I don’t have an essay in the pretty excellent essay collection MFA vs. NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction (FSG, 2014) but in 2008, four years after I left NYC, two years after I graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop with an MFA in fiction, I drank some icy white wine and talked on the phone with a guy I knew a little bit from when I’d lived in NYC before Iowa. He was working on an interview-based article for Vice about the MFA and workshops. We talked for an hour, I got loose and ranted, and he asked questions and sounded like he was listening or at least was still on the line whenever I paused. In exchange for semi-drunkenly rambling about Iowa for an hour, he sent me an ARC of 2666, a signed copy of my former teacher’s latest novel (Home), and the new Leonard Michaels collection. 2666 blew my doors off and I was psyched for the interview to show up in Vice, but then it never seemed to come out. Huh. Too bad. I forgot about it.
Five years later I received an e-mail from an editor at n + 1 saying they’re putting thisMFA vs NYC collection together and they’d like to use some quotations (~two tweets worth) from me from the interview, which Vice apparently published at some point, and then months later the friendly people at n + 1 sent an ARC of the book, which I found to be an enjoyable, stimulating, at times pleasurably enervating trip down MFA/NYC lane.
The collection acknowledges of course what many suspect — some writers in the world might not have MFAs and not live in NYC, or might even have MFAs and not live in NYC and yet they still somehow manage to write and publish. But as a former resident of Brooklyn (specifically, Greenpoint about a decade before “Girls,” a few miles north of what Chad Harbach deems the NYC where NYC novelists live: “a small area of west-central Brooklyn bounded by DUMBO and Prospect Heights”) who moved to NYC to meet some writers and, as in an O. Henry story (a refrain twice repeated in MFA vs NYC), immediately wound up dating a doozy of a young writer (no MFA, occasionally visiting NYC from her distant homeland, although she lives there now) and meeting some of her writer friends who I’d heard about more than I’d read, and then a little later on dating another young writer from NYC who despised the city and lived in Iowa City after attending the Workshop, which I eventually wound up attending, participating in the final complete workshop taught by Frank Conroy (his portrait in this is a good one but doesn’t mention how he evoked “magic” and repeated phrases like “respect the experiment” and “protect the edge” when evaluating unconventional work like mine), this book seemed more or less written for me. But there’s enough in here to hold anyone’s attention, probably, as long as you’re interested in a tour of fiction writing sausage factories in this country.
The essays that present NYC as a professional institution — essays by agents and publicists particularly — were illuminating. An excellent agent says he only reads about six novels a year, other than all those he’s evaluating and selling for work. What are the chances therefore that one of these books is Joseph and His Brothers or Extinction, books that might obliterate a market-based perspective of what’s good? He also probably doesn’t read canonically, as DFW and Elif Bautman and others assume that writers in MFA programs don’t do either, which has some merit but isn’t totally true, in my experience.
A NYC blogger writer rarely mentions reading anything at all although she does go on about her internet addiction and her cat’s health issues (and the resulting costs) at length. I particularly liked the transparency in a few essays about finances — making a living writing ain’t easy, apparently.
In general, there’s a sense that everyone in NYC is trying to survive the city’s exaggerated $$$ pressures — and it’s possible that such pressure turns rocks into gems.
I’ve always argued that there’s no reason for the literary industry to remain in NYC since NYC undermines its interests. No one buys hard covers because they’re too expensive but need to be so costly to cover the publisher’s rent. The whole enterprise should really move to rural Pennsylvania or maybe even Iowa City if it wants to prevail and not simply survive.
On the MFA side of things, I most agree with George Saunders:
“You are not going to be doing this workshop crap forever. You are doing it to get a little baptism by fire, purge yourself of certain habits (of sloth, of under-revision, of the sin of thinking you’d made a thing clear when you haven’t) and then you are going to run away from the whole approach like your pants are on fire, and not look back, but return to that sacred land where your writing is private and you don’t have to defend it or explain it one bit.”
Post-NYC and post-MFA, that’s where I stand in this “argument.” At some point, wherever you are, you have to find a way to make enough money to write and read without worrying all the time about distractions.
No longer all that young and certainly not all that wealthy, NYC seems to me too expensive and offers too many obvious distractions for a writer (unless young or wealthy).
Teaching can distract from reading and writing, but you can bring your passion to play and infect young minds so they in turn buy books you and your friends publish. That’s one of the best points in the book, at the end of Harbach’s titular essay: the common ambition and only hope of all writers will be “to make writers of us all.”
All essays in here are worthwhile — some may stand out for you more than others. I was partial to contributions by the editor, Saunders, Eli S. Evans, Keith Gessen, the literary agent Jim Rutman, the one by the publicist in part about Prep, and the one about Gordon Lish. (The DFW essay I’d read before and think it’s so-so for him.)
There’s a good academic/personal mix, although I found the more academic essays a little wonky and maybe even sometimes wrong. Iowa at least doesn’t teach about itself and adverbs.
John Barth in one of his “Fridays” books says somewhere something like “not even at Iowa can you major in Towering Literary Artistry.” For the record, at Iowa I took a seminar with Edward Carey, author of Observatory Mansions and Alva & Irva: The Twins Who Saved a City — it was about the use of art in lit. We read Sebald, Bruno Schulz, Chris Ware, Pullmann, Gulliver’s Travels. He jumped up and down about making our stuff WEIRDER. A great class, so up my alley, and so unlike what people think Iowa is. Kevin Brockmeier taught there. Jim Crace visited for two weeks. Ben Marcus was in the running to replace Frank Conroy as director. There’s a long-standing Cheever/Yates-lovin’ conservative streak that runs through it, or at least there was, but then there’s Marilynne Robinson’s not particularly conventional “consciousness” approach and everyone who takes Ethan Canin winds up writing a “deep POV” story. In general, I get a little ornery when people reduce the varied work of 25 writers there each year to “Iowa fiction” or say the program flattens fiction. It’s just not really true, or wasn’t true of my time there at least.
