A Literary Weblog. A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR
The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."
The Writers Junction, the groovy writing space where I toil away, is holding its Second Summer Literary Marathon this Friday. Unlike last time, it's not a 24-hour marathon but it's still impressive and entertaining. And I will be appearing at 7:50 p.m. to read a brief section from my mysterious and long-in-the-works second novel. Here is the official write up, and the modest admission goes to a good cause, The Young Storytellers Foundation. Hope to see you on Friday evening! (For you Facebook types, go here.)
Friday, August 12, 2011 7pm-2am at The Writers Junction 1001 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica 90401 Tickets $8 here
Or roll the dice at the door for your admission price – literally.
Revisit last year’s wildly popular 24-hour literary marathon with new & returning stars. This event will feature some of the literary, entertainment, & music world's best & brightest including:
-Inside The Writer's Room: A Panel – get the inside scoop on a television writers room with showrunners & staff writers including: Liz Tigelaar (LIFE UNEXPECTED, ONCE UPON A TIME), Bruce Miller (EUREKA, MEDIUM), Deirdre Shaw (LIFE UNEXPECTED, JANE BY DESIGN) & more!
-Neal Brennan* co-creator of Comedy Central's CHAPPELLE'S SHOW
-Jillian Lauren author of Some Girls: My Life in a Harem
-Drew Droege comedian & 2010 Outfest Award for Emerging Talent
-Brad Listi author of Attention. Deficit. Disorder
Performances will be going for 7 (not 24!) hours straight, as will the food, drinks, & revelry. There will be a silent auction, giveaways, & you can check out the amazing workspace that is The Writers Junction. We will donate a portion of the evening's proceeds to The Young Storytellers Foundation.
I know, right? Wow. Astonishingly entertaining. And, apparently, he's here in L.A. for local readers to check out (though three and a half minutes does seem the perfect length for this sort of thing.) Via.
There were other perils to reading, but it was only when I hit middle age that I became aware of them. Me, I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf was a television play written in 1978 and though it doesn’t contain my usual scene of someone baffled at a bookcase the sense of being outfaced by books is a good description of what the play is about. ‘Hopkins,’ I wrote of the middle-aged lecturer who is the hero, ‘Hopkins was never without a book. It wasn’t that he was particularly fond of reading; he just liked to have somewhere to look. A book makes you safe. Shows you’re not out to pick anybody up. Try it on. With a book you’re harmless. Though Hopkins was harmless without a book.’ Books as badges, books as shields; one doesn’t think of libraries as perilous places where you can come to harm. Still, they do carry their own risks.
Sheila will be making a too-rare L.A. appearance this week, when she combines two purposes into one: On Wednesday night, she will bring her renowned Trampoline Hall to town, and the event will double as a launch for The Chairs are Where People Go, her latest collaboration with Trampoline Hall host Misha Glouberman.
For those who don't know what Trampoline Hall is, it's a lecture series in which people lecture on subjects of their own choosing, but outside their area of expertise, followed by questions from the audience. This time around, Busy Philipps will be talking about "Is Monogamy a Trick?" and Ezra Buzzington will be talking "The Impostor Syndrome." And Sheila and Misha will be reading from the new book.
You can learn more and get tickets here. it's just another of a growing number of excellent reasons to head downtown. Hope to see you there.
For as long I can remember, like many others, I've been captivated by the Arthurian legends. I've consumed more versions that I can remember, from Steinbeck to White to Camelot 3000. But I'm still always excited and interested when a new one pops up. And when it comes with a pedigree like Peter Ackroyd's, I can't help but take notice, despite a lukewarm appraisal in the Guardian.
Viking's The Death of King Arthur: The Immortal Legend (November 2011) is the latest attempt to bring the stories "to life with contemporary prose." Steinbeck has a similar mission statement. In the introduction to his The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights, he wrote that he wanted to "set them down in plain present-day speech for my own young sons," an effort he did not live to complete. And so I thought I might place the famous paragraph, in which Arthur draws the sword from the son, side by side in three iterations for you to compare and contrast.
For those who don't know the setup, Arthur's foster brother Kay is on his way to the joust when he realizes he has (conveniently) left his sword behind. He asks Arthur to go fetch it for him.
First, the original Malory: (From Malory Works, Oxford University Press, 1971)
"I wyll wel," said Arthur, and rode fast after the swerd.
And whan he cam home the lady and al were out to see the joustyng. Thenne was Arthur wroth and saide to hymself, "I will ryde to the chircheyard and take the swerd that stycketh in the stone, for my broder sir Kay shall not be without a swerd this day." So whan he cam to the chircheyard sir Arthur alight and tayed his hors to the style, and so he wente to the tent and found no knyghtes there, for they were atte justying. And so he handled the swerd by the handels, and lightly and fiersly pulled it out of the stone, and took his hors and rode his way untyll he came to his broder sir Kay and delyvered hym the swerd.
Now Steinbeck:
"I will do it gladly," said Arthur, and he turned his horse and galloped back to bring his foster brother's sword to him. But when he came to the lodging he found it empty and locked up, for everyone had gone out to see the jousting.
Then Arthur was angry and he said to himself, "Very well, I will ride to the churchyard and take the sword that is sticking in the stone there. I do not want my brother, Sir Kay, to be without a sword today."
When he came to the churchyard, Arthur dismounted and tied his horse to the stile and walked to the tent, and found no guardian knights there, for they too had gone to the jousting. Then Arthur grasped the sword by its handle and easily and fiercely drew it from the anvil and the stone, and he mounted his horse and rode quickly until he overtook Sir Kay and gave him the sword.
Finally, Ackroyd:
"Of course, brother. I will be back in a moment." When he arrived at the house he found that all the servants had gone to the joust, and that the doors were locked. In great annoyance he said to himself, "I will ride into the churchyard, and take the sword that is sticking in the stone. My brother must not be without his weapon on this day." He came into the churchyard, tied his horse to the stile, and walked into the tent where the ten knights were supposed to watch over the stone. But they, too, had gone to the joust.
So he went over to the stone and, taking the hilt with both hands, lightly and easily took out the sword. Then he galloped back to Smithfield and gave the sword to Kay.
I've always been amused by Kay's initial willingness to claim the sword (and the throne) as his own, and how quickly he confesses the truth.
