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Two Weeks, Ten Books

2010-05-14T22:55:00.000-04:00

I recently was lucky to spend two weeks at the Yaddo Artists Colony, where besides working on various short writing projects, I read ten books, purely for pleasure. Here's what I read and what I thought:

1. Probation by Tom Mendicino: This book begins with a bang. A married man’s life is turned upside down when he’s arrested for getting a blow job at a rest stop in North Carolina. The court sentences him to a year’s probation and mandated counseling for sex addiction, with the stipulation that if he can make it a year without getting arrested again, his record will be expunged. I very much liked the bitter, sarcastic narrative voice and the level of detail. The action flagged a bit as the book went on, and the upbeat ending left me suspicious.

2. The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara: A dramatization of the Battle of Gettysburg. The book was fun to read, like an entertaining history lesson, if a bit dry. Many of the famous soldiers like Robert E. Lee were well-sketched, though there were so many names and battles going on, I kept getting lost.

3. The Curse of the Appropriate Man by Lynn Freed: Just a fantastic, sharp collection of short stories, charged with sex and laced with biting humor. My favorite story, about a South African exchange student staying with a stereotypical Jewish family in New York, made me laugh and cry at the same time.

4. A Gesture Life by Chang-Rae Lee: This beautifully written novel takes up the point of view of a morally compromised Japanese immigrant living in Massachusetts. Now a bored retiree, the main character attempts to sort through his memories and current failed relationships. I was with this book all the way until the ending, which felt too abrupt. I didn’t quite buy it. Still, it was an elegant read.

5. Controlled Burn by Scott Wolven: Why aren’t more people reading Scott Wolven? His rough-edged short stories about hardscrabble lives on the margins of society are written in crisp, honest, precise prose that startles on each page. These stories take you to places that aren’t often visited in American fiction.

6. The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisburger: The main character has a bone to pick with her abusive boss, the high-powered editor of the world’s leading fashion magazine. I have a bone to pick with Weisburger. Whenever the editor appears on the page, I’m riveted. Whenever the abused minion is left to her own devices, whining about her boyfriend, eating chips on the couch with her best friend, I’m flipping ahead to get back to the devilishly stinging portrait of the mean boss. Which begs the question, shouldn’t Weisburger be grateful to her famous former boss for providing her with such great material?

7. Bedwetter by Sarah Silverman: If you find Sarah Silverman’s shtick funny and adorable, as I do, you’ll laugh at much of this book. The frankness with which Silverman described her betwetting and early years was fun to read as well. As the book went on, however, it lost its way, skating too quickly over Silverman’s adult years.

8. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood: One of the reasons Atwood is such a genius of a writer is the fact that she can create such convincing characters and dialogue in such fantastical settings. Sci-fi writers ought to be required to read and study her. Literary writers ignore her at their own peril. I didn’t like this book as much as its “companion novel,” Year of the Flood, which I found more exquisitely detailed and emotionally involving, but this book pulled me in and didn’t let me go.

9. The BFG by Roald Dahl: Dahl is great. This book was just okay. I’d rather have re-read his classic novel Mathilda.

10. I tried to read Great Expectations by Kathy Acker, but the prose was too flat for me. I gave it up after a few pages.

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Don't Judge a Book by its Hype

2010-04-05T10:07:00.003-04:00

Every once in a while, a book comes along with such hype attached, you want to avoid reading it, just out of spite. I must confess that for me, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower was just such a book. I'd heard so much about this story collection for so long, the thought of actually picking it up made me feel as if I were being manipulated.

My loss.

I'm not sure what the proverbial tipping point was, but a few weeks ago, I was browsing in a bookstore and picked up a copy of the paperback. Last week, I began to read.

What I love most about this book is the prose. It's hard to believe this is Tower's first book. Line after line, the guy comes up with arresting stuff like "a steeply sloping apron of mud that sang with mosquitoes and smelled terribly of fart gas." His language is lovingly precise. Corduroy pants are "wide-waled," fake antique furniture is ornamented with "buboes" (I had to look that one up!), a hunky model is described as wearing a "cowrie shell necklace" and having "salt stiff hair." Tower's also great at finding metaphors that are both evocative and appropriate to his characters' world, like a character from the rural South who is described as having the figure of a "pickle jar."

Speaking of characters, what a range of beautifully etched lives are on display in this collection. The complexity of Tower's characters sneaks up on you as read. They're not necessarily people I'd want to have lunch with, but they keep surprising you with their vulnerability. As Tower makes painfully clear, they are people worth caring about, each with his or her own hurts and needs.

Finally, I love the way each of these stories end, usually on a wistful and inconclusive note. You know that the story has gone somewhere, but where is not immediately certain, a lot like life. In workshop (Tower went to my MFA program), I'm sure Tower must have heard that his endings weren't satisfying. I probably would have said the same thing myself. And yet, there's something Chekhovian about the way his stories move forward in time. It isn't necessarily that his characters or their lives have changes so much as they have shifted, in ways that will only become clear later in the characters' lives, or for readers, upon rereading.

My only quibbles about this book were the last two stories, which felt more like exercises that hadn't been fully fleshed out in comparison with the masterful stories that preceded them. But who cares? This is easily one of the best story collections I've read in a long time.

When a Story's Not a Story

2010-02-14T11:42:00.004-05:00

What elements do you need to make a story? Most fiction consists of plot, character, and setting, in some combination. The proportions of each always change, but generally all three are present. But what about fiction that doesn't fit the mold, fiction that "colors outside the lines" so to speak?

In general, I'm not a fan of this type of fiction, but to my mind, for these kinds of books to work, they need to compensate for the lack of what's not there with a stronger emphasis on what they do have to offer. No plot or character? Then you'd better have one hell of a setting. No character or setting? Then that had better be some plot you've got to tell.

But what about if you have none of the Big Three? Then I guess all we're left with is language. In which case, your language had better be fucking incredible.

Though I typically prefer fiction that does what fiction's traditionally expected to do, some of my favorite books are ones that don't follow any rules, that make up their own logic as they go along. So here is a list of some of my favorite rulebreakers, in no particular order except alphabetical.

How German Is It?, Walter Abish
Mansfield Park, Jane Austen
The Mezzanine, Nicholson Baker
40 Stories, Donald Barthelme
Snow White, Donald Barthelme
An Invisible Sign of My Own, Aimee Bender
Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die!, Mark Binelli
The Decameron, Boccaccio
Stories, Jorge Luis Borges
A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs
The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter
Mrs. Bridge, Evan S. Connell
Try, Dennis Cooper
Samuel Johnson is Indignant, Lydia Davis
Bleak House, Charles Dickens
The Lover, Marguerite Duras
Veronica, Mary Gaitskill
Loving, Henry Green
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
The Question of Bruno, Alexander Hemon
A Pale View of Hills, Kazuo Ishiguro
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera
Homeland, Sam Lipsyte
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
Self-Help, Lorrie Moore
Notable American Women, Ben Marcus
The Captain's Fire, J. S. Marcus
Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
Purple America, Rick Moody
Open Secrets, Alice Munro
Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
Martin and John, Dale Peck
The Streets of Crocodiles, Bruno Schulz
The Emigrants, W. G. Sebald
The First Hurt, Rachel Sherman
Collected Stories, Jean Stafford
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, David Foster Wallace
The Intuitionist, Colson Whitehead
The Waves, Virginia Woolf
Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar

Why Write? Why Read?

2010-01-23T16:29:00.004-05:00

A week ago, I was honored to give the commencement keynote address at the Stonecoast MFA Program. I'd like to share one section of the speech I gave, which I think speaks to the current unease about the state of where we are now as writers and book lovers:

Recently, in the Guardian newspaper of London, novelist Philip Roth predicted that in 25 years, the number of people reading fiction would be similar to the number of people who today read Latin poetry. If you talk to authors, editors, and journalists who cover writing, they'll all say the same thing: The publishing industry is at one of the lowest points that it's ever been.
Then again, the good news, I guess, is that for as long as I can remember, people have been saying the publishing industry is at one of the lowest points that it has ever been. I keep asking myself, when was this supposed golden time in publishing when everything was just hunky dory?

Still, I do think it's fair to say the notion that a work of writing is something you can exchange for money is becoming fairly outmoded. Increasingly, text, or what is currently referred to as "content," is something that readers expect to be delivered for free to their laptops, their PDAs, and now their Kindles. Remember when we used to buy newspapers and magazines? Remember when we used to buy books in bookstores? Remember when books were made out of paper instead of digital blips?

When it come to the economics of publishing, we don't know if we're at the bottom of a valley that in the coming years will slope back upward, or if we've reached a new plateau that will stretch on to the foreseeable future. Maybe writers will once again be able to earn money for their work in the way that they used to. Or maybe they won't.

However, there is one thing I do know for sure: The world needs writers.

I'll say it again. The world needs us. In fact, at the very time that our work seems at its most under-read, undervalued, underappreciated in every way, the world needs us worse than ever, even if the world doesn't quite know it yet.
Facebook is fun. Tweets are witty. Blogs are, well, blogs are blogs. But none of these can inspire us in the same fundamental and important way that a great work of literary fiction and pop fiction, non-fiction, or poetry can. I'm thinking here of E. M. Forster's simple yet desperate plea from his brilliant novel Howards End: "Only connect..." Forster wasn't talking about searching for a WiFi connection to log onto his Gmail account. He was asking us to see and hear each other in the fullness and richness of the individual human experience. And in an age when we're constantly glued to screens, both for work and for pleasure, we as human beings are in desperate need of genuine connection with each other and ourselves.

Now, I don't mean to sound like some Luddite here. I love my laptop too. I watch TV pretty much every day. I check my email almost every five minutes.

Also, I want to make clear that the acts of reading and writing are not the only antidotes to our contemporary illness of being entertained to death. There is a whole host of things we all could do each day to fulfill E. M. Forster's maxim of "Only Connect": We could cook a good meal for a friend, we could listen to someone we love, we could close our eyes and take several deep breaths of air, or simply smile at someone we don't know. All of us, writers or not, can do things like these every day to connect more deeply with the very real world in which we live, at a time when it's so much easier and more tempting to simply connect to the Internet.

The trouble is, that all too often we forget to connect. So we need certain people in our society to remind us to do just that. And that's where writers, you guys, come in. By laboring each day to use black ink-marks to recreate our world, or to imagine worlds that don't exist but just maybe might, you stir us to stop watching passively as our lives go by, to stop whatever we're so busily doing for one moment, and... think. Just think.

So that's why I think it's not only advisable but in fact essential that as writers you keep doing what you're doing, published or unpublished. And if not for us, then do it for yourselves. Even if your work touches just one soul, it's worth it. And maybe that one soul just happens to be your own.

Book Recommendations from 2009 for 2010

2009-12-20T12:48:00.002-05:00

I've never liked year-end top ten lists, though I'm a sucker for looking at them, because it seems strange to me that good films, books, albums should occur in multiples of ten. What's so special about the number ten that causes newspapers to make a festish of it every year?

With books, this practice seems more than a little suspect given that no one can possibly have read all the books that have come out in a certain year and from those select the ten "best." Therefore, I'd just like to note a few books I read in 2009 (where they were published in that year or not) which gave me pleasure:

1. The Big Sleep and Lady in the Lake by Raymond Chandler: This guy knows his way around a metaphor like few writers I've seen. I love the plots, I love the worlds he creates, but above all I love hard-bitten, wisecracking Philip Marlowe.

2. Lake Overturn by Vestal McIntyre: A fun, old-fashioned, Dickensian style novel bursting with characters and incidents.

3. Reading Jesus by Mary Gordon: A chance to explore the New Testament with a stirring and sensitive reader.

4. Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton: The first half of this book is a devastating take down of our obsession with status. The second half, in which de Botton advises us on how to deal with the problem of status, is not as strong as the first.

5. Don't Cry by Mary Gaitskill: Why this book wasn't more celebrated is beyond me, especially since it so radically outshines other clunkier efforts (like the new Lorrie Moore novel) to capture the tragedies of the Bush era. Stylistically and emotionally, a triumph.

6. The Scenic Route by Binnie Kirshenbaum: A former teacher of mine and a wonderful, wry stylist, Kirshenbaum creates a vivid profile of a passive life.

7. A Friend of the Family by Lauren Grodstein: Lauren is also a friend of mine, but trust me, this book well rewards your reading. It's a gripping emotional thriller about a man determined to protect his son to a fault. Read this book.

8. Unaccustomed Earth and The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri: Lahiri's first book, Interpreter of Maladies left me baffled about all the praise it received. Her second two have made me a believer. I can't think of another contemporary author who musters so much sympathy for her characters. I loved these two books.

9. The Believers by Zoe Heller: I read this in one day. Heller makes you care about her characters, even if you don't particularly like them.

10. Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama: Whatever you think of the politician, you have to be impressed by the writer. A surprisingly naked and moving self-portrait.

11. Perfume by Patrick Susskind: A terrific ode to the senses, with many beautiful passages.

12. The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain: The kind of book you dip in and out of rather than read cover to cover. The anti-European bias is unintentionally hilarious and a fascinating portrait of American reverse snobbery when it's offensive.

13. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh: I've read it before, but I reread it this year. What a strange book! The first half is one of the most beautiful portraits of young love I've ever read. The second half is a lame apology for it.

That's it for now. I'd love to hear from other people about books they enjoyed...

This is Just to Say...

2009-12-11T22:49:00.002-05:00

I'm busy as hell right now with the end of the semester, but I thought I'd leave a quick note to say I've been immersing myself in the novels of Raymond Chandler and they are indeed, delicious...

I Like You, You Like Me, We're a Happy Family

2009-11-02T13:22:00.003-05:00

If there's one word I'm sick of hearing in a literary context, it's "likable." Then again, maybe I'm sick of hearing it in any context.

Remember when it was fashionable for political pundits to say that the reason Bush Jr. was elected was because he was more "likable" than his opponents, Al Gore and John Kerry? Or in the last campaign, when Hillary Clinton was accused of the grave charge of not being "likable." It seems a little odd to me that one of the standards for being elected leader of the free world should be "likability," but if that is a measure voters are using, then it's a tendency to be decried, rather than analyzed.

Or, on a much more mundane level, imagine if a friend came up to you and said, "I just wanted to tell you, you're really likable." Would you take that as a compliment? Would you even know how to interpret such a remark? One possible response: "Gee, thanks for telling me that it's possible, even probable, that people like me."

And yet, in literary criticism, it's become accepted, even fashionable, for readers, critics, and editors to routinely charge writers with the crime of creating characters who are "unlikable." Forgive me for thinking that my job as a writer was to create characters with distinct and recognizable traits, characters with lifelike complexity, characters who do and say memorable things. No, it turns out that what writers are really supposed to do is create characters with whom a reader might like to split a salad with at lunch. Or, rather, we're supposed to create characters whom editors in New York imagine that readers in such exotic locales as St. Louis, Chicago, or Seattle might like to split a salad with at lunch.

In the past few months, I've read three novels by Raymond Chandler and The Education of Hyman Kaplan by Leo Rosten, and reread A Passage to India by E. M. Forster. These books all had two qualities in common. First, they were brilliant works of literature that were fun and absorbing to read. Second, they featured oodles of characters who could not be called "likable." Coincidence? I think not.

If I want an agreeable lunch partner, I'll call up one of my friends. If I want to read a great novel, the last thing I'll do at the bookstore is scan the jacket copy as if it were a personal ad in the hopes that the characters might be plausible BFF candidates. In fact, what I'm often looking for is quite the opposite.

In life, I would not want to hang out with Philip Marlowe, Hyman Kaplan, or Miss Quested and Dr. Aziz. They'd probably be too much to take after a short while. But in literature, I get the chance to spend time in their company for as long or as little as I wish and whenever I wish, without the burdens of courtesy, comparing schedules, remembering birthdays, etc. Furthermore, the authors who've created these characters have done me the favor of excluding the un-interesting parts of their lives and saving all the interesting stuff for the page. And I'd rather have unlikable and interesting than likable and boring.

I guess what it comes down to is that I read to expand my knowledge of the universe, not to confirm what I already know. As I open each new book I read, my hope is that I will get to observe people and places and storylines that I may not come across in my daily routine. If all I wanted were the latter, I could always go on Facebook.

Yom Kippur Reflections

2009-09-29T15:25:00.002-04:00

One of the many things I like about the synagogue where I attend High Holiday Services is the fact that the rabbi opens services by giving us permission to let our attention lag. That's right, if we find ourselves getting bored during prayers and find ourselves daydreaming, reading ahead through the prayer book, even dozing off, we have our rabbi's blessing.

The idea here is not to indulge the ever-diminishing attention spans of a contemporary congregation, but in fact to give our minds some valuable time to pause and breathe between moments of pious contemplation.

During one of these moments, I happened to read through some of the anecdotes printed in my book, and I came across one that I found particularly inspiring. A prophet goes to the city of Sodom to try to get its citizens to change their evil ways. Predictably, he has no success. Still, he keeps preaching. A child goes up to the prophet and asks why he bothers, since there's no sign he'll ever succeed and getting the Sodomites to reform themselves. "At first I did it to try to get others to change their ways," says the prophet. "Now, I do it so that I don't change my ways."

This story is the perfect analogy for being an artist at a time when the arts are hurting, not just for money, but also for passionate and discerning audiences. Why write, paint, act, dance, compose, on and on, when there is so little hope of being read or watched or listened to? In order to preserve one's soul from getting sucked into the vapid wasteland otherwise known as our contemporary culture. Every minute I'm working on a book, story, or essay is a minute I'm not spending answering the latest Facebook poll, researching the lives of John and Kate (whoever they are), or downloading some useless "app" for my iPhone. Every precious minute I'm sitting quietly reading a book, I'm not checking email, watching TV, or doing some other activity that feeds my candylike craving for instant gratification, but leaves my soul to starve.

Leaving Umbria

2009-09-04T04:24:00.002-04:00

I've been living next to a castle in Umbria for a month, but now my time here is drawing to a close. For the most part it's been a wonderful remove from daily life, though thanks to the Internet, I haven't found it possible to be totally removed.

Aside from a few pounds, I've gained the chance to take a deep breath and hit the "reset" button in my life. As a writer, I find that sometimes it's easy to get lost in the minutiae of editing words or sentences, or the latest ups and downs that are the inevitable condition of an artistic career.

So what's it all about? What's it really all about? Here's my latest guess.

When I was a kid, I used to go down to the basement and act out stories, performed by my stuffed animals. Today, I do the same thing, though generally without the stuffed animals. As a kid, I didn't worry about whether I'd sell my stories, whether they'd be favorably reviewed, or in what quantities they'd be sold. These are the illusions that come with adulthood, because you feel that as an adult, you don't have the right to play. In fact, you do have a right to play, just not the right to expect that anyone else cares.

And so as I move forward with my writing, the one thing I want to focus on is preserving as much as possible that sense of play. We play not only because it amuses us but also because it defines us, shapes our experience, transforms life's inexplicability and randomness into bite-sized morsels of order and beauty.

We know all this without having it taught to us when we're kids. Now as adults, we have to learn it all over again.

An Italian Adventure

2009-08-07T10:14:00.003-04:00

I'm about to leave for a month's adventure in Umbria, Italy. I was lucky enough to receive a fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, which gives writers, artists, and musicians a chance to live for six weeks in an Italian castle in the countryside between Rome and Florence. You can check it out at: www.civitella.org

After working on a novel set in Berlin, I'm ready to begin doing a little groundwork for a new project set in Italy, filled with sunshine and pasta. However, writing an Italian story presents its own challenges, namely, that it's been done thousands of times before. Usually the story involves uptight fair-skinned people from northern countries coming to Italy and losing their inhibitions. I'll be looking for some way to give that story a new spin.

When I tell people I'm going to Umbria, they usually give me a blank look. Today, Umbria is probably best known for three things: 1) Perugia chocolates 2) the truffle 3) "Foxy Knoxy" a.k.a. American exchange student Amanda Knox, who was accused of murder and is right now languishing in jail while the Italian court system takes its summer vacation.

Sadly, my partner has to stay home for this trip, but his spirit will be with me, inspiring me, teaching me, encouraging me, as always. In the meantime, I'll be posting my impressions on this site, so stay tuned...

Shocking News

2009-08-03T14:38:00.002-04:00

Last week, a madman dressed in black entered a gay youth club and began shooting. As a result, two are dead, including a sixteen-year-old girl.

It's heartening (if it's possible to use such a term in connection with such a tragedy) to see the uniform condemnation of this heinous act from so many different levels of Israeli society. I wish that the sources of some of these same voices, such as that of the religious Shas Party leader Eli Yishay, had thought about the consequences of their words when they earlier described gay people with words like "sick," "perverse," and "filth."

Many of the accounts of the tragedy describe Israelis' sense of shock in reaction to the shootings. In reality, however, there is nothing shocking about this story. It is in fact the logical result of a long history of hate, intolerance, and worse, indifference that has been taking place not only in Israel but around the world. It's gratifying that old prejudices of all stripes are on the wane, but tragedies like this one remind us they haven't died entirely, that in fact, hatred dies hard.

I'm not just talking about anti-gay prejudice. Think of some of the ridiculous amped-up rhetoric used lately to describe President Obama. (Glenn Beck, if you're listening, this one's for you.) Think of the insulting treatment of Judge Sonia Sotomayor before the Senate Judiciary Committee, during which Senator Lindsey Graham had the nerve to deliver a lecture on manners to a middle-aged woman based solely on anonymous comments about her made online. (Perhaps Senator Graham also ought to be held publicly accountable for every stray rumor about HIS personal life that have made online.) Think of Dr. George Tiller, assassinated for the crime of carrying out legal medical procedures.

When will we learn the difference between attacking ideas versus attacking people? The answer: when we learn that words matter. Rhetoric matters. Attacking people with words leads to attacking them with fists, knives, and as was so regrettably the case in Israel last weekend, bullets.

Michael Jackson and Me

2009-06-26T11:34:00.002-04:00

When I was nine, I remember a classmate of mine brought into school a 45 single of a song I'd never heard before by a singer I didn't know. The song was "Billie Jean" by Michael Jackson.

My ignorance was soon rectified. Jackson's Thriller album was not just popular; it was a necessity like food, shelter, clothing. Or rather, a fact of life, like air, water, and earth. It was just there, inescapable, immovable, irresistible.

Though I knew the entire cassette by heart, and I had images of Michael Jackson on buttons and posters all around my room, had seen all of his videos several times and repeatedly practiced the "Beat It" dance moves in my backyard though never learned them, I knew almost nothing about Jackson the man. I had never heard his speaking voice. I had never listened to his previous solo record Off the Wall, and was only remotely aware of his career as a child star because a new group called New Edition was being touted as "the next Jackson Five." In fact, I knew almost nothing about him other than his image from his videos and megahit album. He wore sequined jackets. He sang and danced better than anyone alive. And he was shy.

Being shy myself, I became desperately infatuated with Jackson. I deeply coveted his zipper jacket from the Beat It video, which a lot of the boys in school were wearing. However, because it cost forty bucks, my parents were initially reluctant to buy it for me. Unfortunately, by the time they finally broke down and got me one, it had gone out of style. I wore it exactly twice. The second time, I was in a store and I saw two kids pointing at me and snickering, "Look, he's wearing the Michael Jackson jacket."

I dreamed of meeting Jackson, perhaps by writing him an eloquent fan letter that would so move him, that he would invite me to his ranch at Neverland to become his best friend. We'd watch movies together, go on rides, play with the animals in his zoo, have sleepovers. He'd dedicate a song to me. He would love me. I even wrote an unfinished story about our adventures called "Me and Michael," that I felt sure would get his attention.

Thankfully my fantasy never came true, as it did for other young playmates of a troubled grown man who'd formed a profoundly unhealthy attachment to childhood. Though never found guilty in a court of law of his actions, Jackson horribly betrayed the trust of these boys who looked to their idol for friendship and comfort. For this reason, much as I appreciate his music and career achievements, I cannot cry for the man who died yesterday or feel sad that he's gone. Furthermore, I find it nauseating that so many people, in their rush to participate in the orgy of celebrity glorification that defines our culture, are eager to whitewash this man's loathsome legacy. I wonder if these same people might also shed tears for the deaths of their local child molesters who aren't famous and don't have Grammys and gold albums to distract from their unsavory acts.

How Do You Write a Novel?

2009-06-23T17:38:00.002-04:00

Gee, I wish I knew, so I could sell my advice in bottles. Still, in an attempt to answer that question, I'm going to be teaching a workshop addressing novel-writing at the Stonecoast MFA program next month.

The idea behind the class is that the traditional workshop, while good for getting at what's wrong with a story or an individual novel chapter, is not ideally suited toward fixing what can go wrong with a project that spans two to three hundred pages. A workshop can't usually handle manuscripts that are more than twenty pages. Consequently, workshopping novel excerpts tends to lead to somewhat frustrating conversations that usually involve the author chiming in, "Well, if you'd read Chapter Five, you'd know that..."

To get around this dilemma, I've asked the students to provide what I'm calling "samples" rather than excerpts from their work. The idea is to get a sense of the whole from a part, rather than examine the scenes at hand as if they were stand-alone pieces. I've also asked students to provide a description of their projects, an outline of the major plot developments organized under the rubrics of "Beginning," "Middle," and "End," and a list of their major questions. Finally, I've asked the students to read two short novels and think about how they're structured.

When we meet next month, my plan is to work with exercises that get students to thinking about their books as a whole, rather than a series of scenes. The course will be divided into four themed days, in which discussion of student work will be interspersed with exercises on Plot, Character, Line-Editing & Setting, and finally, Getting Your Work Out into the World. I'm also hoping that as we go along, students will give me ideas for teaching tools that suit the longer form of the novel rather than a story or a scene.

I'm excited about this new venture, which I hope may eventually provide a useful model for the future...

Kindling

2009-06-03T14:07:00.003-04:00

A few years ago, when I met people and told them I was a writer, the first question they asked me was, "What have you written?"

Today, their face lights up with a big smile, and they say, "Oh, have you tried the new Kindle?"

The answer I say out loud is no. The answer I'm thinking is, completely not interested.

Somehow I have a feeling that the electronic revolution we've been promised in the book industry may be more of a whimper than a roar. It's not like digital music, where an iPod or digital music player improves upon the existing technology. Remember the days of carrying around a portable CD player? (Let alone a walkman!)

Books, by contrast, are a technology that's already been perfected. They never skip between tracks or run out of battery power. They're easy to carry (at least paperbacks are), the right size and shape to hold in your hand, affordable. If you lose one, you can easily buy another. The only advantage I can see to replacing an actual book with a Kindle is that the Kindle can hold many books at one time, replacing an entire library.

I suppose carrying a library with you everywhere you go is a useful thing when you're going about your day and you're struck by a sudden urge to check a passage in Howards End, and another from Ulysses, and another from Pride and Prejudice. Or maybe you're a voracious reader who likes to make sure to have a back-up book at the ready just in case you finish the one you're reading.

But I never find myself in these situations. If I want a book, I'm perfectly happy to stroll to my neighborhood bookstore and buy it or order it and wait for it to come later. I have time. I can wait. Reading is an activity that cultivates patience and quiet reflection. It is not like the quick fix of ordering a song on iTunes. In fact, reading a book is the perfect antidote to the extremes of our Internet-driven age, when we buzz about like electrons with our websites and text messages and all the rest.

For those of you who want or own a Kindle, God bless you. But as for me, I don't want to replace my library with a screen. The books on my shelves are beautiful. They are covered in thumbprints, scrawled notes, food stains. The pages are dogeared, the covers wrinkled. They sit above my desk and wait for me. And when I have a few moments, I choose one, sit in a quiet corner, open the covers, and begin to read.

The Joy of Not Knowing Everything

2009-05-14T09:40:00.002-04:00

I am in the not unique position of both teaching and practicing creative writing. An obvious questions emerges: Do I practice what I preach?

Almost every day when I sit down to write, I feel a heavy nostalgia for the days when I was in school and I had fellow students and mentors I could pull aside and ask for help whenever I felt stuck. (Of course at the time it didn't feel like nirvana. In fact, I felt anxious to get out of school and become a Published Author as quickly as possible.)

But then it occurred to me: I am a teacher. In numerous classes, I disseminate advice, exercise, quotes from famous writers on writing, anecdotes of my and other writers' experiences, all to encourage students. Yet there are times when I need a little encouragement too, and I'm currently writing without a teacher to guide me.

So why not be my own mentor and encourager-in-chief?

I began by doing some of the exercises I give others: character quizzes, freewriting on a theme, setting questionnaires. I plucked several of the craft guides on my shelf, which I bought to help me guide others, and reread the sections on character. As I read fiction by others (I've just finished three extraordinary new books: The Believers by Zoe Heller, Don't Cry by Mary Gaitskill, and Lake Overturn by Vestal McIntyre), I paid special attention to the way the writers constructed their stories, characters, and settings, even though I don't have a class to report back to about my findings.

The most important lesson of all that I've learned through teaching is to forgive myself for my mistakes, for my utterly wretched passages of ugly prose, for my laziness at times, for my stubbornness in refusing to confront a sticky paragraph or troubling feeling on the part of a character. Though we as writers have to play God, we are not God. Maybe it's that rude disjunction that makes every writer I know feel like an impostor.

Nowhere do I feel more like an impostor, however, in the classroom, where I sit mandarinlike at the head of a table and tell other people what they ought to do. In reality, there's so much left for me to learn about this business. And that comforts me, because in that knowledge gap, I know, lies the potential for my greatest achievements, the ones of which I don't yet know that I'm capable.

Some Good News about the Book Biz

2009-04-23T14:18:00.002-04:00

It's so easy to feel gloomy about the prospects of book publishing these days, I thought I'd pass along a few notes of encouragement.

