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?