I'm inclined to award this exchange to Steinbeck. He takes some liberties and makes some additions but his Arthur - angry, instead of annoyed, and overtaking instead of merely galloping - comports nicely with the Arthur of my imaginings. I also enjoy the opposition of Malory's original "lightly and fiersly" which Steinbeck preserves but Ackroyd irons out. And it's interesting that Ackroyd, whose version is billed as "abridged", chooses to remind readers of the purpose of the guards around the stone. Whereas Ackroyd's "both hands" is both a nice visual and seems consistent with the use of "handels" in the Malory.
Anyway, I could do this stuff all day. I look forward to having Arthur as my companion this summer, and will report back in more detail as we progress.
... I didn't have enough things keeping me from writing and blogging. Le Tour is upon us.
Contador may well be unbeatable but I am going to be pulling for Andy Schleck. And I can't wait for the team time trial. If you've never seen one, they are positively balletic, and we don't get enough of them.
I've tried numerous times to write about the imminent closing of my neighborhood independent bookstore Village Books but I can't seem to get past my anger and my heartbreak to say anything that doesn't risk getting me ejected from the neighborhood. I will weigh on this later but for now I'll settle for saying that closures like this kill the soul. It's a measure of the cultural, intellectual and civic disengagement of a neighborhood that buys BMWs for their kids but can't support a store like Village Books.
Anyway, enough spleen. If you're in the area, come by tomorrow evening at 8:30 to wish the best to the store's wonderful staff:
You are invited to a reception in honor of Katie O'Laughlin and the amazing Village Books staff as we celebrate 14 years of Village Books in Pacific Palisades. The reception will be held at Village Books, 1049 Swarthmore Avenue, Pacific Palisdes, at 8:30 PM. It will begin immediately after the book signing by Sugar Ray Leonard, Honorary Mayor of Pacific Palisades, of his new book The Big Fight: My Life in and Out of the Ring, written with former Palisadian, Michael Arkush. There will be light refreshments and champagne to thank Katie, Mia, Connie, Jessica, Andrea, Barbara, Danielle, Liz, Ed, Amy and all who have worked at Village Books over the years for their contribution to Pacific Palisades and to celebrate the launch of the new business "Village Books To Go!" The reception is hosted by Pauletta Walsh and Bill Bruns. We hope you can join us!
My posts on unpacking my library continue to generate the most (and most interesting) emails. Regarding my conundrum in my prior post about where to place my books authored by the Mc's, one of my readers kindly writes in:
...just to let you know that the "mc and mac" rule is not set in stone. The branch of the county library where I work follows by alphabetic sequence - so much easier and less fussy.
She then went on to comb through the ALA wiki and sent me this link to their filing rules, which sort of seems to play it both ways, although one of the two validates my choice:
In the ALA Filing Rules, names beginning with M', Mc, and Mac are filed alphabetically as spelled. (letter-by-letter)
Unpacking of the library has resumed, after an interruption of several months to accommodate the completion of Part One of my novel (about which, more anon), and to do some home rearranging to add bookcase space. I'm now back at it and have unpacked another two shelves of my fiction collection, pictured below, in the course of which some random thoughts and observations arose.
First, I don't think there's another single volume in my collection about which I have as much critical commentary as I do about Ulysses. (Second place goes to The Magic Mountain but it's not even close. Actually, while unpacking I became utterly engrossed with Doctor Faustus, which will probably get a re-read quite soon now.) I have several companions, including the great Hugh Kenner's, as well as a double-CD set of lectures on the novel. I'm sure there are plenty of other books which have a similarly deep well of critical accompaniment, and I suspect it probably says more of my own interest in Ulysses than anything else. Still, no other single title in my library claims so much space in quite the same way.
(Yes, I'm aware that Tony Judt is not a novelist, but there are a few writers I revere who I feel write non-fiction with a novelist's grace, and so I imprecisely include them here.)
Speaking of imprecision, I grappled with another librarian problem when I got to the letter "M" which, incidentally, is the largest stretch of letters so far, taking up nearly five shelves. What to do with the McWriters? I have quite a lot of McEwan and McGahern, and I've always struggled with where to put them. I remember being taught as a child that when alphabetizing names, Mc came before Ma, but that feels antiquated and just plain wrong. Certainly, my iTunes doesn't put McCartney before Marvin Gaye. Nor do I. And so, McEwan follows Markson. My grade school librarian is rolling in her grave.
I also noticed that the large bulk of my Hungarian novelists emerged in this series of letters - Kertesz, Konrad, Marai and Nadas. Absolutely nothing insightful or scientific to note here, just kind of amusing to be swarmed by so many Hungarians at once. (Part Two of my novel is largely set in Budapest, so I suppose I do have Hungary a bit on the brain these days.)
Then came the the question of what to do with my James Bond collection. I have a series of boxed reprints of the original Jonathan Cape editions, which are quite splendid but take up a ton of shelf space. When I first unpacked the "F"s, I was worried about that and so I did not unpack the Flemings, although I admit now that there might have been a bit of snobbery afoot. Seemed odd to place Casino Royale next to A Sentimental Education. But I recently came across the box of reissues and was struck again by how handsome they are, and so I decided to unpack them, along with a few vintage hardcovers, and set them atop the "F" bookcase (the space below long having been filled up). It seemed a suitable compromise:
And yes, that's Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on the far right.
Finally, I have a whole lot of Nabokov. Which is entirely as it should be. Ondaatje waits in the wings, including my beloved hard cover copy of In the Skin of the Lion. But it's time to begin Part Two, so who knows when the rest of the alphabet will see the light of day?
I’m not entirely sure yet. The benign neglect that has characterized the last year or so might well be an indication that it’s time to pack things in. Yet there’s something in me that stops me from pulling the plug. I continue to value the intelligent discussion with smart, committed and opinionated readers and, despite the overwhelming number of book-related sites, I continue to find that sort of dialogue in strangely short supply.
In recent weeks I’ve read a number of posts at lauded sites, sites I admire, written by folks I like, and I’ve been, well, dismayed at how lousy they can be. But that’s nothing, in and of itself – we all have our off days, we’ve all written things we probably would like to take back.
What I found more troubling was the chorus of commenters who would invariably leap in after each post declaiming its virtues. And I’ve come to believe that perhaps the problem with the internet isn’t that it gives voice to every crank with a keyboard and a broadband connection. No, it may be that the insidious thing is the insularity of the waiting chorus of those who champion mediocrity, who validate self-indulgence or unoriginal thinking.
So, what I can say is that the days of daily updates of literary news are probably over. That sort of thing is crazy time-consuming but, more importantly, I’m just not as interested in this prize and that obituary as I once was. Plus I have some considerable life changes to navigate, not to mention a novel to finish.