1. Apparently, while most other industries are tanking as a result of the Bush/Cheney Economic Depression, the book business has actually flatlined, having found its bottom a while ago. It seems that we've hit a bedrock of readers who despite the bad economic news aren't willing to give up their literary habits. Which is quite an inspiring and wonderful thing. Let's keep it up! (Indie Book-buying day is May 1st, by the way, which means everyone who reads this post should visit their local independent bookstore or online retailer and buy a book on the 1st.)

2. I was at a reading Sunday night featuring Ira Sher, Joanna Smith Rakoff, and Stacey D'Erasmo at KGB Bar. I was talking to D'Erasmo afterward, who reminded me that A) She and I were not the only two people on the planet who care deeply about books and reading. B) Publishing may be going through a painful period of transition, but it's a transition that could lead to some wonderful new way of getting books and writing into the hands of readers, a way that we hadn't previously imagined.

3. I was given an article by Robert Darnton, from the New York Review of Books, talking about the fate of libraries in the digital age. It pointed out that while the media for transmitting the written word have changed throughout the ages, the written word itself has not disappeared. Also, though books are increasingly being read in digital form, the sheer number of books that have existed and will exist over time is so vast that even the considerable resources of Google are not enough to encompass them all. Which means that the book still has an important and viable future.

It's rough out there, to be sure, but not apocalyptic.

What's it All For?

2009-04-03T18:04:00.003-04:00

One of my creative writing students recently asked me a very important question. In this age when fewer and fewer people are reading, when publishing only gets harder, and when writing doesn't get any easier, what's the point?

I often ask myself the same thing.

Recently the poet Patricia Smith came to visit my story writing class at Barnard, and she gave me a few ideas to help answer this question.

First, she said that in an increasingly chaotic and stressful world, the act of writing is the one thing she can trust, a life preserver that helps her to find comfort and guidance.

She also told the story of when she first began performing in poetry slams, when she would channel the voice of various characters from her life. After one of these performances, a member of the audience came up to her to say, "That was me! You got me!"

This made me think of David Foster Wallace, who said that the point of writing was that it helped people to feel a little less alone in the world.

My feeling is that the purpose of writing, if there is a purpose to it which is a debate in itself, is both inward and outward. When you write fiction, you take your innermost thoughts and feeling and try to communicate them to others. And yet the point of this process of clarifying yourself for other people is to get to know yourself. If other people benefit from it, great for them. It's an added bonus. The danger comes, however, when you come to count on others' approval and it becomes the motivation and guiding principle for what you do.

Sort of weird, but the best way I know how to put it.

Those Weird Brits

2009-03-06T21:17:00.003-05:00

The past week I read two weird works of literature by British authors: Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh and The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnhim. Both are wonderful in their own ways, and deeply flawed.

Brideshead begins as a breathless love story between two Oxford students in pre-World War II England. Waugh, who was mostly known as a satirist, forsakes irony for lush, sensitive prose that details the blossoming relationship between Charles Ryder, an emotionally stunted man learning to love for the first time, and the free-spirited Sebastian Flyte, who increasingly depends on alcohol to help him escape the realities of life.

About midway through the novel, however, the story takes a strange turn as Sebastian drops out of it. We watch, confused, as Charles gets married, then has an adulterous affair with Sebastian's sister (who just happens to bear a resemblance to Sebastian himself). I kept wanting to ask, Waugh, what are you doing? You've just wrapped me up in this vivid story of first love, and now you want me to swallow this crap about Charles being in love with a woman without any explanation? Is this meant to be parable of sublimated male sexual desire? Clearly not, as Waugh simply moves Charles from man-love to woman-love like a chess player castling his king with his rook.

By the end of the novel, the meaning of it twists in on itself so completely that I felt angry as I read the book's bizarre, opaque last few pages. The only interpretation that makes sense to me is that Waugh didn't realize he was writing a love story between two men and that the conventions of the heterosexual love story just don't convince for the characters he'd created.

The Enchanted April takes a similarly strange turn. It begins as a wickedly witty satire of the lives of put-upon housewives in England. Their lot is so devastatingly well-rendered that when the housewives arrive in sunny Italy for a vacation from their husbands, we're thrilled... as well as mystified by their decision to invite their husbands to join them. Von Arnhim, I guess, is trying to make some kind of point about the redemptive powers of love and beauty, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not quite so forgiving nor so gullible to believe that if your husband's been treating you like shit for twenty years, a day in Portofino is all he needs to change his ways.

Perhaps the strangest thing about these two books is that in spite of (or perhaps because of) their flaws, I've been thinking of them since I put them down, which is more than I can say for a number of polite, nicely crafted works of fiction that have as much tang and bite as a bowl of melted jello.

The Origin of Genius

2009-02-15T16:19:00.003-05:00

This year, I've made a resolution to finally get to all those books that have been sitting on my shelf for years. At last, I've tackled Pnin by Nabokov, Shosha by Isaac Bashevis Singer, and a whole host of other curios I've been meaning to get to for ten years.

The latest book I've knocked off is a biography of Jane Austen by Claire Tomlin. I picked it up initially for the same reason I think most of us are curious about Jane Austen. We wonder, how is it possible that someone with so little experience of life, education, and romance could write such thrilling and perceptive works that rank among the greatest in our language? What's the secret?

After finishing the book, I got a better idea of Austen's artistic journey. Her private life was fairly uneventful, even typical for a woman of her class in 18th and early 19th century England. Her first novel, an early draft of Pride and Prejudice titled First Impressions, was turned down by a publisher after less than a week than it had been submitted. It took her a little less than two decades between the time she started writing Pride and Prejudice to get it published. After years of toil in private (which contrary to myth, she did not hide under blotting paper for fear that unexpected guests might discover what she was up to), Austen managed to find a publisher through a family connection, who grudgingly took Sense and Sensibility on commission. The modest success of that book started her career. However, even Jane Austen had to switch publishers; after the disappointing sales figures of Mansfield Park, the novel Emma was not considered justification enough for her first publisher to take a chance on one more.

Lessons here? Patience and perseverance foremost. Being a writer is an act of faith in any age, but even more so for a woman in Austen's time. Second, Austen's life and work proves Flannery O'Connor's observation that any writer has gathered enough "life material" for an entire career by the age of five. You don't need to have sailed around the world or hunted big game in Africa or any of the other things people do today to write great stories. Another observation: Rejection is the norm in a writer's life, and some cases, is mighty helpful. If rejection caused Austen to turn First Impressions into the masterpiece that is Pride and Prejudice, then what a fortunate rejection!

But perhaps the greatest lesson I take from Austen's story is that genius is just genius. Austen didn't need an MFA program to bring out her talent. She simply had a knack for putting words on paper in a way that made people want to read them for centuries. On the other hand, without her commitment to getting her work done and sticking to her dream of writing in the face of some pretty daunting odds, that genius would not have flowered into her six beautiful books.

Bye-bye, Bush! 1.19.09

2009-01-19T11:07:00.003-05:00

For almost four years now, since the depressing result of the `04 election, I've been wearing a pin on my backpack that says simply "1.20.09." Now that that wonderful day of liberation is finally at hand, I've been doing a few things to mark the occasion.

On Friday night, my partner and I hosted a Bye-bye, Bush party. We served pretzels, hung an image of Bush to throw shoes at, handed out Bushisms, offered guests the chance to write down their least favorite moments of the past presidency (to shred) as well as their hopes for the new Obama administration.

This weekend I also watched a documentary called No End in Sight, which lays out exactly how the Bushies got us into the quagmire of Iraq. What was so staggering about watching this film was to see obvious misstep after obvious misstep committed by the president and his top advisors, none of whom had actually served in a war. The incompetence was so pervasive, it was actually impressive. No wonder this is also the president who presided over the Katrina mess, the economic meltdown, the ballooning of the deficit, etc., etc.

And I read the novel Election by Tom Perrotta, which has no explicit link to this day, but is damned funny and a good read. (You may have seen the film with Reese Witherspoon and Matthew Broderick.) Why is it that so many literary novels are written at such a soporific pace? Why can't they be bright, funny, and smart like Tom Perrotta's writing? Instead so many of these books have this somber, earnest tone, trudging from one carefully chosen word to the next. Nothing ever happens. Everything gets described. People, about whom we couldn't care less, say things. Ruminations unfold. You get the picture.

Finally, I made a donation to the Human Rights Campaign to help them fight for gay equality. Consider it my personal tribute to Rick Warren, Tim Kaine, and a host of others.

A few people I know have remarked on how silly the coverage of the transition has become. The Obama Express! The Obama concert! The Obama dildo! (No, I didn't make up that last one.) Well, maybe we're due for a little euphoria. It's been a long eight years of the American people having an enemy in the White House.

This weekend I removed the "1.20.09" pin from my backpack. I don't need to wear it anymore.

That Thing You Do in Maine

2009-01-13T13:26:00.002-05:00

For the past couple of years, I've been on the faculty of a low-residency MFA program in Maine called Stonecoast. The concept of a "low-residency" MFA has proven to be baffling to several of my family members and friends, who tend to refer to it as "that thing you do in Maine."

Actually, the whole concept of the low-res MFA is pretty straightforward and makes a good deal of sense given the solitary nature of the act of writing. Twice a year, students and faculty converge on the low-res program's headquarters (which for some reason often tends to be in New England). For about ten days, they engage in a mad dash of workshops, seminars, lectures, and readings. Then for six months, they return to their respective corners of the country and work on their own. This is done in conjunction with a "mentor" who once a month monitors their progress via the "packet," a compilation of that month's creative and expository output.

The low-res approach has its distinct advantages. First of all, a grad student is probably more likely to develop a close relationship with his or her faculty at a low-res program. Second, the costs of a low-res program tend to be less than in a traditional program (which for some reason is never referred to as a "high residency program"). Third, the sense of competition among students, which sometimes characterizes traditional programs with its weekly writing workshops, has less opportunity to develop in low-res programs. Finally, a low-residency option is a great vehicle for students who don't want to give up their day jobs to devote themselves exclusively to their graduate studies. (And given the current publishing climate, holding on to a day job sounds like a pretty smart idea.)

The downsides? In a traditional program, you may feel less connected to the faculty, but you may also develop a stronger bond with your fellow students. Also, if you go to a traditional program based in New York City, for example, you may have a greater opportunity to make connections and network with editors, agents, and writers. And then of course there is that sort of glazed look of misunderstanding when you try to explain the idea of a "low-residency" MFA to the uninitiated. To those who aren't in the know, the idea of the low-res MFA may sound like getting a degree from the Sears Roebuck catalog in days of yore.

As a teacher who dabbles in leading traditional workshops as well as mentoring, I find that students of each program are highly curious about their counterparts and what they're missing out on by choosing one route or the other. (Though I think that in reality, either approach is effective as long as your program has a strong faculty and you as the student are motivated to make the most of your experience by taking an active role in your education.) Which leads me to wonder, could it be that in the future, a hybrid low-residency-traditional MFA program that features the best of both worlds will somehow emerge?

Stay tuned...

The Rick Warren Affair

2008-12-23T10:36:00.002-05:00

A quick note:

I agree with Richard Cohen's column in today's Washington Post (12/23/08) that Obama's failure to cancel his invitation to Rick Warren to deliver the benediction at the Inauguration constitutes a moral failure. The reason people don't think it's such a big deal and want gays to "get over it" is that they think anti-gay slurs are more acceptable than anti-Jewish slurs or anti-black slurs or anti-almost anything slurs. Just to be clear, Rick Warren has repeated the age-old canard of comparing gays to pedophiles. If our future president wants to thank Warren for having him at his church, Obama could invite the portly evangelical to visit him for tea and sumptuous spread of doughnuts in the White House or he could visit Warren's church once more as president or better yet send him a note on pretty stationary. But he should not and must not defile the Inauguration ceremony, which as Rachel Maddow noted belongs to all Americans and not Obama personally, by honoring the unchristian pastor in this way.

I'm particularly disturbed by this choice because I am one of many gay Americans who voted with their money, time, voices, and feet for this man we so passionately believed was the correct choice in November (and in my case also during the primary season), only to see that in December Obama has displayed a striking and unfortunate tendency to reward his enemies better than his friends. (To those keeping score, number of Republicans in his cabinet: 2, number of gays: 0). Now I'm starting to wonder, maybe Hillary Clinton was the best choice after all.

To be continued...

Thou Shalt Not Speak Ill of Other Writers' Books

2008-12-22T09:20:00.002-05:00

Given the current state of publishing, the unofficial writer's commandment of only saying nice things about other people's books would seem more important than ever. Yet it's also a bit false to the truth of one's reading experience. For every book I read with excitement (which this year includes Someday This Pain May be Useful to You by Peter Cameron, several novels by Margaret Atwood, The Slave by isaac Bashevis Singer) there are at least ten more that were just so-so, or even dreadful.

My private benchmark for fiction is my limited bookshelf space. After moving from one cramped New York apartment to another several times, I realized quickly there was no point in keeping books that for whatever reason didn't mean something to me. So now as I read, I keep a pile of books to give away. Some of the books that make that pile aren't necessarily bad. In fact, a few might be fairly good, like Being Dead by Jim Crace, which I found well-written, sort of interesting, just a little glib, a bit too facile for my taste. I can't justify a place for it on my shelf between two gay writers named Cooper (Dennis and Bernard), each with dazzlingly original styles, and John Dalton's novel Heaven Lake, a fascinating trip to China.

Other books that weren't awful, but didn't make the cut: two Narnia books by C. S. Lewis, which I bought at a used bookstore after seeing the film version of Prince Caspian motivated me to reread the entire series. Lewis is a terrific writer and a lot of fun, though a bit creepy to read when you realize the religious propaganda going on in the background. All in all, good, but not necessary rereading like L. Frank Baum's Oz series or Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House in the Prairie books.

I'm also shedding Le Divorce by Diane Johnson, a book with some scattered wit and a completely preposterous plot that was inexplicably nominated for a National Book Award. Speaking of award-winners, Johnson's in good company with the turgid Pulitzer-prize-honored Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. I'm not quite sure what it is that people like about this book. It's flat, lifeless, written in the clean prose of a high school English textbook on composition. "But that's just the point!" exclaim the book's defenders. "It's a masterpiece of tone!" That's right, it's supposed to be boring. (Not that I'm against flat, dry affect, which works so well in the novels Stoner by John Williams, or Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell)

On the flipside, there's My Holocaust by Tova Reich, which suffers from the opposite problem. It's got too much going on. The book's characters are so cartoonish they might as well speak in balloons, kind of like the illustrations in Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, which also made my pile for being a one-note joke that got old after the first hundred pages.

Why take the time to speak ill of one's fellow writers, especially when so few people are buying books? First of all, it should not be bad form to say you didn't like or love another person's book. It's a necessary part of our cultural dialogue. Secondly, if we want to resuscitate the book business, encouraging people to buy any book that gets a good review or wins a prize is not the way to do it. Just as we passionately recommend the books we love, occasionally it's worth a little of our time to steer readers away from books we don't think can do them much good. Generally, I try to avoid negative critique (except when it comes to Republican politicians or so-called holy men like Rick Warren who espouse noxious opinions more worthy of Pontius Pilate than Christ). But every once in a while, a little venting helps to keep us honest.

How to Survive the Economic Crisis

2008-12-04T11:05:00.003-05:00

While we're all worried about our 401k's (if we have them) and the future of our jobs (if we have them), there's little we can do to affect the economic downturn. However, we can take steps to protect ourselves, specifically, by spending less on frivolous expenses, such as entertainment. Now's a good time to stop shelling out ten bucks a pop to go to movies, to cancel our netflix memberships, to stop downloading music from iTunes, to play the video games we already have instead of buying new ones, etc., etc., etc.

However, just as it's a mistake to stop investing for retirement when the stock market is low, it's also a mistake to stop reading and buying books to save money when times are tight. Now more than ever, we ought to turn to literature for inspiration and salvation. Watching a dumb action movie only leaves you worn out and numb. Listening to some pop song by the likes of Beyonce only reminds you of the difference between her lifestyle and yours. Reading a great work of literature, however, can make you smarter and entertain you at the same time. Supporting the publishing industry at this time can also help to ensure the continuity of our national culture and intellectual life.

Below, I've made a list of book recommendations that seem appropriate for our current recessionary conditions:

1. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy. You think you've got it bad because you can only afford one new manicure a month instead of two? Read this guy's story and you'll never feel bad about yourself again!

2. Babbit by Sinclair Lewis. Money's not everything, you know, as this razor-sharp satire of the American bourgeoisie makes loud and clear.

3. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. In this novel, Atwood imagines the following nightmare scenario: America run by an oligarchy of right-wing religious whack-jobs. A bit like the Bush administration, only permanent and with no checks on its power. Thankfully, in real life, we had the good sense this time around to elect Barack Obama to fix what ails our country.

4. The Assistant by Bernard Malamud. This story of a hard luck grocer struggling to get by reminds us that as human beings, we can't escape suffering in our lives, but that suffering has the potential to enlarge and ennoble our spirits.

5. Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill. You know things are pretty tough when all you've got left to sell is yourself. These are fierce, sometimes brutal stories of sex and desperation.

6. Waiting by Ha Jin. As we wait for this economic downturn to pass, read this story about a guy who waits decades to marry, or even to have sex with the woman he loves. Now there's patience for you.

Other ideas? Let's hear them!

Reading Sarah Palin

2008-10-03T13:04:00.002-04:00

For now, let's set aside the question of whether she's qualified to be president. What I'm concerned about is whether any candidate for public office ought to be allowed to get away with such atrocious grammar and syntax.

There was once a time in American life, both public and private, when the ability to speak clearly and coherently was considered a valuable asset, even a necessity. But in today's parlance of "OMG!" "BFF!" and the blood-curdling ":)," anything goes. It doesn't matter how you express yourself, it seems, as long as you, well, you know, kind of get across the sort of general idea of what you're trying to say, you know what I mean. Don't you?

But as George Orwell argued so persuasively in his essay "Politics and the English Language," how you say what you say is inextricably with what you mean. If you can't express your thoughts clearly, it's a sign that either A) you're not thinking or B) you don't want your listener to know what you're thinking.

In Sarah Palin's case, both interpretations are true simultaneously. Any human being with even the most rudimentary sensitivity to language who listens to her addle-headed patter ought to be able to detect the complete vacuity behind her words. Yes, I know, that big ole meanie Katie Couric made cute little Sarah all confused with all that grown-up talk. How spectacularly unfair. And John McCain's macho Washington insider handlers just wouldn't "let Sarah be Sarah." Yes, that's why in response to a question about which newspapers specifically Sarah reads, the good governor replied that she read any of them.

Last night in her vice-presidential debate, commentators commended Ms. Palin on her ability to form sentences. Nice work. I'm happy for her. But the question we need to ask is not whether she can form sentences, but what are the quality of those sentences, in terms of language used, the arrangement of that language, and finally the meaning behind that language. Yes, language was present last night, but what that language means in terms of specific policy, is anyone's guess. Which was exactly the point.

But goshdarnit, wasn't she a cutie-patootie!

David Foster Wallace

2008-09-15T13:47:00.002-04:00

Of the seven deadly sins, envy is probably the most common to writers. It's a condition that becomes particularly acute when one of us (usually young and cute) is anointed as the Next Big Thing in American Letters. Some recent examples: Jonathan Safran Foer, Curtis Sittenfeld, Marissa Pessl, Nell Freudenberger, the list goes on.

I don't remember much of this kind of griping, however, when David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest was released in the mid-nineties. Certainly there were a lot of jokes about the book's heft, as well as critical debate about just how successful the book was as a whole (as there would be about every one of Wallace's books). Yet there was no denying the guy's talent line by line. There was certainly no denying his intelligence.

And of course, the humor. There have been many postmodern writers who've exploded their prose with pictures, quizzes, footnotes, and any manner of non-traditional stylistic devices. But few did it with such charm and acute comic timing as Wallace, who in the end, may not have produced as seminal a work as the masterpieces of his idol, Thomas Pynchon, yet whose writing was a hell of a lot more fun to read.

Only a week ago, I was teaching an excerpt from Wallace's well-known essay A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, a satire of cruise ship culture, which embodied the best of Wallace's strengths (as enumerated above) as well as the worst of his weaknesses (chief among them, an almost pathological inability to restrain himself). In fact, reading Wallace's work is like being on a cruise: you can get pleasured to death. Or to use another metaphor I'm sure Wallace would have appreciated, immersing yourself in Wallace's work is like entering the Orgasmatron that nearly did in Jane Fonda in Barbarella. (Okay, I'll stop myself here. I could go on, but I'm not David Foster Wallace.)

I never met Wallace personally, but I've read him and heard him speak twice, and I couldn't help falling in love with the guy. I know I'm not alone in that sentiment. He described our culture with a unique blend of devastating evisceration and disarming sweetness, as seen in his brilliant device in Infinite Jest of renaming years after consumer products, notably "The Year of the Depend Undergarment." Any other writer might have chosen a whole other array of products. Yet the choice of that diaper was exactly what made Wallace Wallace: absurd, mocking to the point of snickering, yet also somehow tender and sad. Wallace's voice, of which we are now so cruelly robbed, made you sit up and pay attention, made you think, made you laugh, and above all made you want to give him a hug and tell him, it's okay, there's still hope. Yes, American life has become increasingly coarse and ugly and dumb. But there's still love, and where there's love, there's still hope.

Joel Ivan Hamburger

2008-09-02T18:51:00.003-04:00

I wanted to mark the recent death of my father, Joel Ivan Hamburger, who was 79 this year. But I don't know how. There are all kinds of rites and rituals that are possible, but none of them seem equal to the real and true experience of my late father and the facts of his going out of this world.

Perhaps the strangest part of it is the experience of death itself. It makes me think of being in New York during September 11th. While I was going through it, the truth and reality of the actual event kept me so grounded in the present, in every second of what was happening. And then immediately afterward, the memorialization of the event gilded the lily, transformed it from an experience to a narrative.

Lately I've been recounting the narrative of my father's death over and over, and each time I get more frustrated. "But this wasn't how it was," I want to say. The story is so puny next to the pain and sorrow of what I went through in life.

The first time I fell in love, I remember hearing a love song on the radio and thinking, "Oh, that's what they were talking about!" So too, with this, I now have a new understanding of what death means to the living who are left. It makes me hate war more than ever. It's horrific enough when someone dies of natural causes, but to plunge someone through this experience to make a political point is barbaric.

I also have a new appreciation for writers who can capture this rare, awful experience in their work. Lately I've been reading the poetry of Jeffrey Harrison, specifically his book Incomplete Knowledge, which delicately yet powerfully evokes the deaths of several friends and his brother. Perhaps poetry more than fiction is more suited to portraying the host of jumbled, jagged, and sometimes contradictory emotions called up by loss.

We'll see.

The Truth about Short Stories

2008-08-07T13:35:00.002-04:00

I was at a farewell party for an author-friend of mine, a short story writer who's leaving New York. While talking with his editor, the subject of short stories came up. "I love short stories," she said. "Everyone I know reads short stories. Why don't short stories sell?"

It's a refrain I've heard repeated all too often, not just recently, but ever since I came to New York and began meeting people who worked in publishing. Short stories don't sell. If you're going to try to write fiction, which is a silly idea to start with, at least try to write a novel. No one wants to read stories.

And in the meantime, some of the most notable books that have come out in the same period of time include Junot Diaz's Drown, Nathan Englander's For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, Lorrie Moore's Birds of America, Annie Proulx's Wyoming Stories, Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies and Unaccustomed Earth, Adam Haslett's You are not a Stranger Here, Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners, several books by Alice Munro. The list goes on.

But short stories don't sell.

It's possible that the above are the exception to the rule. But I don't think so. I think the trouble publishers are having selling short stories is the same trouble they're having selling any type of fiction. Novels, novellas, story collections, no matter what the form, fiction itself isn't selling, with a few notable exceptions like Harry Potter or a few pop fiction sensations that you see at the top of the New York Times bestseller list. Anyone who has looked at the numbers of copies sold by even some of our most prestigious authors knows that fiction is in a crisis in terms of sales.

As a friend of mine put it, "Fiction is the new poetry."

Why is this happening? The usual villains come to mind: the Internet and cell phones and DVD's for using up people's time that they might be spending in quiet reflection, the necessary state for reading. But I think there's more to it than that. We're living at a time when for some reason people do not want to stop and think and look and listen. Maybe it's the way we've been educated or coddled as consumers, but people are afraid to cut themselves off from the world and take a stance as a thoughtful observer rather than a commenting participant. Maybe that explains why even though the number of books sold keeps falling, the number of masters programs in creative writing keeps rising. We all want to be the star. But do we have what it takes to be a member of the audience?

Recent Raves

2008-07-04T14:51:00.002-04:00

I recently received a Barnes and Noble gift card for my birthday, so I went to a local branch to find the book Someday This Pain May Be Useful to You by Peter Cameron. After searching all through the new fiction releases and not finding it, I went to ask for it at the information desk. The store did have the book, under "YA" or Young Adult fiction.

It's a bit incomprehensible to me that a writer of Cameron's stature should have his latest release shelved under "YA" rather than general fiction just because the narrator who's just out of high school. It's a bit like putting The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, a book with a juvenile narrator, with the kiddie books.

But in fact, Cameron's publisher has put out the book through its YA division, and perhaps they feel that in today's shaky marketplace for fiction, this is the best economic strategy. A bit shortsighted in my opinion, because Someday This Pain May Be Useful to You is not only Peter Cameron's strongest book, but also one of the most compelling reads in contemporary fiction.

At the book's center is James Sveck, a shockingly self-aware and intelligent high school graduate who feels simultaneously above and left out of the mainstream world. With a minimum of fuss and a maximum of acute sensitivity for language, Cameron captures this young man's heartbreaking alienation with humor and depth. The result is the kind of book that disappoints in only one respect: it ends.

This is prime entertainment, not for kiddies, but for sentient and serious readers of literature. Miss this book at your own peril.

A Saintly Weekend

2008-05-13T10:40:00.002-04:00

Just got back from a weekend festival of Queer Lit in New Orleans called Saints and Sinners. It's my third time there, and each time I come back with some new lens on literature, my own work, and myself.

A few impressions that stand out:

1. Sitting in Stephen McCauley's master class on character, in which he gave us some great exercises to flesh out a character you don't know well. Two of my favorites: A) describe your character's feet. and B) imagine yourself walking down a street and encountering your character. What's your impression?

2. Hearing Dorothy Allison full-throated no-holds-barred memories of her career and her fiery prescriptions of what needs to be done to the Bush administration.

3. Participating on a panel with novelists Brian Antoni and Paul Lisicky, who taught me about the importance of sticking it out as a writer, even when things look grim.

4. Having dinner with novelist Gary Zebrun, who told me not to let the current doldrums of the publishing business get me down, and encouraged me to believe in myself and above all to keep writing. "I tried to quit writing for eight years," he told me. "Those were eight of the most miserable years of my life."

Now back in New York, I'm sitting at my computer and ready to attack my work with a new verve. Thanks, Saints and Sinners!

PEN World Voices

2008-05-01T12:02:00.002-04:00

This weekend, I'll be blogging for the PEN World Voices Festival, featuring panels of writers from around the world. You can check out my comments and others by other writers on the PEN website, www.pen.org.

Here's my first post:

One of the most amusing moments for me during a panel called "Rewriting Family" was when the Hungarian-Romanian writer Gyorgy Dragoman announced, "As a writer, you have to get rid of your family." Dutch writer P. F. Thomese agreed, chiming in, "Yes, I agree, you have to destroy your family. You can't think, 'What would my mother think of that?' If that influences you, you'd never write anything of any meaning."

Maybe I should be ashamed to admit that in my own career, I have thought, "What would my father think of that?" and it has influenced me. As a young writer in my teens, my father played a very important role in my literary life. Whenever I needed a villain, he was always there for me. And so whenever he read my work, my father's response was usually along the lines of, "Why do I always have to be
the bad guy?"

As I sat down to write my first novel, I took my father's words to heart. Why is it that fathers are so often the villains in literature? In fact, during the discussion last night, Thomese brought this up when he said that his becoming a father taught him that he wasn't the center of the universe anymore. "Which was a huge discovery," he said, "since writers like to be the center of the universe." This is why, in Thomese's opinion, you see so many sons as heroes of novels while fathers play the role of villain.

While working on my novel Faith for Beginners, I decided I would defy the cliche and write a really nice dad. I made the father character in the book, Mr. Michaelson, vulnerable, caring, even slightly innocent in his concern for those around him. None of these are attributes anyone would ascribe to my father.

When he read the book, a few months before it was published, my father called me up and demanded to know what the hell I thought I was doing. "Why am I always the bad guy in your writing?" he wanted to know.

Go figure.

Israeli writer Yael Hadaya said that the only person in her family she'd never write about is her brother, "because I'm scared of him. He's the only one in our family who can defend himself. My father is dead. My kids are helpless because they're little, and my mother can't read my work without falling asleep, so she's never read anything I wrote."

The truth is, however, that no character is exactly the same as its real-life model. "When you write about your family," said Hedaya, "you're not really writing about them. It's like a collage of various pieces, but it can't be exactly the same. So you're not really writing your family, you're disguising your family. But I have to write about them. I have to write about my child. I can't just write about another child. This is my child."

The trouble with writers and families, according to Thomese, is that in families, you can never be honest with each other, but in writing you always have to be honest, which leads to a natural conflict. And as D'Erasmo pointed out, in a way that's what makes for the juicy tension in writing about families, that the reader always knows there are secrets that haven't been aired.

The Hungarian-Romainian writer Dragoman brought up a funny story about family secrets related to his recent novel The White King. For his novel, he'd made up some family secrets for the characters, who bore some loose resemblances to his own family. After the book came out, his mother told him as long as he was making up secrets about people, she would tell him the real family secrets she'd kept buried for years. And in this way, fictional lies about family ended up revealing truths Dragoman would never have discovered otherwise.

