A strange brew is this, and not all of it is pretty. Partially a record of a crackup and partially a tale of rising from that crackup back into a useful life; and part of that is how I decided writing was necessary to my life and recovery; and another part is just keeping a record of where I have been and what I have learned. You can see the topics I cover the sidebar. The hope is to help others; the purpose is figuring out where I am going. Thank you for dropping by. Feel free to comment.
Yes, I am a fan of Zadie Smith. That is not the purpose of this post.
This post is about the vagaries of opinions about literature. KH - and a lot of my rejections - make a poitn of how subjective are literary opinions. I keep hoping (and revising) and I want you to keep your hopes alive, too. Subjectivity is the point of this post.
It’s a shame. A novelist has a sacred right to hate her first novel, but White Teeth remains by far the best thing Smith has ever written; what bad luck to have done it by 24! Smith has apparently concluded that White Teeth’s
greatest strength, its audacious unreality, was in fact its fatal flaw.
Today, she is firmly within the realist camp despite her recurring
feints at departure. Her much-debated 2008 essay “Two Paths for the Novel,”
which pitted the “lyrical realism” of Balzac and Flaubert against the
20th-century avant-garde, reads now like two paths for Zadie Smith.
Every time she has set out down the second path, it has looped
consolingly back into the first. On Beauty was a novel of ideas; NW, Smith’s fourth novel, dabbled in Joycean modernism. But each new form has represented a fresh attempt to write the morally serious novel that White Teeth had failed to be. This is Smith: radical for the sake of tradition. In another 2008 essay, this one on Middlemarch, Smith
argued that a heightened moral sensitivity drove Eliot to “push the
novel’s form to its limits.” But for this very reason, the “George Eliot
of today” would need to invent her own forms; she certainly wouldn’t be
writing a “nineteenth-century English novel.”
***
...Like Middlemarch, it
is divided into eight volumes, and Eliza even spies Eliot (who
privately went by Mrs. Lewes) among the trial’s attendees. “Was this
what the admirable Mrs Lewes felt as she worked?” wonders our budding
lady novelist as she prepares to write. More than ever, Smith is asking
herself the same question. Her two paths for the novel have become a
perfect circle: What could be more avant-garde in an age of data
harvesting and identity politics than a heartfelt 19th-century novel?
The socially minded Eliot believed that through sympathetic portraits of
ordinary people, the novel could provide readers with “the raw material
of moral sentiment.” With The Fraud, Smith delivers her most passionate defense of this idea to date. Whether it persuades is another matter.
***
So
sympathize away! No one can stop you. But neither the novel nor its
people are so weak that they would collapse if our hearts did not bleed
for them. Indeed, it is precisely because we
feel that characters in novels are real that we can politically object
to the way a writer treats them. This may be what the youngs were saying
— not that they feared for their own sensitive souls but that they
wished to know how to do real justice to imaginary people. How might
Smith have answered them? She dislikes the adage “Write what you know”
on the grounds that it is now used to keep novelists within the bright
chalk circle of personal identity. So for her sake, let us look
somewhere more morally serious. The mid-century literary critic F. R.
Leavis once wrote, in his very serious book The Great Tradition, that
Austen’s genius was to take “certain problems that life compelled on
her as personal ones” and impersonalize them, tracing carefully out of
herself and back into the world. What Leavis admired was not that Austen
had “stayed in her lane”; it was that she’d had the good sense to ask
where it led. This is a splendid notion. It suggests that, for any
novelist, there exists a small number of historical problems that, for
reasons of luck and temperament, she naturally grasps as the stuff of life. The genius lies in knowing which ones they are.
The Fraud is a critique, defence and object lesson in
artistic thievery all at once. It’s a sly facsimile of a Victorian novel
that widens the aperture so we see what those books so assiduously left
out. The invisible women “endlessly refilling the port bottles”; the
“Carib boys in livery at the threshold of fine houses, got up like
Princes of Arabia”; the white-gloved gentlemen who argue for abolition
at dinner parties, but live off their granddaddy’s sugar money.
And
the writers – the obsequious, vampiric, backstabbing, petty-hearted
writers – penning exotic tales of places they never intend to see.
What mighty fun
Smith is having, especially with William Ainsworth, a man so reliably
tedious that Eliza gags him for practical rather than erotic reasons
(it’s the only way she can stop him recounting the plots of his novels).
And having been relentlessly – often lazily – compared to Dickens for
most of her career, Smith conjures him here and then kills him off. You
can almost hear her snickering.
And that, perhaps, is the fatal flaw of The Fraud:
it’s a grand in-joke. Much has been made – mostly by Smith herself – of
her long-held reluctance to write a historical novel, but also its
inevitability. The result is a book that feels so determinedly,
diligently historical – so packed full of titbits and unkilled darlings –
that it alienates rather than invites.
The Fraud
opens in the dusty aftermath of a structural collapse: William’s
library has buckled under the weight of his book collection. It is hard
to shake that image as Smith’s sixth novel unfolds. But it is also hard
to shake the gleeful paradox of it. Novelists are frauds, Smith tells
us. Trust me, I’m a novelist.
Kazuo Robinson published The Ambitious Anachronism of ‘The Fraud’ in The Millions is a more traditional book review, examining characters and plots, but concludes:
Smith has adapted and filled in Bogle’s life without really integrating
it or its telling into Eliza’s, but the material is intriguing
enough—and Eliza’s interest in it credible enough—that it works. “God preserve me from novel-writing,”
thinks Eliza early in her tenure as Ainsworth’s housekeeper, “God
preserve me from that tragic indulgence, that useless vanity, that
blindness.” She will feel later that the novel, indulged enough, is just
the thing to bring together London court scandal, the arc of a
novelist’s career, a Jamaican sugar plantation, and a housekeeper’s many
stifled sentiments.
Three seeing problems, only one seems to find them fatal. Ms. Smith succeeds.
I adore Zadie Smith. I say this having read only White Teeth, a short story, and some essays. While in the halfway house with its free wife, I found her YouTube. Yes, unfettered and unsupervised access to the internet means for me to listen to Zadie Smith on YouTube. I suggest you do so, too.
But, ultimately, Smith has written a first-class novel on the complexities of modern Britain and how it struggles with multiculturalism and how first and second generation immigrant families try to cope with being British while retaining their original cultural identities, yet still finding place to discuss a broader view of Britain as it was at the end of the last century – science, education, children-parents relations, relations between the sexes and, of course, religion in the modern world. It is and will remain an essential read.
Another gift from the federal government was getting a chance to read Zadie Smith. I knew of her, had not thought of reading her, then off I go to prison and decide to take seriously the idea that I should return to writing fiction. I acquired a crush on her - one that has only increased since my release - YouTube has several interviews and lectures. She is a wonder to listen to - she has a grace that marks her writing. What else I have written about Zadie Smith can be found here.
Anyway, The Guardian published Zadie Smith on NW – Guardian book club, which I think has good advice on writing and, yes, it captures her graceful intelligence.
