Story

This semester I'm teaching two ESL classes at New York University in addition to my creative writing class at Columbia. One of the classes is a seminar in which students practice their English skills by talking about different subjects related to American culture. After surveying the students to see which aspects of our culture they wanted to learn about, I was surprised and gratified to find out that the subject they were most interested in tackling was American literature.

With that in mind, I surveyed my bookshelves to find a short story for us to read together. The decision wasn't an easy one. I wanted to pick something interesting and thought-provoking, as well as something short enough to cover in a classroom setting and not too riddled with idioms or specialized vocabulary. In the end, I chose a story called "Neighbors" by Raymond Carver.

There once was a time when it was impossible to study creative writing and not read a Raymond Carver story. (That time was in the early 90s, when I was a student of writing.) The reason? Probably because his deceptively minimal style seemed easy enough to teach for writing professors as well as to emulate for writing students. Carver's use of clipped, everyday language and his narrow focus on small moments of action (a waitress serving a fat man in a restaurant; a couple receiving a visit from a blind friend) can seem so organic as to require almost no background in classic literature or literary devices. Also, at a time when deconstructionism was all the rage in academia, Carver's intimate, off-the-cuff bits of prose made for too tiny a target for an ambitious grad student to shoot down for inevitable "ism" violations: nationalism, colonialism, sexism, racism, capitalism, etc.

And yet for all of Carver's seeming "smallness," as I reread the seven-page story "Neighbors," I realized that I'd have been hard-pressed to find a better fit for a class about American culture. At a time when we're getting more and more overstuffed novels decorated with pictures, graphs, funny typefaces, manic stick-figures substituted for finely-observed characters, it's worth taking a look at the breadth of Carver's achievement in a small space to remind ourselves how truly fine writing can do much with little.

On the surface, "Neighbors" is about two couples who live across the hall from each other. One of the couples, the Millers, frequently housesit for the other couple, who frequently go on vacation. Underneath this central conceit, however, Carver illustrates the allure of the American promise of upward mobility, and the deep disappointment for those who haven't quite managed to fulfill that promise. As the Millers go back and forth between their apartment and the seemingly magical apartment of their slightly better-off neighbors, they feel the cheap thrill of an exhiliration that seems like freedom, but is actually a trap. The Millers begin to indulge themselves in sex and drink but also sexual and even violent fantasies that few Americans would be willing to admit to, until in their excitement, they make a costly mistake.

It's all very Anna Nicole Smith, without the cartoonishness.

Sometimes it seems as if Americans come in two varieties. There are the uber-patriot red-state nationalists who in public go around trumpeting our country as the best place on Earth, the fulfillment of God's dream for mankind, while in private these same God-fearers cruise the Internet for porn like everyone else. Then there are the cynical snickerers, equally holier-than-thou, who point out that all religious and nationalist idealism is a lie, that there is no escape from the bonds of cold hard facts like global warming and corporate greed. What Carver shows us in his tiny, frail compositions is the sin that both of these types commit: the sin of certitude. In reality, we Americans are a frail, confused, and hapless lot, all the more ineffectual for all our nation's economic and military power.

But then, what's wrong with being frail or confused? Isn't that what it is to be human?

Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Start it and When it's Over, Finish It

The other day, I had the pleasure of interviewing Irish writer Colm Toibin for a profile I'm doing for Out Magazine. In person, Toibin turned out to be charming and witty, overflowing with wise and funny observations about life and writing, and in fact, I couldn't fit them all into the piece I wrote.

One thing he said has stuck with me. He was talking about a story he wanted to write and trying to figure out how to structure it. Finally, after two years of struggling, he came up with the following. "I thought fuck it, start the story at the beginning of the story and when it's over, just end it. Tell the fucking thing. No framing shit. No Calvino, no Borges, no being told by two different narrators, almost no flashbacks... and I do think I got it right for once."