The title of the panel is "Rewriting Family," and each of these writers has re-written the notion of family in their work or lives in some way. Moderator D'Erasmo's last novel A Seahorse Year features a same-sex couple whose child has gone missing. Hedaya is a single mother by choice who's currently raising three kids. For Dragoman, family was not an arena of rebellion or conflict, but actually the "last line of defense" in a totalitarian society, the one place where he could feel safe. Dutch writer Thomese, who is married to an Indonesian, switched gears from bitterly satiric fiction to a wrenching personal memoir about the death of his child.

"I had to write it," said Thomese. "Because my child was dead and if I didn't write it, I would be left with nothing."

Barack Obama: Guilty of Literary Crimes?

2008-02-20T13:21:00.003-05:00

This election season has been a confusing one on many levels. I started out warily in support of Hillary Clinton because I was impressed by her strong performance in the early debates and the thoroughness of her knowledge of government. After Barack Obama's moving victory speech in Iowa, however, I started wondering if I was backing the wrong candidate. And then after watching the Clintons go after Obama with their Nixonian campaign tactics in South Carolina, I decided to make a change and now I'm firmly in Obama's camp.

In the end, the choice of Obama or Clinton probably doesn't matter a whole lot in terms of policy, since when they're elected, they'll probably do (or fail to do) many of the same things. As a gay voter, I haven't really had much choice in presidential elections, since the Republicans keep nominating candidates who are determined to offend me. Remember Bob Dole returning a check from the Log Cabin Republicans? Remember George Bush and gay marriage?

The issue that has been more difficult for me is the charge of plagiarism leveled by the Clinton campaign against Obama, who the other weekend used a few lines from another politician's speech without attribution. I doubt that the Clinton campaign has made this charge out of their concern for intellectual property rights, but it is a charge that is no less serious for the spirit of opportunism from which it has been offered.

Even Senator Obama has admitted he should have attributed the lines he stole (let's call this crime by its proper name) to their author, Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts. The question for me, though, is how serious is this crime? Petty larceny or high misdemeanor? How much is too much when it comes to using another author's words? And is that standard different for a speech than it is for a literary text?

Let's be fair here. Neither Obama nor Patrick attributed the lines "I have a dream" or "We hold these truths to be self-evident" to their original authors, nor did anyone suggest they needed to. Also, the bits of Patrick's speech that were original to him, "Just words?" were fairly short. I think what offended people was not so much the words being repeated, but the idea behind those words being repeated minus a simple, "As Deval Patrick said..." But then, don't politicians borrow and steal ideas from each other all the time? "No new taxes." "Universal health insurance." Has there ever been a political campaign where Republicans and Democrats respectively don't endorse these positions? Have I just committed plagiarism by using those words here on this blog?

Furthermore, we live in a culture in which "sampling" is all the rage, in music, in film. It's a kind of homage to use another person's work in your own, even without attribution. And often the work being "sampled" isn't very common at all. How many times have you heard a pop song from the 1970s and were shocked to hear a riff that you thought had been created for a hip-hop hit of the 1990's or our own decade? How does hearing those riffs in their original context make you feel when you recognize them? Thrilled or cheated?

I hate plagiarism and have little tolerance for plagiarists. The trouble is, I have a hard time defining what that term means these days. Right now I'm working on an essay about a novel written about Berlin in the 1990's. I and others have recently tried to find the author, J. S. Marcus, who hasn't published another book in over a decade, but without success. The situation reminded me of Christopher Isherwood looking for the real life model for Sally Bowles, who'd also disappeared. At the end of Berlin Stories, what is probably the definitive work on that city, Isherwood says, "When you read this, Sally--if you ever do--please accept it as a tribute, the sincerest I can pay, to yourself, and to our friendship. And send me another postcard."

And so I closed my essay with the following lines as a double homage, to link Marcus with Isherwood: "When you read this essay, J. S. Marcus—if you ever do—please accept it as a tribute, the sincerest I can pay. And write another book for us."

I did not add, awkwardly, "As Christopher Isherwood wrote at the end of 'Sally Bowles.'" My hope is that those who know the book (Marcus would be among them) will get the reference on their own, and would rightly sneer at the idea of wink-wink-nudge-nudging the reader to remind him or her of the source. It also strikes me that the lines themselves are not distinctive enough to warrant much concern about re-using. It isn't as if I had begun a novel about India or New York City with "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking... Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed," as Isherwood does at the beginning of 'A Berlin Diary.' Now that would be a problem, not only because the lines are so unique but also because I would be using them in a context that does not suggest its source, that in fact suggests that I, Aaron Hamburger, inspired by India or New York, so brilliantly thought up these lines all by my very self.

We all learned in grade school about the evils of plagiarism. What we did not learn is the difference between plagiarism and (to use a hot critical buzzword) "intertextuality," between copying and "sampling." Somewhere there is a line, but I think we have to draw it anew with each and every piece of writing we compose. My opinion is that Senator Obama just crossed that line by a step, maybe two. As for my essay, I think I'm well within safe boundaries, but I'm glad to hear if someone out there disagrees.

Stuff I Recommend

2008-02-08T21:10:00.000-05:00

This past month, I've been consumed with finishing this draft of my novel, but I have found time for a few other diversions. Like...

LADY ORACLE by Margaret Atwood. I've read two other books by Atwood, The Blind Assassin, which I loved, and Surfacing, which I couldn't get through. This book is like neither of those. It's the story of a Canadian poet/romantic novelist who while trying to erase herself tells her life story. What makes this novel such a hoot, however, isn't so much the story, which is a lot of fun, but the vibrance of Atwood's narrative voice. This is one novel in which every sentence, even every word counts, and tickles the reader with pleasure.

SHE LOVES ME, SHE LOVES ME NOT by Leslea Newman. One of the things I like about Newman, whom I had the pleasure of meeting while teaching with her for the Stonecoast MFA Program in Maine, is the way she claims the lesbian experience as a universal experience. When she write about a crush on a fellow passenger in "Flight of Fancy," she's not just letting you know what it is for a woman to desire another woman, but also for a person to desire another person in general. When she writes about a breast cancer scare in "Keeping a Breast," she uses a second person point of view that implicates the reader, whether male, female, straight, gay, or anything else, in the story of a woman confronting mortality. Reading these stories, you wonder why it's been assumed for so long that the straight white male experience is any more "universal" than any other.

THERE WILL BE BLOOD, film. I don't usually publicize movies on my blog since they get enough play in our culture already, but this one is special. The film's main character, Daniel Plainview, is as rich as any character I've come across in many works of contemporary fiction. It helps that Daniel Day-Lewis gives a rich performance that captures all of Plainview's profound virtues and flaws. At the end of this absorbing movie, I wasn't sure whether his character was more victim or villain, but I was so fascinated by his story that I didn't mind thinking it over for a good long while.

Thoughts for a New Year: War and Peace

2007-12-25T17:29:00.000-05:00

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.

Lessons Learned from Recent Reading

2007-11-17T22:11:00.000-05:00

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.

Back to Work

2007-09-03T14:32:00.000-04:00

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.

A Break

2007-07-03T16:42:00.000-04:00

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

The Aesthetics and Economics of Sexuality

2007-06-01T08:56:00.000-04:00

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.

Saints and Sinners

2007-05-15T05:59:00.000-04:00

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.

PEN'd out

2007-05-01T20:31:00.000-04:00

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

Why Books?

2007-04-15T19:13:00.000-04:00

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.

Why Should I Call You By My Name?

2007-03-30T14:19:00.000-04:00

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.

Gossip or Critical Debate?

2007-03-18T22:30:00.000-04:00

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?

Barbaric AWP!

2007-03-04T21:12:00.000-05:00

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?

An American Story

2007-02-15T14:07:00.000-05:00

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?

Start it and When it's Over, Finish It

2007-01-31T14:42:00.000-05:00

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.

Martin Luther King Day Thoughts

2007-01-15T18:24:00.000-05:00

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.

Top Ten Lists

2007-01-02T20:33:00.000-05:00

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.

A Few Burning Questions from Students

2006-12-15T09:57:00.000-05:00

Earlier this week, I went to visit a creative writing class taught by my friend and highly-esteemed colleague Lauren Grodstein. Her students had read my novel Faith for Beginners, and I came to talk to them about the process of becoming a writer and writing that book.

The students came up with some interesting questions for me to answer. Two of them were questions I often get asked by readers, and yet each time I'm asked those questions, I feel somewhat surprised.

The first of these was, "How much of your book is autobiographical." (To find out the answer, you can go to the "bio" section of my site.) The thing that always strikes me about that question is that these days, the first question we ask a non-fiction writer, particularly if he or she has written a memoir, is "How much of your book is true?" It's as if we expect our non-fiction writers to be writing lies and our fiction writers to be writing the truth. In other words, we think that all writers are liars.

Of course, if Pablo Picasso is to be believed, all artists are liars, but it's been said that Picasso himself was a notorious fibber, so now we're getting all Star Trekky...

The other question was, "I don't know much about the Jewish faith, so I'm not sure if I'm getting everything in this book that I'm supposed to get." I've heard a number of readers, not just of my work but of fiction in general, say that to understand a work of fiction it should be universal or specific to their experience. To me it seems that the first condition is impossible, the second undesirable.

There is no universal experience. We all our individuated by our races, religions, nationalities, class levels, etc. However, many of us believe that to have a race, you must be black. Begin white means not having a race, which is therefore "universal." To have a religion, you must belong to a non-Christian religion. Being Christian is "universal." Being American, straight, and middle class, are all also universal. (I've heard that in a recent poll of Americans, 95% said they belonged to the middle class.) Being male is universal. Being female means you have a gender.

However, I wouldn't want to read fiction about the universal experience, which would seem to shave all the interesting edges off stories that make them unique. I also don't want to read fiction specific to my own experience all the time. When I read a book, one of the many things I hope for is the chance to get to know a world that isn't entirely mine. And yet somehow, by reading about the specifics of a world that is not my own, I find a way to relate to it, to imagine how my life compares to this new one I'm encountering on the page. That's why I love reading fiction that is set in such unfamiliar moonscapes as 1850s London (Bleak House by Dickens) early nineteenth century Russia (War and Peace by Tolstoy) or even imperial Rome (The Twelve Ceasers by Suetanious). I love finding out that I have more in common with British orphans, Russian aristocrats, and Roman emperors than I would ever have guessed before reading the books above.

As the student herself put it, "I'm not Jewish, but my grandmother, who's Catholic, worries about the same things as that character Helen in your book, so I could relate."

Exactly.

Another burning question I got this week, from a student in one of my own creative writing classes, was "Is writing a matter of hard work or talent?" This is a fantastic question, worthy of a blog in itself. I've never been a fan of the idea of talent because I've seen how much hard work goes into writing. Certainly I have never felt divinely inspired as I go along. I feel more like a coal miner, slowly hacking away at the page for years. However, I have also seen people diligently going about their work for years and get more and more frustrated with their writing, unable to produce work they're proud of. So what's the difference between someone who works for three years and then produces a book that gets published, and someone else who works a while and comes up with a manuscript to put in the back of a drawer?

I have no idea if you need talent, or if writing is something that can be mastered through hard work and study. But I do know that a number of talented people go nowhere because they don't put enough effort into their work and careers. So maybe the only thing to say about this question is, "Does it make any difference?" If you want to be a writer badly enough, in spite of all the difficulties of this career--and there are many--then go for it, and don't worry about talent. If it exists, it's out of your control whether you have it. But what is in your control is how hard you work to maximize the gifts you were born with, assuming that anyone is indeed born with any gifts. So work as hard as you can. Expect no rewards. Because no one should write for rewards. (The rewards you get for writing aren't worth it, except if you're Stephen King or John Grisham or Dan Brown, and we're not them.) You should write because you care so much about words and are so fascinated by the world of literature that you want to get into the game too, even when doing so seems difficult and discouraging and hopeless.

Bursting with Books

2006-11-30T11:04:00.000-05:00

Last night as I was cleaning out my closet, my book tower fell over.

I love books. I always have. I'm the kind of person who has a hard time going into a bookstore and walking out empty-handed. As I've begun to publish, I have more friends who write books and publish as well, and so I feel it's important to support their work by buying their books. I also believe strongly that independent bookstores are a great resource on the endangered species list, so every time I go into one of those, I almost always buy something as well.

The result of all this is that almost every square inch of surface area in my apartment is packed with books. My bookshelves, of course, but also my desk, my nightstand, the floor beside my desk, are all taken up by books. For some years, I used to save every book I've ever acquired, even ones I didn't like. After moving several times, I began to wonder whether it was such a good idea to continue carting around that thousand-page copy of Iain Pairs's An Instance at the Fingerpost, a book that sat on my shelves for four years unread. Did I really need to save Gould's Book of Fish by Richard Flanagan, despite its rave review in the New York Times and beautiful gold spine? (Owned for six years, never opened once.) Or how about Jim McGreevey's Confession, or The Nanny Diaries, books I acquired for cheap, out of curiosity? My curiosity has now been satisfied. I'm ready to move on.

So every once in a while, I add a book to a tower of Babel that grows and grows in my closet until it reaches an absurd height, and then I remove the books from the apartment, sell them or donate them or give them away. The trouble is, the tower seems to grow ever more rapidly, and it's all I can do to keep up.

Still, it's hard to let go of a book. Maybe I will find time for Gould's fish after all. And maybe I'll want to refer to those Nanny Diaries for a scene to share with a creative writing class. (About how to write a fast-paced but ultimately shallow satire of a shallow subculture of upper crust New York with a deeply unsatisfying anticlimactic ending?) Tastes change. Maybe I'll regret letting of Mr. McGreevey. If I just squeezed those books together a bit more tightly on the shelf, there'd be room for one or two more...

So what do you do with books once you've read them? Keep them all? Some? How do you decide? I'd be interested to hear.

Return to Oz

2006-11-16T14:52:00.000-05:00

For my current project, which features a Wizard of Oz fan as its main character, I've been rereading several books in the Oz series written by L. Frank Baum. (Baum wrote thirteen sequels to his bestselling hit novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. After his death, the series was continued by a few other authors. Even today, many hopefuls to the title Royal Historian of Oz continue to pen Oz sequels.)

One of the wonderful things about re-reading these books, which were written over a span of twenty years from 1900 until the author's death in 1919, is seeing the development of a writer over time, emotionally as well as stylistically. The first book was never intended to launch a series. Indeed, Baum wrote other stories about magical two-letter lands, like The Magical Monarch of Mo and Queen Zixi or Ix. Yet somehow the lands of Mo and Ix never made the same mark on the culture as Oz.

When Baum began writing his sequels to the original book, he tried to get around the problem of returning to the same territory by setting several of his books outside the land of Oz, telling stories about characters who traveled through other magical lands (including another two-letter country, Ev) to get to Oz. Finally, in 1910, with his sixth entry in the Oz series, The Emerald City of Oz, Baum announced that the land of Oz was forever cut off with the rest of the world and so he could no longer receive news of the latest Oz happenings to report in future Oz books. The series was therefore concluded.

For a few years, Baum wrote other fairy tale books, none of which approached the success of the Oz books in terms of sales, even when he tried to import a couple of Oz characters into his non-Oz stories. So in 1913, he "discovered" that he could resume communication with the land of Oz via the telegraph, and he wrote one Oz book a year from then on.

What accounts for these books' enduring charm? Baum certainly has his moments as a writer, particularly in the first chapter of The Wizard of Oz, in which his masterful interweaving of plot, character, setting, and word choice is as good as anything ever produced in American letters. Baum also has his weaker moments when he relies on a series of literary tics that get increasingly annoying with their repetition in each new book. Food is often "smoking hot." Trees are always "stately." Rooms in fairy castles are often scented with sprays of perfume and lit with a soft glow from an unknown source. He tends to do much better when he's tackling the flat landscape of Kansas than the enchanted halls of castles in the Emerald City and beyond. His characters can also seem to lack much variation. They're usually a combination of lucky girls like Dorothy, vain, silly, arrogant talking cats and villainous queens, good-hearted idiot savants like the beloved Scarecrow, resourceful, calm, unruffled boys, and villains whose silliness always seems more genuine than their cruelty.

At the same time, Baum tells his stories with remarkable sincerity, so much so that it's hard to believe that Oz is not a real place. He writes about his favorite characters as if they're good friends, and describes magical encounters with genuine wonder, as if they'd occurred to him rather than been invented by him. As a child reading these books, I used to dream of finding just the write cyclone to whisk me away to Oz. As an adult going back to them, I was surprised by how quickly the same longing recurred and how difficult it was for me to shake it off.

Good and Bad

2006-11-01T11:59:00.000-05:00

This week I've asked my creative writing students to give me some feedback on how their work is progressing and how the class is going for them. I've gotten some very thoughtful and interesting responses. For example, I was surprised (and gratified to learn) how interested many of them were in the fine art of line-editing.

One thing that's stuck with me from these responses and others I've heard from students in the past is their desire to know what makes for "good" writing and what makes for "bad" writing. When I used to teach poetry, for example, one student asked me to bring in a good poem and a bad poem, explain to the class what made one good and the other bad, and then hand out a list of rules so that students could follow them and write only good poems in the future.

It's a perfectly reasonable thing to want to know, and if anyone out there could provide me with rules of "good" and "bad," I'd be grateful to hear about them so I could pass this information on to others. For myself, I no longer can claim to know what "good" and "bad" mean anymore, and increasingly I find that I no longer care.

I think that Zadie Smith's recent novel On Beauty is a textbook example of a "bad" book. In fact I think it represents some of the worst tendencies in contemporary literature and constitutes a fundamental misunderstanding of E. M. Forster's Howards End, the book that Smith claims inspired her own novel. The New York Times Book Review, however, names it as one of the top ten books of the previous year. They think it is a "good" book. Good for them, good for me. I have my opinion, and they have theirs.

I also think rum raisin ice cream is an example of "bad" ice cream. What if I said that the New York Times sang the praises of rum raisin ice cream? Would you care? Would I change my opinion of rum raisin?

For me, the only opinions about literature that mean anything are ones that engage with the essential qualities of the text. We can talk about characters and word choices and plot structure and setting and the use of time. We can talk about how tired we ought to be as readers of books detailing (yet again) the petty tempests in academic teapots, or the cloying contemporary fetish for "updating" plots of classic novels by transplanting them roots and all from the past to the present, ever so cutely substituting "emails" for "letters," for example. Then we can have a real discussion about the validity of these specific decisions.

As for what's good and what's bad, I can only say what I like. But you, reader, are equally entitled to like what you like. But by simply exchanging our opinions about good and bad, we immediately end the discussion because we can go no further. Because as much as I hate rum raisin, you'll still go on eating it, and as much as you want me to switch from cookie dough, I'm sticking to that too.

Straight to Hell

2006-10-17T10:57:00.000-04:00

Research has taken me to some unsual places: a gay cruising park in Jerusalem, an institute for physics research in Berlin, a Cantonese class in Chinatown, a Communist bookstore off Fifth Avenue. But last weekend was a first: a research trip to hell.

First, a little background. I'm starting a new novel that features a number of evangelical Christians as main characters. The past couple of weeks I've done some digging to learn more about evangelical communities and what makes them tick. My great worry with this book is that I'll only portray these people satirically or superficially, because I know so little about them, and I'd really like to get at a deeper, more human rendering.

To that end, I've been doing some reading on the evangelical movement and keeping my eye out for anything related to it in the media. Then last week, an article on "Hell Houses" happened to catch my eye.

Halloween is not a very popular holiday among evangelicals (nor among religious Jews either) because of its pagan origins (though the Christmas tree has pagan origins too) and its association with witches and the like. As an alternative to staged haunted houses for Halloween, churches have begun organizing "hell houses," which feature the potrayal of various sins. On your tour of a hell house, you're likely to encounter a suicide or two (big no-no), a date rape, some drugs, STD's, a gay wedding, and most certainly, a very bloody abortion.

To set up your own hell house, the best way to go about it is to pay $300 for a hell house kit from Pastor Keenan Roberts. His handy manual will give you tips on everything from sound effects, staging, dialogue, to how to simulate an aborted child using meat products. For an extra $45 bucks a pop, you can purchase DVDs of various scenes that particularly interest you.

I was wondering how I would ever get to see one of these houses, when I learned that there was one available right here in this den of sin where I live. A local theater company, Les Freres Corbusier, has decided to stage an authentic haunted house in Dumbo. They've paid their $300, assembled the house according to official kit instructions, and stuck to the original text as provided by the good pastor. There was no choice for me. I had to go to hell.

My tour of hell house began with greetings from a devil dressed in makeup that resembled one of the bad guys from Star Wars. Mr. Devil took us to our first tableau, a rave at which a young woman takes a drug and passes out on the floor, at which point, a man yells, "She's out! Let's rape her!" (Why is it that tasteful art and evangelical Christianity are such unlikely bedfellows?) Other sins included a spectacularly bloody abortion scene, with the red stuff spurting from the womb of a hapless cheerleader. Tools included a rather nasty looking pair of forceps and a vacuum cleaner with a large hose. We also entered a womb where an actor sucking her thumb and cooing, "Gurgle, gurgle" was plucked from the scene by two giant wooden beams covered in aluminum foil. One of my favorite parts was the hallway of sinners, which included a Muslim terrorist, a pothead, and (incongruously) an effete man in a tuxedo warbling show tunes to his heart's content.

In case you were worried, at the end of the tour, we were all saved from Satan by an angel who took us to a white room where Jesus himself offered us salvation. (My friend who came with me was more interested in Jesus's chest hair.) Then we were led to a Christian hoedown, with folk music, powdered donuts, and watery punch.

Perhaps the scariest thing of all about Hell House is that Pastor Roberts claims it has a 33% success rate in converting people to the faith.

Thoughts on Yom Kippur

2006-10-02T14:15:00.000-04:00

Yom Kippur may just be the most literary of Jewish holidays. Yes, there's Simchat Torah, a celebration dedicated the five books of Moses, but most of the Simchat Torah festivities are marked by drinking, singing, and dancing rather than an exploration of the words on the page. (If you ever want to see Orthodox boys gone wild, visit a synagogue on the eve of Simchat Torah.)

Yom Kippur, by contrast, is a day dedicated to the brain, and especially to words. It's a day to remove yourself from everyday concerns like eating or drinking or working or getting dressed up in your fanciest clothes (which is why you'll see Jews in suits with tennis shoes). And it's a day to reflect on stories of atonement and loss. The Yom Kippur service is filled with stories of martyrdom from the days of the first rabbis down to the Holocaust and the founding of Israel. It's also filled with stories of the high priests purifying their bodies and minds to atone for the sins of their people.

One of the creepiest of these stories is that of Aaron, the first high priest, brother of Moses, (yes, my namesake), whose two sons died on the spot for daring to enter the holiest part of the temple without God's permission. The Torah dispenses with them in half a sentence.

I'm also fascinated by an explanation I once heard for why the story of how the high priests used to prepare for Yom Kippur is filled with such drama. During the late years of the Second Temple, the post of High Priest was sold to the highest bidder, often to men who were far from holy and sometimes completely ignorant of religious practice. And yet on Yom Kippur this so-called High Priest had to learn how represent the entire community of Hebrews to God and to carry out the rituals without one mistake.

One of my favorite parts of the service is a recounting of a prophecy by Isaiah, in which he talks about people who went through the rituals of fasting and mourning but without reflecting on the meaning behind those rituals. "Is this the kind of fast that God wants?" Isaiah demands. (I'm paraphrasing here.)

These three stories illustrate how difficult faith was and is. There's a tendency among religious fanatics to think nostalgically of the good old days from the Bible, and to see our own time as one of horrific iniquity. They wish we could behave more like the characters of the Bible, in a time when questions of gay marriage or legalizing abortion didn't exist.

Yes, those were the good old days all right, when upstanding men like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob engaged in polygamy, kept slaves, cheated, lied, and swindled. In our time, we believe that each person should have a free choice about the kind of sexual relationship he or she wants to have, as long as that choice doesn't interfere with someone else's choice. But, no, it was far better in the old days, when women were bartered like cattle.

At the same time, we shouldn't indulge ourselves in the illusion that we are entirely more enlightened than we used to be. Isaiah's harangue about people who go through the motions of faith still rings true to us today for a reason. Sure, it's easy to point out the flaws of any number of characters from the Bible. But how many of us have the courage Abraham had, to abandon his homeland, his family, and the beliefs he'd been brought up with, in order to follow his ideals?

I don't have that kind of courage, and lately, I don't have that kind of faith, either. This morning, as I sat in synagogue, and read responsively, and stood, and sat, and even reflected, I found my attention drifting out the windows, at boats gliding across the river, and the miracle of a helicopter swooping down on Manhattan. And just outside of the large room where we prayed and wept as our stomachs rumbled, three construction workers stretched themselves out in the sun and enjoyed their lunch.

What's in a Name?

2006-09-22T10:21:00.000-04:00

Recently in my creative writing classes, we've been considering the issue of names. The temptation for an author when trying to pick out a name for a character is to play the Dickens card. For example, if your character's a good guy, you want to call him "Mr. Goodman." Get it? This kind of cuteness becomes very au courant if you're one of those wink-nod po-mo type of writers for whom the whole thing's a joke anyway, so what's one more cheap ploy?

For me, the question of naming goes back to a fundamental issue of character: choice. We learn about characters from the choices they make. One thing that we as people have absolutely no choice over is the name our parents give us at birth. Also, at birth, our parents have no idea what kind of person we're going to be. We're just wet pink blobs. Therefore, using a name to signal some kind of trait about a character simply isn't true to life.

And yet, as one of my students pointed out, we as readers do get a kind of feeling for characters because of the names their authors (rather than their parents, since we as authors really are their parents) gave them. He pointed to the detective "Jack Bauer" on the program 24. Would Jack Bauer cut such a convincing figure as a detective if his name were "Worthington"? And as I mentioned in class, are we really prepared to accept a nuclear physicist named Tiffany?

Yes, argued a student who met with me later in office hours. Why not have a physicist named Tiffany? Why go the usual route and give her an intellectual-sounding name like Ernestine? Play with convention a little, and surprise your reader.

Jack or Worthington, Tiffany or Ernestine, either way naming comes back to the same core issue: we don't get to pick our names, so our names (by themselves) cannot tell us very much about the choices we'd make. Names can tell us gender, ethnicity, family heritage, sometimes age group, sometimes the type of family you grew up with (is your name John Marshall Scott III or Moonbeam Applebaum?). They can also tell us a lot about our parents, about the hopes they have for us, the way they go about choosing a name, the relatives they're honoring by naming us after them. But that's about it.

However, there is an important way in which names can tell us about character, which is, what is your character's relationship to his or her name? Does your character like her name? How does he feel when he hears it read aloud, on a class attendance list, for example? Does your character go by a nickname, and who chose that name? Does your character prefer the full version of his name, like Thomas, or does he go by Tom or Tommy for short? Does your character fantasize about changing his or her name? Does the name have a special meaning or story attached and does your character know it and tell it readily? This is all rich, fertile territory for name games.

If you happen to be a writer and still feel the Dickensian itch to get all cutsey with names then do me a favor. Give your character a nickname. Since the character's the one choosing it, you can go crazy. Think of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, for example. (What is it about a grown man who goes by the moniker "Scooter"?)

As for Tiffany the physicist, well, I'm still deciding...

A Comma Obsession

2006-09-02T17:30:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I took a one-day cooking class to learn how to make a birthday cake. As part of the class, we learned how to wish someone a happy birthday in chocolate drizzle on top of a layer of buttercream frosting. Our teacher advised us to start with "Birthday" across the center of the cake, then to add "Happy" above that, and finally the person's name underneath.

In other words:

Happy
Birthday
Aaron

The one thing she didn't tell us to do was to insert a comma between "Birthday" and the person's name. I admit, it would certainly seem odd to come across a birthday cake that read:

Happy
Birthday,
Aaron

But the rules of grammar require a comma there, and not simply for the sake of fussiness. Consider the following two lines of dialogue:

1. "Leave Mom!"
2. "Leave, Mom!"

Without the rule about inserting a comma when a person is addressed by name in speech, how would we ever know if Mom was being asked to leave, or if someone else was being asked to leave his mother. Or try these two:

1. "Kill ducks!"
2. "Kill, ducks!"

Here the comma is a matter of life and death. In the first example, the ducks are about to become dead meat. In the second, the ducks become the killers.

I first learned about this comma (sometimes known as the comma of address) in an undergraduate fiction workshop I took at the University of Michigan with the writer Tish Ezekiel. Since then, I've become fairly religious about using it. I've also become unusually sensitive to its ever-increasing absence in other people's work, especially with work that's been published. An omitted comma of address strikes me as a sign that the writer doesn't care enough about her craft to learn the rules of grammar, doesn't care enough about the comfort of her readers to make the cadences of her dialogue absolutely clear.

True, these little commas are probably not the most egregious error a writer could make. Many times, we can guess pretty easily what the writer had in mind. "Hi Mom" instead of "Hi, Mom," doesn't seem like a huge mental leap. So why do I get so bothered when I see "Hi Mom"?

Because the comma is probably the most difficult of all punctuation marks to deploy correctly. In fact, there are some rules of comma usage that seem pretty much a matter of taste, without hard and fast rules to follow. So when there is a perfectly good hard and fast rule for using a comma, like the rule about commas of address, why not stick to it?

A Few Thoughts about Plot

2006-08-22T13:05:00.000-04:00

I'm getting together lesson plans for two courses on fiction writing I'm teaching this fall, and right now I'm thinking hard about "plot." Various writers have grappled with this term and tried to pin it down. I've always liked E. M. Forster's summation, which goes roughly: The king died and then the queen died--that's a story. The king died and then the queen died of grief--that's a plot.

One important distinction I think is important to make between plot and action is that action is a more rambling list of events that happen in a story, while plot is a succinct summation of what's important. Here's a quick mini-test to see how comfortable you are with the notion of plot. How do you typically answer the question, "What did you do yesterday?" If you're like me, you start from the second the alarm goes off, describe the way the window shade snaps up, linger over the bowl of cereal in the kitchen, until the person you're talking to screams, "Get to the point!" To which I always say, "But I want you to get the feeling of what my day was like!"