But I suppose I should also at this point complexify the duality emphasized by the subtitle (THE Two Cultures of American Fiction) as THE only two cultures worth discussing. To represent the reality of the “cultures” in play, it seems like it would make sense to introduce another acronym into the mix, especially now, four years after publication, when nothing else more pressing is at stake in the world.
To yin the yang of the reductive MFA/NYC duality, how about we add the acronym FTE, for “full-time employee,” AKA writers with non-academic jobs living somewhere other than NYC?
Having set hours and consistent pay stabilize my schedule and psyche in a generally positive way. In the year after grad school when I taught fiction and lit and non-fiction writing at Temple as an adjunct for a year, I found I could always procrastinate and keep myself from writing by preparing more for classes. And I felt like I was generally too focused on writing, too extended in that direction, talking with students about my primary interest and trying to infect them with my enthusiasm for something that flagged at the time in large part because my passion had become my employment. More importantly, making something like $7K a semester plus whatever freelance editing I managed to find, I was always worried about money and had to take on some credit card debt to make ends meet.
Working as a full-time salaried editor, generally applying advanced ninja editorial skills in an office setting, works for me. In particular, I spend my time out of work reading whatever I want, not the books and stories I’ve assigned or student work. In the first months after I re-entered the corporate editorial world, I remember saying that the great pleasure of having a non-academic editorial job was that I could read the greatest writing ever in the history of the world. I could only expose myself to truth and beauty and bright-shining prose! No more crappy stories written in an hour by stoned students!
About a dozen years later, I miss the classroom and organizing my ideas about fiction, miss the learning and laughing, but not enough to think about trying to teach again.
Anyway, if you’re an FTE somewhere other than NYC and don’t have an MFA yet wonder what such people think, this is an invaluable collection. If you’re an MFA/NYC type already, you can’t help but gaze into the cracked mirror of this collection and struggle a bit to put the pieces (of your history, your thoughts, where you stand on everything) back together again.
Thinking somewhat about this stuff is valuable, sure, no matter where you are these days. But in the end you retreat to that sacred little space where you make your true living when you read and write in peace.
Behold above or below the title, depending on your device, an AI-generated estimation of the average reader of the weblog you’re reading. Love the cozy lighting, the sweater, the thick seafaring beard. The man, my wife says, looks like me, author of this post, master of this domain . . . NOPE, I vociferate. I’m comparatively uncouth, inadequately quaffed, usually hoodied, and my beard is not so uniformly gray. I can palm a basketball, too, and once even almost dunked, and this man, whoever he may be, surely can’t and has not. He can recite “Kubla Khan,” “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” whereas I can recite Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29, Public Enemy’s “Bring the Noise” in my own Spanish translation (“Trae el Ruido”), and the complete “Celebration of the Lizard” by The Doors. He and I are not one and the same. Whoever our friendly AI generator hath hallucinated, he reminds me of someone I recently read about in The New York Times, and being otherwise nameless at this point, I hereby anoint him Endangered Literary Man.
The books below derive from my recent reading but I’ll attribute them to Endangered Literary Man himself, comfortable on the couch at home on an end-of-year evening with spouse, cozy yet concerned as he consults the communication device he casually balances on the tip of his toe.
Despite the cozy comfortable room enclosed by weird assortment of windows and walls, why so concerned, Endangered Literary Man? For obvious reasons, like for example because the text you read appears on the back of your laptop instead of on its screen? Or maybe something more subtle, like for example because you “care about the health of our society — especially in the age of Donald Trump and the distorted conceptions of masculinity he helps to foster”? Or even because you’re worried “about the decline and fall of literary men” like yourself?
I can ask these questions but I shouldn’t speak on Endangered Literary Man’s behalf. As a literary fundamentalist (see “litfun” in URL), I’m happy to lend him my literary fundamentalist for the year, of course, but, as mentioned above, I’m not him — for example, I’m neither disappeared nor endangered. I’ve been lucky reading-wise the past ~18 years (post grad school) — so many exceptional reading years, so many extraordinary novels, so often one after the other after the next. But this was the first year in a while that the simple act of reading sometimes seemed challenged.
To a degree, I intentionally tried to limit reading this year in favor of writing, thinking that I used reading to procrastinate from working on my own writing. But also this year’s reading suffered in comparison to previous years thanks to a series of distractions, one after the other after the next: I had a nasty case of Covid in mid-February and then my father died in late March; I had a novel come out in June; and I expended excessive psychoemotional energy and quantifiable screen time on the election (semi-intentionally wasted October and early November, some of the best reading weeks of the year, scrolling Threads for its soothing positive echo-chamber properties).
I no longer commute or walk/read when taking a lunch break, really only reading at night in bed and in the summer on the porch on weekends. In the summer I woke up early to run and then wound up too woozy at night to read much. Instead of reading old-fashioned bound books I often found myself studying French using Duolingo, or reading slowly from Norwegian ebook editions of Tomas Espedal’s Brev or Knausgaard’s Ute av Verden. Toward the end of the year I even started listening to audiobooks via Spotify but only recommend two of those books below (beware: a Spotify premium account only comes with 15 “free” hours of audiobook listening a month). Generally, I’ve been in much better shape as a reader in my life.