What's this novel about? My books don't seem to me to be about anything other than the people in them and the sentences used to construct them. Which makes NW
sound like an "exercise in style", a phrase you generally hear people
using as an insult of one kind or another. But to me, an exercise in
style is not a superficial matter – our lives are also an exercise in
style. The hidden content of people's lives proves a very hard thing to
discern: all we really have to go on are these outward, manifest signs,
the way people speak, move, dress, treat each other. And that's what I
try to concern myself with in fiction: the way of things in reality, as
far as I am able to see and interpret them, which may not be especially
far.
When I was writing this novel what
I really wanted to do was create people in language. To do that you must
try to do justice simultaneously to the unruly, subjective qualities of
language, and to what I want to call the concrete "thingyness" of
people. Which was Virginia Woolf's way of being a modernist – she loved
language and people simultaneously – and her model is important to me. I
admire Beckett and respect Joyce. I love Woolf. Whenever the going gets
tough I reread her journals and it helps me through.
Jhumpa Lahiri's “Jubilee” is available for free (well, free as of 6/30/2025) from The New Yorker.
A wooden ruler with the etched faces of Henry VIII’s six wives running down the middle; ticket stubs from Hampton Court and the Chamber of Horrors, where we walked ahead of our mothers, hand in hand; a few wrappers of Dairy Milk. I still see clearly the brochure from Madame Tussaud’s, a green nameplate on the cover with white lettering. We shuddered at the likeness of one particularly sinister man standing in an olive-colored three-piece suit with old brown pharmaceutical bottles behind him. We’d seen him in the chamber dedicated to those who poisoned and stabbed and slashed. Later, flipping through the brochure, sitting side by side, we braced ourselves for his effigy; how we dreaded turning to that page. A Mavis Gallant story I discovered only recently likens the compulsion to save tickets and programs to a type of narcissism: that’s how a mother interprets a daughter’s need to hold on to memorabilia. But was that not what Gallant had done in some of her stories, and taught me to do? Intertwining invention with preserved bits and scraps of life? Already that spring, about to turn ten in the city of my birth, I was attempting to leave some trace, struggling to glimpse myself on a murky surface.
Although O’Connor—in the spirit of Chekhov’s famous dictum about the onstage gun needing to go off—has prepared us for the appearance of the Misfit, in a more profound sense she has radically rewritten the rules that seemed to have governed her tale. The effect is dizzying, and intensifies when it becomes obvious that the family can only be murdered by the Misfit and his men.
***
...Her darkly funny, violent world continues to exert tremendous appeal—and fascination—not least because of its collision of incongruous elements: the low and the transcendent, the comic and the speculative, the grotesque and the divine. In her meticulously crafted fiction, these opposites resolve via the unlikely transmutations and orderings of the creative act. For within her peculiarly personalized spiritual orthodoxy, ultimately nothing is incongruous; all is one. As she wrote, quoting the French theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, “Everything that rises must converge.”
I think of Lahiri as elegiac, Gallant as sharply condensing lives as an observational vignette, and O'Connor as twisted.
sch 6/30
I had not heard of Grace Paley until the last ten years, since I went to prison. I had heard of Zadie Smith. I still have not read Grace Paley, but I have read Zadie Smith (and written about her on this blog).
Paley reminded me of my past but also of my present: living in Greenwich Village, with a poet as a partner, trying to write while bringing up two kids. The startling aspect, to me, was that she included it all. She didn’t put a cordon around a short story and use a special literary voice to create it. In her expert hands a short story is like one of those cavernous shoulder bags you’ll need to carry in the city if your plan is to tote around four or five novels, a feminist treatise, a bunch of diapers, somebody’s lunch, a photocopy of a zoning law to brandish at a community-board meeting, and a large banner that reads “END THE WAR.” Paley is an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink sort of a writer, with an emphasis on the kitchen sink. The domestic is not banal to her, nor is it bourgeois. It’s perhaps a little perverse to write a story called “The Silence” in homage to one of the chattiest writers on the block, yet for me Paley has always served as a kind of stimulant to honesty. I can get all up in my head when I’m writing. But if I read a bit of Paley just before I open the document I feel some of that wildness and openheartedness enter me. My character Sharon in “The Silence” is a fictional person from a shadowy region of my mind, but Paley cleared the space and built a little platform so that Sharon could step forward and just . . . be. My Sharon is dealing with “the Change,” which seems also to be on Paley’s mind in “My Father.” (“We should probably begin at the beginning, he said. Change. First there is change, which nobody likes—even men. You’d be surprised. You can do little things—putting cream on the corners of your mouth, also the heels of your feet.”) But Sharon is not a participant in what I want to call “menopause discourse.” She doesn’t really have a language for what’s happening to her. She’s just trying to get through it.
When I gave up writing in my early twenties, one part was not having anything to write. What I did not learn until I began telling my Indiana stories to people from the East, until I read Joyce Carol Oates's western New York stories and Thomas Hardy's Wessex novels, was that where there are people there are stories to tell. You look around and see what you can see, and then try to recreate the life you see on paper.
Okay, I just read Todd Cronan's Zadie Smith Finds Her Way to Class on the L. A. Review if Books site. I did this because I think Zadie Smith a brilliant writer of fiction and essays. I wrote about my infatuation with her here and here. The essay approaches her writing through the lens of Smith's political development.
But the essay also pricked my imagination on colonialism and classism and economic exploitation. It may do the same for you.
Three writers I found in prison have pieces published about them this weekend.
I admit to not reading much by Deborah Levy, a now 13-year-old short story, and reading much about her. The more I read about her, the more I think there is to learn from her. The Guardian did a podcast How Deborah Levy can change your life, which I listened to this morning. Women readers, women writers might be profit the most, but men should not ignore her. She seems to be working out what I stumbled upon – that realism that does not include our mental life of dreams and the like is not reality.
Smith was subjected to the media glare when she
was barely out of university. “Most of the terrible stuff that went on
when I was young was not really to do with me, it was an insane
projection,” she says now. “You are dealing with what people themselves
want.” Nobody could believe that a young woman wouldn’t want to be
endlessly profiled, with her photo in the papers on the flimsiest
excuse. “But I really didn’t want it. I don’t want to be a photograph in
the newspaper because it fills some space.”
Neither
did she want to present a TV show, write a column or any of the other
things that were relentlessly pushed her way in her 20s. “As I made very
clear, I want to write novels. Could you let me write them, please?”
Which
is exactly what she did. White Teeth was followed by the often
overlooked The Autograph Man, about the corrosive effects of fame. Its
protagonist, the British-Jewish-Chinese Alex-Li Tandem, is “a weird,
nerdy, obsessive, melancholy type of guy … he’s probably more like me
than any character I ever created”, Smith admitted in a recent essay.
Her next novel, On Beauty, a classy reworking of EM Forster’s Howards
End transferred to a New England college town, won the Women’s prize in
2006. She was just 30.
There was a seven year gap until NW, a formally experimental but deeply personal novel about friendship and success, in 2012. Then came Swing Time in 2016, which also took in celebrity and shaming and was set partly in west Africa.