The trouble with plot for writers is that the activity of writing a story is all about these little details. You're spending most of your time mired in bits and details that you're trying to make vivid for the reader. But there's nothing more boring than listening to a writer trying to answer the question, "What's your book about?" if he or she hasn't prepared a twenty-five word or less standard description of it.

When people first asked me about the novel I'm writing now, I used to say, "Well, it's about this young woman who moves to Berlin with her new husband to get away from her old life, but then she finds the new one isn't all that she'd hoped for either, and the marriage isn't going that well, and she wants to have a baby, but she and her husband are having bedroom trouble, and then one day she meets this Russian immigrant by chance and forms a bond with him, and then she's..." By which point, my conversational partner's eyes have thoroughly glazed over.

These days I've learned to say, "It's about a love triangle set in contemporary Berlin." If I'm feeling frisky, I might add," involving a married couple from America and a Russian immigrant."

Now that's plot.

Bad Behavior

2006-08-15T09:45:00.000-04:00

Last week I was scolded for my bad behavior at a reading. Well, not me personally. I was part of an audience who shared the collective blame. Our crime? To laugh at a passage read aloud by its author who hadn't intended her words to be funny.

The passage in question was a short story about psychoanalysts during the 1950's by author Sarah Schulman. Much of the dialogue was so loaded with psychological jargon that we as members of the audience had only two possible interpretations of it: either the author had a tin ear for realistic dialogue or the author was trying to make a joke. Being in a generous mood, we went for the latter option, and laughed.

When Schulman finished reading, we gave her a hearty round of applause, for which she thanked us with an indignant reprimand. "That story wasn't funny," she informed us, as if the reaction of a crowd of one hundred reasonably intelligent listeners could not have counted for as much as the author's opinion, since the author always knows best. Schulman went on to explain that the jargon that made us laugh came out of an impulse for positive change and healing and that our nervous laughter showed how inept and uncomfortable we as cynical modern people were at hearing that kind of language. In other words, we laughed because we were shallow, or at least, not as enlightened as Schulman presumably was.

Schulman's claim to authorial supremacy strikes me as quite astounding in an age when the "death of the author" has been proclaimed often and loudly. We've had schools of critics who've analyzed texts with complete disregard for the author's background, instead focusing only on the words on the page. We've had other schools of critics claim that the individual author is merely a function of complex social phenomena and therefore doesn't even exist. And yet here is Schluman demanding, almost like Stalin or Mao, that there is only one true path, the author's path, and that for a reader to take any other is heresy.

As an author, I'm often surprised by the reactions of readers, who sometimes miss what I was trying to say but often pick up on meanings that I hadn't consciously intended. I feel that as long as readers can point to places in the text that back up their response, their response is valid. But then I grew up in an educational system that promoted this same point of view. Schulman, who seems a little older than I am, may have been educated in a different way. Also, I am writing my work at a time when I am relatively free to write about gay subject matter and to be up front about my identity. This freedom is thanks to the pioneering efforts of writers like Schulman, who wrote about queer themes at a time when such writing was not so commonplace. Perhaps she found it necessary to develop a certain stridency of character, an "I'm right and all of you are wrong" philosophy, in order to simply do her work.

Whatever the reason for Schulman's beef with her audience last week, she could have reacted to the situation in any number of ways. She could have said, "I'm glad you enjoyed the story, but actually, it wasn't my intention to be funny. Here's what I was trying to do in this story..." She could have laughed at her own failure to convey her intended message that evening and hoped for better audiences in the future. She could have gone home and complained to her girlfriend, her therapist, or her dog. She could have realized that an author is often the person who understands her work least. She could have done nothing.

Instead Schulman told the crowd who had taken time from their busy lives to listen to her words and applaud her efforts that they were not smart enough to understand her work. Fair enough. Since I'm not smart enough, I won't bother making the attempt ever again.

P.S. Since I originally published this post, Sarah Schulman herself was kind enough to comment on it, as you'll see below. She says that she was simply surprised by the audience's reaction and didn't mean to come off a scold. Thank you, Sarah, for putting in your two cents. I'm happy to give our author-reader relationship another chance.

Passivity in American Letters

2006-07-31T09:53:00.000-04:00

In a recent essay in the New York Times Book Review, author Benjamin Kunkel complained that the problem with today's memoirs isn't that they're untruthful but that their protagonists are too passive. Without citing specific examples (except for a quote from Running with Scissors), Kunkel argued that today's memoirs feature main characters whose only accomplishment is to have endured suffering and survived.

Last weekend, memoirist Mary Karr responded, in a letter to the Book Review, by referring Kunkel to his own novel Indecision, whose hero has so much trouble making up his mind about anything that he does just about nothing for about two hundred pages. Finally, after taking drugs and having sex in South America, Kunkel's hero decides to do something: he goes to his old prep school and delivers a lecture about something called "democratic socialism." Not exactly an edge-of-your-seat plot.

Passive heroes are not unique to memoirs. You can find plenty of passivity on both sides of the fiction/non-fiction divide. I agree with Kunkel's complaint (and said something similar in my own essay on memoirs in Poets and Writers) that too often American memoirists write about bad childhoods, abuse, drug addiction, surviving a fatal disease, any affliction you can name. However, a survey of American fiction turns up much the same thing.

Want to read about surviving child abuse? Try Bastard out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison. Surviving slavery? Start with Toni Morrison's Beloved or The Bluest Eye and then keep on going. Surviving the boss from hell? Try The Nanny Diaries or The Devil Wears Prada. From award winners to best-selling fluff, our fiction is filled with heroes and heroines who survive rather than act.

Why is this happening? For one thing, during the `90s, thanks to Oprah Winfrey and the increasing popularity of ethnic and gender studies, we became surrounded by the victim narrative. On TV, in school, in the movies, newspapers, and magazines, stories of manly straight white men doing bold deeds were replaced by tales of noble sufferers (often victims of those manly white men) whose act of courage was to tell a story that had not yet been told.

I also think the passive hero syndrome is a side effect of the growth in the teaching of creative writing. It's hard to make up stories and at the same time to make them believable. As a result, many creative writing teachers exhort students to "write what you know" (without adding, "or else, know about what you write.") And since most people who take creative writing classes in America are not rocket scientists, brain surgeons, or astronauts, the world that they know may not seem immense. They may not recognize the drama of everyday events like work, family, and love, but rather feel tempted to reach for that one awful time in their lives when everything seemed to go wrong.

One more thing. Our lives today in America can seem so easy and well-ordered. Anything we could want can be found in a moment on the Internet. We walk into a restaurant and within minutes we are served a tasty meal fusing tastes and spices from a variety of sources, Asian, Mexican, African, French, all in one bite. Credit cards arrive every day in the mail promising us more free money to shop with. In such a climate, maybe we enjoy the thrill of watching things go wrong instead of right so often.

Whatever the cause, all this passivity in American writing can't be good for us because the picture it paints is false. As Americans, we enjoy a position of privilege and power unmatched on the planet since the time of the Roman empire. And yet we turn a blind eye to the things that go on in our name around the globe and instead cry over re-runs of talk shows because we too were not hugged enough by our fathers or we too have trouble managing our alcohol intake. When will our writers stop re-enforcing our penchant for self-pity and start exhorting us to wake up, and act up?

How's Your Book Going?

2006-07-16T22:33:00.000-04:00

At some point, every writer has probably had to answer the question "How's your book going?" I wonder, however, if other writers have had as much difficulty as I have in coming up with an honest answer.

For me the process of writing a book begins some time shortly after birth. It is the direct result of my collected life experiences, some large and meaningful, others seemingly insignificant, which together point me toward an interest in arcane subject matter. Sprinkle in some day dreaming and extended periods of self doubt. Then write. Read what you've written. Try not to throw up. Rewrite. Read again, preferably after hiding all sharp objects in the vicinity. Repeat this process one hundred times and you might end up with a first draft.

What is a first draft, anyway? Or more precisely, what is a draft? When I write a novel, I try to move logically from point A to point B and somehow always get waylaid at point Q and a half. I attempt to flesh out one character, only to discover that as I learn more about who she is, I learn that her interactions with my only fully realized character in the novel make absolutely no sense. And just how many rooms does Mrs. Hinckel's apartment have? Was the picture in her living room of a landscape or a naked woman straddling a unicorn? What does the interior of the synagogue on Rykestrasse in Berlin look like? What magazines would you find in the waiting room at a German doctor's office? Answering burning questions like these, that's the romantic life of a writer.

Right now, I've written and re-written the novel I'm working on so many times I've lost count of all the pages I've typed and torn up. My main character has gone from the age of 37 to 23. Her husband has changed careers several times (he's now an international lawyer specializing in real estate, and let's hope he sticks to it). Her boyfriend has changed nationalities several times and gone back to his original origins as of this writing. The book's length has gone from 160 (handwritten) to 350, streamlined down to 200 (a bit of a starvation diet), and now is hovering at a reasonable 250, where I hope it will linger.

It's a fine piece of work, but I'm the last person to know anything about it. Now is the stage when I begin passing it around to critics I trust so they can tell me about the holes I can't see because I've had my nose rubbed into this story for too long. I'm waiting for the advice I desperately need to bring this book home.

"I'm closer to the end than to the beginning," that's how my book is going. How much closer, I'm not sure yet.

Anne Tyler and the Art of the Middlebrow

2006-06-30T10:32:00.000-04:00

As I closed the covers of Anne Tyler's new novel Digging to America, I found myself hard-pressed to think of another writer who's achieved as much success as she has to so little effect in literary circles. Here is a best-selling writer who's won the Pulitzer Prize, is a member of the American Academy of Letters, whose every new novel is treated as an event by the New York Times, and yet... Can you imagine a young writer of literary fiction citing Anne Tyler as an influence? Or just try walking into a literary gathering and mentioning that the latest book you've read and really enjoyed is the new novel by Anne Tyler. When I first moved to New York, I was surprised by the reactions I got when I mentioned her work. One writing teacher of mine, a Pulitzer-Prize winner himself, told me that when he'd first heard I was a Tyler fan he'd been seriously worried about my work. Another writer said, "Oh, her? She's so middlebrow."

Indeed, this is the chief charge against Tyler, that she's "middlebrow." (Type "Anne Tyler" plus "middlebrow" into Google and see how many hits you get.) Critics never explain this judgment with any specific objections to Tyler's work. There's simply a roll of the eyes, a wink-wink, and a "you know, middlebrow," dismissal. And then it's on to more serious stuff like a book by one of the Jonathans, or Zadie Smith (?).

So just how good is Anne Tyler? Is she a serious writer deserving of our attention or a hack who's managed to pull the wool over the eyes of a few select critics?

First, let's consider her weaknesses. Tyler's chief fault as a writer is that her characters never seem overly troubled by the drive for sex. (No less a writer than E. M. Forster had the same problem; Katherine Mansfield famously claimed to have come away from Howards End unsure of Helen Schlegel had been impregnated by Leonard Bast or a stolen umbrella.) I've read fifteen of Tyler's seventeen novels at this point, and am hard-pressed to remember a sexual act described in any of them. Often her characters express a desire for companionship, love, or even cuddling. (In her latest novel, a character memorably recalls sleeping curled up next to her husband like "two cashews.") Sex itself, however, is only alluded to (the two central couples of Digging to America have been trying to have kids, but you never get a sense of how they've been trying!), and rarely if ever glimpsed head on, discussed, or even contemplated in Tyler's world. This evasion comes off as all the more peculiar in relation to a literary landscape littered with authors like Michel Houellebecq or Philip Roth who seem unable to go without a few choice bits of porn for a few chapters, let alone an entire novel.

Tyler is also a relentlessly provincial writer. Digging to America like all her books since her fourth novel, The Clock Winder, is set in and around the city of Baltimore. Of course, Faulkner was provincial too, but somehow the provinces in his books, the decaying ante-bellum South, seem more important than the anonymous suburbs of Baltimore, whose sole element of local color seems to be a queer mispronunciation of Baltimore as "Balmer." Larger issues like politics rarely intrude in this gentle sheltered world, except as markers of time passing. It should be noted, however, that in Tyler's last two books, The Amateur Marriage and Digging to America, she has begun grappling with the effects of history (the turbulent social changes of the `60s and current concerns about immigration and the fluidity of identity) on private lives to fruitful effect.

Work is not Tyler's strong point either. Most of her characters are rarely shown in work settings, and seem to forget their jobs entirely once they leave the office, particularly if their professions are the usual ones, i.e. doctor, lawyer, teacher, real estate agent. The great exception to this rule is when her characters have odd self-created start-up businesses that run from home, running a "homesick restaurant," or writing guidebooks for people who hate to travel.

No sex, no politics, little work, nary a curse word, how do Tyler's characters pass the time? Mostly they chat together over meals or politely bicker on the phone, shop, attend parties, change diapers, or vacuum stubborn peanut-butter covered graham cracker crumbs out of rugs. Little is at stake but the human heart and perhaps a relationship or two, though the same might be said of Jane Austen as well, and look what happened to her career.

So what are Tyler's strengths? To begin with, few contemporary writers are able to generate as much liveliness and energy on the page as she does with so quiet a style. Contemporary writers tend to fall into one of two camps. Those like Philip Roth or Gary Shteyngart make you feel the pulse and rhythm of life with long sprawling somersaulting sentences that neatly echo the rhythms of life. Then you have writers more in the vein of Raymond Carver who use a hard-bitten minimalism to express alienation. Tyler walks a middle path, avoiding veering into extreme wildernesses of verbosity or abstemiousness. Yet her style is anything but boring, I think because of her word choices, which are marked by a clear-eyed precision matched with a somewhat whimsical wit. The following line from Digging to America is typically Tyler: "Her eyes were the shape of watermelon seeds, very black and cut very precisely into her small, solemn face." Or the wonderful surprise at the end of this sentence, from the novel Earthly Possessions, "I tripped over a mustard jar big enough to pickle a baby in." Or this crystalline description from The Amateur Marriage: "an upper lip that rose in two little points so sharp they might have been drawn with a pen."

Next, Tyler captures the complexity of family life and the difficult choice between being an individual versus belonging to a group. Her characters may not struggle against the usual bugbears of fiction, (bad sex, money trouble, unfulfilling job) but they are in a life and death struggle against the bonds of familial and societal expectations, sometimes barely detectable in today's less regimented world, but inexorably present all the same. Maryam, the Iranian-born matriarch at the center of Digging to America is a classic Tyler heroine, a capable woman, polite to a fault, yet troubled by her conflicting desires to be independent and to connect to others.

But Tyler's chief strength is how she makes you genuinely feel for characters, tugs at heart-strings more effectively than any writer alive. How does she do this? By focusing in like a laser beam on desire, each character's desire is clearly-marked, however strange, and they're so sure of what they want that we have to read on to see if they get it or not. This is not easy to do, especially when her characters themselves don’t seem to know. Perhaps this is the mysterious alchemy in her work that reviewers are constantly referring to.

So in the end, is Anne Tyler guilty of being middlebrow? Yes, but only in the sense that Lorrie Moore, John Updike, Michael Cunningham, or Tom Perrotta and any number of writers who explore the difficulties of modern suburban life are also middlebrow. It's not a fault, just the description of our times. Most of us in America today lead small, comfortable lives punctuated with trips to shopping malls. Few of us live next door to Beowulf. Why should we expect our novelists to compose epics about the way we live now?

Going Home

2006-06-16T03:44:00.000-04:00

After almost a year of living in Rome, my Italian adventure is coming to a close. I've been trying to think about what it's all meant to me, and how the experiences I've had will stay with me in the future. I think the quality that characterizes this year for me best is "double-ness." Not a very elegant way for a writer to put it, but it's the best word I can think of for this year.

First, there's Italy itself, which is such a splendid contradiction. You have a country with such a rich and deep history going from the Etruscans to the Roman empire to the Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque periods, a place that for so many years was the center of political power and cultural output that's almost unrivaled in history. And now? Since the unification, Italy has been ruled by a series of fragile, squabbling coalitions interrupted by periods of relative stability under the rule of a fascist (Mussolini) and a proto-fascist (Berlusconi). In terms of culture, Italy has gone from the dizzying heights of Virgil, Dante, Michelangelo, and Leonardo (to name a very very few stars in a vast solar system) to not a hell of a lot. There was opera, and directors like Fellini, De Sica, Visconti, and Pasolini. A few talented writers like Elias Canetti, Italo Calvino, and Primo Levi. And an art movement, Arte Povera, that was characterized by its ephermerality.

And then there's the Italian lifestyle, which can seem so laidback and easygoing. Italians can be so warm and informal. "Don't stand on ceremony," they seem to be saying. "Just come to my house for dinner and relax." Do whatever you like. Except don't use a knife to cut your pasta or put cheese on a dish with seafood or drink white wine with meat or red wine with fish or leave a party or a dinner too early (meaning less than four hours).

Which brings us to the question of rules in Italy. Sometimes they don't matter at all and sometimes they are dreadfully important. Witness the following two examples.

Example A: When I first came to Italy, I was on a bus when that rarest of rare events happened: an inspector boarded and asked to see if I'd bought a ticket. Misunderstanding what she meant, I replied in Italian, "I'm getting off in ten stops." The inspector heaved a great sigh and repeated her question in English, then said, "Okay, okay" and moved on to the next passenger. I tried to show her my valid ticket, but she couldn't have cared less.

Example B: A month ago, I went to buy a ticket to a movie that started at 8:00. I arrived at 8:04. The woman at the box office informed me I couldn't go in because it was after 8:00 and her computer now only printed tickets for the next show at 10:30. "But can't I buy a 10:30 ticket and go in now?" I asked. "No." "Why not?" "Because." "But why? It's the same price, and I've only missed a few minutes." "Because you can't. Next customer." "Are we in Germany?" I said. "I guess so," she said. A friend of mine who was there at the time said, "This theater is full of assholes," and we left the building. As we were standing outside, the woman got up out of her chair, came out of the booth, followed us outside, and said to me, "Excuse me, excuse me. You, here, are the asshole," and then returned to her desk.

Another time I was in a bakery and could smell the delicious perfume of some fresh rolls coming out of the oven. I asked if I could have one, and was told, "These rolls won't be ready for another half-hour." A minute or so later, another person behind the counter said, "Didn't you want one of these fresh rolls? How many do you want. I'll wrap them up for you now."

This kind of thing happens all the time. Depending on who you talk to and what mood she's in, you'll hear either, "Don't worry about it. Do whatever you want." Or "But you can't do that! It's against The Rules!"

But for me personally, the biggest source of double-ness of this past year has been living here while my partner of over five years remained back in New York. We visited each other every two months or so, taking turns crossing the Atlantic, but life without him hasn't been the same. With every new beautiful thing I see or place I visit or person I meet, the pleasure is that much less sweet because he can't be here to share the experience with me.

Going home, however, doesn't meant the end of double-ness. Though it may stand out in higher relief here in Italy, we in America have plenty of experience with it as well. (For example, fundamentalist Christians who believe abortion is murder while they whole-heartedly back the death penalty.) And maybe that's the lesson I've taken from my year, to take a second look at the mass of self-contradictions we live by, the unswervingly single-minded allegiance we pay to truths (political, religious, sexual, cultural) that seem self-evident, but upon closer examination just don't make sense.

A Trip to Sicily

2006-05-31T09:16:00.000-04:00

A week and a half ago, I flew to the east coast of Sicily to see what was there. The plane arrived in Catania, the "other" major hub of Sicily, (Palermo being the one most of us probably think of first). I'd planned to take a bus directly to Siracusa, namesake of the American college basketball team that won the national championship a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, at the time the bus was scheduled to depart, a heavyset man with slick hair and glistening sunglasses strolled through the crowd at the bus stop and murmured, "Siracusa?" over and over in a low voice like a drug pusher in Washington Square Park. When enough of the passengers were paying attention, he then announced, in the same impassive tone, "No bus." No bus? Why no bus, demanded several irate passengers. "Problem," was the answer.

The next bus was an hour later, giving me ample opportunity to get to know the Catania airport, basically a giant shed which is being replaced by a glass cathedral next door, still under construction. After wilting in the shade of a giant rock for a while, I went back to the stop where there still wasn't any bus. Just as I was on the point of a nervous breakdown, it ambled up to the pavement, fifteen minutes late.

We were dropped off on an island called Ortygia, Siracusa's historic center, where the 17th century buildings are packed together in no discernible order, a bit like Venice without the canals. Most of the facades are crumbling apart, but that doesn't seem to bother anyone living on the island. I spent most of my first day wandering in the narrow alleys, eating delicious seafood, and visiting the Duomo, which is actually a Greek temple with a roof over it and a statue of the Virgin Mary where a statue of Athena used to stand. I also took a bike ride around the island and went for a swim at the local beach, a big rock underneath one of the battlements, from which people leap into the clear blue water. Unfortunately, many of the museums were closed or partially closed for renovations. This included the famous archeological museum, two-thirds of which was closed, though they were still charging the full price for a ticket. "Why is it closed?" demanded an indignant German tourist. "Problem," was the answer.

For dinner I went to a local trattoria and ate one of the most disgusting foods I have ever tasted: pasta with sardines, wild fennel, capers, and olives, a local specialty that I saw several other tourists enjoying. The waiters were very disappointed in me because I didn't manage to finish the whole heaping plate of the stuff. Afterward, I strolled to the main square, where in front of the city hall, embarrassed schoolchildren in togas performed Greek dances for a crowd of delighted parents toting handheld video cameras.

My next stop was Catania itself, a dark, bustling city of noisy, unfriendly people. I loved it, though I'm not sure it loved me. The architecture is high Sicilian baroque with lacy facades that warp and curve above wide boulevards with narrow sidewalks. In the markets, the vendors scream out their wares at passersby. I was bullied into buying a kilo of delicious fresh cherries by an ebullient grandmother with a set of lungs that would put Maria Callas to shame. Everyone in the city seemed to be the star of his or her own TV show.

And then there are the clothes. Having visited Catania, I now realize that Dolce and Gabbana are not fashion designers; they are documentary filmmakers who are simply reporting to the rest of the world how people dress on the streets of Catania. This particularly true of the men, who wear skin-tight T-shirts in day-glo colors (wearing bright pink doesn't make you any the less masculine in Catania) drizzled with gold, silver, and bronze paint, rhinestones, spangles, and extravagant stitching that matches the sparkling gel in their hair and their silver sunglasses and their gold and silver sneakers. Strutting around in their dizzying finery, they reminded me of giant lollipops. The next morning, I stopped by a clothes market and bought a few cheap silver-drizzled T-shirts of my own, which will probably remain at the back of my drawer for several years.

The last stop on my tour was Taormina, a town beautifully situated on the side of a mountain that heads straight into the Mediterranean Sea. This was where I took my best photographs, and had my worst misadventures. Getting off the bus, I managed to dodge the parade of flabby tourists from northern countries to get to my pension, where the old lady in charge informed me that due to technical difficulties in the reservation system (nobody had written it down in her notebook), I had no reservation. She sent me to another pension down the street which had a surplus of rooms (in fact, I was the only guest), probably because they had no air conditioning and were located across the street from a construction site.

The fun was just beginning. On my way to the justly famous Greek theater (which like almost everything else in Sicily that's called Greek is actually Roman), I paid an inflated price for a pair of batteries that turned out to be dead. After confronting the shop owner, I was told the fault was mine for wanting to use these batteries in such an unusual item as a camera, but if I paid two more Euros, I could have more powerful batteries. I asked to try them out first, and indeed, these more powerful batteries also turned out to be dead. At this point, I asked for my money back, and the shop owner invited me to bring the police, which I did, and after heaping much abuse upon my head for wasting his time and opening his packages of dead batteries which because they were opened he could no longer sell to credulous tourists, he returned the money.

The next day, tired of waking up to the sound of jackhammering, winding my way between enraptured tourists, and paying on average thirty-five Euros per meal, I was more than glad to get on the bus back to the Catania airport, which departed on time. All seemed to be well until about a mile from the airport, our bus sideswiped a machine that was paving the road. We pulled over and our driver got out to perform an operatic scene with the construction workers. One of the passengers got off too, flagged down another bus, and hopped on, leaving us to our fate. Finally, a second, empty bus arrived to take the rest of us to the airport, where our plane arrived an hour late, causing the old man sitting behind me and a flight attendant to get into a heated discussion over whether the airline was engaged in a conspiracy to deceive its passengers into believing its flights ever arrived on time.

I can't wait to go back to Sicily.

Adventures in Italian Travel

2006-05-15T11:31:00.000-04:00

In a month and a few days, I'll be going back to New York, so lately I've been scrambling to see various things in Rome and Italy before I leave. Last week I traveled with a group from the American Academy to the Veneto region, near Venice, to see several villas designed by the Renaissance architect Antonio Palladio. (Unfortunately I also stupidly left my passport at an Internet cafe there, but I'm getting it back this afternoon.)

There's something solid and impressive about these villas, a something that proved pretty difficult for any of us on the trip to define, maybe because Palladio's designs have been copied so much that the effect they must have had on his contemporaries is probably lost on us. From what I could glean, his innovation was to use Greek temples as models for residential buildings, a choice that apparently seemed shocking to viewers in the 1500s, though not for a Michigander like me who's seen his share of Ionic columns in suburban subdivisions.

The day after I came back from up north, I went with an Italian friend to Naples, the city where he was born. The trip began with a hot, airless ride on an inter-city train crowded with noisy Neopolitans slurring their words and adjusting their glittering sunglasses and flashy silver belt buckles. That night, I stayed in an area called the Spanish Quarter, a tightly-packed neighborhood of buildings decorated with endless lines of laundry and improvised shrines to the Virgin Mary. Mopeds zip and swerve at dangeriously high speeds through the back alleys where kids play in dark, garbage-strewn puddles. The buildings were so close together that everywhere I walked through the streets I could hear ghostly voices echoicing out of the windows, though I could never tell where they were coming from. My room was a shed built on the roof of the building, from which I took in a magical view of the Bay of Naples lit up by night.

This week, a friend of mine is here to visit, and so the two of us have been exploring corners of the city I've haven't yet gotten to. We wanted to go for lunch on his first day, but the indignant waiter at the first restaurant we walked into reprimanded us, "We're closed. It's 3:00!" Apparently in Italy one is not allowed to be hungry after 3:00 because we tried several other restaurants with the same result. In the end, we settled for a take away joint serving the inevitable "pizza al taglio," or pizza by the slice.

Yesterday we rented bikes and rode down an old Roman highway that is closed to traffic on Sundays, except that yesterday it wasn't closed to traffic because of a wedding party taking place there. We've also visited a Christian catacomb, several churches with dazzling mosaics, and a market in Rome's immigrant neighborhood where you can get Arabic couscous, Indian spices, or Chinese pears. If I had my experience to do over again, I'd have spent much more time with Rome's immigrant community. I can only imagine the rich stories I might have uncovered.

The day after my friend leaves, I'll be going to Sicily to see the eastern tip of the island, and the cities of Syracuse, Catania, and Taormina. I called an inn in Taormina to make a reservation, and as I started to say my name, the man who picked up the phone interrupted me to ask, "Where are you from? England? Germany?" I told him I was American. "One American, the night of May 23rd," he said. "See you then. Bye."

How all these sights and sounds are going to impact my work is not immediately clear, but I'm glad to have had the chance to take them all in.

Prague, 10 Years Later

2006-05-01T06:10:00.000-04:00

Ten years ago, I got off a train at the main station in Prague with an overstuffed backpack and duffel bag and began a yearlong adventure that ultimately resulted in my first book of stories, The View from Stalin's Head. Last Monday, I booked a last minute ticket on Czech Airlines and flew back there from Rome.

As I took bus 119 from the airport to the center, I was struck by how clearly I remembered so much of the landscape. Here I was again on Europe Avenue (which used to be Lenin Avenue), passing the Esso gas station that made a cameo appearance in one of my stories (with an inflated tiger on the roof who is no longer there). There was the Delvita supermarket, the path I used to climb uphill to my friend's house and my gym in Petriny, tram 26 that I used to ride to work every day, my old apartment.

In the city itself, I was glad to see so many of the little cafes where I used to go to write were still open, and even though they're smack in the middle of prime sightseeing land, they've somehow avoided being taken over by tourists. On the other hand, Dunkin' Donuts, which had staked out several posts in the city including prime territory on Wenceslas Square, is now out of business in Prague.

A lot has changed. Everywhere, prices are higher, even in state museums that used to charge Czechs lower entrance fees than tourists. Now everyone pays the same inflated price, which is still pretty reasonable by Western standards. There's a new museum of Communism, a period that is beginning to feel like ancient history. (I went in and stopped for a while in front of a display about the Stalin Monument that inspired the title of my book.)

Cinemas show American movies almost exclusively, and tickets that once cost two dollars are now up to seven. The food culture is also very different. Before, there were pretty much only Czech "hospody"--pubs--to choose from, all serving the usual national staples of pork, cabbage, and dumplings. Today, however, Italian restaurants, particularly pizzarias, have taken the country by storm, and you can find cappucino, tiramisu, and pizza margarita even in the most remote suburbs.

On a more serious note, I was glad to hear that the cause of gay rights had just scored a major victory when the Czech parliament overrode the veto of the conservative President Vaclav Klaus to legalize civil unions for same-sex partners. I was pretty disappointed in Klaus, who'd been the prime minister when I lived in Prague and whom I'd always liked because he bore an uncanny resemblance to Santa Claus, minus the beard.

The biggest change I noticed was the omnipresence of commercialism. Sometimes it seemed as if every last inch of free space had been plastered with advertisments. Drive a little ways out of the city, and you'll see the highways are lined with office buildings for Western companies, new apartment complexes, shopping malls that look as if they'd been airlifted from American suburbs, or megastores like Ikea and Bauhaus (the German version of Home Depot). A friend told me that the new Czech dream is to move to the suburbs, commute to work in town, and on weekends take your family for a stroll through a shopping mall. (Sound familiar, anyone?)