Anyway, the winner of the wonderfully irrelevant Endangered Literary Man’s Exceptional Reading Experience Award for 2024 is the first one below, Lance Olsen’s Always Crashing in the Same Car: A Novel After David Bowie (Fiction Collective 2; 2023). Note: the other books are listed in no particular order.
Next year I hope to haul off on some canonical biggies, some Trollope and Jean-Christophe by Romain Rolland, but also A Naked Singularity, some more Lance Olsen, a Dag Solstad essay collection in Norwegian, the new Christian TeBordo, the new Tom McAllister, the new Avner Landes, and the new whoever else I know who has a new one out, and on and on and awn to the breaka breaka dawn.
Always Crashing in the Same Car: A Novel After David Bowie by Lance Olsen
This was published in February 2023 and as of the end of 2024 has 41 ratings and 12 reviews on Goodreads. WTF is wrong with the world? This is one of the most interesting, well-done new novels I’ve read in a long while. It’s about everything David Bowie is and represents. Employs various techniques to match the spirit of the shape-shifting star. By a writer in his late-sixties it’s at its best about the end-stage Davy Jones in his late-sixties at home with Iman or walking around downtown Manhattan, under-recognized. Also at its best when essentially delivering monologues by Angie Bowie, in the form of responses to unrevealed interview questions (a la Brief Interviews with Hideous Men), and Iman, directly addressing a drugged-out dying Davy at five in the morning, which I read one morning at five in the morning, up way too early, my sleep disturbed by a similar situation with my father, who died two days later. Also led to me listening over and over for weeks to Bowie’s Blackstar, which came out two days before Bowie died. Need to re-read but lost my copy somehow. Just ordered a replacement copy and will try to write something substantial about it in 2025.
Sunday by Olivier Schrauwen
Acquired after Chris Ware, on the Beyond the Zero podcast (1 hr 3 min 13 secs into it), recommended this as “probably one of the best graphic novels of the past 10 to 20 years.” Liked reading it, looking at it, sure! Mr. Ware may have hyped it but it’s definitely one of the more visually appealing graphic novels, with ambitious, original, yet intuitive storytelling. Reminds me somewhat of the author’s countryman Brecht Evans (The City of Belgium, eg), albeit paler colors. The linear day-in-the-life format gives the author a lot of leeway, although through some of it I was somewhat frustrated with the central character’s common thought processes, masturbation, drinking etc. Interesting that he’s a font maker but overall the author could’ve chosen someone else’s Sunday to depict? Regardless, a welcome addition to the stack of visually delightful, engrossing books. Perfect for end of the year, darkest week, pre-Xmas reading, usually the time I turn to these fancy high-art adult comix.
Telephone by Percival Everett
Just about perfect (other than the misspelling of “ten cuidado” toward the end). This one came to my attention as something that will please/dismay all daddies of young daughters. Turns out as the daddy of a daughter with special needs about the same age as Sarah in the novel, I could “relate” all too well. Our daughter even had a few minor seizures when she was a toddler and had neurologic testing done at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
Formally, the novel is perfectly cinematic, perfectly structured, perfectly paced. The dialogue is believable and strong, the scenes steady and of similar length, the language straightforward yet with moments of philosophy and insight, if never lyrical or poetic (the narrator is an academic geologist/scientist who doesn’t understand his poet-professor wife’s poetry). The characters feel distinct and real.
Loved generally how race is backgrounded, unlike in American Fiction, which I’ve watched twice and really enjoyed, or in The Trees which I tried twice to read and deemed a cartoonish sensationalist screenplay and quit 50 pages into it — that is, in this one I responded positively to how race deepened and differentiated everything, as part of the whole, occasionally in play, but not the primary focus.
Loved the one line about the narrator’s father’s suicide, how his father hadn’t done the work to get tenure, like his colleague who had done the work but hadn’t sent it out. Loved the doubling, the smaller action in the novel (eg, intervention in Paris) that justifies the larger action (the novel’s end). And then I loved how the part about the disappeared women of Ciudad Juarez, which seemed like a stray thread through most of this, takes over and fully makes sense as a resolution, as a way of dealing with grief, righting a wrong, doing the work and sending it out, engaging and doing what must be done to save others.
Loved also that, even if there’s no God but there is a devil, how not everyone is evil — loved all the stray positive helpful people throughout whose small acts of kindness or even a smile are so helpful for Zach.
But mainly just came away impressed with this on a formal level, its solid consistent cinematic dramatization, almost to the point that it could be easily reformatted as a screenplay. Lots of interstitial lines between sections at first relating to fossils and geology, then DNA, lines in German I didn’t bother inputting into Google Translate, lines about items needed when going camping, lines about it being hotter in New Mexico, that seem somewhat beguiling or only really there to complicate in a “literary” way the general straightforward super-conventional formal aspects. Reminded me of a bit in one of the Rachel Cusk “Trilogy” novels about how contemporary fiction these days is mostly glorified screenplays, wholly committed to dramatization/dialogue, with at most a literary flourish, the equivalent of a grandfather clock in the corner. The interstitial bits seem like one of those grandfather clocks, there only to add an oblique thematic level, something that to me seemed unnecessary but not enough to really distract or deem worthy of a “star” demerit.
Along those lines, the title is beguiling too — what does it suggest? The line of connection between people, the calls the narrator makes to the investigator in Ciudad Juarez at the end? The game where a story morphs as it’s relayed from one person to another to another to another? It easily could’ve been called The Bear or something simple like that.
I also read somewhere that there are three different versions of the ending available but I’m not sure how that works. I’m satisfied with this ending but interested to hear if there are others and wonder how much of it is different in the three versions. (Edit: this LitHub piece explains it all. Turns out I read the “For Henry and Miles” version. Will keep an eye out for the others if I see them at used bookstores etc but am not really inspired to go out of my way to acquire them, mostly because the variations are apparently pretty minor, per the linked piece.)