While
all of Smith’s novels deal with race and class and gender – from Black
girls growing up on a council estate in Swing Time to a forward-thinking
19th-century housekeeper in The Fraud – she doesn’t feel any sense of
responsibility. “I take pleasure in it. That’s something I think I take
from Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison. It is not some tedious moral
weight. It is a delight,” she says. “I’m not here to represent anybody,”
she adds. “I barely represent myself. My job is to think about things
and to express them in language.” She pauses. “I want people to read me
because I can write. That matters to me more than anything else.”
Finally, another Guardian review (yes, its book review newsletter was full of much goodness this morning), In the forest of the soul is more a biography and overview of Kenzaburo Oë's life and work. Oë won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and I found far more amazing than even Murakami. There is life and love in Oë.
Oë's commitment to Hikari (nicknamed "Pooh" after
AA Milne's bear) inspired, over 30 years, a unique cycle of fiction
whose protagonists are fathers of brain-damaged sons. That experience
pervades his complex vision, in fiction and essays, of militarism and
nuclear disarmament, innocence and authenticity, faith and redemption.
His translator John Nathan, professor of Japanese cultural studies at
the University of California at Santa Barbara, and author of Japan
Unbound (2004), says that, like Natsume Soseki, the early 20th-century
modernist, Oë "created a language of his own, in the manner of Faulkner
and few Japanese writers before him. He's excruciatingly self-conscious
and aware, painfully looking beneath the surface of things." Although
Nathan feels Oë (pronounced oh-way) has been "undertranslated - he's
terribly hard to do", his work has reached more foreign readers since
his Nobel prize for literature in 1994.
Henry
Miller likened him to Dostoevsky in his "range of hope and despair",
while the late Edward Said, a friend for 20 years, noted his
"extraordinary power of sympathetic understanding", particularly across
cultures. Who else, Said wrote in a public exchange of letters in 2002,
would repeatedly warn of the "danger to Japan of too much imperial
swagger and economic delusion?", a peril rooted, for Oë, in a failure to
learn from the past. According to the British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro,
he has "always been fascinated by what's not been said about the
Japanese role in the second world war".
Please give all three writers a chance, and also the original articles. There is much to be learned in them.
If any of you have been reading my posts, you should know I am enamored by Zadie Smith. She is intelligent, and humorous. There is also her perspective, or her perspectives, about class and identity. That she finds herself stupid about so many things sounds like me. She also teaches - and I suspect she does it very well, she is doing this while on what is essentially a book tour. I spent two hours yesterday with her voice in my ear, listening to her deflate oligarchs, the bondage of slavery, identities, frauds, and writing. In the end, she is a person of good sense.
For Americans, she has lived and taught here. What she has to say about America deserves our attention.
Zadie Smith is good company, whether in these videos or through her prose.
I can find some papers, all I can find is my own writing. Therefore, I am concentrating on getting more of this paper typed. Which means less reading that will convince me I just must comment on it. The Supervised Release posts continue, of course, and will more than ever contain notes on what I may have been reading, instead of separate posts. They will probably look more like this post. Also, continuing will be the pretrial detention posts, they are on the desk.
I worked until 1:30 today. Getting home took me 90 minutes. I was tired when I got here – no bike riding, a walk to McClure's my only exercise and departure. E and played phone tag today and if not for her, I would have napped.
Email needed to be done and some reading. I still need to send pay stubs to the PO.
DHS sees a direct correlation between the watch list encounters and
broader migration patterns in the hemisphere and takes the screening
process seriously, said an agency official who wasn’t authorized to
discuss procedures publicly.
The department is working to expand
its capacity at the border and doesn’t have evidence of foreign plots to
exploit perceived security weaknesses, another official,
Counterterrorism Coordinator Nicholas Rasmussen, said at a recent public
event.
“That doesn’t mean, though, that we don’t need to be
concerned about and working hard to address the way in which terrorists
or people with terrorism links might exploit vulnerabilities at the
southern border,” Rasmussen said.
I think I read part of Ben Jonson's Volpone while in prison, so I am not quite the person Ed Johnson worries about in his The Other Folio: On the Legacy of Ben Jonson, except that I cannot say Jonson has greatly interested me.
Outside of academic circles, where there has been a resurgence in
interest, Jonson is a distant third in the contemporary popular
imagination about the time period, after canonical Shakespeare and sexy Christopher Marlowe. When it comes to Renaissance theater written by people other than Shakespeare, you’re lucky to see Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus performed, and some edgy directors will give us John Webster’sThe Duchess of Malfi or John Ford’s fantastically titled ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore.
Jonson, though it’s not unheard of, isn’t produced as often. Yet Jonson
was the great showstopper of the age, revolutionizing the theater every
bit as much as the others, writing in every major genre from domestic
and revenge tragedy to city comedy, and penning verse that despite its
deceptive simplicity is among the most moving of that age. Moreover,
while Shakespeare is in some sense a cipher onto which a variety of
positions and opinions can be projected, Jonson in his imperfections can
seem more real. Shakespeare may have been for all time, but Jonson was
so of his own age that he remains more tangible as a personality.
But having read this essay, I think I will need to change my mind and read Jonson.
Pure curiosity led me to reading Academic Angst Goes Abroad in ‘The English Experience’by Seth L. Miller. It is a review and the novel reviewed sounds like a good time. What led to my finishing the review was this paragraph:
The novel reunites us with Schumacher’s sarcastic and inert Jay Fitger, a
professor at a small liberal arts college in the Midwest, who has been
tapped, at the last minute, to lead a group of first-year students to
London for a winter term abroad. But Fitger is burned out, to put it
mildly. He’s spent far too many years in a system that barely notices
him and is still in the thick of grading last term’s finals. The
prospect of squeezing in a trip to a city that he hates (it reminds him
of his ex-wife and the disappointing time they spent there a decade ago)
is not exactly enticing.
In the end, for me, Schumacher’s trilogy stands with David Lodge’s
famous Campus Trilogy of the ‘70s and ‘80s as the go-to source for how
it truly feels to make one’s way inside higher education.
Being a Warren Zevon fan, I had to check out the blog, Lawyers, Guns, and Money. I have to say White supremacy and plutocracy noted something I have not seen or heard, for all it confirms an opinion of mine – that the super-rich use racism to stay on top. Succinct and well-written, give it a look. (Book Sales is a hoot.)
Wallace’s erudition, his humor, his willingness to blend the low and highbrow felt like the kind of attitude I would like to project to the world, even as I understood my more limited intellectual firepower. I would have called him my favorite writer, no doubt.
Lockwood discusses both aspects of Wallace the writer and Wallace the person that perhaps should be grappled with as we consider his work 15 years after his death in 2008. We know that he stalked and intimidated a romantic partner. We know that he could be crude and unkind. He never purported himself to be a saint, but sometimes in death we decide those things don’t matter, and maybe we shouldn’t.
Lockwood suggests that years on, as fresh and new as Wallace’s work seemed to be at the time, perhaps it is not as innovative as once believed and that turning Wallace into a guru is a dead end.
It is also comforting to see my own diagnosis of not belonging to Wallace's generation has some support.
I noted Alexandra Chang in Women Writers, Books By Women, and in The Millions newsletter I received to there is another interview, Alexandra Chang Is Compelled by Constraint. I like the sound of her. She discusses her stories, and she hits on a point of which I am curious: kishōtenketsu. If I were not trying to get stories written i prison over ten years ago into an electronic format, I would be delving into this idea. I am not so happy with the idea of resolution – I am not sure if it happens, as in a permanent solving of the problem featured in the story.