What made me happiest, though, was the most important thing that hadn't changed: friendship. Once again, I was chatting with my friend Milan about the latest squabbles in Prague's tiny and endlessly subdividing Jewish community, talking politics over tea with my friend Ivo, and communicating with a mixture of broken English, ersatz Czech, German, and hand gestures with my friend Pavel, who still has his same old earthy charm. I couldn't help tearing up when I visited Milan's "maminka," who as ever bubbled over with her infectious warmth. After cooking us a hearty lunch, she carefully wrapped a plastic box of cookies to take with me for the flight home.

Revisiting all these familiar people and places made me turn inward, to ask myself how have I changed since those days? I'd imagined that after living in Prague, I would come back home with a surer sense of my own identity, a strong drive to go after the things I wanted out of life. And it's true that since then I've accomplished quite a lot. I've been in a serious relationship for more than five years, I've moved to New York, I've gone to graduate school and written two books. And yet as I waved goodbye to Pavel and Milan at the airport, for a few dizzying seconds, I couldn't go forward, past the passport control and on to the security check. I still felt like that same scared kid who'd gotten off the train ten years ago and wondered, what next? What am I supposed to do now?

Kosher for Passover in Italy

2006-04-15T07:54:00.001-04:00

Passover is upon us, and while most Italians are mobbing the stores to do some last-minute Easter shopping before everything closes for the "ponte" (literally, "bridge," but actually "long weekend"), I went hunting for non-bread products to keep me going for the duration of the holiday. For those not in the know, pasta is not kosher for Passover, though every year many of my non-Jewish friends try to convince me otherwise. Trust me on this one, guys. Even though it doesn't look like bread, pasta still counts.

Not being able to eat pasta in Italy presents a bit of a challenge. (I have a newfound appreciation for another of the fellows at the Academy who has a gluten intolerance.) As I wended my way through the aisles of my local grocery store, crammed with enormous overpriced hollow chocolate eggs wrapped in glistening cellophane and riots of ribbons, I tried to plan the next few days of meals. At the bread section, I paused, then went on wheeling my cart, in the odd hope of finding a box of matzah. (My copy-editor at Random House insists it's spelled matzo, but somehow the "o" spelling doesn't look right to me.)

Imagine my surprise to find a box of crackers called "Pane Azymo," imported from Strasbourg. As I looked over the ingredients, water, salt, unleavened flour, it was clear what I was holding: genuine matzah. True, if I were going strictly by the book, the Pane Azymo wouldn't count because though it had a symbol on the box indicating it was kosher, there was no mark that it was kosher for Passover, which is officially a different thing. However, I made a sign of the cross over the box, which in my book is just as good as paying off some ultra-Orthodox rabbi for the kosher-for-Passover stamp, and voila: matzah.

Some of my friends have trouble understanding my pick and choose attitude toward religion, and truly, I'm not sure I get it all either. At one of the Passover seders I went to this year, a debate erupted at the table over whether we're allowed to decide for ourselves the extent to which we keep the rituals and laws of religion. My view is that I'm not willing to run around wearing a yarmulke, only eating pre-approved foods, keeping the lights off on Shabbat (or setting them to go on and off on a timer, which always strikes me as a bit of a cheat). At the same time, I don't want to chuck all of the traditions I grew up with out the window. And so I nod to the past, rather than bow. I'm willing to give up bread, pasta, cookies, and cake for Passover, but I'm not going to chase bread crumbs with a feather and a candle.

This approach leads to some confusion, even hypocrisy it might be argued, on my part. I won't touch bread on Passover, but a slice of sandwich-less non-kosher salami doesn't bother me. "A-ha!" cry both my religious and atheist friends with satisfaction. "Your system of rules has no logic! Why bother keeping it at all?"

Suppose it was your husband's birthday, and you didn't want to take him out to the most expensive restaurant in town and buy him a new Mercedes. Would that mean you shouldn't recognize the occasion at all? Or that it's less valid to celebrate a birthday by baking him a cake and giving him a new tie?

My version of recognizing my Jewish identity connects me with my past in a way that I find satisfying. I don't ask anyone else to do as I do or to approve. It's just that for me, I don't get much out of pondering whether a box has a K stamp or a K for P stamp or a Mickey Mouse stamp on it. There are other questions in life I want to spend my time worrying about. That's not to say that a question of stamps might not prove extremely meaningful and satisfying to someone else. But for me, I'm sticking with my "pane azymo" topped with a few slices of tomato and mozzarella. Or, if I feel like it, some non-kosher salami.

A Matter of Style

2006-03-31T09:25:00.000-05:00

While I can't speak for everyone, it's hard for me to imagine a writer who isn't prejudiced one way or the other about literary style. It won't come as a surprise to anyone who's read even a few sentences of my work that I prefer dry, clear, sharp writing to robust, purple prose. Given the choice between Jane Austen and Laurence Sterne, or to be more contemporary, Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon, I'll go for Austen and Roth every time. That's not to say I haven't enjoyed the works of flashier writers ranging from Henry Fielding to Thomas Hardy to David Foster Wallace. But there's a difference in my appreciation of the two types of writing. With Hardy, I'll slug it out with his winding sentences and use of arcane vocabulary like "dumbledore" for the rewards of his bizarre plots and unforgettable characters. When I read a master of concision like E. M. Forster, however, I get pleasure out of his plot and characters as well as the cool elegance of a line like, "To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge; the poor cannot afford it."

During the `80s and for a part of the `90s, it seemed as though lush, muscular, flashy prose wasn't quite so commonplace. Minimalists like Raymond Carver held more sway, particularly among graduates of MFA programs. These days, however, walking through the literary fiction section of a bookstore you can't help but trip over plump four-hundred-plus page books jam-packed with zany characters, plot twists, and marathon-length sentences that you don't read so much as decipher, like a message written in Morse Code.

That's not to say the minimalists are inherently superior to other writers. At its worst, minimalism can be a cover for lazy, unimaginative, and dull writing, the kind you might encounter in a Dick and Jane reader. However, maximalism at its worst suffers from much the same disease, lazy, unimaginative, and dull writing that because it's so busy can sometimes seem more impressive than it actually is.

Take, for example, an excerpt from the novel "The Amalgamation Polka" by Stephen Wright, recently published to high acclaim. Here is a representative sentence: "She flung open the window, admitting the clemency of spring, its sweet pastoral breath, and the nervous twitter and rustle of sparrows on the roof." In English, this sentence means that she opened the window and felt a spring breeze and heard birds outside. But that's not good enough for Wright, who wants his character to "fling" open the window (for no apparent reason I could find other than to impress the reader with the choice of "fling" instead of "open"). He then gives us "the clemency of spring," a metaphor that made me pause, but for the wrong reasons. Clemency from what? Winter, I suppose. This leads me to wonder, what sin has been committed to earn the dire punishment of winter? Who handed down this stern judgment? And to whose grace do we owe this welcome "clemency"? "The nervous twitter and rustle of sparrows on the roof" sounds alright to me; that's a specific, if uninspired, bit of detail I can wrap my mind around. The same cannot be said for the cloying and vague "sweet pastoral breath." Maybe this phrase is an attempt to imitate or spoof an archaic, formalized style of writing. So why does it remain merely an attempt at parody instead of a direct hit? For me, it's because the choice of words seems like a forced reach for a kind of majestic tone that the writer isn't himself comfortable with. It reeks of the kind of pretense you often hear in public speakers like Jesse Jackson who are so anxious to pass themselves off as intellectuals that they confuse words like "tragical" and "tragic" or "orientate" and "orient."

Compare the laxness of these word choices with another pastoral image, this from the forthcoming novel by Gary Shteyngart, Absurdistan: "The world was golden around me, the evening sun setting light to a row of swaying alders; the alders abuzz with the warble of siskin birds, those striped yellow fellows from our nursery rhymes. I turned pastoral for a moment, my thoughts running to Beloved Papa, who was born in a village and for whom village life should be prescribed, as only there--half asleep in a cowshed, naked and ugly, but sober all the same--do the soft tremors of what could be happiness cross his swollen Aramaic face." Wright gives us sparrows, but Shteyngart gives us "alders abuzz with the warble of siskin birds." Which writer would you rather go bird-watching with? Wright's sparrows are merely there for window dressing, to give us an idea of a real scene. Shteyngart's alders, however, are not only specifically observed, but also they connect the image of the countryside to the theme of childhood innocence ("those striped yellow fellows from our nursery rhymes,"), which in turn leads naturally and elegantly to memories of the narrator's father. Every word in Shteyngart's sentence seems chosen for a precise effect, and yet no one could accuse Shteyngart of dullness. His sentences are every bit as lively and lush as Wright's, with that added advantages of meaning and sense.

So how do we account for the acclaim Wright has received for "the vibrant beauty and savory brilliance of every paragraph" of his writing, "the untrammeled delight it offers to anyone lucky enough to read it"? I can't, except to say that when reading Maximialists, critics are often so distracted by the strangeness of the writing that they don't stop to take the sentences to task and rather accept their somersaulting on faith. It's a little like watching a movie with expensive special effects, when we're so dazed from all the fireworks on screen that when the smoke clears, we forget to notice there's nothing else there.

My Own Sex and the City

2006-03-15T07:52:00.000-05:00

I'm still jet-lagged from the trip back to Rome, so instead of sleeping I've been watching borrowed DVD's on my Mac until 4 in the morning. A friend lent me the first two seasons of Sex and the City, which I'd never seen before, and that's what I've started with.

The show made its debut the same year that I moved to New York City, and watching it now is like opening a time capsule. This is pre-9/11, pre-dot-com bust, pre-George Bush (even pre-Monica Lewinsky) New York City. The World Trade Center still dominates the skyline. Jobs paying twenty dollars an hour to do little more than surf the internet all day are still plentiful. Manhattan is a big playground of fusion-cuisine restaurants and smoky bars where every night it seems possible you might meet The One, the man or woman you'd spend the rest of your life with.

Like the characters of Sex and the City, I went from date to date, trying to convince myself that despite each new flaw I'd discover in the latest guy I was seeing, this time things were different, this relationship would last. And though none of them did last, none of them ended my faith in the possibility that the next relationship would be different from the one before.

It was a confusing, heady time with daily miracles and catastrophes. I'd just started grad school and was meeting my writing friends in cafes to exchange our latest short stories, hot from our printers. The most ambitious of us would feverishly submit our work to literary magazines that would send back form rejection letters, occasionally scribbled with a cryptic handwritten "Sorry, but try us again!" Or "Nice work" and then an illegible signature as if to say, "Here's a compliment, but don't dare try to use this to establish a relationship with a real person on our staff."

Politics hardly seemed to matter. Certainly they mattered less than the brilliant screenplays we were going to write, the important sculptures we were going to create, the torrent of culture and cuisine we felt it was our duty to consume and comment on.

Back then, the one thing I knew for sure was that I wanted to leave New York as soon as I could. I hated the crowded sidewalks, the lines, the extravagant prices, the snobby bar scene, the stupid parties where you were expected to hold court with a drink in your hand and utter clever bon mots. I used to wander through Riverside Park, trying to find a corner where I'd be surrounded by trees and nothing and no one else. There I'd dream of living in a quiet, civilized college town with my own car and cheap, massive grocery stores with parking lots.

Where would I go? How would I earn a living? Who would I fall in love with? When would I be published? I was so consumed with trying to find the answers to these questions as quickly as possible that I completely missed that I was living in an enchanted fairyland. Many of the literary magazines I used to get rejection letters from have folded because no one reads anymore. The dot-com jobs have vanished. The friends from that time in my life have mostly moved away from the city and started different lives. New York grows ever more expensive, and the city's festive atmosphere has darkened under the shadow of the constant threat of terrorism. Even in our happy, reckless moments, at the back of our minds, our joy is tinged with the upsetting knowledge that elsewhere on the globe, war rages on.

By Hand

2006-03-05T16:11:00.000-05:00

A week ago, I boarded a British Airways flight from Rome to New York (which included a harried transfer at London Heathrow). While on board, I opened up my notebook and began to write a new short story. When I say notebook, I mean the kind with paper inside and not microchips. When I say write, I mean write, not type. I've always written my first drafts by hand... until now.

Getting the pen to move across the paper was like pushing it through sludge. The words refused to suggest themselves. Characters refused to speak. The rooms they moved in remained featureless, unfurnished blank cubes without traces of human contact. I finally had to give it up.

For years, the only way I've been able to start a project has been with pen and paper. (It also makes for a handy parlor trick to pull out of my hat at readings. "You've written an entire book BY HAND?") But I wasn't doing it to impress anyone. It was the way I began writing as a kid, before computers were widely available. It felt natural to be able to flip back and forth through pages, to scribble notes to myself in the margins or on the back of the page. It felt satisfying to scratch, scratch, scratch through a sentence or paragraph that doesn't work, or to scribble in a brilliant new insight across the white space on the top.

Writing by hand also forced me to re-evaluate what I'm working on word by word as I type what I've written into my computer. It created a necessary extra step that gave me a second chance to consider my choices. Did I really believe deep down in that metaphor? Would a character from Georgia really speak like a princess born in London? Was this inside reference to my favorite Jane Austen novel worth an extra sentence that bogged down my forward narrative drive?

I've been a true believer on the subject of writing by hand for so long that now as I try to continue the habit, I'm all the more surprised by my failure. The trouble began with my novel, which I've written twice by hand, once a couple of years ago, and again all last fall in Rome. When I was dissatisfied with the results, I just couldn't face the idea of opening a notebook and starting at page one once more. Instead, I turned on my computer and began to type. My fingers flew. I didn't focus on getting scenes right word by word. I threw in details of setting and physical description when I felt like it, but didn't stop to worry over them. Instead I homed in on action and moved forward through time with each sentence. The characters seemed to dance across the screen, and all I had to do was keep up with them. After a month, I had a glistening new novel instead of the lumpy mess I'd been trying to polish without success for so long.

Recently, as I tried to begin a new story on paper, I experienced the same frustration. Somehow writing each word felt too slow for me. But when I turned on my computer, I felt liberated. Scenes, characters, settings could all be fleshed out later. The main thing was to race to the end, and to go back and fill in shadings later. The new approach worked like a dream. Within a week, I had my story.

I'm not convinced that this rejuvination I feel from working on a computer rather than with pen and paper has much to do with the physical properties of either medium. It's probably making a change for change's sake that helped me more than the nature of that change. If I were a writer who preferred to work afternoons and had decided to swtich to mornings, it might have done just as well. The important thing is to shake things up, not rely on what's worked in the past.

The same goes for the content of the work itself. In my previous work, I explored stable codes of behavior associated with Judaism or American middle class life. In the work I'm doing now, I'm beginning to consider more personal, completely invented codes of behavior that shift from scene to scene, chapter to chapter, plunging characters who believe themselves to be rational into life-shaking confusion. The results are thrillingly and achingly alive. More importantly, they present me with new problems to solve, new people to get to know, new questions to ask my readers who like me are trying to make sense of a world that seems to be teetering on the edge of chaos.

Back Home?

2006-02-16T16:16:00.000-05:00

My stint in Berlin is over and I've just returned to Rome, which oddly enough, feels a bit like home.

The minute that I entered the gate and heard the Italian passengers greeting each loudly, as if they were hosting a private party for all one hundred of their closest friends, I knew I was leaving silent, somber Germany behind. When I arrived in Rome and headed back to the Academy, I noticed how the scenery had a lovely coherence, instead of the urban jumble of Berlin. And speaking and understanding Italian felt much more comfortable than the rigors of the German language.

All that said, I enjoyed my time in Berlin. I met writers and artists, Berliners and American transplants. A striking number of the latter were Jewish. When I mentioned to a Berliner friend that I was thinking about writing an essay on how strange it must seem to some to love Berlin and be Jewish at the same time, she told me, "You'd better hurry. There are so many Jews coming to this city."

Why do I love Berlin? It's nowhere near as beautiful as Paris or Prague. The people, though often polite, are hardly as effusive as the Romans. In comparison with the lilt of Italian or French, the language grates the ear. Culturally, I'm much more an Anglophile than a Deutsch-ophile. And no, I don't have any bizarre Nazi fetishes (though I've met Jews who do).

What I like about the city is that it's always been a special case, the kind of place that always has an asterik next to it, a work in progress that never seems near completion. I read a history of the city that argued that Berlin has always had a kind of angst because it's always been trying and never quite succeeding to earn the international cosmopolitan reputation of a London or Paris. Maybe that explains why over the past hundred and fifty years it's been constantly remodeled and reconceived. Yet each "New Berlin" that emerges always bears marks of the old, from the imperialist hopes of the Kaisers to the classical aspirations of the Nazis to the competing utopian reconstruction projects of the West and East Berliners after the war, to the current euphoric city of glass and steel being built post-reunification.

Still, the real Berlin always seems to be a bit beneath the dreams of its ambitious architects. To me, the soaring beauty of Berlin's latest crop of buildings with their clean lines and immaculate facades has a sterility that belies the liveliness of the city. You can sense that liveliness watching artists lugging home organic groceries on their bicycles, the meaty steam of doner kebab stands and Chinese-Thai "Asia Snack" restaurants, punks leading their dogs down the sidewalks, smoky cafes, crowded discount stores seemingly every few steps, subway passengers selling the unused portions of their tickets on their way out of the station.

It's the kind of city where you'll stumble on a modest brass cobblestone set into the sidewalk indicating that the building you're walking by was once the residence of a Jew who was deported to Terezin. Or while riding your bike, you'll cross an ordinary-looking street and suddenly realize you've just passed from the former West Berlin to the former East (even though you're riding toward the west). The past, though not always very nice, is often startlingly present.

It's also one of the few European cities where you can easily find bagels, sushi, cheeseburgers (good cheeseburgers, in fact), pad thai, felafel, and quesadillas. Thanks to the reunification, there seems to be at least two of everything: art museums, bohemian neighborhoods, operas, and symphonies. And the nice thing for artists is that it's very cheap. Rent, for example, is barely a quarter of what you'd pay in New York City.

It's a city that's difficult to sum up or categorize, but one that bears revisiting, as you'll never have the same experience twice. This last time, as I watched the slow demolition of the Communist Palast der Republik, I thought of how stupid I was not to have gone into the place when I had the chance. Or when I went to see a movie at the Berlin Film Festival in Potsdamer Platz, I remembered when the place was a vast field of cranes and dirt. My most magical memory of Berlin was my first hour in the city, back in 1997, when I rode Bus 100 from West to East and we approached the famous Brandenburg Gate, and then suddenly headed right through it! Today the route has changed, but it's still worth getting on. Who knows which way it will go tomorrow?

Sounds of Silence

2006-02-02T15:07:00.000-05:00

So I'm actually not reporting from Rome this time, but Berlin, where keyboards reverse the y's and z's, so I have to keep remembering not to hit the wrong key as I tzpe this, or rather, as I type this.

Besides keyboards, one of the things I notice most about the difference between Berlin and Rome is the silence. This is partially due to the frigid weather, which means fewer people out on the street, but even the ones who are out walk
fairly silently and avoid each other's eyes. You notice it on the subway too. On my way to this internet cafe, I was in a crowded car during rush hour, and all the passengers were either completely silent or talking in hushed tones.

The other major difference I've noticed is that the food tastes blander, even if you're in an Italian or Asian or Turkish restaurant. Even the produce has a milder taste. Which is not to say that the food is bad, because I've had some very good meals here, but you don't get the extremes or the richness of Italian cuisine.

What am I doing here? I'm trying to put an end to my novel before it puts an end to me, and absorbing details of atmosphere and culture that can only be gleaned, at least in my case, from lived experience. It's a great city, rich with history and culture, but also a sense of flux that comes from how diverse it is. Not only do you have the collapsing of East and West, which has produced a rich variety of cultural venues, but also there are immigrants from all over the world. Walking down the street, you're sure to see various skin tones and facial structures, and many many women with head-scarves.

So far what's been most helpful is the silence. The studio apartment where I'm staying, and indeed the city as a whole, is so quiet that it's allowed me to focus and retreat into my own head so deeply I sometimes feel as if I'm in a trance. As a permanent state of affairs, this might not be healthy, but for now, it works well, and I'm feeling quite rosy about this new book. I think it may not only be the finest thing I have written, but also the deepest and most honest. And if I stay disciplined enough, this book will help me realize my dream of writing a short, dense 200 page novel like The End of the Affair or On the Black Hill, small books that you can never forget.

For inspiration, I've turned to two different sources. The first is Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee, which I loved when I first read it. Now that I'm rereading it closely, I'm astonished by it. I simply cannot understand how it's possible not to be bowled over by this book, which I still don't entirely comprehend, and for me, that's the point. The other book is Owls Do Cry by Janet Frame, whose life and work have been a longtime obssession of mine. Though the book is only about 160 pages, it's taken me a month to wade through its currents. The richness of Frame's language and her range of expressive tools reminds me more of poetry than prose. I also admire her dead-on feel for the meaningless rituals we give value to as children, adolescents, and then as adults. As with Coetzee, I have a hard time figuring out how her work hangs together as a coherent whole, but I don't mind either, when there are such rich rewards of langauge or insight on every page.

So that's what I'm hearing these days. And a little Joni Mitchell too. Not a bad life for now. I feel lucky to be able to have it while I can.

Some Italian Theater

2006-01-16T12:04:00.000-05:00

It's cold here, but everyone seems to be in a little better mood than usual because the holidays are (finally!) over and we've had over a week of uninterrupted sunshine.

In America, our "holiday season," which is really a politely ecuminical way of referring to the breaks from work and school that we get because of Christmas, usually lasts around a week and creates barely a ripple in our regular lives. Here, where theater is a way of life, getting ready for, experiencing, and coming down from the holidays is a production that would make Verdi and Puccini proud. In addition, the holiday season gets stretched out for an extra week by "La Befana" Day on January 6, when an old ugly witch appears to give candy to good children and lumps of coal to bad ones. What this means in practical terms is that no one goes to work (which is actually the normal state of affairs in Italy) and that Piazza Navona turns into a street carnival with games, a carousel, cotton candy, candied apples, and helium balloon versions of SpongeBob Squarepants and the Power Puff Girls.

If Italian life is theatrical, Italian theater is even more theatrical. Last week I went to see the Edward Albee classic "Chi ha paura di Virginia Woolf?" starring Mariangela Melato, probably best known to American audiences for starring in the Lina Wertmuller film Swept Away. This is the second play I've seen in Rome, and both productions featured handheld video cameras, which the actors use to videotape each other while they're performing, so that their every facial expression is magnified on TV screens for the audience. This does not happen all the time, of course. Only during very emotional or dramatic moments, just in case the audience isn't aware that it's an emotional or dramatic moment. If that isn't enough, there's also dramatic music swelling in the background and chartreuse or magenta colored spotlights to key us in. This emotional underlining may seem unnecessary to American theatergoers, but you have to keep in mind that the Italian style of acting is to scream every line at a fever pitch, which therefore makes the detection of dramatic peaks and valleys that much more difficult.

The finest form of Italian theater, however, is not as you might expect opera, but rather politics, which are heating up in Italy because there's going to be an election in April. It's media magnate and rightist Silvio Berlusconi (who happens to control or influence just about every major TV and radio station in the country, not to mention several newspapers) against the candidate of the united left, Romano Prodi. Imagine John Kerry without the charisma, and that's Prodi.

To remind Prodi what his priorities ought to be, the Communist party sponsored a rally last weekend to advocate for civil unions. Almost as fascinating as the rally itself were the lovely posters fixed up on walls all over town of two gorgeous impeccably dressed Italian men holding hands while sitting on a white sofa. It could have been an Ikea ad, except that a large Communist flag with hammer and sickle was suspended between them. (For some reason there was no version of the ad with two women.) Actually, it seemed a little strange to me that the Communists should be in favor of gay rights given the dismal treatment of gays in Communist countries like the Soviet Union or today's China.

At the rally itself, a motley gang of groups (including athiests selling T-shirts that said "No God" and stickers that said "Danger! Catechism!") gathered to declare what ought to be an obvious statement: "Italy is a secular state." If you're not Italian, however, it may be difficult to imagine the emotional resonance of this sentence. Sadly, given the Pope's enormous influence on politics and culture here, Italy is not a secular state in reality, which may explain why it is the only country among the EU's original sixteen members that doesn't have some kind of domestic partnership arrangement on the books.

However, in this respect at least, as an American I have no cause to look down my nose at Italy. Certainly our own country does not answer to the Pope, but rather to a caricature of Jesus Christ whipped up by evangelicals who believe, for example, that God gives strokes to Prime Ministers who evacuate the Gaza Strip, or sends hurricanes to punish cities where people have too much fun. "America is a secular state." I think I'm still safe in saying that. We'll see if I feel the same after a few more years of a Republican White House. One thing, I do know for sure, however, is that I would feel very nervous walking down an American street dressed in a "No God" T-shirt, even in that bastion of liberalism, the People's Republic of New York City.

A New Year's Wish

2006-01-01T09:04:00.000-05:00

Last night, I was talking with some friends at a New Year's party, and I suddenly said aloud, "This has been a really shitty decade." What a relief to admit it. Since the selection of 2000 (can we really call it an election?), very little seems to have gone right in the world.

My first thought, when I try to understand why things seem so terrible, is to blame the president. Even if you're a Bush supporter, can you possibly be satisfied with what he's produced? A war seemingly without end in Iraq? An exploding deficit that keeps ballooning more and more out of control each year? Newspapers filled with bombs exploding around the world (though none so far on our precious soil)? And despite Bush's grand promises to his conservative base on abortion and homosexuality, has he really managed to make any serious inroads on those issues?

Since this small-minded man has become president, we've become more divided as a nation (both from each other and our neighbors), our national culture has become coarser, our people have retreated out of fear into a blind imitation of faith that leaves us angry and bitter, and worst of all, we're constantly scared for our lives. We're afraid to fly, afraid to ride public buses or subways, afraid to travel to crowded cities like New York (tempting terrorist targets), afraid to write emails or do google searches that could be archived and some day come back to haunt us. We're even afraid to argue about politics with people who don't agree with us, afraid that the emotions underneath our political views will get the better of us and bring us to blows. Books, movies, and music are all tired and less accomplished retreads of things we've seen before. TV shows are becoming more violent, crude, and acrimonious. And the people who watch the shows and then imitate the behavior they see while speaking on their cell phones to teach other are becoming more violent, crude, and acrimonious. And no one cares. Why should they? They're behaving just like the man at the top, our violent, crude, and acrimonious president who will be remembered for two qualities: pettiness and vindictiveness. Oddly enough, he once claimed that his inspiration was Jesus Christ. Which specific characteristics do George Bush and Jesus Christ have in common?

Sadly, however, we can't heap the blame for all the troubles we're in on this one rather vile man. As powerful an office as he holds, and as powerful a nation as America is, we are not powerful enough to control the minds and destinies of the world's citizens, who are becoming increasingly selfish, shallow, and miserable. And for this state of affairs, each of us bears some responsibility. What have we done to make other people's lives easier, richer, happier? How often do we take a break from worrying about our petty concerns about our looks, our money, our inability to feel perfectly loved, entertained, and satisfied at all possible moments and instead think about the suffering of others? We don't need more iPods or cell phones or secret government agencies to spy on ourselves and others or consitutional amendments banning behavior we don't like. We don't need lavish vacations and parties with mountains of uneaten food that get thrown out at the end fo the evening and vulgar displays of jewelry and clothes and cosmetics. But what can I do, we ask ourselves. The world is big and its problems are bigger, and we are so small.

We can spread love, each one of us. And we can start now.

We need to love every person we know and every person we see and every person we think of, even George Bush, even terrorists hiding out in caves who may be planning our destruction. We need to turn off our cell phones and Tivos and iPods and all the unnecessary noise that's polluting our brains and we need to think seriously about who we are and why do we want to continue to live on this planet. And most of all, we need to stop being afraid, of terrorists, of ignorant presidents, or each other.

If we can just stop being afraid, that there won't be enough money for all of us, that some dark stranger is lurking around the corner who wants to kill us, that we're getting fat, old, ugly, boring, uninformed, that the world is going by so fast that if we don't race to keep up with our emails and voice mails and favorite websites it will pass us by--if we can just let go of the weight of all our fears, imagine how beautiful our world could become. It's so hard not to be afraid. And yet what has our fear given us? How has it protected us? Or has it only made us more vulnerable, causing us to spend more, worry more, argue more, and love so much less.

So that's my goal for this new year, and my wish for the world, that we all stop being afraid. Maybe not all the time, but maybe a few minutes each day, maybe an hour, an hour and a half, I will tell myself, I am not afraid. And I will wait for peace to come.

A Reading Rut

2005-12-16T06:11:00.000-05:00

One of the things I worried about before coming to Rome was the challenge of getting English books here. What I've found is that it's actually very easy to find books in English. Finding the exact ones you want, however, is difficult.

Right in my neighborhood, Trastevere, there are two English-language bookstores: Almost Corner, which sells new books (including both of mine--hooray), and the Open Door, which sells used. If I go downtown, I can also find English-language book sections in the big chain bookstores like Mel and Feltrinelli, though usually they only have books I've already read or books I'd never want to read, the latest in chick-lit or testosterone-driven thrillers. Otherwise, I can check out the library here at the Academy, or if I feel very patient, I can order books from amazon.uk, which seems to take about a month, by which time I'm interested in reading something else.

My problem is I can never predict what it is I'm going to want to read, and it's usually something that isn't readily available, for example, Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy, or a story by an obscure Yiddish author.

Until recently I was doing fine with the books I'd brought with me: the indelible Mayor of Casterbridge by Hardy, a collection of essays and stories by my current obsession, E. M. Forster, which includes a breathtaking piece called "Inspiration." But lately I can't seem to stick with anything. I don't know if it's the book themselves or maybe just my mood.