Anyway, started this one with elevated expectations and based on my experience of The Trees I was pretty wary but ultimately really enjoyed this and ordered two more Everett novels as a result.
I Am Not Sidney Poitier by Percival Everett
Dramatization of the philosophy of nonsense. Read the final 150 pages on the porch on a long, lazy, still, temperate, and toward evening slightly inebriated mid-July Saturday. Once Not Sidney goes to college it takes off and deepens, with the introduction of Percival Everett the nonsensical professor and a girlfriend from a wealthy, conservative, “coffee with cream” family. The scenes at their home in DC, the racism and opportunism toward the darker, richer Not Sidney, the Thanksgiving dinner, all seemed enough to base a great novel around, like an all-black version of Get Out. The professor’s — and the novel’s — nonsense making sense reductio ad absurdum-wise regarding for example race.
But I think maybe I don’t respond so well to Everett’s cartoonish depictions of rednecks and hillbillies. The second section when he’s arrested in Alabama for being black and sentenced to a work camp, and then escapes chained to a redneck, all that had me wondering if I was going to be able to read this. I watched a scene on YouTube of Sidney Poitier saying “they call me Mr. Tibbs” that’s described in the book and echoed later, modified to “they call me Mr. Poitier,” and you can see the sort of ’60s depiction of deep-country cops that must have made an impression on Everett’s imagination.
Dream sequences always had me semi-accelerating my reading pace since they seemed long and unrelated to the text — after I finished I did some googling and learned that the book is filled with references to Sidney Poitier movies, none of which I’ve seen in the modern era (although I do remember watching something with him on TV when I was kid — and my mom talking about him the way she now talks about Idris Elba). I’m sure if you’re familiar with Poitier’s films the dream sequences and the chapter structuring seem like more than nonsense, but for me it seemed unnecessary, excessive, a meta/referential level that sorta confounds what’s otherwise an enjoyable satirical coming-of-age novel about an orphaned intelligent handsome young black man who happens to have a ton of $$$ and somehow lives with Ted Turner, who’s always fun in this, always interjecting little random observational questions that come to mind.
Amusing throughout with a few actual LOLs. Definitely not put off by this — will keep reading Everett. I admire the clear, straightforward dramatization that steadies his satirical spirit and imagination, and the generally lighthearted but then sometimes suddenly sneakily intense illustrations of racial and class-related complexities. Based on only two of his novels (I’ve so far only otherwise read Telephone), he also seems to layer on a theoretical level that doesn’t do much to help what’s otherwise a strong enjoyable narrative.
Dr. No by Percival Everett
Enjoyable, easy reading. Short chapters. Silly and then sometimes sneakily surprisingly serious and at times actually LOL. Philosophical satire of James Bond movies, maxing every iteration of the idea of “nothing” in an almost Abbott & Costello “who’s on first” sorta way. Big laughs during the scene when pulled over by state trooper. Would have been fun to have read this in Quincy, Mass. Another quirky professor, another mother who made millions in the stock market, another iteration of the line that God doesn’t exist but the devil does, and a few other cross-overs with the few other Everett novels I’ve read so far. Nothing is what the wealthy in this country want to happen, that status quo stasis is stored in a warehouse, otherwise filled with gold bars, in a box in Fort Knox. As a symbol, “nothing” works wonderfully well. But the novel itself, its mechanizations, its villainous characters, its governmental investigators, its extreme commitment to cinematic-friendly dramatization, its quirky nonsensical or obtuse and more or less meaningless mathematical dialogue, it’s all stronger in theory, theoretically, than in practice, in execution, as narrative, exactly unlike Telephone and I Am Not Sidney Poitier, the two others I’ve read so far, which excelled on the story level but seemed buttered up with an unnecessary theoretical high-falutin critical chum, something to elevate beyond simple story. In this, the story was intentionally meaningless and ridiculous but it was saved in many ways by its system of potential significance around the concept of “nothing”? Probably forgettable but enjoyable while it lasted.
Erasure by Percival Everett
Straight-up wonderful reading for the most part, excellent depiction of family dynamics (father, mother, brother, sister) and careerist writerly market expectations regarding race (seems more than a decade ahead of its time), the short chapters organized into multiple shorter sections without seeming necessarily fragmented, and of course the narrator’s a classic: Thelonious “Monk” Ellison feels absolutely real, a realer straighter-up version of the author’s other auto-depictions of gnomic befuddled possibly neurodivergent professors. Wish I’d read this long ago.
I’d rank this tied with Telephone atop the handful of Everett novels I’ve read recently, but my reading was complicated by having watched American Fiction twice, also by skipping the 70-page “My Pafology” section jammed in the middle of the book before returning to it once I’d finished everything else.
Loved “American Fiction,” watched with my mom while drinking a few favorite beers the night my father died in late March, and again with my wife about a month ago. When wife asks what sort of movie I want to watch, how I want to feel, lately I’ve said something like American Fiction. Really loved it, and so reading the novel on which it’s based I couldn’t help but read it through the filter of adaptation, which I suppose is a sort of “erasure,” the images I would’ve conjured erased in advance by Jeffrey Wright’s embodiment of Monk, but also all the elements in the novel the film erased, the wood-working thread, the fly-fishing thread, the sister’s murder, the great scene with the mother out in a boat on the pond, all the DC stuff transposed to Boston, the white writer woman who wants to use Monk for sex, all those elements in the novel that the film erased, although I really feel like the film improved on the book in a lot of ways.