What I will continue to do is to run interviews with authors of note; to point out books I think are worthy of your attention and to wave you off the overrated ones; to take this piss out of the occasional blowhard; to draw your attention to especially thoughtful essays and discussions online; to continue to post about teaching and share some of my writing lessons; to post longer, random train of thought essays (like this one) and to discuss second novel travails. (A new post on that subject is in the works.)
And, of course, I will continue to advise you on all matters Banville-related.
Speaking of which, I’ve been asked several times about my failure to discuss Banville’s latest novel The Infinites. Some people have taken my relative silence to be somehow damning. Not the case. There are three reasons why I haven’t talked as much about the novel as I might.
First, I’ve come to realize that there is an assumption among my readers that a Banville novel is a pre-sold quantity to me. I’m not sure that’s entirely inaccurate, but at a minimum, I suspect no TEV reader would have been much surprised to see me endorse the novel. (Which, incidentally, I do.)
Second, many of you are likely to remember that Banville was kind enough to blurb Harry, Revised. And so I found myself perhaps a bit oversensitive to accusations of logrolling and the like. On the one hand, I’ve seen enough about the ecology of blurbs that I’ve come to understand they are, as often as not, gestures of friendship as they are of critical respect. (Think of the familiar round-robin of names that routinely surfaces on the back of any novel by Believer alumni.) On the other, a good book is a good book, whether written by a friend or foe, and I’ve come to see it seems excessively fastidious not to say so. Still, I continue to pick up books hopefully, gambling each time against experience that a blurb will be meaningful, and so I’ve been a bit reluctant to further undermine an already debased form.
Finally, and most relevant, I hadn’t actually read the book until last month.
How on earth is that possible? Let me explain. MOTEV called me some weeks ago to inform me that her book group had turned to The Infinities, and she was loving it. She was eager to discuss it with me, when I had to shamefacedly admit I hadn’t read it yet. I had started it when it came out, but I’d set it aside and now I couldn’t remember the reason. The last year really has been tumultuous, and amid my personal travails and focus on my novel, much has fallen by wayside.
So I picked up the book and began it again, and was thrilled anew as I always am by Banville’s prose. After a dozen pages or so, I remembered why I’d put it down. My novel is, among other things, about a character dealing with the death of his father. Which is one of the main themes of The Infinities. I decided that I wanted to avoid any additional Banville influence – as it is, anyone who has read The Book of Evidence will immediately see that my book is a rip-off, um, homage to this earlier work. So I decided to wait.
Unfortunately, Novel 2 has taken much longer than planned – subject of the future post – and I realized at this rate, it might be years before I could read it. And I remembered something Joseph O’Neill said when I interviewed him:
TEV: Do you read fiction while you are writing fiction?
Joseph O’Neill: I do. And I might do a couple of quick laps, and that’s it. It depends. Obviously, I can’t go seven years without reading a book. If I’m stuck for juice, I will go back to certain writers or investigate new writers and find out what’s going on.
TEV: Will there be any risk of seepage when that happens?
Joseph O’Neill: I hope so. I mean, you want a little bit of that. You know, you’ve got be grown up about influences. I think you’ve either got it or you haven’t. By ‘it’ I mean the knack of writing something valuable that’s your own. So if you are worried about being influenced, it’s almost a pointless worry. Either you’re going to be influenced or you’re not going to be influenced—it doesn’t change anything, it’s all about whether you have the knack. Anyway, the alternative is to not read anything. And no one can be a writer without being familiar with other writers.
And so I decided to bring it, and I’m glad I did. The Infinites is superb, and O’Neill is right, it makes a difference. Which makes it a timely moment for Harold Bloom’s latest to land on my desk. About which I intend to say more in the future. For now, I leave things here in a state of fragile equipoise, and I assure you posting here will continue, as the form struggles to make itself known to me.
However sporadic my posting might be these days, you can always count on me for a Banville Bulletin - he's won the Kafka Prize.
An international jury which included German literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki and British publishder John Calder selected Banville for the prize, which is awarded annually and includes $10,000.
"I don't rate him as a writer at all. I made it clear that I wouldn't have put him on the longlist, so I was amazed when he stayed there. He was the only one I didn't admire – all the others were fine. Roth goes to the core of their [Cartwright and Gekoski's] beings. But he certainly doesn't go to the core of mine . . .Emperor's clothes: in 20 years' time will anyone read him?
I mean, yes, OK, The Humbling - embarrassing. But come on.
Putting my head back down. Nice to see you all survived the Rapture.
Scott O'Connor first came across my radar with his sharp little 2004 novella Among Wolves. Since then, we've become pals - he's acknowledged in Harry, Revised for assisting me in the mechanics of throwing a punch - and I'm terribly excited to read his debut novel Untouchable. It's described thusly:
It is the autumn of 1999. A year has passed since Lucy Darby’s unexpected death, leaving her husband David and son Whitley to mend the gaping hole in their lives. David, a trauma-site cleanup technician, spends his nights expunging the violent remains of strangers, helping their families to move on, though he is unable to do the same. Whitley – an 11 year-old social pariah known simply as The Kid – hasn’t spoken since his mother’s death. Instead, he communicates through a growing collection of notebooks, living in a safer world of his own silent imagining.
His publisher has set up a nice page which includes a trailer and a first chapter download, but I'm writing to advise you he's reading at Skylight this Tuesday evening, and although I am sick as a dog, I'll be there spreading my germs through the crowd, and hope you can come by and check it out as well. Scott is an engaging reader, smart and witty and a splendid time is guaranteed for all.
I am, understandably, obsessed with tales of second novelhood, like this one in Slate. (Thanks to Katherine Taylor, who bested me!)
My first novel had gotten good reviews and sold, for a first novel, reasonably well; I wanted to do better this time. At the very least, I wanted not to go backward. This novel's success would also impact my next book deal—hell, it might determine whether there would be a next one. And then there was Deborah. She works as a high-level editor at a major magazine; I didn't want to put her in the position of walking into the office the wife of second-rate novelist. The prospect of embarrassing her—of being anything less than a husband she might feel the urge to brag about—was even worse than the prospect of embarrassing myself.
The unfortunate use of impact as a verb notwithstanding, it's worth a read.
John Banville reviews James Attlee's Nocturne for the Guardian.