For example, I tried picking up the new Michel Houellebecq novel, The Possibility of an Island, which I got in the UK edition. (I don't know why, but his books tend to come out there six months earlier than in America.) After about fifty pages, I had to put it down. In the past I've been an avid fan of his, but somehow the fourth time around, his voice, with all its lusty pessimism, simply feels tired. Maybe it's not any fault of the author's. It's just that the world is depressing enough these days. If I'm going to read five hundred pages about how we're going to hell in a handbasket, I'd like a little hope, the kind David Mitchell gave me in Cloud Atlas. Or, at least, something in the way of character other than world weary Parisians making crude ethnic jokes and having glorious jaded sex. And maybe, if it's not too much to ask, a moment of genuine feeling. Perhaps the biggest secret about Houellebecq is that he yearns to be a sentimentalist. When I look back on his last two books, what I remember most are the painful, pathetic scenes, a boy drowning his sorrows in endless bowls of Corn Flakes, the narrator of Platform giving up on Western Civilization after the end of a love affair that caught him by surprise.

Next I tried a slim novel in Italian called "Novecento" by Alessandro Barrico, who's a big cheese here. My Italian skills are still fairly weak, so it's hard for me to comment too much on this book, which is a novel in the form of a monologue which is actually supposed to be the treatment for a film. It was actually made into a film with Tim Roth, and is the story of a pianist who's born on a cruise ship and goes back and forth across the Atlantic and never gets off the ship. All very ironic and world-weary. Capitalism and show business are brutish and so forth. I put it down.

Now I'm working on a mammoth book called The Nazarene by Sholem Asch, a writer I admire greatly for his vision as well as his achievement in his book Three Cities, which I keep haranguing people to dig up. The Nazarene has a more interesting back story than Three Cities, but the part I've managed to get through can't compare in terms of brilliance. Published in 1939, during the height of Nazi atrocities in Germany, The Nazarene is an epic life of Jesus Christ written in Yiddish. You can imagine the response Asch got from the Jewish community when the book came out. The literary community, on the other hand, hailed the book as a great achievement. So far, I can't agree. The book opens fetchingly, with a daring conceit: a Jew in Poland goes to work as a translator for a rabid anti-Semite who reveals that he's actually a reincarnation of one of Christ's murderers. The relationship between these two is rich and intriguing. Too bad that after thirty pages, Asch chucks it entirely and instead relates the anti-Semite's "memories" of Christ in Imperial Judea. Suddenly the language and details of place and character that were so finely etched in the opening disappear. Instead we get the usual Roman carping about that nasty little colony of Judea that gives us so much trouble. If you've seen any movie along the lines of Ben-Hur, you get the idea.

So what's next? Well, I hate to sound like a wimp, but I think I'll just go back to re-reading E. M. Forster.

More Rain, and Other Distractions

2005-12-01T06:03:00.000-05:00

More rain. The weather here is becoming a joke that might be funnier if I didn't have to trudge through it. At least the general sogginess gives me an excuse to chain myself to my desk and chip away at my novel, which is moving steadily along. Still, the distraction of the Internet frequently proves irresistable, a link to the pageant of bread and circuses back home, at the heart of the American Empire.

Click, and I can now read a flattering profile of debut authoress Nicole Ritchie. Click, and I learn that a moderately entertaining, though slightly baggy bit of fluff called Prep is one of the best books of the year. Click, and I snicker over an amusing, ironic tribute to the inventor of Stove Top stuffing.

And all this is from the New York Times.

News from the American Academy? The author Oscar Hijuelos was supposed to have visited, but had to cancel at the last minute. We went on with the dinner in his honor without him. In a week or so Laurie Anderson is coming to give a talk. There have been many, many other talks and concerts and tours, a ceramic factory here, a classical ruin there, a sumptuous villa, a collection of drawings off-limits to the public. I could spend a year simply looking at it all. And it might be a profitable investment of my time, but I feel drawn to this book I'm working on. My characters have gotten themselves into deep, deep trouble, and it's up to me to find out what happens to them.

Down the hill, the alleys of Trastevere are decked out with Christmas tinsel and lights. Ornaments are expensive here, and people who put up trees seem to prefer plastic to real. Better for the environment, cheaper, and generally easier to deal with, I suppose. It's also the season for Rome's many, many churches to transform into concert halls. There's a chamber concert this Sunday that I'm planning to catch.

I'm beginning to get used to the buses here, which I used to avoid and still do if I can possibly walk. I've learned that flagging a driver down does no good if you are not standing directly under the sign indicating an official bus stop. Standing a few feet away is an invitation for the driver to ignore you completely and speed by, leaving you to stand in the wet and the cold, waiting another twenty minutes for another ride. In general, the drivers seem a bored, grumpy lot, unwilling to give cogent directions or wait a second longer than necessary for you to fight your way to the door to get off when it's your stop. A friend of mine, riding his bike, was recently hit by a bus that might have continued to squeeze the very life out of him had the passengers inside not risen up and cried out in protest.

The other thing I've learned about Rome is that generally there is some kind of miraculous sight behind every corner if you're patient and willing to explore a little. Generally this kind of miracle involves entering a church. For example, the Santa Maria degli Angeli, which Michelangelo carved out of the ruins of the baths of Diocletian, or the ordinary-looking San Pietro in Vincoli, where I met my new friend Matteo last week. (Matteo Bianchi is an extraordinary Italian author whose works deserve to be translated into English, and hopefully soon they will be.) "Do you know what's inside?" I asked him as we sat on the front steps. No, he'd never been. "Come on, then," I said, so we went in. There are two miracles inside the church of Saint Peter "in chains." First are the actual chains used to bind Saint Peter when he came to Rome. Don't bother wondering if they're real. Every relic in Italy is real. The other, true miracle in this church is Michelangelo's Moses, who sat pondering in the dark when we walked up to him. A crowd of tourists were peering into the shadows, trying to make him out, until I put fifty cents into the light machine and became a hero for half a minute.

Inevitably, miracles become tiresome, and in search of respite, I went with two friends to the Warner Village multiplex where a mob had gathered to watch the new Harry Potter movie. Though the first showing was at 3:10, the box office didn't open until 3, and a mob of Italians held a siege of the box office demanding tickets. At any given moment, the two ticket sellers were serving about ten arguing customers at once. A handsome "steward" named Claudio stood by in his official Warner uniform and calmly looked on. In Italy, there are always at least two people to do every job, one to do the work, and the other to watch. Inside the theater, you feel as though you might be in America, with the smell of popcorn and the overpriced drinks and candy. The only major differences are the VIP smoking lounge and a soft drink for sale called "Pepsi BOOM!"

My friends and I went to the theater showing the "original version" (aka, not dubbed) of the movie, found our seats, and waited for the lights to go down. After twenty-five minutes of ear-splitting commercials and previews, the lights came up and then down again, and then the movie began. And for a couple of hours, we lost ourselves in a fantasy of special effects, art direction, and a world in which every question has one answer.

The Latest from Rome... The Heat is On!

2005-11-15T05:01:00.000-05:00

The heat has come on in our building (the law here says you can't have it on until November 15) and none too soon. The past few days we've been showing up at dinner in our sweaters and jackets.

During the day, though, the weather is pleasant, sunny and cool, with no rain. Last weekend, I met my friend Marco who said this last gasp of summer often happens right around November 11, a saint's festival which is popularly known as the day of the henpecked husbands.

Here at the Academy, we're getting ready for Thanksgiving--I am head of the pumpkin pie committee--and Christmas. Every year, the Fellows are expected to put on a show in Italian for the Italian staff, a performance that climaxes with the appearance of Santa Claus, bearing gifts for the children. I'm sidestepping the show by volunteering for the Christmas tree committee, because every Christmas tree needs a good Jew to help make it look beautiful. Actually, I've heard a story that Christmas trees were popularized during the 19th Century by Jews in Germany who wanted to blend in with their Gentile neighbors but couldn't bring themselves to put up a creche in their windows.

My major news is that I've joined a gym called "La Fitness," tucked into one of the dense alleys of Trastevere. Gyms here seem a bit different than those in the States, in that with your membership you get access to a trainer who will lead you around and tell you what to do. My trainer is Realdo, a short, highly muscular man with a craggy face and a shaved head. There's a picture of him in a spangled bikini (and nothing else) as he flexes his muscles and accepts a trophy for natural bodybuilding. Realdo (who teaches in a warm-up suit, not a spangled bikini) explains to me in a slow clear voice exactly how to position myself in front of the weight machines, how to pull the weight, how to breathe. As a result, I've now learned how to say "weight," "three sets of ten reps," and "biceps" in Italian.

My language skills have been improving rapidly. Last week I went to see the Jodie Foster movie Flightplan dubbed into Italian (all movies are dubbed here), and I understood just about all of it. Then again, it wasn't a terribly complex or interesting movie. Jodie spent most of it running up and down the aisles of the airplane, screaming, "Dove mia figlia!" (Where's my daughter!) Now that I think of it, most American movies these days could probably benefit from being dubbed into Italian.

There are times, however, when my Italian completely fails me, usually when it's someone giving me directions over the phone. For example, last weekend Marco was trying to invite me to do something and I had no idea where he wanted to take me. I got so confused I couldn't even understand where he wanted to meet beforehand. Finally, he said, "Meet me at Termini train station, track number 7. That way there'll be no confusion."

So I went, and then followed him to a highway, where we waited about twenty minutes and then a car picked us up (driven by Marco's roommate Ludovica). Off we drove to a neighborhood called "Centocelli" which means 100 jails in English. There we drove in circles, asking directions from passersby who couldn't help us, until we parked illegally beside an abandoned military fortress that had been taken over by a commune of anarchist squatters. By then it was dark, and a light fog had settled over the fortress grounds, which were lit with torches, like an outdoor carnival. After paying three and a half Euros each, we passed through a graffiti-painted tunnel into an underground network of brick and stone catacombs. Inside there were art exhibitions, a cinema, a theater, a display of common household products that were bad for the environment, political action stands, and a market selling organic wine, cheese, olive oil, and other foods. Each stallkeeper offered free tasting and explanations of how his or her wine, soap, cheese, salami had been made without any additives or chemicals.

The crowd was a mix of young people, many of them with dredlocks, a smattering of piercings, leather jackets, and dogs. "Today if you want to be in the punk style, it's necessary to have a dog," Marco explained.

After sampling some putrid cheese, some very flavorful wine and cheese, and a chewy tasteless cake sweetened with organic fruit sugar, I came home with a bottle of organic apple juice and a pot of organic red currant jam. I drank some of the juice last night, but I have yet to use the jam, though it looks pretty in my refrigerator.

Memoir of a Book Tour

2005-11-01T16:23:00.000-05:00

What does it take to sell a book? Random House, my publisher, and I were willing to bet that a two-week, six-city tour of bookstores and synagogues across the country just might do the trick. And so in the middle of October, I made my way to the airport in Rome and flew to the United States.

Before publishing my first book, I used to dream of traveling at my publisher's expense to various cities in order to show off my work to appreciative audiences, newspaper and magazine reporters, and radio talk shows. In reality, a book tour may include a little of that dream. If your name is Jonathan Franzen or Toni Morrison, a book tour will include a great deal of that dream. For the rest of us, a book tour is a kind of marathon that can range from moments of exhiliration to deep depression. You pray that people will actually show up, that they've read your good reviews and not your bad ones, that they'll have the right sense of humor, the right politics, or simply that they've seen your author photo and think you're cute.

The biggest trouble with readings is that generally people don't like being read to. Or at least grown-ups don't. So it's important for a writer starting out that his friends and family mobilize the troops.

And mobilize they did. Everywhere I went, I was flattered and honored to see people I loved in the audience, particularly in my hometown of Detroit, where the local Borders brought out extra chairs to accommodate the overflow. Yet, it doesn't necessarily follow that because someone is your friend or family member or family member's friend that he or she is your target audience. In fact, quite a few people I met at readings told me they never read books. And so I read my novel about Jews visiting Israel to Christians who've never left the continent, about a middle-aged housewife with her troubled gay son to older men with no children or young straight career women, or impressionable middle schoolers who'd been promised extra credit by my nephew's English teacher for showing up. The best part of it was that many of these people actually had a good time.

What is the point of a book tour? I'm convinced it's more than the event itself. It's an opportunity to turn the publication of the book, which is really no more than opening a box and putting copies on shelves, into a happening worth marking by local bookstores, media, and readers. Your book gets placed in a prominent position in the store a week beforehand. Your reading gets listed in local newspapers. You sometimes do interviews. You shake hands with booksellers and audience members, several of whom (to my great delight) had read my first book and had eagerly been awaiting my new one.

Then there are the unforeseen wonderful small moments you never expected. I heard from friends of mine I hadn't heard from in years, including two men who came out to me for the first time. In Atlanta, I met a gay man who'd just escaped to the big city from the small town where he'd felt trapped for years and was enjoying his new life of freedom. In Washington, I was met at the airport by a "media escort," which is a person who makes a living by picking up authors in town for book signings and taking them around the city for the day. My media escort turned out to be a smart, insightful social worker with whom I shared a thoughtful conversation about religion and the role of faith in progressive politics. In L.A., I was adopted for the weekend by the synagogue Beth Chayim Chadashim, where I was treated like a rock star.

And then in Chicago, I had a moment that reminded me what this whole business is really about. My eight-year old nephew Nick had just purchased the latest Berenstein Bears book--he owns the entire series--and I asked him if I could read it to him before he went to sleep. Nick very graciously said yes. "Do you have a bear you like to cuddle with when you're being read to?" I said. He did, and with his stuffed animal safely tucked into the crook of his arm, he lay in bed with a completely absorbed expression on his round face as I opened the book to page one and began to tell a story.

Another Rome Diary

2005-10-14T14:57:00.000-04:00

My first month in Rome is done. In this time I've written
half of a novel, which hopefully will give birth to its currently
missing other half. Soon, however, I'm traveling back to the
States for a two-week book tour, an odd pause in this yearlong
Roman dream.

October and November are known as the rainy season, and so
far the weather is doing its best to live up to its reputation. As I
write, water has been falling constantly from the white sky
for the past seventy-two hours. The temperatures have dropped
twenty degrees and because the ceilings are so high here, it can
be difficult to stay warm.

Italian food is relentlessly rich, and sometimes delicious. We have a
new cook at the Academy. When Alice (while in Wonderland) says,
"People come and go so quickly here," she could have
been describing the cook situation at the American Academy in Rome.
On the other hand, the bald man in the blue vest and bowtie who
presides over dinner with a clipboard and turns you away if you
haven't reserved your place in advance is a permanent fixture.

Food here has a bewildering variety of names that corresponds
inversely to its lack of variety. No matter what you eat, you will
probably encounter four basic elements. First is some sort of
cured meat, which will always be salty, filled with fat, and bloody in
appearance. Then there's a juicy sliced vegetable, either braised
with olive oil or served raw and coated in olive oil. Next is cheese,
so tangy and thick it could be a slice of meat. Finally, these
elements are combined with some kind of bland recepticle, bread
that's hard and chewy outside and dry inside, spongy pizza dough, or
pasta, which comes in tubes, strings, bowties, shells, corkscrews,
and more (any minor variation in its shape gives it a new name).
Take all this, douse it in olive oil, and serve. Genereally it's impossible
to go through a day without eating pasta. If you're lucky, you may avoid
pizza, but only if you're lucky.

I've been taking my time seeing the sights because I have all year to
look around, but there are a few you can't help bumping into, simply
by walking around. There's the Colosseum, a brown giant that's
visible from all over town, as well as the more modern Victor Emmanuel
Monument, a wonderfully tacky white wedding cake of a memorial built
at the turn of the last century in honor of Italy's first king. Ruins
abound. So much so, that when building their houses, people will grab
a few scraps of columns or old sculptures and stick them into their
walls when they run out of bricks or stones.

Recently I spent a couple of hours in the Capotline Museums, where I
wandered past rows and rows of busts of dead Roman emperors. You get
to know their faces after a while. Octavian has a receding hairline.
Nero is chubby. Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius have beards. Tiberius
looks like a man you wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley (and if the
history books are true, you wouldn't).

I've also met a few living Romans, like Federico, an architect who
sometimes picks me up on his motorino. Imagine if a motorcycle could
have a puppy and you'd get a motorino. I cling for dear life as
Federico zips through the traffic at sixty miles and hour, darting
between lanes and yelling at the slower cars: "Go home! Get off the
road! Why are you sleeping?"

Another friend, Mario, is an assistant to a costume designer who's
working on the film version of The Da Vinci Code. Mario is sick of
the city and his dream is to move to New York. We meet to trade
languages.

I've also made friends with an American expatriate, a vegetarian yoga
instructor named Joan who refers to her ex-husband as her "was-band."
Joan points out all the good places to eat and buy bread, and recently
took me to Rosh Hashanah servcies at Rome's main synagogue, which has
a beautiful interior decorated with vines and leaves and the city's
only square dome, which is painted in rainbow colors (from inside).
Unlike American Jews, who if bored during services will yawn quietly
or whisper to each other, Roman Jews see no reason at all to pretend
to pay any attention to the rabbi praying on the stage. They happily
chat with each other in the crowded sanctuary so that the chorus of
their voices sounds like the New York Stock Exchange during high
volume trading.

My Italian is getting better steadily, as I learn to guess correctly
at the words I don't understand. Occasionally I do get thrown off
because the Romans, like the Japanese, substitute "r" for "l," so that
the word for money, "soldi" becomes "sordi." Also, I'm still learning
slang expressions. For example, a person who cuts in line here is
called "Portuguese." "American" has its own connotations here too.
As one Roman expressed it to me, "You are not like your countrymen
because you have culture."

Thoughts from Rome

2005-09-25T09:22:00.000-04:00

In this installment, I'm going to depart from my usual thematic essays to write a little about my experience so far at the American Academy in Rome, where I've been for the past three weeks.

Here's the basic set-up. For one year, I'm one of 30 fellows who've been awarded a place to live as well as an office in which to work, two meals a day six days a week, and money for basic expenses. We live together in a historic villa where there's a constant round of lectures and organized trips, as well as support for the research most of us are engaged in. The other fellows come from a range of backgrounds. They're art historians, architects, museum directors, landscape architects, painters, and more. Everyone is brilliant, which is not an overstatement, everyone pursuing provocative individual projects involving questions like the role of the family in the development of organized religion or the history of madness.

And during the course of this year I'm expected to... basically, to do whatever I want. A free year in which to read, write, wander, anything, in a beautiful romantic historic city--you're probably hating me by now.

So far it's too soon for me to speak conclusively about my impressions of Rome, but what the hell, I'll give a few anyway. I've been most surprised by this city's small town feel. It's more like a collection of small villages shoelaced together than a single city with a pulsing, unifying center. Also, there's a strange way in which it feels strangely like a backwater town. Milan is the capital of business, Turin and Naples centers of contemporary culture, Florence, the capital of the Renaissance, Venice the capital of romance. Rome is a bit like Washington DC, the political and symbolic historic capital of the country, a beautiful city constantly inundated with tourists, and yet it's strangely calm and quiet.

People fall in love with this city, its slow pace, its historic alleys, its comfortable cosmpolitan atmosphere. I haven't fallen in love quite yet, but I think that's primarily because I've found that the English language, my primary tool for ordering the world, doesn't work here. The buzz of news, gossip, print, advertising, and TV I've become so used to surrounding myself with in New York is suddenly gone. And in its place is a babel of sounds that occasionally and entirely without warning come jarringly in and our of focus. "hand" "table" "Don't be ridiculous!" "Let's go inside this way" "By yourself." Words and phrases popping in and out, but to connect them, nothing. Sometimes I'll get a run of sentences that seem tantalizingly within my grasp, and then an unknown word creeps in and I'm lost again.

This is good for me. But not easy.

The other thing I find most difficult here is feeling at peace with my own solitude. Rome is not a city of solo acts. Everyone I pass seems to be walking with someone else, especially the tourists, but also the locals walking hand in hand with their lovers or children or even their friends. It's become shocking to me to see someone walking by him or herself. But then I catch a glimpse of myself, alone, in a shop window, and that lone wolf is me. And it makes me wonder, so who am I?

No End to Howards End

2005-09-12T08:31:00.001-04:00

It's almost a week that I've been in Rome, and I'll have more to say about the experience once I've been here longer. One of the wonderful gifts about being here is having the time to reread books I love, which is probably the most important thing for a writer to do.

Having just finished Howards End by E. M. Forster for possibly the fifth time, I'm firmly convinced that it's possible to learn everything you need to know about writing from studying this magnificent work of art. It would also serve as an excellent guide on how to think, and more than passable as a blueprint for how to live.

At first glance, the plot seems to amble aimiably, almost carelessly from minor crisis to minor crisis, introducing us to charming characters who get into sticky, though hardly life-threatening, situations. What a miracle it is when the pieces "connect"--the book's epigraph is "Only Connect..."--so beautifully in the powerful finale, like a sleeping giant who's been hidden under a blanket of earth, grass, trees, and rocks until he wakes with a jolt, and we realize that nothing short of the meaning of life is at stake here.

An oversimplified way to present this book is as a struggle of competing values between two English families who meet by chance while on vacation, the Wilcoxes and the Schlegals. Yet Forster's presentation of this schematic conflict is much more highly-nuanced, and with Forster (much like it is with John Kerry) nuance is all.

Yes, the Schlegals, particularly the heroically sensible Margaret and her passionate but shortsighted younger sister Margaret, represent sensitivity, art, culture, liberal humanitarian values. Yet among their camp is the utterly banal Mrs. Munt, who appreciates culture in the most mundane way possible. On the opposite extreme is the youngest Schlegal, Tibby, a careless aesthete (most likely spoiled by his older sisters) whose selfish devotion to the realm of ideas blinds him to the troubles of the living. Even when his own sister cries desperately to him for help, Tibby's more interested in leafing through a text on learning Chinese or checking on his dessert so that it doesn't get cold.

The Wilcoxes seem a much more disciplined, uniform camp at first, embodying the coldness of order, efficiency, what Forster lumps together under a category called "the seen." Yet they too have their degrees. The eldest son Charles is the worst of their lot. Forster tries valiantly but ultimately cannot bring himself to conceal his dislike for Charles's stubborn, cold heart, even in the hour of Charles's mother's death. Next is Charles's younger brother Paul, who's mostly a plot device to develop other characters, and remains shunted offstage until the end of the book so he can appear as a stand-in for Charles when he can no longer be physically present. However, then there's Evie, the only daughter, seems like a brat, good at sports, breeding puppies, and spending her father's money on a needlessly elaborate wedding, but she shows surprising tenderness for her father at the end of the book. She is actually capable of sentiment. Henry, the Wilcox patriarch, is the best of them. Somehow (Forster never explains satisfactorily how), Margaret sees his inner potential for feeling, which comes through at the book's end, though with one glaring deficiency. (Mrs. Wilcox, Henry's first wife, is actually a Howard, and of an entirely different order.)

The question this book poses, still useful today, is which is better, to be sensitive or to make the trains run on time? Supreme in his feeling for nuance, Forster answers, you need some of both, but if you're going to err, choose sensitivity. And yet, as Forster shows, even then the balance is imperfect. We're stuck with events that are out of our control, illness, war, forces of nature, and petty cruelty. There is no answer to the dilemma of being alive.

We can find some hope, however, here and there in various corners of this tragic novel, which feels oddly sunny despite a sour note at the end. I'm especially moved when in Chapter 4, Charles Wilcox tries to explain to Helen Schlegal that it's no use being polite to servants, since they don't understand it. Forster explains to us that the "Schlegal retort" to such cant is: "If they don't understand it, I do." That strikes me as exactly on target. The good we try to do may not always be appreciated by others, but then we don't try to live in the right way for other people. We do it for ourselves.

As a Chocolate-Loving, Democratic-Voting, New York-Living Fiction Writer, I...

2005-08-24T17:45:00.000-04:00

My niece recently asked me to read her college application essay, which began, "As a triplet, I..." You may have noticed the way many of us tend to begin every opinion we offer with qualifiers like, "As a woman, I..." "As an African-American, I..." "As a Jew, I..." "As a left-handed lesbian of indeterminate color who enjoys finger-painting in a wheelchair with survivors of sexual assault and tsunamis, I..."

Where does this impulse to bolster an argument by tying it to the author's identity come from? One explanation is that in the age of reality TV and the internet blogger, we've become increasingly convinces of the fallacy that empiricism is the firmest basis of truth. In other words, the best way to know something is by experiencing it.

I remember when I was a composition instructor, I asked my students to write an essay about a time when they'd changed their opinion. What was the opinion and what made them change their mind? I got back a series of essays that ran something like, "I used to think drugs were okay, but then I got addicted to them and realized they weren't." "I used to think science was boring, but then I won a national merit award for my science project and I realized it wasn't." My favorite was, "I used to think pre-marital sex was wrong, but then I got a girlfriend and I realized that it was okay."

Perhaps we've become a nation of empiricist philosophers, but somehow I doubt it. It seems to me that the "experience" part of the equation is less important to us than the "my." We are endlessly fascinated by our own lives, particularly if we belong to a younger generation brought up in an educational system that puts a premium on self-expression over empathetically understand of someone else's plight.

Nowhere has this lesson been driven home more firmly than in literature classes. It's become almost axiomatic that in order to teach a novel, poem, story, or play successfully, it has to relate directly to students' lives. Got a roomful of African-American students? Teach them Toni Morrison, Ernest J. Gaines, and Rita Dove. Jews? Give them I. B. Singer, Philip Roth, and just to be daring, a touch of Jonathan Safran Foer. Hispanics? Garcia Marquez ought to work (never mind that he's South American, not Caribbean or Mexican), and then some Sandra Cisneros, Julia Alvarez, and Junot Diaz. The list goes on.

Similarly, writing students are encouraged to mine their own rather limited experience of the world in search of nuggets to write about. Recently I taught a class called "Fiction and Personal Narrative," in which students could submit works of fiction or non-fiction. The students were wonderful writers with great imaginations, but the one question that seemed to stump them again and again was when I'd ask them, "So is this a work of fiction or non-fiction?"

Of course when I was a writing student, and I and my fellow students were no wiser. Our instructors always reminded us that we had to remember the works we were reading were fiction. We were not to assume any story was autobiographical. That state of affairs lasted for about two seconds. Almost immediately after getting our first few batches of stories, I remember we'd whisper to each other in the hall, "Oh, I didn't know he was a drug addict who lived in a shack in New Orleans with a stripper." Or "Wow, I guess she had some unresolved issues with her mother that she's been taking out on her boyfriend." Or "Isn't that funny? I never would have guessed she came from an Orthodox Jewish home and rejected her faith to pursue a career as a writer."

No wonder memoirs are so popular these days. In a way, they seem more honest than fiction writing of this style. After all, what's fiction really? Just non-fiction with the names changed.

When I was starting out, I'd veer between autobiographical and more imaginary modes. Before I wrote my Prague stories, I was working on a series of fantastical tales like "Gay God," about a gay bar where a magical spirit lived above the ceiling and maliciously and capriciously set up couples or broke them apart. A teacher of mine liked my cleverness and imagination, but challenged me to add more feeling to my work. That's when I began delving into autobiographical sketches, inspired by people I knew in Prague. And yet, the two stories that seem to resonate most with readers are ones that also seem to have little direct connection to my own life. One's about a middle-aged couple visiting a concentration camp. The other's about two Czech boys searching for the missing head of a famous statue of Stalin.

It's funny that no one asks me if either of these stories is autobiographical, yet both borrow large chunks of experience and emotion directly from my own life. On the flip side, when I tell people the plot of my new book, about a Jewish mother and her drug-addicted gay son who go to Israel, the first thing they want to know is, "Oh, so did you go to Israel with your mother?" (For the record, the last time I went to Israel in the company of my parents was when I was a pre-adolescent, long before my numerous stints at Betty Ford in the company of Liza, Liz Taylor, and all the rest. And as a survivor of drug addiction, I resent the implication that etc. etc...)

With the book I'm writing now, I'm determined to get out of my own head, learn about experiences radically different from mine and identify with them anyway. For example, I'm currently reading Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, a non-fiction tract about the roots of terrorism, written by a Muslim academic born in Uganda. I've also been checking out homeland security journals online, Communist newspapers, and maternity magazines. As I read, I'm continually impressed by how little I really know, how much knowledge is necessary to even begin to glimpse our complicated existence. As Horace says (and I only know this because it's the quote of the day on my desk calendar as I write this), "To know all things is not permitted."

So, as a pregnant Muslim Communist homeland security expert, I urge anyone who's reading this to forget yourself. Try on a new hat for a day. Use the great divine gift of the imagination to see what's on the other side of those identity blinders you've been encouraged to shackle yourself with all these years. See if you don't learn how small you are.

On Giving Advice

2005-08-04T16:05:00.000-04:00

August 4, 2005

My father has become somewhat of a legend in our family for his famous, oft-repeated proverbs, with lessons for handling almost any life crisis. My father on travel: "Best thing to do is stay home." My father on trying new things, "I've never been boiled in oil, but I wouldn't want to do that either." My father on hair stylings: "The longer the hair, the shorter the brains." And my father on giving advice: "Never give unsolicited advice. Either the person ignores you, or he follows your advice and it doesn't work out and then he calls you pisher." What about solicited advice? "Never give that either, for the same reasons."

My father might be horrified to learn that in the past year or so, I've been asked for advice on writing and publishing with surprising frequency for advice. Some of these petitioners are strangers who've contacted me through friends or the Internet. Others are friends or colleagues I didn't even know were writers. So far the requests have been steady, not quite a deluge, and I try as often as I can to say yes, yes, and yes. I know some writers find it bothersome to share what they've learned with aspiring up-and-comers, particularly at a time when it seems that more people are interested in writing books than buying them. (See my blog of June 5, 2005).

Yet it's crucially important that as we move up the ladder, to whatever small degree, we extend a hand down, across, or even up to our fellow-sufferers. An important part of being a writer is to give and get feedback with an audience more intimate than a book critic, more informal than a teacher, more generous than a classmate in a workshop, more idealistic than an editor or agent.