Having read a handful of Everett novels in a row I’m accustomed to theoretical add-ons, often-italicized bits working conceptual angles, propping up the narrative with — to my mind — unnecessary theoretical support (“maybe I have misunderstood my experiments all along, propping up, as if propping up is needed, the artistic traditions that I have pretended to challenge” – pg 156).
There’s something interesting about that “pretend challenge,” something between audacity, wonkiness, and a lack of self-confidence maybe? But generally it always strikes me as something that could be cut without sacrificing anything, anything other than a commonality among his novels that make them what they are, or make Percival Everett who he is, almost like these curlicues are fated, embedded in his fancy old-fashioned first name?
In The World According to Garp there’s a novella by TS Garp presented whole, something about a pair of gloves, that I could not get through when I tried to read it twenty years ago. I had such trouble with it, I wound up putting the book down. This time, confronted with “My Pafology,” I read a few pages and then saved it for later. Which is a recommended move. It really could’ve been included as an appendix? When I ultimately read it, the writing was better in “My Pafology” than expected, the rhythms and phonetic spellings right on, or at least tight and readable and cinematic, the way a lot of Everett’s work is readable and, suitable for a writer based in LA, film-ready in a way.
I’ll otherwise wait to read James until it’s in paperback and will probably hold off for a while on his other stuff (So Much Blue?) but I’ve enjoyed this little summer reading session. Would rank the novels I read thusly: 1) Telephone and Erasure (considered with American Fiction) tied, 2) I Am Not Sidney Poitier, 3) Dr. No, and then a distant 4) Percival Everett by Virgil Russell (interestingly confabulatory and confounded through the first half but then confusing in such a way that closed up for me — thought it’d be more affecting on the dying father front but too many games and random stories, with only the paternity thread really of interest: shruggies!) followed by a distant 5) The Trees, which I tried twice but thought it seemed to satirize the popculturalization of atrocity, with intentionally cartoonish characters and dialogue (“oh lawdy!”). Considering everything Erasure‘s about, it seems that with The Trees readers are playing interpretative checkers while the author’s playing chess, that is, Everett’s anticipating and to a degree satirizing in advance a laudatory response to a schlocky page-turnery cartoon that’s deemed “relevant” thanks to magical 2666-ish inclusion of Emmett Till. I tend not to read or favor predominantly dialogue page-turners with cartoonish characters, not even if they suggest hefty ever-present history. I admired the conception generally but read ~50 pages in ~20 minutes and put it down disappointed.
The Material by Camille Bordas
Secondary meanings of the title suggest the essential substance, the whole cloth from which the final product/performance takes form, the humanity that yields the humor. Third-person POV moving through a handful of teachers and students’ lives, minds, and histories, way more interior and questioning than expected, scenes opened with amusing musings, observations (eg, how watching TV in English with English subtitles on sort of feels like watching with another person), and insightful conclusions. Set in Chicago but more so seems to exist in an idealized space for lecture and discussion, the pages like classroom and stage. Also very much recommend the author’s semi-recent story in The New Yorker, Colorin Colorado, which I’ve never read but have listened to twice.
The Moon Is Down by John Steinbeck
Fantastic Antifa lit. The first five chapters are perfect. The rest get a little muddled sometimes with characters and machinations but the end is strong. Applicable to any country occupied by foreign invaders. Sensed the resonance of contemporary relevance. Exemplary humanization of evil enemy. Liberal humanism uber alles. Exceeded expectations. Had no idea what it was about. Skipped the intro until I finished the text.
Morning and Evening by Jon Fosse (translation by Damion Searls, read by Kåre Conradi)
Loved the audiobook narration, wonderfully read, rhythmic, modulated, spiced with Norwegian pronunciation (“lure” pronounced like “luhhurle”), generally loved the two hours listening to this via Spotify while driving to and fro a swanky Whole Foods five miles away via winding wooded roads on a bright clear midday, while folding three loads of my own and my daughter’s laundry in the early evening, while driving on a dark gloomy morning to and fro the gym where I listened to this on noise-canceling headphones while strengthening my aging corpus on my first of an unheard-of twelve consecutive days off.
The experience of listening to something like this is different than when seated stationary at home or reclined in bed. It’s about death but filled with sensations of life, and it makes you aware of the fact that you’re alive, moving about, doing what needs to be done or what you want to do. There’s a heaviness to it and a lightness to it, the way Johannes begins to note that everything seems heavier and lighter simultaneously. Heavy in that it’s about birth, death, love, and the process of crossing over to the afterworld; light in that its details are slight, morning coffee, a cigarette, brown cheese on stale bread, fishing, a boat, an old friend, a daughter.
Lots of casual rhythmic repetition in the language, not overdone, not quite biblical but along those lines, suggestive of biblical prosody but only suggestive. Again, I listened to this, so didn’t sit silently and look at the text. Listening to it, I heard how elements of Fosse’s style that I found irritating or affected in The Other Name or The Shining ideally sound, how reliant on rhythm the language is, and how it at best manages to work in a space between this world and the next, or another spiritual plane, albeit one that’s mystical and Christian. Which nevertheless puts me off — I’m fine with a sort of literary mysticism but not this sort of Christian mysticism. Feels evangelical sometimes.
But the main issue I have with this and Fosse generally is the total humorlessness. There’s a sense that this is serious dramatization of the mysteries of life and death, this is what literature is, this is “how it is.” It’s set in some period before contemporary culture infected everything, there’s electricity and social security but it feels set in the same setting as Growth of the Soil. This is a sensibility that knows Beckett but not Beckett’s humor, knows Kafka but not Kafka’s humor, knows Ibsen but never heard of Monty Python, and so its mythic mystical humorless Christianity, although solid and almost moving at times, is too elevated to feel true to life? But humor would surely break its spell, right? Which is what it’s trying to do, cast an incantatory spell, right? I understand that Fosse is not trying to write maximalist absurdist revved-up realism, and I’m not saying I want that from him, but I feel like even in Tarjei Vesaas’s The Birds there’s some humor, or at least good-spirited affection for the characters, an inherent feeling en route to humor? But again generally I loved listening to the audiobook, appreciated its effect, and will listen to other shorter Fosse recordings once my 15-free audiobook hours refresh.