AS: You mentioned that the story “Unknown by Unknown” follows a particular structural pattern. Can you talk more about that?
AC: It’s based on kishōtenketsu,
which is a Japanese term for a traditional four-part structure that’s
common in classical (and contemporary) East Asian literature and
storytelling. I believe the form originated from a structure of early
Chinese poems. Some people call it a “plotless” story structure, but I
disagree. There’s plot, in the sense that there is cause and effect at
some point, it’s just that there aren’t traditional Western elements of
rising action, climax, and resolution. A lot of my stories lean more
toward kishōtenketsu structure, but I made it explicit in this story by
dividing it into four sections.
Those four parts are, traditionally:
1. Ki/Introduction: In “Unknown by Unknown,” I just set
up the character and her voice, and establish that she’s going to
housesit.
2. Sho/Development: Expanding on the introduction; the narrator lives
out her housesitting days. There’s more on setting and her routine.
Nothing changes here for characters.
3. Ten/Twist: This is probably the closest to a climax. Something
unexpected happens and this changes the character’s world or situation.
(I guess I won’t spoil the story here.)
4. Ketsu/Conclusion: I like the use of the word conclusion, rather
than resolution. It typically isn’t a neat ending, and the character
doesn’t necessarily triumph or grow in any way. It’s just what happens
after the twist.
Users tapers to a slow end after Miles gets fired. His wife detaches herself from him; his kids grow distant; and he drifts away from the tech world, though not far. It is not a satisfying ending—nor should it be. Among the novel’s strengths is Winnette’s ability to capture the dissatisfaction that life online generates. While other novelists have focused on the addictive, sickening effects of endless scrolling, Winnette highlights the opposite: the slow numbing of the imagination that comes from hooking it up to machines. He renders this hooking-up literal with the Egg, but really, Miles subjugates himself to technology the moment he begins working in tech. It will not be news to many readers that handing your imagination over to capitalist powers tends to lead to destruction and unhappiness. Even so, Miles’s downward spiral is an effective and upsetting reminder that there’s more to lose on the Internet than just time and money.
Folks, the government thinks I am a very dangerous person because of what I once did on the Internet. I used to think this was a silly idea, then along came the January 6 insurrection. What I saw scared me and sickened me and angered me, but I did not think of acting out in the real world what I played with online. A caning video did not make me think reenacting that video was a thing to do. I did have a conversation with a friend at Fort Dix FCI (a SO also, but one who was more involved with viewing than me who was trying to get in good with a woman of 34 years in Columbus, Ohio). He told me he was scared that he might act on what he saw. That the prospect scared him, I think indicates the likelihood of taking action was slight. I am not a Luddite, regardless of what some friends might say, but I am one who thinks there is a danger on the Internet. There are weak-minded people who cannot (do not?) differentiate between what they see and hear online and the real world. They are not all Trumpers. It is also dangerous to attribute the danger to an erroneous cause. Call me lucky, that where I got compulsive about clicking links and spending time was Wikipedia.
Dinner time. 6:55
The Evening:
I cannot get the beans done. I ordered just now (7:40) from Panda Express.
Zadie Smith, Gen X Writers, Wondering Where I Fit In:
I quote a lot from Come as You Are by Adam Kirsch, a review of Zadie Smith's new novel. First, because I find Zadie Smith fascinating in and of herself. Secondly, because of the literary history of which I had no idea and was (am) rather removed from.
Batuman was a college sophomore in 1996, presumably experiencing many of the things that happen to Selin in Either/Or. But by the time she began to fictionalize those events twenty years later, she joined a group of writers who defined themselves, ethically and aesthetically, in opposition to the older representatives of Generation X. For all their literary and biographical differences, writers like Nicole Krauss, Teju Cole, Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, and Tao Lin share some basic assumptions and aversions—including a deep skepticism toward anyone who claims to speak for a generation, or for any entity larger than the self.
That skepticism is apparent in the title of Zadie Smith’s new novel, The Fraud. Smith’s precocious success—her first book, White Teeth, was published in 2000, when she was twenty-four—can make it easy to think of her as a contemporary of Wallace and Wurtzel. In fact she was born in 1975, two years before Batuman, and her sensibility as a writer is connected to her generational predicament.
Smith’s latest book is, most obviously, a response to the paradoxical populism of the late 2010s, in which the grievances of “ordinary people” found champions in elite figures such as Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. Rather than write about current events, however, Smith has elected to refract them into a story about the Tichborne case, a now-forgotten episode that convulsed Victorian England in the 1870s
***
What Smith is dramatizing, of course, is the experience of so many liberal intellectuals over the past decade who had believed themselves to be on the side of “the people” only to
find that, whether the issue was Brexit or Trump or COVID-19 protocols,
the people were unwilling to heed their guidance, and in fact loathed
them for it. It is in order to get to the bottom of this phenomenon that
Eliza keeps attending the Tichborne trial, in much the same spirit that
many liberal journalists reported from Trump rallies. Things get even more complicated when she befriends a witness for the defense, Mr. Bogle, who is among the
Claimant’s main supporters even though he began his life as a slave on a
Jamaica plantation managed by Edward Tichborne, the Claimant’s supposed
father.
I have returned to writing fiction after giving up any effort in this direction after 40 years. I do not know if I belong to anything like the generational grouping described here.
By the end of the millennium, this was the familiar voice of
Generation X. Loquacious and self-involved, its ironic grandiosity
barely concealed a sincere grandiosity about its moral mission, which
was to defeat despair and foster genuine human connection. Jonathan
Franzen, Wallace’s realist rival, titled a book of essays How to Be Alone, and for these writers, loneliness was the great problem that literature was created to solve. “If writing
was the medium of communication within the community of childhood, it
makes sense that when writers grow up they continue to find writing
vital to their sense of connectedness,” Franzen wrote in his
much-discussed essay “Perchance to Dream,” published in these pages in
1996. Eggers seems to have taken this idea literally, creating a
nonprofit, 826 Valencia, that advertises writing mentorship for
underserved students as a way of “building community” and rectifying
inequality.
If sincerity and connection were the greatest virtues for these writers, the greatest sin was “snark.” That word gained literary currency thanks to a manifesto by Heidi Julavits in the first issue of The Believer, the magazine she co-founded in 2003 with the novelist Vendela Vida (Eggers’s wife) and the writer Ed Park. The title of the essay—“Rejoice! Believe! Be Strong and Read Hard!”—like the title of the magazine, insisted that literature was an essentially moral enterprise, a matter of goodness, courage,
and love. To demur from this vision was to reveal a smallness of soul
that Julavits called snark: “wit for wit’s sake—or, hostility for
hostility’s sake,” a “hostile, knowing, bitter tone of contempt.” For
Kafka, a book was an axe for the frozen sea within; for the older cohort
of Gen X writers, it was more like a hacksaw to cut through the barred
cell of cynicism.
This was the environment—quiescent in politics, self-consciously
sincere in literature—in which Smith and her contemporaries came of age.