And yet, as I read and dispense stories of my limited experience with publishing, I often wonder what if anything I can provide that's of any use. I recently read an insightful essay by Lynn Freed in Harper's about the occupational hazards of creative writing, in which she confesses to feeling "like a fraud... I have just realized the novel on which I have been laboring for 18 months... is hopeless... Every sentence in it a lie. Who do I think I am... Balzac?"

I know what she means. I'm not like a manuscript doctor who can prescribe a cure for unfocused characters or a weak sense of plot. I'm not even sure I can diagnose an illness. I can only give my honest impression of what I read and why I responded to it in the way I did. But who's to say my impression is valuable? I can safely comment on rules of grammar and syntax, but creative writing cannot be said to have rules so much as techniques or tools. Each new story or play or poem presents its own specific and unique problem to be solved with whatever tools can get the job done. Once the writer has solved that problem, she then has to start from scratch again with each new work she attempts. (Or else churn out the same work over and over, which is not a solution either.)

Sometimes I get asked to read something that baffles me completely, not only in terms of what next steps should be taken, but also the artist's own intention. In these cases, I can only pose questions. Why did you choose these words? Who are these people you're writing about and what do they want? What does the experience of reading this provide to the world?

These are questions for the writer to answer, not me. Anyone thoughtful is as capable as I am of posing questions like these. Alternatively, these questions can be found in the growing number of books on the craft and business of creative writing that get published each year. Yet maybe advice isn't all that we as writers are seeking from each other. Maybe what we want isn't so much an answer as the experience of talking to and being heard by a peer, to get some reassurance that we're not alone. The human contact itself provides more comfort than any wise words.

The trouble is that in the creative process, we are alone. No one can show us a way out or give us a leg up. We have to find our way by ourselves. Even when trying to find an agent or an editor to buy a poem or a story, we have to do most of the grunt work on our own. No one else can make the inevitable process of rejection any easier. The false comfort of companionship lasts only so long before the same knotty problems of word choice and characterization stare us in the face. They demand our attention, which regrettably, can only be given in solitude.

The Retreat from Berlin

2005-07-11T22:15:00.000-04:00

The longer I write, the less I feel I know about writing. That's supposed to be comforting, yet every time I go through this process of doubt, it's always painful. With each new project I work on, I've tried to learn from what I did the time before. I wish it were only that easy. Ionce heard that you have to learn how to write from scratch with every new book. Each project has its own lessons to master, lessons that don't carry over to the next one you'll tackle. So far, that's been my experience.

I was lucky that when I wrote Stalin's Head, I had no idea of what I was doing. I simply wrote stories that meant something to me, and after I had ten good ones, roped them together into a collection, and sent them to an agent. I didn't realize how much heavy lifting would go into revising them until they were ready for publication, but I've always seen myself as the workhouse type of writer, anyway. I like having work to do, my desk full of projects to complete. Work doesn't scare me; it gives me a reassuring sense of purpose.

With my second book, Faith for Beginners, I started out from the premise that since so many of the stories in Stalin's Head were about sexuality, Judaism, and politics, I ought to choose a subject that combined all three of those elements: the gay community of Israel. Conveniently, no one had dealt much with Israeli gays in fiction. So I plunked down money for a plane ticket, arranged to stay with friends, and left. The only problem was that when I got to Israel, the gay community there didn't suggest a story to me. Great, I thought, all this time and money wasted. And anyway, who did I think I was calling myself a writer when (at that time) I hadn't even sold one book yet? I spent my last few days in Israel just being a tourist. It turned out those final few days resulted in the inspiration for my novel.

When I decided to write about Berlin for the novel I'm currently working on, I thought, okay, I'll learn from my past mistakes. I won't try to control the subject of my research so much. I'll just travel to Berlin, try to see and do as much as I possibly can, and wait for a story to emerge. Which is exactly what happened. And in the fall of 2003, while I was waiting for Faith for Beginners to be considered for publication, I began writing out a first draft for my Berlin novel. It's all a matter of putting in the work, I thought. You write, revise, write, revise, show it to people who tell you what's gone wrong, which you fix, show it a few more people who help you tweak the rest, which you do, and then it's reasonably okay and you're done.

The process of writing this book, however, hasn't turned out quite so easy. I was a little naive about how distracting the process of publication can be. First, I had to put the Berlin novel aside to do revisions on Faith for Beginners in the winter of 2003. Then when Stalin's Head came out, I went slightly insane, which is pretty good if you consider that most writers need to undergo a combination of psychiatric drugs and electroshock therapy when they make their debuts. Suddenly, when I typed in my name in Google, I got hundreds of hits, with people I didn't know saying things about me in reviews or on blogs. (And this is for a first collection of literary short fiction. I can only imagine what the process must have been like for higher profile writers.) I also had to do several readings and travel to promote the book (on my own dime), while holding down my regular job, all of which took some valuable time away from Berlin.

It wasn't until the summer after Stalin came out, I finally had some quality time to work on the new novel, but then in the fall, I began teaching creative writing classes at night in addition to my day job, which I enjoyed, but again consumed a good deal of thought and time. My Berlin novel was like a resentful neglected cat mewing at me from the corner of my desk for attention, which I gave when I could, but not as much as it needed.

Finally, this summer I've had a chance to really sit and face down this novel after a crazy two years, in which I've changed personally and professionally. What was in front of me, however, reflected an earlier version of myself. I liked the writing and some of the characters, but the ideas behind them didn't excite me anymore. The purpose of the book felt out of date. The books I've read since that writing that first draft, especially Sholem Asch's Three Cities, Michel Houellebecq's Platform, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, and Graham Greene's novels, have tempted me to seek a larger vision from fiction, something with greater scope and daring, a goal that this current draft couldn't sustain.

Furthermore, the experiences of working on Stalin's Head and Faith as well as of teaching creative writing have challenged what I thought I knew for sure about literature. I don't want to simply repeat what I've done in the past. I have to grow and feel stimulated. Working on this new project, I keep feeling lost, unsure of what I'm writing about. It's become drudgery.

So I'm declaring my independence. I've come to the painful yet liberating conclusion that it's time to put two years of work aside and start over from page one. That doesn't mean the work I've put in is fruitless garbage. I suspect a lot of it will prove useful in the new book about Berlin I plan to write. But I've got to forge ahead unencumbered by the past. I know how difficult it is when you're editing to cut out a scene or even a sentence you've worked hard on. But in writing, hard work doesn't mean you've done your job as a writer. And correcting past mistakes or repeating past successes won't work either. You simply have to face the darkness again and again, and hope that inspiration will come once more.

A Bias Worth Having

2005-06-22T22:18:00.000-04:00

Whenever a piece of writing gets criticized, an easy way to take comfort is to accuse the reader in question of having such a system, of being "biased." But then aren't all readers biased in some way? Do we really want an unbiased reader? After all, there's no one so objective as a robot, except for a corpse. The question isn't of bias, but whether the bias of a given reader is worth having.

One bias I have as a reader is an overly-sensitive bullshit meter. If a writer goes to great pains to impress with grandiose rhetoric, my internal radar goes off. "Did you think of that phrase yourself or are you just parroting some received wisdom because you think it makes you look smart?" "Are you using those words because you like the sound of them even though you haven't thought about what they mean?" "Did you choose those words because you observed something in life that made you think of them, or because you just couldn't think of anything better?" If forced to decide between prose that's too modest or too overblown and purple, I'll take modesty any day. The decision isn't simply a matter of taste like a preference for chocolate or vanilla. These choices reflect a larger vision of the purpose of writing.

Consider the following two passages by Saul Bellow:

#1 "If they didn't breathe the most difficult air of effort and nobility, then she wished for them the commonplace death in the gas cloud of settled existence, office bondage, quiet, store-festering, unrecognized despair of marriage without hope, or the commonness of resentment that grows unknown boils in one's heart or bulbs of snarling flowers."

#2 "It came into his head that he was like a man in a mine who could smell smoke and feel heat but never see the flames. And then the cramp and the enigmatic opportunity ended together. His legs quivered as he worked his feet back and forth on the carpet. He walked over to the window and he heard the loud crack of the wind. It was pumping the trees in the small wedge of the park six stories below, tearing at the wires on rooftops, fanning the smoke out under the clouds, scattering it like soot on paraffin."#1 is from The Adventures of Augie March, a novel generally held to be superior to the source of #2, a novel called The Victim. Each quote is a good example of why critics prefer #1 to #2 and why I think just the opposite.

Various writers and critics have looked at The Victim and nodded approvingly. They applaud the small, correct word choices that carefully evoke the object being described. They find the quality of the prose solid, yet uninspired, maybe even a bit pinched, passionless.

But when Augie March comes along, these same readers get really excited. Now there we have narrative exuberance, excitement, whirling turns of phrase with surprises like "snarling flowers," grand sociological pronouncements like "the gas cloud of settled existence," the chance to sneer at bourgeois values, adventure, risk-taking. What a lark! What a plunge! Almost as fun as a ride at Coney Island!

I understand this point of view. Maybe it is the correct one to have. But I can't agree with it. Take another look at the language in the quote from Augie March. Notice how vague and inflated it is: "difficult air of effort and nobility" "commonplace death" "settled existence" "unrecognized despair of marriage without hope" "the commonness of resentment." (Notice too the sloppy repetition of "common.") The only tangible objects in this litany are the boils and "snarling flowers," though I'm not sure why a flower would ever snarl or why it should. I suppose it sounds catchy and makes for a cute metaphor about seemingly nice things that are actually mean and angry. But couldn't Bellow have done a bit more homework here and found an actual object in life that has these qualities, like the lovely but poisonous rhododendron, which can be found in so many suburban lawns?

More importantly, what do these vague language choices really refer to? They're meant to satirize the stultifying effects of puritanical American suburban middle-class values, like putting the nose to the grindstone in some nine to five job while neglecting to feed the soul. The problem is that the grandiose rhetoric Bellow uses to malign these values is the same kind of empty discourse that's too often used to glorify them, for example in a politician's stump speech. Bellow's passage could very readily be re-written as follows:

"the commonplace life in the airy cloud of settled existence, the liberation of work, quiet, store-blossoming, unrecognized joy of marriage without disruption, or the commonness of contentment that bubbles up unknown in one's heart or in bulbs of laughing flowers."

The passage from The Victim, however, demands to be read as written because of its wondrous specificity. The concrete language dramatically re-enacts the same kind of despair of modern life that's only described in Augie March. The passage begins with a far more intriguing metaphor than "snarling flowers," because a man in a mine who smells smoke but doesn't see fire makes literal as well as metaphorical sense. It has a meaning that can be worked out and isn't just there to startle us with its sound or vague poetry. As the passage goes on, Bellow makes us feel the physical effects of the narrator's despair. We experience the emotional turbulence directly through the pain in his body and then indirectly, through the raging weather outside his window which almost seems to have been affected by his mood. After we feel the emotion, we gradually realize its significance, unconsciously at first, and then after some thought, consciously. To me, that's a miracle far greater than simply spelling out your point to readers like a priest preaching his Sunday sermon to an amen corner in church.

In a way, my preference for earned effects instead of purple prose makes me a bit homespun, guilty of the same middle class crimes Bellow indicts in Augie March. I want language to do its job instead of meandering aimlessly to Mexico on a road trip. But the alternative strikes me as too easy, and more than a bit fake. It's like watching a blindfolded cowboy wildly swinging a lasso in a rodeo, in hopes of roping a steer. If he's successful, good for him. But I don't feel like waiting around for it to happen. And I certainly wouldn't advocate his method as a model for young cowboys in training to emulate.

A Call to Arms

2005-06-05T22:20:00.000-04:00

It's the weekend of B. E. A., the publishing industry's annual grand convention, and lately I've been hearing gloomy forecasts about the state of the business from a number of writers I know. No one's buying fiction any more (Da Vinci Code excepted). Of course, as long as publishing has been around, there have been writers complaining that no one buys books. But recently I was having a conference with a student of mine that made me wonder if maybe this problem really is becoming more acute. The student in question and I were discussing his final grade, and I asked him what writers he liked to read. “I don't like to read,” he replied. “Not that I think there's anything wrong with that if I want to be a writer. Other people will read what I write, but I don't have to read what other people write.”

As outrageous as this statement may sound coming from someone who's studying creative writing, it really isn't that abnormal if you stop to consider the rising popularity of creative writing classes, as contrasted with the falling numbers of book sales. Or think about the staggering volume of submissions to literary magazines contrasted with subscriptions to those same magazines. Or the query letters to agents versus the number of books sold by clients represented by those same agents.

We are all like the student I described earlier. We want to express ourselves, but we're far less interested in hearing other people express ourselves. Imagine a room filled with millions of people screaming past each other. Is that what being a member of the community of letters should look like?

The question is what can we do about falling book sales. We can't force people to buy books because it's good for them. Or even if we could do that, should we? Why do we expect anyone to support our work?

But there is something we as writers, publishers, and book lovers can do, which is to buy more books.

Many of you may be thinking, but I do buy books. Remember, I'm not talking about reading books. I'm talking about buying them. Those of us who are in the publishing world get books for free from publishers or magazines we review for, or friends who work in the business. Or sometimes we just borrow them, or buy them at used bookstores (or buy used copies from Amazon). But how many hardcover books have you bought last year? (At an independent bookstore?) Buying hardcovers may seem like an expensive habit. But if you paid twenty-five bucks for a theater seat, a concert ticket, a nice dinner, a sweater, or anything other than a book, you'd think, great, what a bargain. Most of us don't have any trouble plunking down ten bucks for the latest shlock from Hollywood, but that's half the price of a hardback book right there.

I'm not suggesting skipping Star Wars to buy a book. But every time you do go to the movies or spend fifty bucks on an evening of beer, stop and think, have I bought a book recently?

Some people may think, why bother? It's not going to make any difference if I buy one more book. Sadly, the state of publishing is such that each purchase of fiction does make a difference. And it's about more than dollars and cents. Each time people see you handling a book in a store, or each time that book crosses a cashier's desk, or when you hold it up on the subway or the beach, you're creating a ripple effect that gets that book out into the world in a way that's more powerful than any ad in the New York Times Book Review.

Also, I'm not reminding you to buy books the way doctors exhort us to take our medicine when we're sick. Reading isn't an onerous burden. It's rewarding, enlightening, and yes, it's fun. That's why you're reading blogs like these and taking creative writing classes, and scribbling in your journals in cafes. Yet how easy it is to forget in the age of TV and internet and iPods that reading is a pleasurable activity.

So set yourself a goal. Every month, buy at least one book for its retail price, possibly a hardcover, possibly at an independent bookstore. This will cost you about three hundred bucks a year at most (which is tax deductible if you're a writer). If you can't afford that much, try going without a Starbucks coffee once a week. There's twenty bucks a month right there. Ask for books as birthday presents. Give them as wedding presents along with cookware and linens.

Or give them for absolutely no reason, which is the best reason.

Joining the Club

2005-05-19T22:31:00.000-04:00

I'm sorry for being a bit later than usual with my latest posting, but I've had an amazing week. I have now been to my first literary conference as well as my first literary award ceremony, so I thought I'd write about both, from the perspective of a first-timer.

I'll start with the conference: the Saints and Sinners Festival in New Orleans (which is now one of my favorite cities). If you're like me, you've probably seen literary conferences advertised in Poets and Writers and wondered what they were like or why someone might go to one. For me, the best part of going to Saints and Sinners, a festival for queer writers and readers, was its sense of community, all-important for our necessarily lonely profession.

All the events took place in the same three gay bars, all on the same corner, so I kept running into other conference-goers coming from or going to the readings, panels, classes, and parties. Though Saints and Sinners is a gay literary festival, the things we talked about most were relevant to all writers: issues of craft, favorite authors, how to make a living, and the book business. (I even attended a class on designing author websites.) The line between the presenters and audience members was, appropriately, porous. On Friday, I attended a very helpful presentation by author Jim Grimsley on how to get through the "murk" in the middle of your novel. On Saturday, I was on a panel about virtually the same subject, how to finish your novel. Immediately after that panel, I attended a poetry reading where fellow writers, MFA students, and self-taught writers who'd been in the audience at my panel now read their work aloud while I listened. The writers I met in New Orleans were a mix of slam poets, academics, performance artists, and authors published by small presses as well as major houses. Some of us had only published in journals or anthologies while others had several books under their belt. But everyone seemed to share the same sense of seriousness about their work and the same love of reading.

A couple of days after I got back from New Orleans, I went to a much more formal gathering at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, where I officially received the Rome Prize. I had no idea of the Academy's existence until I was notified that they'd given me a prize (an unexpected honor, for which I am deeply grateful). When I first dreamed of becoming a writer, I imagined the "literary establishment" quite literally as a club with mahogany tables and Greek columns. If such a club actually exists, then yesterday I wandered into it.

My day began by running into the Pulitzer-prize winning playwright Donald Margulies and his wife on the steps of the building. Once inside, I stopped in a room of signed photos of famous Academy members, everyone from Henry James to Eudora Welty to Bernard Malamud, Edward Albee, on and on. Upstairs, I listened to a pleasant bearded man (who turned out to be novelist E. L. Doctorow) tell a story about watching a drunken Robert Penn Warren fall asleep in his seat during an Academy ceremony years ago. I also met John Updike, who examined my nametag and said, "Oh, you've won a prize. How nice for you."

At lunch, my father and I were seated at a table with the poet Mark Strand and novelist Alison Lurie, who made smart and funny observations about the people in the room as if they were characters in one of her novels. Then came the ceremony itself, during which I sat on a stage with one hundred other writers, composers, and artists, including Maya Lin, Cindy Sherman, August Wilson, Edwidge Danticat, Robert Pinsky, Cynthia Ozyck, and Stephen Sondheim. My assigned seat was between Edmund White and the peppery Grace Paley, who gave a rousing cheer when my name was called. I was just hoping I wouldn't trip over Tony Kushner and Edward P. Jones on my way to the podium.

The whole situation was wonderful and more than a little overwhelming, and while I was there I kept wondering what it all meant. Was I truly admitted into that club I'd always hoped to join? Yet now that I've had some time to reflect on that question, I realize I've always been a member without realizing it. The person accepting the award on that stage and the writing student I'd once been, the one who'd never published a word, have a lot in common. The only difference is that hazy term "success." But what is success or failure, really? In five hundred years, none of our work will be read. Or if it is, we'll all be long gone and unable to glory in that fact.

Just as Pulitzer Prize winners still get hungry and get sick and get depressed, they also still have to struggle with sentences, the same work we all do as writers. What matters is the pleasure that struggle gives us now, at this moment. I can take pleasure in award ceremonies and literary conferences, but I also take greater pleasure in arranging words on a page, reading work I love, guiding a student toward progress. The meaning comes from the pleasure, not the other way around. That's not to say that every moment of writing is wonderful, just as not every moment of a party or a literary gathering is wonderful. But the highs you get make the lows bearable, and in life, it really doesn't get much better than that.

What Teaching Has Taught Me

2005-04-25T22:32:00.000-04:00

The academic year is winding down, and I'm about to be deluged with student portfolios to grade. This has been my first full year of teaching creative writing to undergraduates, and I'm reminded of J. M. Coetzee's observation from his novel Disgrace:

“He continues to teach because it provides him with a livelihood; also because it teaches him humility, brings it home to him who he is in the world. The irony does not escape him: that the one who comes to teach learns the keenest of lessons, while those who come to learn learn nothing.”

I'm not convinced my students have learned nothing, but I have surely learned as much from them as I have taught. Their questions have forced me to clarify my own ideas about writing. Their work reminds me of the infinite variety of forms writing can take. And their progress suggests paths for me to explore in my own work.

One example. At the beginning of this term, some of my students have been having problems with the use of time in their work. Their narratives can skid disconcertingly from present to past to future, sometimes within the same sentence. To study control of time and pacing, we took a look at the first chapter of Anne Tyler's Earthly Possessions and timed the narrative to see how many sentences she used to move her story forward. (You can read an essay I wrote about this here.) One of the things we noticed was that by eschewing flashbacks as much as possible and folding the effects of the past into her present narrative, Tyler was able to build her narrative momentum and keep the reader hooked.

Gradually, I began noticing the salutary effects of this exercise on students' writing. Stories that were once confusing, distanced, dragging summaries suddenly came alive on the page, thrillingly. Characters we'd only heard about now breathed, felt, fought in front of our eyes. The prose seemed to clean itself up, as if of its own accord.

Glad to see my students' progress, I turned to my own work, the novel about Berlin I'm working on right now. I'd shown the first few chapters to a few friends who all agreed that as it went along it became more and more engrossing, despite a bumpy start. I re-read the first two chapters. What was going wrong?

Then I thought of the lesson I'd just taught my students about chronology. The present day action was getting dragged down by relentless flashbacks, flashbacks that I'd thought were necessary for the reader to appreciate the significance of the current story. So what if I did what my students had done and removed those flashbacks?

As an experiment, I opened a new file and removed every flashback I could find and laid them out in order. My new arrangement was a strong, swift Chapter One that introduced the present-day plot with little background, then a chapter two that contained the entire backstory as a separate, linear story, followed by a strong, swift chapter three that picked up where chapter one had left off and zoomed forward. It was an elegant solution to a difficult problem that might have taken me a lot longer to solve, if not for the lesson on chronology that my students and I had worked on together.

The other thing I've gained from teaching is a newfound love and appreciation for literary works outside of my main genre: fiction. As part of my Structure and Style class at Columbia, I was required to introduce students to poetry and playwriting. For my Fiction and Personal Narrative class at Barnard, I had to examine fiction as well as creative non-fiction. I've realized that I've been missing out on a rich variety of literary genres because I've focused my reading diet on fiction. Poetry has taught me about the power of language in distilled form, while playwriting has taught me how to tell a story wholly through dialogue, and non-fiction has helped me appreciate the rigorous art of shaping a narrative from true events.

This fall I'll be taking a year off from teaching, and I know I will miss the dynamic atmosphere of my creative writing classes, where rooms full of students have challenged, enlightened, and stimulated me this past academic year. I'd like to wish them all good luck and especially to say thank you, for all you've taught me.

Research? What Research?

2005-04-10T22:34:00.000-04:00

Research seems like much too official a word for what I do as a writer to find out information I don't know offhand, but I can't think of a better term. Whenever I tell people I'm researching something for a book, I imagine they imagine me pouring over ancient texts in a library or scanning microfilms or strolling with university professors on ivy-strewn campuses.

I remember when I was traveling in Israel to research FAITH FOR BEGINNERS, and I described what I'd been doing to an Israeli I was interviewing, he said to me, "That's not research. That's going on vacation!" But then that's the beauty of researching as a fiction writer. It's the intellectual equivalent of taking a vacation.

Each writer addresses this issue in his or her own way. Some can spend years in libraries or archives or museums, but that's not what I do. Here's how my process works:

After I come up with an idea to write something set in a specific place, I'll make plans to go there. Before going, I might do some reading on the history of the city, country, or the particular community I'm going to be seeing. Usually it's a subject I'm already interested in and have been reading about anyway. While I'm in a bookstore, I might casually drift by the section devoted to the history of this place or the religion or bit of sociology I plan to tackle, leaf through a few books, maybe buy one. I might do a google-search, or I might not. I'll probably send emails to everyone I know asking if they know people who live there or know something about what I'm interested in.

Next, I'll visit the place I'm writing about. (Hopefully I'll have earned enough frequent flyer miles on my credit card to score a free flight.) While I'm there I will walk, eat, sightsee, participate in local functions, meet up with friends of friends. The only organizing principle is that whatever I'm doing has to interest in me. I'll keep a journal and keep track of everything I'm doing, every fleeting impression that comes to mind. I collect bits of scrap paper, advertising, free magazines, leaflets, newspapers, packaging, anything that could later give me some sense of the place. I'll take pictures too, not usually of tourist attractions so much as of local streets, city views, a restaurant, a park, an interesting block or public square. Local graffiti and bumper stickers are often very helpful. The most important thing I do is talk to people. The conversations I've had (or listened in on) have given me much more than anything I've gleaned from a book or an article.

So far, in my limited experience as a writer, I've found that this kind of traveling will lead to some encounter or question that suggests a story. And when I come home, usually several months after my return, I'll scribble down a first draft of that story as quickly as I can. In the case of FAITH, it took me a month or so before I was able to start writing. With the novel I'm working on now, set in Berlin, I waited half a year after coming home from Germany to begin.

When that first draft is done, I'll read over what I have and then and only then do I know what I have to find out. For example, with my current project, after writing my first draft, I realized I'd have to learn about physics, childbirth, missing persons cases and the Berlin police department, the German language and German classes for foreigners, immigration rules for Germany, Russian immigrants to Germany, American communists, Disneyworld, a city called Magdeburg, Albert Einstein, and the British royal family, Prince William in particular. (I think I've left a few things out.) A lot of people ask me which comes first, the writing or the research? I find that generally speaking, the two processes are mostly interdependent. In the case of the Berlin book, I traveled to Berlin, wrote a draft, then went back to find out the information I needed, came back and wrote some more, and may probably go back again one more time. Yet the most serious in-depth research could begin only when I had a working draft of my novel.

Although the amount of topics you have to familiarize yourself with can seem daunting, what's wonderful about being a fiction writer as opposed to a journalist or a non-fiction writer, is that the depth of knowledge required can actually be pretty shallow. This will depend heavily on your plot or the angle of your story, or if you're writing historical or science fiction (which James Wood argues are pretty much the same thing and I agree with him). Still, I don't like to over-research as if my Ph.D. depends on it because I'm writing novels, not operating manuals. So I read. I talk to more people, I keep my eyes open for articles related to what I'm doing. I check out things on-line. I tell my friends what I'm doing and nine times out of ten, someone will say, "Oh, I have a friend you should talk to!" or "I know the perfect book you should read." And I hunt down their leads. But I don't become obsessive. Reading too many books, scanning the Internet, and rummaging through libraries can turn up useful information, but more often than not it can lead to dead ends or down avenues that aren't relevant to what I'm working on. Then I end up wasting time researching that I could have spent writing or focusing on the works of fiction writers I'm looking toward for stylistic guidance. Also, sometimes the research can be so fascinating that I feel daunted coming up with my own fresh details. Tidbits from real life often seem so much better than anything I could make up and I feel stuck. These are the times when I'd prefer not to know everything, but rather just enough to get the shadings right. Then I can close my eyes and imagine myself as my character going through an experience and I find the details I need that way.

In other words, I usually research until I get bored. Then I go back to telling a story. After all, in the end, isn't that the job I'm really supposed to be doing?

War of the Words

2005-03-27T22:35:00.000-05:00

At first glance, you might easily mistake Jonathan Safran Foer's new novel for a human interest magazine. Between its covers, you can find pictures of the World Trade Center, tennis player Lleyton Hewitt, and Laurence Olivier as Hamlet. Foer isn't alone in including non-typographical embellishments in his work. Ever since Dave Eggers's celebrated memoir came illustrated with various charts and graphs, young literary writers of fiction and non-fiction have rushed to furnish their texts with all manner of pictorial elements to liven up the tedium of all that black ink. Add to that the critical acclaim accorded to the prose of the late W. G. Sebald, and the practice of mixing image with text now comes stamped with a highbrow pedigree. If a European middle-aged man (who met an early and tragic demise) writing about the Holocaust can illustrate his prose with pictures, surely nice young middle class American boys and girls can do it too.

This generation isn't the first to use extra-textual decoration in their work, as anyone who's read Jon Dos Passos or Donald Barthelme knows. However, Dos Passos and Barthelme were writing in a time when there was no Tivo or HBO on Demand, when people filled their home libraries with books instead of DVD sets, when the written word wasn't constantly being debased in favor of visual excitement.

Now more than ever, we as writers need to cling firmly to our belief in words. We need to venerate the magic transaction that occurs when black ink marks on a page paint pictures, when black ink marks make us feel more in one sentence than reams of celebrity photos or hours of our favorite Sex in the City episodes.

This is not to argue against experimental writing, but rather to argue for authors to conduct their experiments with language. Have we really exhausted the possibilities of language so thoroughly that we have to resort to telling stories with pictures? If that's so, then how do you explain the glorious surprises achieved by David Foster Wallace's footnotes, Lorrie Moore's self-help stories, Rick Moody's italicized snarls, and yes, Safran Foer's enchanting play with English as a second language in his first novel, Everything is Illuminated? And what about writers like Michel Houellebecq whose work leaps off the page without the help of Lleyton Hewitt or footnotes or any other stylistic fireworks, but simply because of the powerful clarity of his voice and his vision?

If you feel that no word or combination of words can express your vision as powerfully as an image, then the question must be asked, what business do you have working with words? Why not be bold and honest enough to go all the way and declare yourself a visual artist? It's much easier to compete as a writer among artists than with other writers. And these days you don't even need to take your own photographs or paint your own pictures to be taken seriously as a young artist. Simply select a nice image, add your text above or below, choose a sleek black frame, and you've arrived.

To be fair, I haven't read Foer's book, so I can't comment on whether his particular experiment has failed or succeeded. Perhaps he has succeeded brilliantly and his book is a worthy heir to writers like W. G. Sebald and Donald Barthelme and others who effectively use elements other than texts in their books. Still, as much as I admire them, I want these writers to remain glorious exceptions, not models for the future. Also, writers like Sebald and Barthelme are prose magicians, who use pictures to amplify their already finely-wrought sentences, not as substitutes for places in their writing where they're stuck and don't want to bother searching for just the right word any longer. Can the young practitioners of scrapbooks as literature honestly say the same thing about their own work?

In Praise of Dribs and Drabs

2005-03-03T22:36:00.000-05:00

People often ask me, "How do you find the time to write a novel?" To tell the truth, I wish I could produce more work that I have so far. But for what it's worth, here's my secret.

Last week I was off from work and decided to catch up on some well-needed rest. This semester I'm teaching seven classes in addition to working on my writing, so sleep is one of the several activities that have gotten short shrift recently, meaning I usually manage about five, six hours a night during the week, sometimes as much as six and a half.