Writers today are under a subtle but perceptible pressure to develop some kind of narrative gimmick, a telling trademark style that makes their writing unique and immediately identifiable. David Foster Wallace? He's the guy with the clever footnotes. Rick Moody? He writes long sentences punctuated with italics that pop up seemingly for no reason. Jonathan Safran Foer? He makes experimental writing reader-friendly, even poignant. The list goes on.

If you don't have a stylistic gimmick, it's helpful to have some kind of personal story to make your mark. Who can forget J. T. Leroy's shyness about public appearances? Or the fact that Zadie Smith was ONLY 23 when she wrote her first novel, or that Nick McDonnell was ONLY 17 when he wrote his novel Twelve, etc., etc.

These kinds of considerations have everything to do with publicity but very little to do with the business of writing, which is simply to choose your story that you need to tell and figure out the best way to tell it. The author as a person is free to vanish within the text, and it's perfectly acceptable, even honorable, for the author's hand to seem almost invisible.

Recently I've been reading the work of Jean Stafford (a former student gave me a book of her stories as a gift). What's remarkable to me about these radiant stories is the use of adjectives, the precision with word choice, and the intensity of the pain faintly palpable underneath the highly-polished surface of Stafford's writing. It's interesting to note that Stafford was married to the poet Robert Lowell and suffered from disease and depression most of her life, but it doesn't change the quality of her writing, which doesn't need pictures or footnotes or italics or words in capital letters to be powerful.

I wish that the people in our media who decide which books get attention and which books don't would start thinking more seriously about what makes for a groundbreaking work of literature. Today it seems that it isn't enough for a book to be well-written; a book has to also signal to readers and reviewers that it is well-written with a host of post-modern devices that in many cases are so showy that the book turns out to be less well-written as a direct result. But what about those writers who don't feel the need to imitate Calvino or Kafka or the latest spawn of literary imitators of W. G. Sebald? I love David Foster Wallace as much as anyone. But what about writers who commit the radical act of telling a story simply, starting at the start and finishing when it's over, with words instead of punctuation marks and graphics, with calm, steady voices instead of shrieking? They deserve a little attention too.

Monday, January 15, 2007

Martin Luther King Day Thoughts

For many of us it's an extra day off work or school. For our politicians, it's a chance to score some easy flattering news coverage by uttering the usual noble messages about racism. And for a few of us, Martin Luther King Day is a holiday with meaning.

My own view is that it's a shame we as a nation have missed the chance to make more of this holiday than we do. Somehow we have this notion that race is an issue that affects only black people, gender is for females, sexual orientation for gays and lesbians, ethnicity for Latinos and perhaps Asians, and the list goes on.

But of course, white people do have a race, males have a gender, Christians have a religion, and straight people have a sexual orientation. The culture of the majority may be more visible to the minority, but it's still there, and worth more attention than we usually pay these matters.

Furthermore, as the newly-elected Lieutenant Governor of New York pointed out today, racism is a white problem, just as sexual discrimination is a male problem, and religious discrimination is a Christian problem. When we needlessly marginalize anyone in our society, we miss out on the contributions that person may have made to our community, had he or she been allowed to become a full member.

Nowhere in literature is this lesson more powerfully evoked than in a novel I tend to advocate reading every few months or so, called Three Cities by Sholem Asch. In what is probably the definitive look at the Russian Revolution, Asch describes (through a fictional narrative) how a variety of regimes missed out on a chance to reform the Russian empire into a fair and thriving country for all its citizens because the suggestions of a few smart, capable people who happened to be Jewish were ignored.

For more on the dangers of needlessly marginalizing people for reasons of religion, nationality, or politics, we need look no further than our own present regime's conduct of the war in Iraq. As Jonathan Alter of Newsweek reported on MSNBC, potential candidates for participating in the reconstruction of Iraq were asked, "Do you support Roe vs. Wade?" Why a person's stance on abortion has anything to do with their capability to help rebuild Iraq makes no more sense than why (under this administration) several of our few fluent Arabic speakers in the military were removed from their jobs because they happened to be gay. Nor does it make any sense to disallow companies from countries who did not participate in the invasion of Iraq from participating in the reconstruction, simply by virtue of nationality.