Nocturne – a term taken over by Chopin from the Irish composer John Field, but frequently employed by painters, too, particularly Whistler – is written in the relaxed, ambulatory tone of an 18th-century rambler's tale. Attlee conducts us on a latterday grand tour that takes in, among many other places, Turner's Thames, Basho's Japan, Pliny's Vesuvius and Rudolf Hess's solitary cell in Spandau prison. We learn little about the author, not necessarily a bad thing in these confessional times, although he does throw us hints as to his predilections and anathemas; for instance, he has a keen interest in painters – Samuel Palmer, Joseph Wright of Derby, the aforementioned Whistler – and in Japanese poetry; he deplores the seemingly unstoppable spread of light pollution yet considers Las Vegas at night one of the wonders of the world; he is not too happy about noise pollution, either – "Why aren't we ever content to just shut the fuck up?" – and declares "a particular hatred for wind chimes, hanging bells and all such paraphernalia".
Will Self: I'm still not convinced creative writing can be taught. Perhaps you can take a mediocre novelist and make them into a slightly better one, but a course can't make someone into a good writer. Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguru both did the UEA MA, but they were both innately good anyway. Some people swear by creative writing courses. I say, go and get a job, a fairly menial one instead. Otherwise what are you going to write about? Writing is about expressing something new and exploring the form in new ways. So unless you want to churn out thrillers or misery memoirs, you can't work from a pattern book. You need to autodidact.
As my students at UCLA already know is, my answer - maddening as always: It depends.
Ernest Sábato, one of the giants of Spanish-language literature, died on April 30.
Over subsequent decades “el Maestro”, as his compatriots came to refer to him, wrote thousands of influential essays, short stories and magazine articles. But he published only three novels. Those were enough, though, to win him the Cervantes Prize, the most coveted award among Spanish-language writers, in 1984. His lack of published output, he explained, was because he had a tendency to burn in the afternoon what he had written in the morning – it was not that he was making a point of “being existentialist”. He suffered from depression – nothing really mattered, good or bad. “It may be because I considered that all my work was imperfect, impure, and I found that fire was purifying,” he once said.
There's nothing quite like a photo feature on "writers' unruly manes" to directly feed one's own insecurity about thinning hair ... assuming, you know, one suffered from such an insecurity.
Daniel Mendelsohn deconstructs Julie Taymor's Spider-Man musical, untangling threads of modern comics and ancient myths (an approach sure to burst blood vessels in Dale Peck's very small brain).
But these are merely symptoms. If Taymor’s show is a failure, it fails for interesting reasons—as it were, for genetic reasons. For the show itself is a grotesque hybrid. At the heart of the Spider-Man disaster is the essential incompatibility of those two visions of physical transformation—the ancient and the modern, the redemptive and the punitive, visions that Taymor tried, heroically but futilely, to reconcile. As happens so often in both myth and comic books, the attempt to fuse two species resulted in the creation of a monster.
(Spider-Man was the only comic I collected as a child, but I collected it assiduously. Marvel Tales, Peter Parker, you name it, I had them. For me, the series reached its high point with the death of Captain Stacy and its nadir with the Hobgoblin saga. I wish I knew what became of all those comics; no doubt they were the victim of some long ago purge. Even with all that, I can report precisely zero interest in the Taymor/U2 collaboration.)
A couple of events of note this week. First, there's PEN Center USA's Pale King event at the Saban Theater Thursday night. It's hosted by David Ulin and features monologues read by Henry Rollins, Josh Radnor, Megan Mullally, Nick Offerman, and many more. You can learn more and buy tickets here.
Then this weekend the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books kicks off at its new location down at USC. It's got the usual mix of literary worthies and celebrity banalities, and you can find more details here.
(A real highlight is the outline of Light Years. I never tire of snooping into the working methods of novelists I admire.)
I've been given permission to reproduce the introductory essay from the recent Salter tribute by PEN, and I do promise to get it up for you in the next ... well ... soon.
The always insightful Garth Risk Hallberg's take on The Pale King is the Weekend Read around Chez TEV.
Under the hood, though, what’s remarkable about The Pale King is its congruity with Wallace’s earlier ambitions. Recent generations of Americans have, with a few notable exceptions, been allergic to what used to be called “the novel of ideas.” Information we love, and the more the better. Memes? By all means. But inquiries into ontology and ethics and epistemology we’ve mostly ceded to the science-fiction, self-help, and Malcolm Gladwell sections of the bookstore. A philosophy-grad-school dropout, Wallace meant to reclaim them. Infinite Jest discovered in its unlikely milieu of child prodigies and recovering addicts less a source of status details than a window onto (in Wallace’s words) “what it is to be a fucking human being.” And The Pale King treats its central subject—boredom itself—not as a texture (as in Fernando Pessoa), or a symptom (as in Thomas Mann), or an attitude (as in Bret Easton Ellis), but as the leading edge of truths we’re desperate to avoid. It is the mirror beneath entertainment’s smiley mask, and The Pale King aims to do for it what Moby-Dick did for the whale.
In the file of TEV Posts I've Never Written But Keep Thinking About is the one about my failure to fully appreciate Wallace (a failure I continue to view as mine, not his). I remember thinking if anyone could make me see the error of my ways it would be Wyatt Mason, but I found his NYRB essay a spectacular disappointment, his argument essentially "If you don't like him, you don't understand him." Hallberg comes the closest to inspiring me to try yet again. I am nothing if not persistent.
I taught my last writing class at UCLA Extension on Tuesday night, at least for a little while. I'm taking a semester or two off to focus on personal business and getting back to my novel. I taught Novel III this year and it was my favorite class to date. I had a great mix of committed students, half of them loyalists who have been with me through Novel I, whose work I have watched progress in that time; and half of them genuinely talented noobs who have brought a welcome new energy to the class.
What I enjoyed most about Novel III was the opportunity to go into greater detail than in previous classes. Where Novel I did one class apiece on character and point of view, Novel III included three classes on character - one class on main characters, one on secondary characters and one on minor characters - and two classes on point of view, one of which looked at the same scene as told by three different characters. The text this semester has been The End of the Affair which has lent itself very nicely to that kind of study.
Now that the class is over, I thought I might share some highlights of some my lessons here, since I know many writers read this site; as well as many close readers. And my lessons more often than not have been much more about reading than writing. My recent discussion on voice and language was a case in point.
Here is a paragraph I distributed from The End of the Affair. It's from a scene in Book One, where the narrator Bendrix is waiting for the first appearance of Sarah, his former lover whom he hasn't seen in years.