Just as they started to publish their first books, however, the stopped
clock of history resumed with a vengeance. It is unnecessary to list
the series of political and geopolitical shocks that have occurred since
2000. For the millennial generation, adulthood has been defined by
apocalyptic fears, political frenzy, and glimpses of utopia, whether in
Chicago’s Grant Park on election night 2008 or in New York’s Zuccotti
Park during Occupy Wall Street in 2011.
I came too late for Sixties style idealism – as well as being in the wrong place geographically. However, I did come in time for Nixon and Vietnam and the Oil Embargo and Watergate and stagflation and the collapse of General Motors. I do not think my generation – let's call them the Class of 1978 – were not idealistic, but rather cynical and practical. For music, we did not have (first-hand, anyway) The Beatles or Jefferson Airplane or The Rolling Stone or Bob Dylan. We had KISS and David Bowie and Lyrnyrd Skynryd and Bad Company and Elton John and Black Sabbath. Kurt Vonnegut was big. So was science fiction, like Robert Heinlein and Frank Herbert. None were part of our generation.
The dream of uniting the sophistication of art with the
straightforwardness of justice also animates Lerner’s fiction, where it
often takes the form of rueful comedy. In 10:04, the narrator
cooks dinner for an Occupy Wall Street protester, but when asked how
often he has been to Zuccotti Park, he dodges the question. His activism
is limited to cooking, which he pompously describes as a way of being
“a producer and not a consumer alone of those substances necessary for
sustenance and growth within my immediate community.” That the dream never becomes more than a dream
betrays Lerner’s similarity to Lin, Heti, and Cole, who frankly
acknowledge the hiatus between art and justice, though without
celebrating it.
Zadie Smith has always been too deeply rooted in
the social comedy of the English novel to embrace autofiction, yet she
also registers this disconnect, as can be seen in the way her influences
have shifted over time. When it was first published, White Teeth was compared to Infinite Jest and Don DeLillo’s Underworld
as a work of what James Wood called “hysterical realism.” The book’s
arch humor, proliferating plot, and penchant for exaggeration owe much
to the author Wood identified as the “parent” of that genre: Charles
Dickens.
When Smith says that a woman “needed no bra—she was
independent, even of gravity,” she is borrowing Dickens’s technique of
making characters so intensely themselves that their essence saturates
everything around them—as when he writes of the nouveau riche
Veneerings, in Our Mutual Friend, that “their carriage was new,
their harness was new, their horses were new, their pictures were new,
they themselves were new.” Dickens is a guest star in The Fraud,
appearing at several of William Ainsworth’s dinner parties, and the
news of his death prompts Eliza Touchet to offer an apt tribute: “She
knew she lived in an age of things . . . and Charles had been the poet
of things.”
But Dickens, who at another point in the novel is gently
disparaged for his moralizing “sermons,” is no longer the presiding
genius of Smith’s fiction. (Smith wrote in a recent essay that her first
principle in taking up the historical novel was “no Dickens,” and she
expressed a wry disappointment that he had forced his way into the
proceedings.) Her 2005 novel, On Beauty, was a reimagining of E. M. Forster’s Howards End, and
while her style has continued to evolve from book to book, Forster’s
influence has been clear ever since, in everything from her preference
for short chapters to her belief in “keep[ing] one’s mind open.”
***
Whether they style themselves as humanists or aesthetes, realists or visionaries, the most powerful writers who were born in the Seventies share this basic aloofness. To the next generation, the millennials, their disengagement from the collective struggle may seem reprehensible. For me, as I suspect is the case for many readers my age, it is part of what makes them such reliable guides to understanding, if not the times we live in, then at least the disjunction between the times and the self that must try to negotiate them.
I belong to the Boom Generation; its tail end, to be specific. After reading this article and while writing this bit, I decided to see who are considered Boomer novelists. I do not agree the AARP's novels are Boomer novelists – they may have influenced Boomers, but I do not think they were all written by Boomers. Of Grandfolk's Ten Top Baby Boomer Authors Review, I only recognize Stephen King. I am not sure that Freelance Writing's The Genesis of Boomer Literature: A Brief History, even though it contains a definition:
A definition has already been put forward by two writers, Stephen Woodfin and Caleb Pirtle who are members of the group:”Boomer books reflect fundamental human issues and can be any genre, but they are character-driven stories centered around those who have the experience to understand life: its trials, its tribulations, its triumphs, and its contradictions.” And that understanding can only come about with the accumulation of years and experience…
Wikipedia has a list of novelists born in 1960. I am the same age as Ian Rankin and Kenneth Branagh and Jeffrey Eugenides; I have no idea what we all have in common. Wikipedia also has a page for 1955 in literature, also with a list of births. Here I recognize quite a few names. Nope, I am not sure what I do have in common with other Boomers.
KH thinks I am having trouble placing my stories because I am writing about people my age, and I am writing in the times I have lived.
Firefox crashed after writing a long paragraph, it is 10:51, and I am not sure if I want to rewrite that paragraph. What I will say instead, is that I do not feel the part of any generational thinking. I do not see that what I call the Class of 1978 were particularly idealistic; we had seen the failure of Sixties idealism; we were practical, needing to make a living. The “producer” of the Lerner example (see above) sets my teeth on edge. I may not have had great faith in action, but I have no respect for the dilettante do-gooder. In fact, I find do-gooders to be dangerous people, idealists seeking to make reality conform to their ideals regardless of the death toll incurred while imposing their ideals. Injustice may be the target of art, but enforcing justice belongs to the political world.
Ten children in the state’s foster care system sued the Indiana
Department of Child services (DCS) in the U.S. District Court for the
Northern District of Indiana on Wednesday, alleging that the agency
failed to provide for the children’s care and left them in placements
known to be “dangerous.”
“DCS’s system failures are well-known to state officials, who have
failed to act to address those failures. The lawsuit seeks a range of
remedies, including lower caseloads, the development of additional,
appropriate placements and services, and far better accountability,” a
press release from the national nonprofit A Better Childhood said.
What's great about Indiana – how little changes here. A person could be gone from the state for 11 years and not be terribly confused by what is going on in the state.
Indianapolis author John Green last week brought national attention
to an ongoing attempt by the Hamilton East Public Library to move young
adult books to adult sections. And while he got a reversal, hundreds of
other books have been similarly mislabeled — the issue is far from over.
The turnover of four appointments last year at the Hamilton East
Public Library introduced new members — including conservative hardliner
and pastor Micah Beckwith — who set their sights on limiting access to
books, especially in the children’s and young adult section.
No, I do not approve. I have one question: who benefits from banning books?
Which leads to -
The End of America?
It is time for a change. The Electoral College proved the failure of The Founders' vision by electing Donald J. Trump. The Electoral College was meant to check the people from electing a would-be dictator.
The newer
element, which has gathered strength in recent decades, is the deepening
polarization of the political system. Various factors have caused this:shifts within the two parties that have enlarged the ideological gap between them;geographic sorting that haswidened
the differences between red and blue states; a growing urban-rural
divide; and greater hostility among individuals toward political
opponents.