The Maniac by Benjamín Labatut
Not a novel, maybe not “literature,” but some damn fine pop-science writing. Downed it in days. Reminded me of Good Will Hunting (sans Minnie Driver and Ben Affleck and friends, just the math), biopics like Money Ball (if just about the math and the A’s), any number of Netflix documentaries about obsessives (each with their parade of all-star testaments about the titular character), Wikipedia entries (fully absorbed and artfully optimized herein), etc.
Not sure about the comparisons to Sebald and Bolano — the polyphonic structure in the second section with various associates etc retelling tales about von Neumann, feels nothing like The Savage Detectives (what I’ve read of it at least). The polyphonic structure also preexisted Bolano. And there’s nothing particularly Sebaldian about anything, particularly the pace of the prose (Max’s prose is famously “lugubrious,” molasses-like, glinting with unexpected humor, indirectly gesturing toward the history of atrocity). Labatut is a genius re-teller of tales about geniuses, his prose is flowing, energetic, perfectly clear and direct (particularly evocative and teleportive when writing about the A-bomb and hydrogen bomb tests). But he’s not really a poet, he’s not at all elusive or suggestive or “gesturing” toward something — themes are aired and elucidated and repeated.
The polyphonic structure allows Labatut to present stretches of essayistic first-person telling often relaying information and quotations available online without overburdening the text. The voices also sound 95% the same, with minor variation, other than one voice that’s clearly New Yorky and another that’s spare, with sentence fragments arranged like little stanzas, which made those pages fly by at just the right time in the novel, maybe 65% through. The book is nicely aerated at regular intervals with blank or nearly blank pages, including a stretch or two with only a line of italicized text, accelerating one’s reading progress in a way that’s always appreciated, or maybe like one of those Go moves DeepMind makes that don’t do much but add almost imperceptibly to the final positive outcome.
In my review of his previous book I wrote “An entertainment for the educated who want their fiction to educate and entertain.” And this one is more of the same sort of educated entertainment about intelligence so advanced it’s nearly artificial, approaching god-like, and leads to the advent of AI itself.
In a way it’s a book about the following famous DFW quotation: “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being . . . I just think that fiction that isn’t exploring what it means to be human today isn’t good art.” So in that sense, thematically, it’s “literature,” it’s good art, in that it’s exploring what it means to be human, but unlike when reading fiction the human reading this doesn’t really co-create it or need to do much work, it’s all received intelligence, an entertainment therefore like a riveting documentary you can stream and chill on the couch with or a page-turner thriller or other genre novel wherein the reader’s pleasure derives in part from submitting to passivity and pace, to letting oneself be entertained. The prose in this often felt similarly, like you just had to press “play” on the text and it read itself. I can’t imagine I’d ever re-read this to achieve some deeper resonance or excavate some meaning I missed on first read.
Would love to see Labatut write a fully “fictional” novel, write about someone who’s not extraordinary, without Wikipedia pages or sources or memoirs to draw on — that is, would love to see what he does with a normal everyday life, an average Joe, he conceives from a composite of memory and imagination. Writing about geniuses, the way Zwieg often wrote excellent, supremely readable biographies about geniuses (eg, his masterbuilders books, like Hölderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche: The Struggle with the Daemon), often comes off seeming smart, by definition, but Zwieg also wrote excellent fiction about total normies.
Another thing I thought about was how autobiography/memoir (essentially creative non-fiction) often takes shelter under the inclusive, welcoming term “fiction,” almost like a legal term suggesting that creative liberties have been taken, we’re not going to include a goddamn reference list at the end or footnotes/annotations, it might be 95% true to life but the other 5% the author fudged or imagined for the art of it, also in part so it could be listed as fiction and thereby expand the notion of what a novel is.
The last section about DeepMind playing Go against the South Korean master who shares a name with me was riveting, unputdownable, totally excellent, perfect (stayed up too late one night to finish it) and easily could’ve appeared in any magazine as a non-fiction feature. But it wouldn’t suit the fiction slot in an issue of The New Yorker or Harper’s, right?
BUT THEN I WATCHED THE ALPHAGO DOCUMENTARY AND REALIZED he just sort of transcribed the documentary, used it as source material and ran it through his human intelligence to create the last section of the book. Very generously, this could be seen as a commentary on AI’s use of source material, or it could be seen almost as a sort of plagiarism? Makes me want to find some other videos with 30+ million views and then turn them into text. Very much makes me question my valuation of the whole section, although I enjoyed those pages, almost as much as I enjoyed watching the doc. See for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXuK6…
So, the middle section about von Neumann started to agitate me about midway through and could’ve been forty pages shorter, and I mostly found myself more interested in questions about genre than anything the book was raising about human intelligence, morality, computers, self-replicating machines, AI, etc, but overall this is definitely a “good read.”
Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger
Re-read after ~22 years. First time through I remember finishing it on the NYC subway and loving it, just completely latched on and charmed and then of course loving the resolution. Acquired for $1 a sixth edition hardback from the early 1960s (the two parts first appeared in the New Yorker in ’55 and ’57 and the book was published in ’61) in really good condition at the local library’s biannual booksale and then re-read it on a whim, having remembered it fondly. Loved right away being back uptown with educated exceptional kids on the verge of (or one step beyond) a nervous breakdown. So much talk and smoke. I pretty much agree with the self-criticisms in the first three introductory pages of Zooey, when Buddy Glass the narrator directly addresses the reader about these prose home movies, saying there’s too much nose-blowing and mysticism and they’re unfair to Bessie the mom. I found myself charmed but impatient with the descriptions of gestures and movements and postures and cigarette and cigar smoking consistently interrupting the dialogue, as though the narrator, or the author really, wanted to monologue but knew for the sake of dramatization that these interstitial descriptions needed to be interstitched. Many of these are fine and character-revealing and world-building or even almost funny and all underpin a sense that the story is real, that the Glasses are a real family, that the newspaper spread out on the floor to catch stray paint dripping from the painters in the apartment really does show Stan Musial holding up a brook trout of exactly 14 inches, that these are really home movies rendered in prose.
Feels real throughout but at the same time fictional — I was surprised when I checked Salinger’s Wikipedia page and saw that he only had one sibling, an older sister. But I think also that the impatience I felt through the long opening bathtub scene with Zooey and Bessie, and then the long dialogue with Zooey and Franny in the over-bright room with Franny sobbing on the couch with Bloomberg the cat, my impatience was engineered by the author to create pressure so when they have their breakthroughs, when they get to monologue for a goddamn second without interruption the reader feels a similar breaking through, a release, similar to the relief when the first bathtub scene ends and we’re out of that goddamn tight enclosure for once. And so at the end when Zooey calls Franny pretending to be Buddy and Franny goes off on how Zooey’s the one who’s losing it, not Franny, and then Zooey ends the call with the whole thing about shining your shoes for Seymour’s fat lady, and how Seymour had told something similar to Franny, and they both imagined a similar woman listening to the radio afflicted with cancer, and Franny particularly finally understands what Zooey’s been saying about Christ consciousness, something about the clarity of the prose, the perfection of the image of Seymour’s fat lady, and the uninterrupted connection between brother and sister and their influential yet dead older brother (see “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”), it really does feel cathartic for everyone involved, the story’s mysteries (re)solved, more like a multilevel family love story than a mystical story, per the introduction to Zooey.
The end is so good, so flat-out great, I decided to re-rate the book five stars, really mostly for that conclusion and its self-contained particular world, the commitment to it, the glare and the smoke and the paint fumes in the room, plus the airing and handling on its ideas, the mysticism that will become widespread with the beats and the Beatles later in the decade. Not sure how many readers these days would feel like all the pages building pressure are worth the release, and I often sort of vacillated on re-read, having forgotten most of Zooey, other than that there was something glorious at the end I remembered reading circa 2002 on the subway heading uptown, something I knew everything was headed for, despite the many sidings and stops along the way.
Other Minds and Other Stories by Bennett Sims
Love the early stories in this: Unknown, Pecking Order, Other Minds, and The New Violence. Almost Hitchcockian at times, anxiety induced by commonly underlined passages in an ebook, letting someone at a mall use your phone. The chicken descriptions in Pecking Order were spot on (we have a coop in the backyard) and the story overall ridiculously gory fun, reminiscent of Mishima’s Patriotism. (Our chickens are my wife’s responsibility but I’m sure if we ever have to put them down the task will fall to me.) Ordered the author’s previous collection immediately after finishing that story. The stories upfront seemed more engaging, compelling, “greater” etc, than the often denser, paragraphless, quasi-Sebaldian, abstracted pages in the latter stories. But I appreciated the carefully constructed phrases throughout even if I didn’t always have the necessary patience.
Cheap Therapist Says You’re Insane by Parker Young
Fun, approachable, enjoyable collection of stories, each about the length of an ideal online literary submission (<2K words). If I were still reading submissions for the site I edited from 1999 to 2014 or so, I probably would’ve accepted 90% of them — not that the 10% were lame or anything, just that most of these surprised in a way I liked to be surprised. The stories about writing I loved, each and every one of them. (Also the page about Lance Stephenson. Which reminds me that the publisher, who long ago contributed to the site I used to edit, once published a memoir that included a bit about Sedale Threatt. Which makes me think I should write a collection of very short stories, each about a single player, starting with one about Latrell Sprewell.) The story “May 24” I felt subtweeted my last two novels, as well as my forthcoming one, all of which take place on specific days (March 18, Dec 28, June 16) — this bit from that story particularly hit me hard (made me laugh aloud etc): “It would have been an evil book, about the writer’s supposedly superior means of moving through the world, transforming mundane experience into high culture, and I would have been forced to renounce it eventually.” The final story, “The Story behind the Stories,” I loved too, the way it shot ahead at a crazy pace, like Voltaire’s Candide — particularly loved the bit about friends with agents and Denis Johnson asking the narrator to leave his farm. Reminded me somewhat of Eli S. Evans’s Obscure & Irregular, in good humor, accelerated pace, upright prose posture, and relentless narrative swerve.
Exhibition Text by D. Frederick Thomas
Beguiling, intriguing, straightforward yet sort of intentionally artistically blurred philosophical novella — it’s structured as thirteen single-paragraph chapters of what felt like consistent length about preparing to fly from Australia to Baltimore to write about a friend’s art exhibition, the air travel, the arrival and jet lag, viewing the art piece, traveling by train from Baltimore to NY, and then some time with the narrator’s parents, who are both engaged in extended, abstract/symbolic projects, the mother weaving (what she refers to as an Annunciation even if it’s not an Annunciation, that is, an announcement that’s not an announcement of the arrival of something momentous) on an enormous loom in the narrator’s former bedroom, the father creating a camera obscura.