I laid the newspaper on the table and read the same page again because I wouldn’t look at the doorway. People were coming in, and I wouldn’t move my head up and down and betray an unmet expectation. What have we all got to expect that we allow ourselves such disappointment? There was a murder in the evening paper and a Parliamentary debate about sweet-rationing, and she was late. She caught me looking at my watch. I heard her voice say, “I’m sorry. I came by bus and the traffic was bad.”
Only it's not the actual paragraph from the book. It's an altered version, in which I changed some of Greene's word choices and sentence rhythms, resulting in a paragraph that essentially does the same narrative lifting but is workmanlike. The original paragraph, which I put on the back of the distributed page, is as follows.
I laid the newspaper flat on the table and read the same page over and over again because I wouldn’t look at the doorway. People were continually coming in, and I wouldn’t be one of those who by moving their heads up and down betray a foolish expectation. What have we all got to expect that we allow ourselves to be so lined with disappointment? There was the usual murder in the evening paper and a Parliamentary squabble about sweet-rationing, and she was now minutes late. It was my bad-luck that she caught me looking at my watch. I heard her voice say, “I’m sorry. I came by bus and the traffic was bad.”
I wanted my class to think closely about word choices. Why the first paragraph, while doing the same work, is inferior. How the efficient use of the word "continually" paints, with one word, a busy cafe that a less experienced writer might have spend a sentence or two on. Why "squabble" is more interesting, more telling and more musical than "debate." I urged them to listen for the melody of sentences - the "over and over again." I used the analogy of the knife drawer - we all know which is the sharpest knife in our kitchen and invariably reach for it, bypassing the duller blades. Writers should reach for the sharpest words possible - precision, focus, tone are the writer's sharp blades.
In future posts, I'll share highlights of our point of view class, as well as my famous "The Many Dratfts of the First Draft" lesson. And thank you again to my wonderful students, whom I hope to see again in the fall for Novel IV.
The mansion believed to have been the inspiration for Daisy Buchanan's home is set for the wrecking ball to make way for a five home subdivision.
... the mansion at Lands End has long been rumored to be the inspiration for Daisy Buchanan's house in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. (Sands Point is thought to be "East Egg," the tonier of two peninsulas in Fitzgerald's version of Long Island.) The 25-room colonial pile, built in 1902, sits in splendid isolation on thirteen acres of land. It's been on and off the market for years, most recently listed for $30 million in 2009.
The unpacking of the Sarvas Library continues, slowly but pleasingly. As expected, there are many detours, and I've actually even refilled a few holes I've noticed. For example, my copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy had mysteriously vanished, although the rest of the trilogy remained. So that's been replaced. And my copy of Charles D'Ambrosio's superb Dead Fish Museum existed only as a bound manuscript, so I decided to upgrade that to an actual finished copy.
Along the way, though, I encountered a problem that I haven't yet sorted out to my satisfaction. I'm presently unpacking fiction only. Typically, I've kept my collection of writers' letters - another obsession of mine - in a separate section, which has always worked reasonably well. Now, I'm sort of wondering what to do about writers' biographies. I don't have nearly as many of those, but I've accumulated a few since the last time the library was on shelves. So I'm left wondering do I store my copy of Frederick Brown's Flaubert biography with the rest of my Flaubert, or do I separate the biographies as well.
(I don't know why this photo is oriented this way, having technical issues this morning.)
This might sound like a trivial question, and in the grand scheme it is. But I've just added two more bookcases, and it's clear I won't have the shelf space for everything I own. And as you can see from the picture above, the biography - like most biographies - takes up a healthy amount of shelf space. So what to do? For the moment, I'm placing the bios with the fiction, but as shelf space disappears, I might revisit.
I also notice that Alexandre Dumas wrote some truly fat books - yes, he was writing serials, paid by the word - and the 11 volumes of his I own eat up nearly an entire shelf. Will I ever re-read The Vicomte de Bragelonne, I wonder? Still, for now it remains.
Other than recommending a mental health care visit, any suggestions?
I was shown tremendous hospitality by the lovely people of Christchurch when I attended a literary festival there in 2008. My hotel room looked directly down on the cathedral which now lies in ruins. I live in earthquake land myself, but I'm speechless at the devastation of a city where I spent such happy days. My prayers and wishes go out to everyone there, as they dig out of the rubble and begin rebuilding their lives.
Take your time over the rainy L.A. weekend with Paul Collins's riveting essay Vanishing Act, about the rise and heartbreaking fall of child prodigy novelist Barbara Follett. (Many thanks for FOTEV Katherine Taylor for sharing obsessions.)
The warning notice on her door the following year, though, marked a new project: young Barbara was attempting an entire novel. On some days the eight year old topped four thousand words. While her notes to her playmates and family overflowed with warmth, she was absolute in guarding her time to write. Neighboring children who didn’t understand were brusquely dismissed.
“You don’t understand why I have my work to do—because, at this particular time, you have none at all,” she snapped in a letter to a complaining playmate.
Four thousand words a day. Are my Novel III students paying attention?
OK, that’s an obvious headline. Almost cheap, I admit. But it got your attention, right?
Which, at the risk of getting a bit too meta, perfectly distills Dale Peck’s raison d’etre.
His recent squib at Mischief and Mayhem is a perfect summation of why he is utterly dispensable as a critic, as forgettable as he is flamboyant. He represents the worst of the Wieseltier School – the bitterness and the careless, self-defeating rage, without the learned humanity.
On the one hand, it’s probably unfair to hold his brief screed to formal critical standards, since Peck himself admits in the comments that the piece is “lazy”. And given the way he breathlessly updates his post to note a link from the New York Times, it seems he was less interested in substantive commentary and more excited about bomb throwing. (His back and forth about blurb requests just feels petty. Anyone who has spent five minutes in publishing is a bit more savvy about blurbs than that.)
Still, it’s worth asking the question, keeping in line with my earlier post about comments here – why does Peck feel an argument can’t be engaged with, without blanket character assassination? One may fairly disagree with Mendelsohn’s take – some of my readers here have. But a bit like this …
Daniel Mendelsohn—a Princeton-educated classicist who should never be allowed to write about anything more recent than, say, Suetonius. Frankly, I’m not sure he should be allowed to write about the classics either, but I don’t know enough Latin and Greek to say if he’s as wrong about them as he is about modern stuff. Because man is this guy wrong. Always. Every time. Completely off the mark.
… torpedoes any credibility the person making it might have. Anyone who spends five minutes in the NYRB will see that this is the sort of scorched earth idiocy that suggests that Peck’s true métier has all along been blogger, not critic.