So last week I slept as long as I wanted, enjoyed nine to ten hours of sleep a night, and during the day I was a zombie, drifting around Manhattan like poor shell-shocked Septimus Smith from Mrs. Dalloway wandering around Hyde Park. By contrast, now that I'm back to my regular sleep-deprived schedule, I'm buzzing from class to class, tearing through a staggeringly accomplished lost classic novel called Three Cities by Sholem Asch, churning out revisions on my new novel, a couple of essays, and this blog that's in front of you right now.

In the same way, I've often found that when I've had plenty of free time to write, long empty stretches of hours with nothing to do but focus on my work, it can take me forever to get anything done. But when my schedule is full and I'm forced to carve out half an hour on the subway, an hour when I get home, plus another hour after dinner and then maybe sneak in another fifteen minutes before bed, I'm much more productive.

You'd think that working in these dribs and drabs would result in a pile of scraps with little relation to each other. In fact, my new novel Faith for Beginners was almost entirely completed this way, and I'm knee-deep in the middle of another novel whose first draft was composed drib by drab on the subway ride home from Brooklyn.

How many times have you heard the complaint, "I wish I could write more, but I just don't have the time"? Or "I'd write if I didn't have to work, but I can't afford to quit my job to be a writer."

The reality is that few writers, even ones who've been published, have the luxury of quitting their jobs to pursue their life's calling. Luckily, there are always little wasted bits of time every day that can be recaptured and used for valuable work time. I recently read that the effects of exercise are cumulative, and four fifteen-minute blocks of exercise scattered throughout the day are equal to a continuous one-hour workout. It's my firm belief that the writing process works in much the same way.

Many writers I know invest an almost mystical belief in the necessity of deep concentration to get their pens moving. Maybe that's why there seems to be a general belief out there that if you can't work for three hours at a time, there's no use in trying to get anything done in two hours, one hour, or even half an hour. For me, the trick has been to break down the process into smaller tasks that can be completed in thirty minutes to an hour and a half. These tasks might include re-reading the previous day's work and making light revisions, re-writing a stubborn paragraph that hasn't been working, or jotting down notes for a scene that hasn't been written yet. Sometimes I'll just work on one or two pages that seem to form some kind of thematic unit in themselves, then take a break to tackle some chore I need to get done, and then pick up my book where I left off.

I'll confess that at some point in whatever project I've worked on, I've needed stretches of uninterrupted time when I could focus for longer than an hour or so. In the past, I've used holidays or vacations to block out that kind of prime writing time. However, those precious stretches of free time would have been worthless if I hadn't generated raw material during my usual hectic workweeks. So if you have a life outside of writing, as most of us are required to do, and you want to generate enough material for a collection of stories, a novel, or a book of poems, you may find the drib-and-drab method could work for you.

2005-02-11T22:37:00.000-05:00

I recently finished a book called Literary Feuds by Anthony Arthur, which detailed the history of some famous author versus author squabbles, like Ernest Hemingway against Gertrude Stein, Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal, and recently Tom Wolfe and John Updike. Part of our interest in these feuds has more to do with gossip than serious literary study, yet interestingly, the disagreements between these writers was almost always related to their conflicting visions of what makes for good literature.

The other week in the New York Times Book Review, essayist Wendy Shalit laid down the gauntlet for a new literary feud in her opinion piece attacking Jewish fiction writers like Nathan Englander and Tova Mirvis, whom she labels as "insider outsiders." Her complaint was that these writers make their living by portraying themselves as dissidents who were once in the fold of Orthodox Judaism, but have now broken away and are explosing the dirty laundry of extremist religious freaks. Shalit argues that Mirvis and Englander not only fail to paint a full and true portrait of observant Jews but also have no right to claim any special knowledge of that world because they themselves are not part of the community.

To read Shalit's essay, click here.

Writing in the Forward, Mirvis composed a rather brilliant response to Shalit's critique. First, she points out that a writer need not share the lives of the characters she's writing about to understand them. "Since when must one be a murderer to write Crime and Punishment, a pedophile to write Lolita, a hermaphrodite to write Middlesex, a boy on a boat with a tiger to write Life of Pi? Yes, it seems, Shalit has outed the whole tawdry lot of us. She's revealed to the public the terrible truth: Fiction writers make up things."

Second, Mirvis says that experience and opinion are unique to the individual. Since writing fiction is an individual act, it necessitates an individualized point of view that should not be judged by its verisimilitude. Novels should not be confused with documentary films. "People like Shalit attack a story by saying, "But not everyone is like this." Of course not. But the fiction writer is saying, "Let's imagine one person who is.""

To read Mirvis's response, click here.

Frankly, Shalit's take on what a book ought to be is simplistic and dangerous. [Full disclosure: I know both Mirvis and Englander and admire their work.] However, there's an undercurrent in Shalit's essay that's worth exploring. It's her argument that works that attack religious people are celebrated by the literary community while works that celebrate religious people are attacked, or even more devastatingly, overlooked. Why? Because of the prejudices of the literary intelligentsia, who are more likely to be secular than religious, liberal rather than conservative, blue state rather than red state.

These days, I myself would probably be categorized as "secular," though I have a deeply spiritual outlook on the world that's informed by my religious upbringing. I am also a dyed-in-the-wool blue state liberal who's never voted for a Republican, though I don't rule out doing so. I admire several Republican politicians as well as despise many thoughtless Big-Government Democrats who believe the free market is the root of all evil (just as simpletons like our president believe the free market is the cure for all evil).

Do I believe an author must share my political opinions to write a great work? Definitely not. Knut Hamsun was a Nazi sympathizer, yet I loved his novel Pan. I do not share Toni Morrison's views on race in literature (as expressed in her book Playing in the Dark), yet I would gladly trade a limb to have written Beloved. And I can't count the number of times I've read books where writers make wink-wink, nod-nod anti-Semitic or homophobic asides that briefly jolt my reading experience. It's as if by continuing to read their works, I'm buying into their views of simpering gays and greedy Jews, though of course that's not true.

The books above focus more on story than political agendas. However, there are books that are intentionally political, that are meant to jolt us with their views. Can we enjoy them even if we don't agree with their politics? And can a book be ruined by its moral or political failings? Could I enjoy a book that featured a Bush-loving general who recounted his exploits in building democracy in Iraq? (That would have to be science fiction, since an election in which the majority of voters shows up to the polls to support an Iran-style theocracy because they've been told by their religious leaders they'll go to hell if they don't is not an example of Jeffersonian democracy.) Or how about a book about a religious leader who succeeds in converting gay people into straights? A book by a racist? A book about how ignorant and dirty poor people are? About how immigrants ought to be vaporized, and women put back in their place?

My answer is an emphatic yes. If you go to the recommended books section of this site, you'll find one book I'm recommending is by the French writer Michel Houellebecq, whose politics I often find repugnant. His fiction, however, is brilliant. I wouldn't want to be stranded on a desert island with this man. I also wouldn't want to live in a world in which he couldn't continue to write his vital and brilliant screeds that bristle with resentment against p.c. pieties and puritanical dishonesty about gender roles. When I read, I want to taste life, and life includes Eminem as well as Pollyanna, George Bush as well as John Kerry, Pope John Paul II as well as Sinead O'Connor. I don't mind reading a "biased" or political work of fiction. The test for me is whether I believe the book is honest (not to reality, but to the writer's own voice and vision), urgent, and above all, magical (which unfortunately is not a quantifiable quality). I don't want "fair and balanced" portraits all the time. Sometimes I want a slant. Yes, the world is complex, but why does fiction always need to recreate that complexity? It doesn't. Not if you're a curious reader.

Looking for Inspiration

2005-01-25T22:40:00.000-05:00

The high volume of books on writing available in stores suggests we writers are an insecure, skittish lot, in constant need of reassurance. (I plead guilty.) It makes a lot of sense for us to feel lonely and insecure since writing is probably the most private of the major art forms as well as the one with the smallest earning potential. No wonder these guides tend to sell. Writers need all the help we can get.

Another reason for these books' ubiquity is that they seem fairly easy to write. Just jot down your random musings on what you do every day, with a brief nod to young, developing writers, and voila–you've fulfilled a book contract. I've noticed that the more famous the writer is, the thinner her book on writing tends to be, both in terms of length and content. Joyce Carol Oates's guide, for example, is a slim collection of essays already published elsewhere and doesn't get that much more specific than "Write your heart out." On the other side of the spectrum, John DuFresne's The Lie that Tells a Truth is chock full of concrete, eminently practical advice on everything from character development to finding your voice to step-by-step writing exercises to get your budding career started.

Recently, to get ready for some creative writing classes I'm teaching this semester, I looked over a few of these guides, starting with one of the classics of the genre, Annie Dillard's The Writing Life. Dillard's book takes the Oates approach, which depending on your point of view can be described as spare and poetic or cynically empty. Much of the book is devoted to describing Dillard's sojourns in quiet, tucked-away places like friends' vacation cabins, where she finishes her books. (Anyone out there have a cabin they'd like to lend me?) There are also several evocative anecdotes that lead up to cryptic maxims like, when chopping wood, aim for the chopping block and not the wood. That's definitely richly suggestive of something, though I'm not sure what. Dillard herself seems to be aware of a tendency toward obscurity in her work, which she highlights in a chapter where she confesses that the only people who seem to understand her writing are a few critics. So then why write? Stymied, she indulges in a bowl of popcorn with a few neighborhood kids, and then discovers to her surprise that one of them has read and enjoyed her work. I smiled in recognition when I read that story. You really can never predict who'll be affected by what you write.

I was browsing in Three Lives Bookstore in Manhattan when I picked up If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence, and Spirit by Brenda Ueland, whom I'd never heard of. The book was originally published in 1938 and was brought out again in paperback by Graywolf Press. Judging from her bio page, Ueland was quite a woman. She lived the bohemian life in Greenwich Village, then set a world swimming record for women over 80 years old, and was knighted by the king of Norway. Her book is a delightfully cranky exhortation to enjoy the art-making process, regardless of its ultimate product or material success. She cites the familiar Van Gogh example of the artist who labored seemingly in vain all his life to show that the work itself ought to be more than ample reward for its own sake: "By painting the sky, Van Gogh was really able to see it and adore it better than if he had just looked at it," she writes. That may be cold comfort to aspiring unpublished writers (or writers who have published but have found the experience less than life-fulfilling), but it's the best, noblest reason to slog away at this business. I also enjoyed when Ueland compared her writing students' work to published stories and essays and concluded that her students' work was more imaginative, passionately-observed, and wise. I was glad to learn Ueland's thoughts on how the imagination works (slowly and quietly) as well as the importance of long, solitary, and quiet walks. (Turn off your cell phones if you have them—I still haven't got one.) Most importantly, Ueland advises writers to write first and plan what they're going to write afterwards. I agree. I've found the surest way to kill a potential story is to think it all through beforehand and leave no room for improvisation while writing.

My favorite of these writing guides, though, continues to be Anne Lamott's oft-prescribed Bird by Bird. The first time I read it, I thought Lamott's insights and humor were a bit facile and coy. But the longer I've worked at writing, the more I recognize how wise this book is. What I like most about Bird by Bird is that it's a mix of the practical and spiritual, with chapters on jealousy alternating with advice on plot development. When I started out as a writer, I took solace from her thoughts on the necessity of writing shitty first drafts, a concept I'll forever emphasize to my students. When my first book came out, I studied her notes on the process of getting published, and laughed out loud at her description of how a bad review made her feel like streaks of feces on the underpants of life. Lamott makes you feel like you're not alone in this lonely craft, which I suppose is the true reason these books on writing are out there and do so well.

All in all, I've found each of these books on writing helpful in its own way. Someday I'd even like to write one, though at the rate new ones keep coming out, by the time I get around to doing it, I'm not sure how much there'll be left to say.

The Romance of Solitude

2005-01-08T22:47:00.000-05:00

I remember the thrilling sense of relief I felt when I first learned the difference between "lonely" and "alone." While growing up, I enjoyed spending much of my time on my own and I was beginning to wonder if there wasn't something wrong with me. I loved to read, think, and retreat into my imagination to make up stories. The world seemed to me a complex and confusing place, with so much to think over and try to understand. Being around other people could sometimes be a welcome respite from my own thoughts, but they also brought up new problems to consider.

Somehow I thought I'd lose my taste for being alone when I got older, but now as an adult, I find that I continue to gravitate toward doing things on my own. I eat out, shop, go to the movies, the theater, even go on trips by myself. Many people I know would never dream of doing these things without a partner or five, maybe because they're afraid other people will see them by themselves and think they're lonely, as if there's no difference between not being in the mood to see other people and not having other people to see.

Solitude is becoming increasingly freakish in a culture where singers appear onstage backed by a line of dancers in cute outfits, politicians front a backdrop of carefully-picked everyday people, live audiences clamber up to talk show stages to throw chairs at each other, win cars, or (if they're on Ellen Degeneres's show) dance, and news anchors come in pairs, triples, and quartets. The concept of the entourage has become so de rigeur that there's even a TV show by that title. When was the last time you saw anyone alone on TV or in a movie? (Answer: Tom Hanks in Cast Away, in which his alone-ness was considered something of a special effect in itself.)

What I love about being alone is that things get very still, even if I'm in a crowded restaurant, or walking down the street. I'm lifted out of the place where I happen to be physically into my mind's remove, where I can be in several different places at once. There's no one to negotiate with, to see your dumb mistakes, to hear your passing thoughts. There's nothing you need to buy (which may be why being alone seems so discouraged in America) or do or say or be. Time slows down and often seems to stop.

Is solitude a necessary state for a writer? It can be helpful for a writer to play the observer, to gain some distance from others to understand the world better, to note useful details about people and places to use in a story or essay. And certainly it's crucial for a writer to have space and time alone to produce her work. Sometimes when I answer the phone after I've been writing, people will say to me, "Did I wake you up?" As a matter of fact, they have woken me up from a meditative state, a dream I've willed myself into to access the hidden places in my head where my characters live, breathe, and speak.

However, solitude has its degrees, and each writer confronts solitude in his own way. Some writers are like coal miners who punch the clock, go down the chute, and come back up when they've finished their job. Others, like me, show up early, leave late, and come back to the mines at odd hours, not necessarily to do extra work, but because we like the condition of being underground. We're attracted to writing because it gives form to those odd hours we spend cut off from the world.

When I read certain writers' books (or look at their jacket photos), I sometimes imagine I can tell what kind of relationship to solitude they have. For example, I've often that that Bernard Malamud's work has a much lonelier quality than Philip Roth's (though from what I understand, Roth lives alone in rural Connecticut, spends hours in isolation working on his books, and shuns publicity). When I think of Dickens, Fitzgerald, Toni Morrison, as well as the slew of young writers like Dave Eggers, Safran Foer, and Shteyngart, I imagine them in a brightly-lit room filled with people holding drinks. On the other hand, Woolf, Joyce, Hemingway, W. G. Sebald, and frankly most European writers always strike me as detached souls shut up in drafty garrets and thinking deep thoughts. Jane Austen was famous for craving solitude and never getting any, while Proust retreated into it. Janet Frame, who grew up in a raucous rabble of a household, became something of a high priestess of solitude. Jonathan Franzen wrote a book with the title How to Be Alone, (which, embarrassingly, I have yet to read).

I was telling a friend my feelings about this subject, and he said to me, "But, Aaron, you know everyone!" I'm not sure that's true, but there are many times when I've been in group situations and felt like I was standing in the eye of a hurricane. I watched the noise and energy swirl around me, while I remained at the center in the calm and the quiet, where not a breath of wind or drop of rain could reach me. It's a scary, dizzying perch, not without its dangers, though if you can stand them, there are sometimes rewards.

2004-12-12T22:48:00.000-05:00

It's that time when critics in magazines and newspapers declare their picks for the ten best books of the year. As a writer, I certainly have my opinions on that subject, but since so many books come out each year and I've only sampled a relatively small proportion of them, I'd rather keep out of that debate and instead focus on what made 2004 so important for me: The Top Ten Lessons I've Learned about Getting Published.

1. Getting published doesn't change how you see yourself, but it does change how other people see you, though only for five seconds.

I still scribble my first drafts in the same spiral notebooks I used as a teenager in high school. I still sit in cafes and stare off into space while trying to focus on my work as I did in college. And I still worry about what I'm going to do when I grow up. However, now that I've been published, when other people ask me what I do, I can say that I'm a writer and have an answer ready when I they ask the inevitable next question, "Have you been published?" Yes, I have been published. Generally, the response is, "Oh, wow! That's great!" That's how long you are guaranteed that getting published will change how other people see you, because then they'll have heard of your book or they won't have heard of your book, which leads to all sorts of complications.

2. Memorize how to answer, "So what's your book about?" in 25 seconds or less.

Because books get so little attention in the media, it's more than likely that people you meet will not have heard of your book and then they will feel bad for you. To be polite, they may ask what your book is about. You should tell them, but spare your audience the university lecture. Give them a quick hook and then make an end of it, or else you'll experience eyes glazing over. It's like a little test. If you can't sum up the book in less than 25 seconds, then your book must be a meandering mess. No one will say that, of course, but that's what your friend is thinking.

3. There's no use in asking a writer, "So how's your book doing!!??"

If the question needs to be asked, then it has no real answer. Does anyone ask Toni Morrison or Philip Roth, "So how's your book doing?" (How would they respond, I wonder. "Well, the Nobel was nice, but I'm waiting for another Pulitzer." Or "Only fifteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list this time.")

When people ask this question, they're wondering about two specific kinds of success: sales and critical reaction. But these two areas are not only the least important for a writer in the long run, but also the two areas least under his or her control. Success is about finishing your book and putting it out in the world, crafting sentences and characters you're proud of, realizing your vision, expressing ideas, seeing your book in a store, reading to an audience who gets your jokes, and so much more.

Sales are important because they increase your chances of being able to continue to write with fewer obstacles, and that's it. (This may be a hard lesson to remember.) If sales were the ultimate goal, then Dan Brown and Hillary Clinton deserve the Pulitzer Prize for the next three years.

Critical acclaim is nice too, but as an occasional critic myself, I know there are times when I get a book that simply isn't to my taste, or when I'm grumpy that I have to read something and comment on it in a witty insightful way even though my mind would rather drift elsewhere, like the fight I had with a friend or a problem at work. I've gotten wonderful reviews and reviews that complained I chose the wrong subjects for my book, or that I wasn't as good as Hemingway or Nabokov. Who's right?

If you're a writer, and people ask you how your book is doing, tell them, "Great! I'm so happy with the way things have gone." Throw in an anecdote of something nice that's happened to you because the book has been published. Or not. Either way, you'll feel better and increase the positive vibrations in the ether about your work.

4. The two appropriate things to say to a writer who's just published a book are: A) "I'm going to go right out and buy a copy!" or "I read your book and I loved it." (Also acceptable is, "I've just bought your book and I can't wait to read it.")

If none of these three statements are true for you, then do your writer friends a favor: lie to them. I've had people say to me, "I think I saw your book somewhere." (As if the book were a long-lost orphan who'd been sighted on a milk carton in Idaho.) I've also gotten, "I'm waiting to find your book in a used bookstore." "I'm waiting to get your book at the library." "My friend bought it and as soon as she's done, she's going to loan it to me." "One of these days I'm going to get your book, if I happen to see a copy of it for sale somewhere."

What these statements sound like to a writer is, "You're a nice person, but not nice enough for me to waste my time supporting your career by going to a bookstore and picking up a copy of your book, or even to spend 2 minutes and $24.95 or $12.95 to order your book on-line." Maybe that is genuinely how you feel, and there is nothing wrong with that. But what good does it do to tell this to the writer?

Similarly, if you did read the book and didn't enjoy it, why let the writer know except to punish him or her for torturing you for a few hours out of your life? As the author Frederic Tuten once told me, there are enough people out there who will tell writers what is wrong with their work. I can say from personal experience that I am indeed fully aware of every conceivable objection The View from Stalin's Head could have earned and I expect when Faith from Beginners comes out I'll hear about that too. Unless you're a close friend (and even then, you might want to consider your words closely), just lie. Or say something about an aspect of the book you did like. "The setting was great." "I loved the character of the mother." "Great word choice on page 73." Saying nothing is somewhat less preferable because writers are needy sensitive creatures who will interpret silences as damning.

The worst thing to say, by the way, is the maddeningly non-committal, "I read your book." Or "I have a friend who read your book." How is the writer supposed to respond? Imagine if you invited a friend to your home for dinner, and at the end of the meal she said, "I've eaten your food."

Just lie.

5. Start working on something else

It takes a long time, sometimes years, to publish and edit a book. By the time it's out, you get a three-month window in which you're not expected to have done anything else because you can be described as "just having been published." After that, you're left with nothing.

As soon as that final manuscript is delivered and accepted, celebrate for a day or two and then get to work on your next project. It's also a good way to stay somewhat dispassionate if something unfortunate happens with the publication of your book.

6. Try to set the bar higher with each new book.

Why do the same thing twice? You've proven you can tackle third person? Try first person. You've written an autobiographical memoir? Go for a book about something that isn't so close to you. Take chances. Stay fresh.

7. Have a life.

This is almost impossible for writers, but try to develop and maintain other interests besides writing and books, and then talk about them with your family and friends. Save the neurotic yammering about the state of literature for your diary or your therapist.

8. If you're asked for a favor, do it if you possibly can.

We have enough assholes in the world. Success breeds success. Kindness breeds kindness. Don't worry that someone might get a leg up on you if you help him up the ladder. You may need help from that person yourself someday.

9. Read and buy books

Support your friends and your community by buying their work, even if you don't read it. This is an important business we're in, and we need to keep it going. Replace the time you waste watching that rerun of "The Golden Girls" for the eightieth time by reading for half an hour. You'll like yourself for it.

10. Be proud of what you've achieved!

As Anne Lamott and so many others have pointed out, getting published won't take care of all your problems, but is an extremely nice thing to have happen to you. I feel tremendously blessed for the publication of The View from Stalin's Head, the way it was put out, the way it was received, and the way it's changed my life. I could have had more, but I could have had less. It's like that for every writer. Even my idol E. M. Forster lamented that he hadn't accomplished enough. Writers are gifted at being miserable. Take some time to be happy for what you have. You deserve it.

Please Don't Bother to Entertain Me

2004-11-28T22:49:00.000-05:00

Ever since I was aware of literature, I've wanted to read Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy, mostly because the title sounded so, you know, like, cool. First of all, I had never met anyone with the mysterious name of Jude, a name that sounded to me as if it were Jewish, even though I knew it was Christian. Then there was the "the Obscure" part. How could someone with such a lofty, regal-sounding name and title be "obscure"?

Even though I'd read some of Hardy's other work and enjoyed it, I stayed far away from Jude. I'd been warned off by English teachers, professors, even my sister-in-law, that the novel was dark, depressing, twisted, heavy, dense. A good read if you enjoyed uttering Satanic chants or tearing wings off butterflies in your spare time, or a chore to complete for school. Definitely not something to read for fun.

Recently I was in a bookstore and happened to see the intriguing title once again looming in front of me. I felt old enough, brave enough, experienced enough to handle the tortures within its covers, so I picked it up and began reading.

After finishing the first few chapters, I noticed the experience I was having was much different from the one to which I'd become accustomed when reading fiction, watching movies, looking at art, even riding in the subway. At first I couldn't put my finger on what was so strange about the book. Then it hit me. I wasn't being entertained.

Today, it seems as if not being entertained has become impossible. Life is now the ultimate spectator sport, underscored by constant commentary and scores from other games around the world. The news is now accompanied by flashing lights, music, subtitles, and a constant crawl of headlines to keep your eye moving. Picking out groceries is now a performative-theatrical experience. It's no longer enough for a food to be strawberry-flavored, for example. It must be strawberry-kiwi-boisenberry flavored, with silver packaging and a free toy inside, or a diet plan, or an easy, quick, delicious low-fat recipe. Also, it must be bite-sized and come in bright colors like hot pink and sky blue. Waiting for a movie to begin is now a chance to be entertained by songs designed by corporate executives who've learned which chords and melodies appeal to the largest common denominator, or by snippets from TV shows about waiting in line for soup, or on-the-set "exclusive peeks" from made for TV movies featuring B-movie actors. Everything we see lights up and flickers, comes with extra features we've never asked for but accept, because, A) they're free, and B) most importantly, they're new. As soon as we wake up in the morning, we're being entertained by something. And if something doesn't entertain us, like a friend's over-long illness, the genocide in Sudan, or modern dance, then we dismiss it with the ultimate of damnations: boring.

Indeed, a new crop of writers, perhaps feeling the heat from their multimedia cousins on the internet and in film, have declared their aim to thrill, to entertain, to join in the Roman circuses instead of offer a refuge from them. Their stories are chock-a-block with cliffhangers and climaxes, thrills and spills, more fun than a day at Six Flags.

Of course entertaining audiences isn't new to literature. Just check out Ben-Hur or the novels of Charles Dickens, who wasn't above writing a scene of spontaneous combustion or two.

What's new is that we live in a time when we don't need literature as an escape from our boring, drab, gray lives. If anything, life offers too many vehicles for "excitement" these days. What we need from literature now, more than ever, is a jolt us back to reality and out of our constant state of caffeine-rush alertness to the latest over-the-top news headline on our computer, the latest Hollywood exclusive (available to millions of viewers in the English-speaking world), the latest internet porn fantasy.

Unfortunately, many of the writers who aren't trying to thrill us are putting us to sleep. I'm taking about authors of literary fiction whose characters putter around the house and in the yard waiting to be struck by an epiphany that their lives have been a waste, though it's too late to change and it's all so pointless anyway. These "slice-of-life" stories are in their own way as much removed from reality as the chills-and-spills approach.

Jude the Obscure is not so much a slice of life as it is a slice out of life. Its mix of Biblical references and antiquated rustic slang can sometimes be impenetrable; the characters' hemming and hawing can be infuriating; the bleakness of their world is overpowering. As readers, we don't know quite what to make of Hardy's vision. We become angry, uncomfortable, and best of all, confused. In other words, we feel alive.

And what's wrong with that? In this age of you're on my side or you're against me, what's wrong with a little uncertainty? Are we so insecure in our selves that we can't handle being provoked, unsettled, and even upstaged by a work of art?

We have artists today who make deliberately confusing work. That's easy. What's hard, and what's so admirable about Hardy, is that he writes novels that seem almost understandable, which is what makes them so lifelike. He veers back and forth between naturalism and surrealism, riveting action and obscure, repetitive scenes in which nothing seems to happen. We as readers feel we ought to understand it all, but when we finish his work, we come away scratching our heads, angry with ourselves for not knowing what to think. We become more skilled at living with uncertainty, a skill we're in desperate need of more and more.

So who else is teaching us this lesson now? Who is our Thomas Hardy today? I'm open to suggestions, if you have any.

The Literary Meaning of the Election of 2004

2004-11-13T22:51:00.000-05:00

In my writing classes, my students often like to deflect criticism of vagueness in their work with the mantra, "But it sounds good." In response, I tell them it isn't good enough for words to sound good. They have to mean something as well.

Unfortunately, the relationship between word and meaning is becoming a radical concept, an outmoded value. We live in a country and a time when musicians lip sync and call it "singing," when museums exhibit bicycles and Armani dresses and call it "art, when performers preen for the camera and call it "acting." Evangelical preachers support the death penalty to promote a culture of life; bacon, raw fish, and candy bars are marketed as health food; people appear on reality TV shows as "characters."

At last this country has found a president to match our predilection for falseness and inversion, our ongoing project of divorcing word from meaning. In 2004, we re-elected a president who goes to war to keep peace, who imposes democracy on other countries so their inhabitants can express their free will (under the watchful eyes of our troops), who builds a case for war on the grounds of "weapons of mass destruction," and when that evidence is disproven, takes no responsibility for the falseness of those words, but instead changes the grounds for the war. Now we are fighting to spread democracy. The words about WMD, peddled for months by the president and his cohorts, don't matter because they are only words. They sounded good at the time, but their meaning is fundamentally unimportant.

It will probably strike future generations as more than a little odd that a president with such a penchant for falseness is so beloved for his honesty. But then, we as Americans on both sides of the red/blue state divide have lost our ability to judge and interpret language. Many of Bush's supporters like him because they think he sounds honest, not because they have spent five minutes parsing his words to see if he really is honest. Many of Bush's detractors compare him to Hitler, and especially to the terrorists themselves, but these comparisons are unfortunate exaggerations that obscure the real danger of Bush's presidency.

The problem is not that Bush is a terrorist. A terrorist is an individual or a member of an organization who cannot be held accountable for his actions by the citizens of a state. The problem is that in his careless disregard for words and their meaning, Bush uses language in the manner of a terrorist because terrorists revel in doublespeak. They fight holy wars by the unholy method of slaughtering women and children. They fail to distinguish between civilians and soldiers because distinctions are useless when you want to paint your message in broad swaths of blood. Unfortunately, our president has as little use for truth in language as our old vanquished foes, the Communist dictators of Eastern Europe.

Sadly, this is the level to which we as Americans have sunk long before "Black Wednesday," lulled by our Ipods that play music only we can hear and video games in which we score points for committing vile crimes that don't matter and "healthy" chocolate covered energy bars that satisfy our cravings for sugar our body doesn't need. In such an atmosphere, can anyone be surprised that we've re-elected President Bush? (I say "we" to include myself in the decision because we are all responsible for the outcome of the election, however we voted.)

In 2004, we said to our enemies: we in the free world think just as you do in the land of shackled. The ideals of our Constitution, of our two hundred year old democracy, those are mere words, easily sacrificed in the name of "security" on the streets of Baghdad, in Abu Ghreib, in Guantanamo Bay, and in the halls of our own Congress when the Patriot Act was rushed into law. Might makes right. We do what we do not because we should but because we can. And in sacrificing our ideals, we believe, we have made America safe. We have also lost a little of what "America" used to mean.

And so in November 2004, we sent our message loud and clear to the terrorists, the jihadists, the religious extremists and petty dictators who wish us ill. We should not be surprised when we hear their response.