We may never know if our current misadventure in Iraq may have been less of a disaster if our administration had included the best people for the job at each stage of the invasion and reconstruction, rather than the people who seemed most likely to hold views and/or come from backgrounds most similar to the people in the executive branch of our government. What we do know for sure is that the current cast of characters in charge do not seem to have learned any lessons from their mistakes. Then again, have any of us learned any lessons about tolerance from history? What are we doing in our own lives, not just on Martin Luther King Day, but every day, to see people clearly as they are instead of as the preconceived stereotypes we seem to prefer them to be.

Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Top Ten Lists

It's that dreary time of year when magazines and newspapers get into the business of ranking works of art. Imagine applying such a system to nature. "That tree is the best one I've seen all year!" "I really liked that river, but it wasn't as good as the one I saw last month." "Gee, that sky is such a disaster. It's the worst one I've ever been under."

To me, talking about a movie or a book in this way is equally absurd. When I go to a theater or museum or when I open a book, I don't think to myself, "Now, where will I rank this on my year-end list of reading or viewing experiences?" And if Pedro Almodovar's last movie was the best or the worst movie I saw between the dates of January 1 and December 31 2006, who cares? And five years from now, who will remember? I read, watch, and listen because I want to have an intense experience that will leave an impression. Excellence? I suppose that's nice, but I don't mind a movie or painting with flaws, as long as they're interesting flaws.

This list-making business reaches unparalleled heights of stupidity when it comes to books because there simply aren't enough days in the year to read all the books that come out in one year. Supposing you read a book a week all year long. That would mean you'd tackled fifty books out of all the ones that had been published that year (assuming that you hadn't read any books that came out earlier than the current year). Supposing you read two books a week. You'd have one hundred. Now think of how many books come out in a calendar year (a number that's somewhere in the thousands). How can anyone with a straight face claim to have read all these thousands and from these have culled a list of the Top Ten?

So rather than give you my top ten of 2006, I'm going to list here, in no particular order, some books I've read this past year that made their mark on me for one reason or another, listed in no particular order. I have no idea where The Radetzky March ranks in relation to The Mayor of Casterbridge or Veronica, but I won't forget any of these three books or the others below any time soon:

The Leopard by Tommaso di Lampedusa: I was (understandably) on a bit of an Italian lit kick this year, and this novel, about an aristocratic family on the decline in Sicily, is a classic that doesn't feel the least bit musty.

The Day of the Owl by Leonardo Sciascia: Continuing my Sicilian tour, I turned to this gripping novella about the mafia, fascism, and the culture of corruption.

The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth: A moving evocation of an Austrian dynasty trying to cling to old values while the world is changing all around them. One of the great works of European literature.

The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy: This book begins smashingly, with a man selling his wife and child because they're getting on his nerves (a practice that apparently was not uncommon in early nineteenth century England). Does this guy know how to tell a story or what?

Veronica by Mary Gaitskill: Gaitskill uses language with the precision of a stonecutter. An intense and moving experience.

The Last of Her Kind by Sigrid Nunez: This is a fascinating read about the sixties, sex, and class. Written as a faux-memoir, this book has the immediacy of non-fiction with all the craft we expect of a great novel.

Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart: Funny, smart, and supremely necessary for our times.

Never Let Me Go, An Artist in the Floating World, A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro: Reading a bunch of this guy's work at once made me realize that Ishiguro baasically only does one thing in his fiction, but what a thing that he does! I can't think of another writer who uses unreliable narration with such confidence and deftness. These books made me want to run to my notebook and get to work.

The Captain's Fire by J. S. Marcus: A brilliant book you may not have heard of. If you like experimental fiction on historical themes like W. G. Sebald's books, this novel is for you.

Twelve Caesers by Petronius: I never thought I'd be interested in Roman history, but this chatty, gossipy, downright bitchy book had me enthralled. These guys make George W. Bush seem like a saint. I'll never forget the emperor who lost his grip on power because he stopped to tie his shoelace.

There's a start. I'm sure there are others I've forgotten to mention. Feel free to chime in with your recommendations.