Beyond the name calling, Peck’s post is shabby, subpar and, as he admits, lazy. He makes an assertion:
I think that, ultimately, is my problem with Mr. M.: he has no inkling of the problematic but fascinating phenomenon of the postmodern savvy audience—educated to the point of jadedness, suspicious but also sentimental, craving the thing it’s been taught to distrust
It’s an assertion that is both empty and exhausted. First, the term postmodern has been beaten so bloody, waved so relentlessly for decades, that I’m not sure anyone can agree on what it means any more. But Peck lazily relies on presumptions and associations, and then presumes that we will agree with him and see their truth and value. There’s so much assuming going on here, one’s head spins.
If Peck were interested in discussion, he might take a moment and explain this allegedly fascinating phenomenon. But that’s clearly not his game, and I suspect he knows if he were called to make a more substantive argument, he’d fall on his face. Once the insults are over, he runs out of gas.
(It’s also a favorite rhetorical brickbat of the aggrieved, that one who disagrees with us is always characterized as “missing the point.” As though “the point” was so obvious to begin with that any discussion is unnecessary. The term is always a tipoff to impending intellectual dishonesty.)
Obviously, I linked to the Mendelsohn piece earlier because it resonated with me, and confirmed my experience of watching the program. And the essay is considerably more nuanced than Peck’s sneering (or the Times's scandal-baiting) suggests. Still, it can and should be engaged with, and one hopes that more responsible, intelligent and insightful interlocutors will make themselves heard.
After more than two years, I have finally begun to unpack my library from storage. I'm hauling one banker's box at a time up from the garage and filling up my bookcases again. To give you a sense of what this endeavor entails, I worked for several hours yesterday, and finished A through C. (I'm beginning with fiction, the bulk of my library, which I alphabetize by author. Unsexy but effective.)
I'm struck by some things as I unpack. The first is simply how much I have missed having ready access to these books. I've gone downstairs over the years and pulled out a volume from time to time when I needed it for a review or a lesson plan. But I've missed the real pleasure of lingering in front of the shelves and letting my eyes trail randomly over titles, plucking out old favorites and forgotten pleasures.
I am also struck by what a completist I once was. If I loved an author, I had to own and read everything. And I do mean everything. It will surprise none of you that the "B" section is among the biggest, and it contains two full shelves of Banville. This is a nettlesome twitch I inherited from my father the collector. His collection of MG models was the most famous in the world, and he wasn't content with one of each type of car - he had to have one of each variation. If an MGA was made by Dinky in five colors, some with the top up, some with it down, some with two passengers, some with three, well, he had to have them all. I would watch him spend years pursuing a single, elusive variant.
I've been similarly extreme in my collecting habits, so I've got firsts and signed firsts from both the UK and US, plus paperbacks plus galleys plus the Black books and other incidentals and one-time oddities, including a short story in a 1974 issue of Argosy that Banville himself had forgotten.
And yet, as I unpack, I note that sort of excess has deserted me in recent years. James Salter is the first author in years whose entire oeuvre I felt compelled to buy and read, but one copy of each title was more than enough for me. And in truth, with the sense I have of always feeling behind in my reading, it almost seems an unforgivable luxury to commit so much time to one author.
Still, I enjoy re-enountering my obsessions of the past. Other authors who hog up such large sections of my shelves include Peter Carey and J.M. Coetzee, and so I've just been re-exposed to their long and impressive careers. I remembered the first time I read Oscar and Lucinda, who completely I fell for the work and its author. And I remembered the crushing moral weight of Disgrace, the book that launched my Coetzee mania. And I know there are others lurking in the wings as I move through the alphabet. Which I will dutifully report here.
The brotherhood of cranks: Wolcott on Martin Amis's request for "asylum" ...
But when Amis goes on in the email to inquire about the condition of my wine cellar and whether there might be space for him to store a few bottles of his "favorite plonk," I have to wonder if this email, like the previous one of his that found its way into my in-box, may have been misdirected. I wouldn't know a wine cellar from a bomb shelter, and I never touch the stuff, wine snobbery making me break out in hives. Perhaps Marty meant to reach out to Jay McInerney and got me instead, a mix-up which will someday give us all a good laugh at the nursing home.
Wolcottt goes on to reveal that Amis has opened his yap again - only for once, the usual hyperbole notwithstanding, I'm hard-pressed to disagree with the substance.
In his recent appearance at Brown, John Banville read a "bleeding chunk" of his latest novel in progress. Tantalizing glimpses to be found here.
I should like to fall in love again, just one more time," says the narrator in John Banville's latest novel, from which he read Tuesday evening in Salomon 001.
A few words on my comments policy appear to be in order.
Over the last few months, I have had a handful of irate readers berate me for deleting their comments, so it seemed a good moment to revisit how comments are handled at TEV.
First, I have never understood those readers who feel entitled to have their comments posted, no matter how rude or unedifying they might be. So let me reiterate, TEV is not a democracy. I pay a fee to keep this site up and running, plus the investment of my time, and it is entirely up to me to decide who can and cannot comment. If I chose to ban left-handed redheads, so be it.
Fortunately, I am not that capricious. And contrary to the assertions of my wounded anonymous kneebiters, I do not delete comments that merely disagree with me. Go through the archives, you will find numerous posts with deep comment threads containing spirited back-and-forths. I am all for thoughtful disagreement and debate.
What I will not abide, and will continue to delete, are comments that are little more than name-calling. Comments that are needlessly rude or pointlessly flip. Comments that are nothing more disembodied snark, that take cheap shots at me or my other readers. (Comments which without exception hide behind false names and false email addresses.)
I have always been tremendously proud of the smart, spirited readers who make TEV their home, and the civility of the comments area is a source of singular pride. But it has required me from time to time to show certain readers the door – are you reading, “Serge?” “GG Gaynor”? – and I will continue to do so as I deem necessary. And I suspect the majority of my readers will thank me for it.
Back now, to our regularly scheduled programming. Big happenings at Skylight this Sunday afternoon, check the sidebar for details.
You can count on one hand with four digits left over the times I've agreed with the n+1 kids, and here it is - Sheila Heti is, indeed, the bomb. I've been a fan since her novel Ticknor became my first print review back in the day, and have been waiting eagerly for another novel. As the Observer reported while I was slowly drowning last month, she had been struggling to find a US publisher. Well, Bookforum informs us that How Should a Person Be will be published at last by Holt. I'm reading it at this very moment (well, not this very moment, obviously) and can confirm that the praise is deserved.