The
result is that today, a minority of the population can exercise outsize
influence on policies and leadership, leading many Americans
increasingly to feel that the government is a captive of minority rule.
Twice in the past two decades, the president was elected while losing the popular vote —George
W. Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016. That had happened only three times
in the previous 200-plus years. The dynamic extends beyond the
presidency to the other two branches of government.
A
new Washington Post analysis found that four of the nine current
justices on the Supreme Court were confirmed by senators who represent a
minority of the U.S. population. Since 1998, Republicans have had a
majority in the Senate a total of 12 years but did not during that time
represent more than half the nation’s population, The Post’s analysis of
population data and Senate composition shows.
The
Post also found that during Trump’s presidency, 43 percent of all
judicial and governmental nominees were confirmed by senators
representing a minority of the population.Under President Biden, not quite 5 percent of nominees were confirmed by senators representing a minority of the population.
The
state of democracy is not uniformly negative. In moments of crisis
especially, elected officials have found common ground. At times,
government action does reflect the public will. Under Trump, bipartisan
congressional majorities passed and the president signed multiple rounds
of relief during the covid-19 pandemic. Biden and Congress came together to pass a major infrastructure package in 2021. Last year, there was bipartisan agreement on legislation to spur production of semiconductor chips in the United States.
At
times, protection of minorities and their rights from the will of the
majority is needed and necessary. Checks and balances afford further
protections that nonetheless can seem to hamstring government’s ability
to function effectively. But on balance, the situation now is dire.
Americans are more dissatisfied with their government than are citizens
in almost every other democracy, according to polling.
Henry
Brady, professor of political science and public policy at the
University of California at Berkeley, has been studying these issues for
many years. As he surveys the current state of the United States’
democracy, he comes away deeply pessimistic. “I’m terrified,” he said.
“I think we are in bad shape, and I don’t know a way out.”
And there I leave. Hopefully, you learned a little, and maybe I have given you something to think about. Have a good day.
I find Zadie Smith adorable - intelligent, with a style that is accessible without coming close to boorish. She is publishing a historical novel - her first - and explains why she did so in an essay for The New Yorker., On Killing Charles Dickens.
I think this short excerpt get sot what I like about her style.
....Throughout all this equivocation, I kept clinging to the one piece of data about which I felt certain: any writer who lives in England for any length of time will sooner or later find herself writing a historical novel, whether she wants to or not. Why is that? Sometimes I think it’s because our nostalgia loop is so small—so tight. There are, for example, people in England right now who can bring themselves to Proustian tears at the memory of the Spice Girls or MiniDiscs or phone boxes—it doesn’t take much—and this must all have an effect on our literary culture. The French tend to take the term nouveau roman literally. Meanwhile, the English seem to me constitutionally mesmerized by the past. Even “Middlemarch” is a historical novel! And though plenty English myself, I retained a prejudice against the form, dating back to student days, when we were inclined to think of historical novels as aesthetically and politically conservative by definition.
If you pick up a novel and find that it could have been written at any time in the past hundred years, well, then, that novel is not quite doing its self-described job, is it? Surely, it’s in the very DNA of the novel to be new? So I have always thought. But, over time, the specious logic of these student arguments has come under some pressure, specifically after I read several striking examples of the genre. “Memoirs of Hadrian,” by Marguerite Yourcenar, is not written in Latin, and “Measuring the World,” by my friend Daniel Kehlmann, is not in old German. Even the language of “Wolf Hall” has very little to do with real Tudor syntax: it is Mantellian through and through. All three bring news. Not all historical fiction cosplays its era, and an exploration of the past need not be a slavish imitation of it. You can come at the past from an interrogative angle, or a sly remove, and some historical fiction will radically transform your perspective not just on the past but on the present. These ideas are of course obvious to long-term fans of historical fiction, but they were new to me. I laid down my ideological objection....
I have two favorite writers of historical fiction: Kenneth Roberts and Gore Vidal. Both shared one quality, they celebrated the characters that got short shrift in mainstream histories, the people that put the warts on our national mythology - Benedict Arnold and Aaron Burr. True, they are not stylists like Mantel, but cosplay is not what I think of with their novels. I suspect Ms. Smith's novel will not, either.
And about the problem of Charles Dickens:
Hanging over all this anxiety was the long shadow of Dickens. To be my age, bookish, and born in England was to grow up under that tiresomely gigantic influence. Dickens was everywhere. He was in school and on the shelves at home and in the library. He invented Christmas. He was in politics, influencing changes in labor law, educational law, even copyright law. He was the original working-class hero—radiant symbol of our supposed meritocracy—as well as a crown jewel of the English Heritage tourist industry. (In other words, he was posthumously manipulated by many different sections of British society to score a variety of political points.) He was also everywhere I wanted to be: in the theatre, in Italy, in America. Televised versions of his books were on rotation—there is a case to be made that Dickens is the reason that we have prestige-TV miniseries in the first place—and he was in the goddam Muppets and all over Hollywood, in conscious adaptation and unconscious theft. I personally read far too much of him as a child, and though I grew up to have all the usual doubts and caveats about him—too sentimental, too theatrical, too moralistic, too controlling—I was also never able to quite get out from under his embarrassing influence, as much as I’ve often wanted to. So it went with my surreptitious research. No matter where I found myself in nineteenth-century London, I’d run into Dickens. In the main chapters, in the index, in parentheses or out of them—all roads led back to Charles. There didn’t seem to be a nineteenth-century pot he didn’t have his finger in.
Did not really turn out that way. I have a pile of papers to go through in the morning. The first problem came when the PO called and let me know he was coming up. In a way, that lit a fire under me, who had actually slept in. I ran out to get new windshield wipers for a friend. Back here, I got the bedroom into shape.
The PO showed up. He let me know that with the budget cuts/government shutdown, I might have to start paying for my polygraph exams. Well, that might put that silliness into a new perspective. I found he fished; I had always thought him a hunter. The usual silly questions about pathological issues that do not exist. He arrived around 1 pm and left a half hour later.
While waiting for him to show up, I started on my email. Then I started putting together this post.
More rejections for "No Ordinary Word";
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I fear that I have avoided The Walrus, even before my current (supposed) embargo on politics, but I do read the newsletter sent and see what is being published. When I saw the link to The Case for Reading Quebec’s Most Reclusive Author, I clicked.
Over fifty years ago,
a young Québécois writer was staring at a small pile of rejection
letters. His clutch of manuscripts had been turned down by all of the
province’s publishing houses. They deemed his writing immature,
illegible, and too enamoured with breaking convention. So the
twenty-four-year-old tried a Hail Mary: he sent a manuscript to
Gallimard, the goliath of Parisian publishing responsible for the
careers of many of French literature’s great twentieth-century figures.