My review of Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya's novel, The Storyteller of Marrakesh, has posted at the Barnes and Noble review. I was not, I fear, a fan.
These are the sort of things that pass for wisdom in The Storyteller of Marrakesh: "Do we speak the truth, or do various, often incompatible versions of the truth speak us?" Or "beauty … is akin to truth, and truth is energy, and energy is always in motion." Or "For beauty, like faith, is food for the soul." The first two don't actually mean anything at all, and the third would be at home on a high-end greeting card. The tone, perhaps seeking to evoke 1001 Nights, comes off as pastiche, bordering on the parodic, a cartoon travelogue which feels—the author's Indian birth and education notwithstanding—very much like a typical westerner's ersatz view of Eastern mysticism and inscrutability.
This slim volume by the president and founder of the Nexus Institute, a European-based humanist think-tank, stands as the most stirring redoubt against the ascendant forces of know-nothingness that we've come across in a long time. A full-throated, unapologetic defense of the virtues of Western Civ – in which "elite" is not and never should be a dirty word – this inspiring exploration of high art and high ideals is divided into three sections: The first looks at the life of Riemen's great hero Thomas Mann as a model for the examined life. The second imagines a series of conversations from turning points in European intellectual history, populated with the likes of Socrates, Nietzsche and others. The final section, "Be Brave," is nothing less than an exhortation to dig deep, especially in times of risk. The notion of nobility of the spirit might strike some modern ears as quaint but it seems more desperately necessary than ever before, and there are worse ways to read the accessible Nobility of Spirit than as a crash refresher in the Great Thinkers, free of academic jargon and cant. As a meditation on what is at stake when the pursuit of high ideals is elbowed aside by the pursuit of fleeting material gain, however, Nobility of Spirit might well be the most prescient book we've yet read on what's at stake in the current election cycle and in the developing global situation. Agree or disagree with Riemen's profound, ambitious and high-minded plea, you will be thinking about his words for a long time. It's been ages since a work of non-fiction moved us this way. Read it. Discuss it. Argue about it.
With rave reviews from James Wood, Michiko Kakutani and Dwight Garner, it might not seem like we need to tell you to drop everything and go read Netherland, but we are telling you, and here's why: The way book coverage works these days, everyone talks about the same book for about two or three weeks, and then they move on and the book is more or less forgotten. Whereas a berth here in the Recommended sidebar keeps noteworthy titles in view for a good, long time, which is the sort of sustained attention this marvelous novel deserves. A Gatsby-like meditation on exclusion and otherness, it's an unforgettable New York story in which the post 9/11 lives of Hans, a Dutch banker estranged from his English wife, and Chuck Ramkissoon, a mysterious cricket entrepreneur, intertwine. The New York City of the immigrant margins is unforgettably invoked in gorgeous, precise prose, and the novel's luminous conclusion is a radiant beacon illuminating one of our essential questions, the question of belonging. Our strongest possible recommendation.
"History," wrote Henry James in a 1910 letter to his amanuensis Theodora Bosanquet, "is strangely written." This casual aside could easily serve as the epigraph of Cynthia Ozick's superb new collection Dictation, which concerns itself with lost worlds evoked by languages -- languages which separate and obscure as readily as they bind. It can be risky to look for connective tissue between stories written years apart and published in magazines ranging from The Conradian to The New Yorker. But themes of deception, posterity, and above all, the glory of language -- at once malleable and intractable -- knit together this quartet, recasting the whole as the harmonious product of Ozick's formidable talent. Read the entire review here
Now, on the one hand, you scarcely need us to alert you to the existence of a new J.M. Coetzee novel, or even to have us tell you it's worth reading. But we can tell you - we insist on telling you that Diary of a Bad Year is a triumph, easily Coetzee's most affecting and fully wrought work since Disgrace. Formally inventive, the book intertwines two narratives with the author's own Strong Opinions, a series of seemingly discrete philosophical and political essays. The cumulative effect of this strange trio is deeply moving and thought provoking. It's increasingly rare in this thoroughly post-post-modern age to raise the kind of questions in fiction Coetzee handles so masterfully - right down to what is it, exactly, that we expect (or need) from our novels. It's telling that, for all of his serious pronouncements on subjects ranging from censorship to pedophilia to the use of torture, it's finally a few pages from The Brothers Karamazov that brings him to tears. Moving, wise and - how's this for a surprise - funny and lightly self-mocking, Diary of a Bad Year might well be the book of the year and Coetzee is surely our essential novelist. We haven't stopped thinking about it since we set it down.
David Leavitt's magnificent new novel tells the story of the unlikely friendship between the British mathematician G.H. Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan, mathematical autodidact and prodigy who had been working as a clerk in Madras, and who would turn out to be one of the great mathematical minds of the century. Ramanujan reluctantly joined Hardy in England - a move that would ultimately prove to his detriment - and the men set to work on proving the Riemann Hypothesis, one of mathematics' great unsolved problems. The Indian Clerk, an epic and elegant work which spans continents and decades, encompasses a World War, and boasts a cast of characters that includes Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Lytton Strachey. Leavitt renders the complex mathematics in a manner that resonates emotionally as well as intellectually, and writes with crystalline elegance. The metaphor of the prime number – divisible only by one and itself – is beautifully apt for this tale of these two isolated geniuses. Leavitt's control of this dense, sprawling material is impressive – astonishing, at times – and yet despite its scope, he keeps us focused on his great themes of unknowability and identity. The Indian Clerk might be set in the past but it doesn't resemble most so-called "historical fiction." Rather, it's an ageless meditation on the quests for knowledge and for the self – and how frequently the two are intertwined – that is, finally, as timeless as the music of the primes. (View our full week of coverage here.)
Joshua Ferris' warm and funny debut novel is an antidote to the sneering likes of The Office and Max Barry's Company. Treating his characters with both affection and respect, Ferris takes us into a Chicago ad agency at the onset of the dot-bomb. Careers are in jeopardy, nerves are frayed and petty turf wars are fought. But there are bigger stakes in the balance, and Ferris' weirdly indeterminate point of view that's mostly first person plural, underscores the shared humanity of everyone who has ever had to sit behind a desk. It's a luminous, affecting debut and you can read the first chapter right here.
Coming to these shores at last, John Banville's thriller, written under the nom de plume Benjamin Black, has drawn rave reviews across the pond since it first appeared last October. Those who feared Banville might turn in an overly literary effort needn't worry. Influenced by Simenon's romans durs (hard stories), Banville unspools a dark mystery set in 1950s Dublin concerning itself with, among other things, the church's trade in orphans. At the heart of the book is the coroner Quirke, a Banvillean creation on par with Alex Cleave and Freddie Montgomery. Dublin is rendered with a damp, creaky specificity – you can almost taste the whisky.