The gamble paid off. Gallimard would publish Réjean Ducharme’s L’avalée des avalés in 1966, as well as three more titles in quick succession
***
By the time Ducharme died on August 21, nine days after his
seventy-sixth birthday, he was a myth. His nine novels, five plays, two
screenplays, and songwriting collaborations are part of Quebec’s
cultural psyche. Ducharme has earned “a place apart from the rest of
Québécois letters, on account of his work, on account of the mystery
that surrounded his life,” wrote La Presse book critic Josée
Lapointe, after Ducharme’s death. For the rest of Canada, he is still
very much a secret. His English Wikipedia page is exceedingly brief, all
of six sentences. His French one is longer, yet nowhere near the length
of his English Canadian counterparts, such as Margaret Atwood, Mordecai
Richler, and Alice Munro. Yet as the winner of three Governor General’s
Literary Awards, a finalist for France’s Prix Goncourt, and an officer
of the Order of Canada since 2000, Ducharme is a French Canadian
institution, widely taught in the province’s college and university
curriculums.
***
It would be hard to
overstate Ducharme’s revolutionary effect on Quebec writing. According
to Annabelle Moreau, editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Lettres québécoises,
Ducharme “created a literature for the province centered around our use
of the language, which by extension grew into our sense of culture and
national identity.”
From the article, I get the reasons for reading him; I suggest you read that argument.
What I took away from the article were other things: the transitory nature of literary fame; the obscurity imposed by our education of other cultures, other writers; and, finally, and far from least for me, that regionalism need not be the pejorative it is always taken to be.
We all live in a place. What we write about has its roots in our places. Why aren't Joyce, or Proust, or Tolstoy, or Thomas Mann, or Alasdair Gray, or Zadie Smith, or Charles Dickens, or José Saramago, or Gabriel Garcia Marquez, or Mishima, or Amos Oz, or Orhan Pamuk, or John Steinbeck, or Chinua Achebe, or Naguib Mahfouz, or Milan Kundera not a regional writer?
The region we need worry more about is the limits we put on our imaginations - curbing our imaginations is the truly dangerous regionalism.
I have had George Saunders and Zadie Smith Talk with Deborah Treisman (The New Yorker) playing in the background. Two brilliant people, two great writers; plenty to learn about the process of writing, and about books. Yes, I have a crush on Zadie Smith, but the root of that crush is her writing and her thoughts on writing.
On the opposite end of my literary faves is Thomas Pynchon. He fascinates me because I am not as enamored of him as seems to be the norm for American critics. Richard Beck's Thomas Pynchon Is Angry (The Yale Review) uses the phrase "stoner humor" that might explain my finding Pynchon tiresome. I was never a stoner, never appreciated stoner humor for all the Cheech and Chong movies I've seen. However, Mr. Beck finally has me understanding how Pynchon is relevant to my own ideas.
The one thing
everyone knows about Thomas Pynchon’s novels is that they are paranoid.
We’ll get to that later. The other thing everyone knows about them is
that they are overstuffed. Packed with a manic variety of subplots,
original song lyrics, scientific arcana (both real and invented),
pop-cultural detritus, zany character names, and stoner jokes, Pynchon’s
books often feel as if they are on the verge of exploding under the
pressure of their own contents.
Yet if any one Pynchon novel can seem chaotic and ramshackle,
Pynchon’s body of work is among the most unified in postwar American
fiction: all of his novels deal with Americans’ inability or
unwillingness to understand the historical forces that built and
continue to shape the world they inhabit. This has been Pynchon’s great
subject from the beginning....
Thinking over the Pynchon novel's I have read - Gravity's Rainbow, The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and Against The Day - this does make sense.
Nor did I pay any attention to Pynchon's take on nostalgia being the same as mine - a variety of self-delusion:
This reverie, this “fantasy of old-time Milwaukee,” continues for quite a
bit longer. The first time I read it, I thought that Pynchon was
dragging on, that he had piled detail upon detail until the larger
picture collapsed under the weight of its constituent parts. The second
time I read it, I came to believe that it’s McTaggart’s longing that is
excessive, not Pynchon’s rendering of it. Remember what Pynchon wrote in
V.—that people situated at the bottom of history’s folds
console themselves with “a false memory, a phony nostalgia about what
they were.” That’s what McTaggart is doing here. The rosy urban
landscape McTaggart paints for himself in no way corresponds to the
Milwaukee that would actually be waiting for him back home, a city at
the economic nadir of the Great Depression, where jobs are scarce,
organized crime is running amok, and terror bombings are a regular
occurrence. Life in the U.S. may not be as grim as it is in Hungary, but
it is still pretty miserable. McTaggart’s nostalgia is not just
misplaced; he is lying to himself.
And complete agreement with America's dislike of history; albeit, I acquired this idea from Gore Vidal.
Pynchon isn’t just writing
about McTaggart here. Though his novels are filled with fantastical
hijinks and science-fictional elements, Pynchon is genuinely a writer of
historical fiction, one who has spent his life investigating how
certain historical moments came to be. What gives this project a
political valence is the fact that many Americans are—and always have
been—committed to remaining ignorant of the way their country’s wealth,
culture, and geopolitical strength were, and are, founded on violence
carried out in defense of capital accumulation and white supremacy.
Pynchon has previously written characters who could be duped or
bewildered by history without losing their author’s sympathies (Slothrop
in Gravity’s Rainbow comes to mind), but in his depiction of
the blank stupidity that one finds just behind the screen of Hicks
McTaggart’s energetic charm, one detects a writer who has finally lost
patience with Americans’ persistent failure to understand the obvious
consequences of their own country’s actions.
A stray thought, sparked by the following paragraph, concerned Dashiell Hammett:
When he says to Boynt Crosstown, his boss back at the PI offices, that
he can’t believe the feds would bring up the old days like that,
Crosstown’s response is scathing. “Of course they’re trying to turn
you,” he says. “Back to what you never stopped being. . . . You think
you’re reformed now. Not just a normal tough guy but a saintly one. . . .
But he’s still in there, Hicks, still the same dirt-stupid gorilla
always ready to take short pay for beating up whoever he’s told to.”
Talking to a mobster-turned-anarchist-bombmaker in the course of an
investigation, McTaggart says he wouldn’t be interested in going to
Italy, due to its being “a Fascist dictatorship.” “What makes you
private dicks any different?” the bombmaker replies. “Study your
history, gabadost,
you started off, mosta yiz, breakin up strikes, didn’t ya, same as
Mussolini’s boys.” Even in Europe, McTaggart can’t find anyone who will
lend him a sympathetic ear. “Have you ever really looked at your
employment history?” an Interpol agent asks him. “One high-risk
orangutan job after another, always in the service of someone else’s
greed or fear?”
The Pinkerton Detective Agency employed Hammett. They made big bucks breaking strikes; whether Hammett was a strikebreaker seems to be unclear. However, it is not unclear that Hammett's Red Harvest shows the after effects of strikebreaking and the costs of being ignorant about history. History is a record of humanity's character.
I still have a problem with the big slabs of books rampaging off into the wilds, the stoner humor mentioned above. That bias when combined with a fleeting comparison with Theodore Dreiser and the stoner humor comment made me spend a few seconds considering what Dreiser might have done if he smoked a few spliffs.
(Regarding Dreiser, I found these items: Roger W. Smith's Theodore Dreiser site and The mystery of Theodore Dreiser by Joseph Epstein, which opens with this:
I begin by borrowing a line from Theodore Dreiser, the master himself, before setting out to consider the first of many issues that Dreiser’s extraordinary career poses—that of the relationship of style to art. It was his friend and early champion H. L. Mencken who once remarked that Dreiser had “an incurable antipathy to the mot juste” but that ain’t the half of it. Theodore Dreiser also had an aluminum ear (one down from tin), an unfailing penchant for the purple, an oafish wit, and the literary tact and lightness of touch of a rhinoceros. Who but Dreiser, in Sister Carrie, could cap a brief description of workers returning home on a winter’s night in Chicago by saying that the crowd was “a spectacle of warm-blooded humanity”? Only Dreiser, in An American Tragedy, had the innate klutziness to write, “The death house of this particular prison was one of those crass erections and maintenances of human insensibility and stupidity for which no one was primarily responsible.” No one except Dreiser, in The “Genius,” could roll off this squib of dialogue: “‘Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!’ laughed Suzanne.” For the gracious descriptive touch, there is this from The Bulwark: “Most of them were becomingly gowned in long frocks of every hue.” By now readers who have not read Dreiser and for whom style in literature is decisive are likely to join in the sentiment of Eugene Witla, the autobiographical hero of The “Genius”: “‘Nothing doing,’ he exclaimed, in the slang of the day.” But I would caution them, before giving up on Dreiser, with a line of snappy dialogue from Jennie Gerhardt: “‘Aw, you hush up,’ was her displeased rejoinder.”
But then it is a good deal easier to make fun of Theodore Dreiser’s prose style than it is to account for his genius. A genius he was, of that there ought not to be any serious doubt. He may not always have been able to write a careful sentence or a well-shaped paragraph, but this did not stand in the way of his turning out powerful novels. To put my cards on the table early in the game, let me say that Theodore Dreiser, in my opinion, is America’s greatest novelist. Herman Melville may have written the greatest single American novel, Henry James plumped deeper into the subtleties of human motivation, Mark Twain written more lyrically about this country, but Theodore Dreiser, that clod, bumbler, yokel, creep, wrote the novels that tell more in the way of elemental truth about American life and character, and tell it in a consistently persuasive and powerful manner, than those of any other American writer before or since his time.
***
The best students react well to the novels of Dreiser.
They sense that there are big things going on in his pages. And even the
very best students have the advantage that, at eighteen, they have very
little sense of prose style, and hence no snobbery about it. I am not
arguing for the superior wisdom of the young, but rather that the
shallow sophistication of the not-so-young can present its own
obstacles. Saul Bellow, who has long written and spoken admiringly of
Dreiser’s novels, puts the point best: “I often think the criticism of
Dreiser as a stylist at times betrays a resistance to the feelings he
causes readers to suffer. If they say he can’t write, they need not
experience these feelings.”
What are these feelings? I should say that any
comprehensive list of them would include humiliation and fear of
failure, the craving for respectability, every kind of longing, and the
desolation that accompanies an unutterable loneliness in the face of a
(probably) uncaring universe. In teaching Dreiser I have always wanted
to begin—perhaps some day I shall begin—by saying, “What you must
understand about Theodore Dreiser is that he was born poor and homely
and raised in ignorance and filled with desire. Write that down and
remember it. Now get out of here and go home and read the book again.”
I cannot say I ever approached Dreiser with joy, but in those two paragraphs I think is what makes Dreiser worth reading. Power. You go along with him, grumbling and even resisting a little, until you realize that he has grabbed hold of you, and you cannot go along with him to the end.)
Giorgio de Chirico is famous as a visual artist, but less well known is his prolific career as a writer. Considered the godfather of surrealism, his trajectory as an artist proved lastingly controversial.
It is hard to overstate the influence of his early artistic phase—of so-called metaphysical aesthetics—upon 20th-century modernism. In the early 20th century, we read again and again that the two pillars of modernism were on the one hand Picasso and on the other de Chirico. De Chirico was taken up and lionized and became in many ways the touchstone for surrealist paintings. The paintings of Magritte and Dalí, with which we’re so familiar, were essentially unthinkable without de Chirico’s figurative cityscapes, particularly deserted cityscapes, of which MoMA is the biggest owner in the world.
But other than the following section, I found little that struck my fancy:
SH: To respond super quickly to
de Chirico’s bilious and cantankerous bits, I want to mention that one
thing that is quite strikingly different between the two novels is the
structure of these screeds.
I’m so glad you mentioned the Memoirs because this gets at
another way he plays with form. In both novels de Chirico ends up making
what I find to be a documentary move. The documentary practice of
taking research materials or tangible language from elsewhere and
putting it into a creative text is super vibrant in poetry currently and
a pretty radical thing to do at the time. People often locate its roots
in 1930s leftist movements, with writers like Muriel Rukeyser and
Charles Reznikoff.
There’s a single moment like this in Hebdomeros where he drops in language from political posters. In Mr. Dudron,
he weaves his own writing with extensive quoting from an existing
19th-century tract on painting. The structure of the novel incorporates
this kind of external material, and I started noticing how when he does
this in Dudron the formal move is happening in the same moment
that he’s talking about material in visual art. He uses the documentary
move to highlight, in a different form, what he is critiquing about the
lack of materiality in painting. In both cases I think maybe he wants to
underscore the physical and tangible.
Some of the stuff he’s mad about is definitely bonkers, but some of
it is quite moving and convincing—like that people have moved away from
working with their hands and they’re not making their tools with their
hands and so they’ve lost a relationship with the materiality of that
which they make.
This feels echoed in the double voice you mention. He has this
interlocutor named Isabella Far which is also the name of his second
wife, or the name that he gave her, and he makes her a character in this
novel and he calls her “she of the philosophical spirit.” She’s the
greatest thinker about art and he places his own screeds in her mouth.
Dudron, who’s the autobiographical character is sitting around when
she walks in. He asks her questions, and she lectures him. Then, in real
life, in his 1945 essay collection Commedia dell’arte moderna,
he publishes some of these very same essays that are quoted in the
novel under her name, even though we now know that he wrote them.
YMMV.
I have not read enough of Thomas Mann, and Doctor Faustus is one of those i have not read. Ignorance of the novel does not mean I lack curiosity. Which is why why I spent time this afternoon with Jeffrey Meyers and his Thomas Mann’s ‘Doctor Faustus’. The opening whetted my interest.
It’s unusual for an author to create a great novel and then, fearing
readers would not understand it, to write another book that explains
it. Thomas Mann’s The Genesis of a Novel (1949) describes how he composed Doctor Faustus (1947) and provides valuable insights into that difficult book. After working on Joseph and His Brothers for
16 years, the 69-year-old author finally completed that tetralogy in
January 1944. He first thought of finishing his early satiric novel Confessions of Felix Krull (1922), but decided to take up the challenge of writing the far more ambitious Faust novel.
***
The musical, military, pathological and political themes
magnificently merge at the end of the novel as the four stages of
Adrian’s disease—migraines, infection, remission and collapse—tragically
fuse with Germany’s predisposition to Reformation-inspired demonology,
deliberate choice of Nazism, decade of military conquest and apocalyptic
destruction.
Jeffrey Meyers published Thomas Mann’s Artist-Heroes (Northwestern, 2014).
"Thomas Kemp" received another rejection:
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high-quality submissions we received, and we encourage you to try us
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