Scanning our Recommended selections, one might conclude we're addicted to interviews, and one would be correct. If author interviews are like crack to us, then the Paris Review author interviews must surely be the gold standard of crack (a comparison Plimpton might not have embraced). The newly issued The Paris Review Interviews, Volume I (Picador) rolls out the heavy hitters. Who can possibly turn away from the likes of Saul Bellow, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Jorge Luis Borges, Dorothy Parker, Robert Gottlieb and others? The interviews are formal and thoughtful but never dry and can replace any dozen "how-to" books on writing. What can be more comforting than hearing Bellow, answering a question on preparations and conception, admit "Well, I don't know exactly how it's done.” The best part of this collection? The "Volume I" in the title, with its promise of more volumes to come.
See, we’re not all literary fiction here. Princeton Architectural Press’s absolutely breathtaking Above Paris is very much the kind of thing we’re eager to bring to your attention. Between 1950 and 1972, pilot and photographer Roger Henrard recorded more than 350 images of Paris from the seat of a single-engine Piper cub, documenting Paris from its outskirts to its center. His photographs show not only Paris's famous landmarks - they also give you a sense of the way the city is interconnected: the tight-knit medieval districts as well as the expansive geometry of the grand boulevards. Maps at the beginning of each chapter and fine captions and essays by Jean-Louis Cohen help you navigate the City of Light as never before. Just glorious.
The best short story collection we've read since ... well, certainly since we've started this blog. And we might even say "ever" if Dubliners didn't cast such a long shadow. The short story is not our preferred form but D'Ambrosio's eight brilliant stories are almost enough to convert us. Defy the conventional wisdom that short story collections don't sell and treat yourself to this marvel. (We're especially partial, naturally, to "Screenwriter".)
What would you do if the woman who’d left you high and dry ten years ago called out of the blue to invite you to a party without any further explanation? If you’re French, you’d probably spend a lot of time pondering the Deeper Significance Of It All, which is exactly what Grégoire Bouillier does for the 120 hilarious pages of The Mystery Guest. This slim, witty memoir follows Bouillier through the party from hell, and is a case study in Gallic self-abasement. Before it’s all done, you’ll set fire to any turtleneck hanging in your closet and think twice before buying an expensive Bordeaux as a gift. But fear not – just when it seems that all is, indeed, random and pointless and there is no Deeper Significance, salvation arrives in the unlikely form of Virginia Woolf, and the tale ends on a note of unforced optimism. Parfait.
When George Ticknor's Life of William Hickling Prescott was published in 1864, it received rapturous notices, and reviewers were quick to point out that the long-standing friendship between Prescott and Ticknor made the latter an ideal Boswell. Sheila Heti has pulled this obscure leaf from the literary archives and fashioned a mordantly funny anti-history; a pungent and hilarious study of bitterness and promise unfulfilled. As a fretful Ticknor navigates his way through the rain-soaked streets of Boston to Prescott's house ("But I am not a late man. I hate to be late."), he recalls his decidedly one-sided lifelong friendship with his great subject. Unlike the real-life Ticknor, this one is an embittered also-ran, full of plans and intentions never realized, always alive to the fashionable whispers behind his back. Heti seamlessly inhabits Ticknor's fussy 19th-century diction with a feat of virtuoso ventriloquism that puts one in mind of The Remains of the Day. Heti's Ticknor would be insufferable if he weren't so funny, and in the end, the black humor brings a leavening poignancy to this brief tale. But don't let the size fool you — this 109-page first novel is small but scarcely slight; it is as dense and textured as a truffle.
No, your eyes aren't deceiving you and yes, we are recommending a Believer product. Twenty-three interviews (a third presented for the first time) pairing the likes of Zadie Smith with Ian McEwan, Jonathan Lethem with Paul Auster, Edward P. Jones and ZZ Packer, and Adam Thirwell with Tom Stoppard make this collection a must-read. Lifted out of the context of some of the magazine's worst twee excesses, the interviews stand admirably on their own as largely thoughtful dialogues on craft. A handful of interviewers seem more interested in themselves than in their subjects but in the main this collection will prove irresistible to writers of any stripe - struggling or established - and to readers seeking a window into the creative process.
John Banville's latest novel returns him to the Booker Prize shortlist for the first time since 1989's The Book of Evidence. In The Sea, we find Banville in transition, moving from the icy, restrained narrators of The Untouchable, Eclipse and Shroud toward warmer climes. Max Morden has returned to the vacation spot of his youth as he grieves the death of his wife. Remembering his first, fatal love, Morden works to reconcile himself to his loss. Banville's trademark linguistic virtuosity is everpresent but some of the chilly control is relinquished and Max mourns and rages in ways that mark a new direction for Banville - and there's at least one great twist which you'll never see coming. Given the politicized nature of the British literary scene, Banville's shot at the prize might be hobbled by his controversial McEwan review but we're rooting for our longtime favorite to go all the way at last. UPDATE: Our man won!
We've been fans of Booker Prize winner John Berger for ages, and we're delighted to have received an early copy of his latest work, Here is Where We Meet. In this lovely, elliptical, melancholy "fictional memoir," Berger traverses European cities from Libson to Geneva to Islington, conversing with shades from his past – He encounters his dead mother on a Lisbon tram, a beloved mentor in a Krakow market. Along the way, we're treated to marvelous and occasionally heart-rending glimpses of an extraordinary life, a lyrical elegy to the 20th century from a man who - in his eighth decade - remains committed to his political beliefs and almost childlike in his openness to people, places and experiences. There's no conventional narrative here, and those seeking plot are advised to look elsewhere. But Here is Where We Meet offers a wise, moving and poetic look at the life of an artist traversing the European century from a novelist whose talent remains undimmed in his twilight years.
In his recent TEV guest review of Home Land, Jim Ruland called Sam Lipsyte the "funniest writer of his generation," and we're quite inclined to agree. We tore through Home Land in two joyful sittings and can't remember the last time we've laughed so hard. Lipsyte's constellation of oddly sympathetic losers is rendered with a sparkling, inspired prose style that's sent us off in search of all his prior work. In Lewis Miner's (a.k.a Teabag) woeful epistolary dispatches to his high school alumni newsletter ("I did not pan out."), we find an anti-hero for the age. Highly, highly recommended.
Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."