The single-paragraph style prose is effective, more like Fosse than Bernhard, softer, straighter, consistently pitched and paced, also absolutely flowing and clear, allowing it to work some magic every once in a while when for example relating a film he’s watching on the plane involving someone able to move backwards through time, or when he experiences the art piece’s unusual effect, or when he questions everything that’s occurring to him on this disquieting dissociative travel back to his homeland.
There’s generally a sort of “high lit affectation” or old-style prose presentation, for example with characters’ names only bearing the first capital letter and then _____, a texture I liked, quasi-humorous recognition of its old-timey Euro influences. Feels like a contemporary Kafka-type piece, everything straightforward, not particularly exaggerated, but off, swerved, skewed, suggestive of some great yet elusive significance. A recommended unconventional well-written “literary” novella from a small Australian press that I believe primarily publishes poetry.
36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem by Nam Le
TFW that guy from your MFA, dude you were in three of four workshops with, goes on to publish with a major prestigious NYC publisher a collection consisting solely of the stories he put up — probably the best of which hinges on a scene from life involving you in somewhat different elevated form — that goes on to win several awards (see The Boat) but then dude is nearly silent for 15+ years before publishing an 88-page hardcover collection of poems in a glossy dust-jacket from Knopf blurbed by a Nobel laureate, Nick Cave, and other luminaries. I don’t read enough poetry, really, to effectively analyze these titrative analectics. Maybe it could be reduced to meta political identity formalism? A+ formal variation, A+ thematic elaboration. Dug the pages in mock slam voice, the flushing out of stereotypes, the “violence” of translation. I imagine this will be studied in schools.
Splinters by Leslie Jamison
I first met the author 20 years ago at ye olde graduate school when she was 21 years old. More recently, I acquired this and discovered that all has not been particularly right on the relationship front for her but she’s managed to write her way out of it, or at least has managed to turn her pain into a hard-to-put-down, well-sequenced “pleasure,” although that’s not the word for the experience of reading this. It’s more like rubbernecking a trainwreck but simultaneously receiving a massage in the form of consistently and intelligently rendered perception? Her writing career seems to a degree at this point compelled by necessity to eat her life alive? Or, more so, the instinct and intellect that drives her writing is the source of and cure for all her problems. Would love to read an online supplement presenting C, the tumbleweed, and the ex-philosopher’s side of things in their own words. I also came away from this somewhat concerned about all the gummy candy she seems to eat. In the best possible way, I hope she doesn’t experience anything worth writing about for a while.
Address Unknown by Kathrine Kressmann Taylor
A short epistolary story, airily formatted to achieve slim volume-dom, totally satisfying and unputdownable after a point. Pretty much perfectly done. Recommended to fans of fraudulent felonious wannabe autocrats, and all those who oppose them.
The Silver Snarling Trumpet by Robert Hunter (read by Fred Berman)
Absolutely exceeded expectations, about as good as a young man’s autobiographical novel like this could be, a memoir of madcap Holy Fool bohemian young intellectual searchers, especially worthwhile now as the pendulum swings toward oppressive conservative conformity. This would be worth it as a historical document even if the narrator and the main character didn’t go on to write some songs together. Humorous shades of Melville and epic poetry in the DNA of the prose, humorous because it’s justa poet, a writer, and a guitar player, mostly, also a sax player and a few other weirdos, hanging out, philosophizing/jabbering at cafes. Late teens, early ’60s, post-Beat, pre-hippie, no drugs or anti-war movement or anything other than chasing their quixotic white whale they call The Scene, always on guard against the conventional temptations of “security.”
Interstitial dream sequence bloviation mars the story, a texture that was easy enough to half listen to on audiobook but the sort of thing I’d’ve skimmed if reading in print, and you’re only allowed one “lapis lazuli” and “idly wandered” per book, but even so the humor (a delightful, truly LOL scene with “Tom” early on), free associative exuberant dialogue, general crazed high-minded anti-“security” spirit, and simple wonderful characterization throughout make this a winner.
The contextual intro and outro by Dennis McNally and Barbara Meier are worth a listen. Jerry, apparently, was always Jerry, the focal point of the scene even if being the center of things wasn’t his intention as much as living in the here and now and playing music. Also interesting in that the action picks up soon after the car crash Jerry and Alan Trist were in that killed their friend and made Jerry think he better start taking his music more seriously. But overall, if you have a Spotify account, it’s worth ~six hours of your time. And if you’re still interested, also recommended are ~three hours of related interviews with Alan Trist and Barbara Meier and others spread across two episodes of the Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast.
Proust: The Search by Benjamin Taylor
Loved this short bio focused on Proust’s transition from social-climbing gadabout dilettante to the next Stendhal thanks to the conception, execution, and reception of In Search of Lost Time, his “telescope fixed upon time.”
The prose is dignified, flowing, accessible, not quite aping Proust but in a similar direction, with a similar spirit. It’s also not at all fawning or overcelebratory or sensationalist — a few times it calls out Marcel for being foolish to suggest that he’d pay for printings of his books, for example, and there’s a bit about Marcel’s penchant for autoerotic manual manipulation while two starved caged rats are released to eviscerate one another. The author gapes aghast along with the reader. A percentage of the text is dedicated to inversion, mostly in terms of source material for his great inverts, but most of it focuses on the budding and flowering of The Search, for example Marcel’s pivotal translations of John Ruskin (downloaded the complete Ruskin ebook for $2 as a result):
“Art divinizes, according to Ruskin, according to Proust. Of course the great difference between them was, as Tadie says, that the ‘Bible lay at the heart of Ruskin’s aesthetics; it was his religious fervor that had guided his religious feelings; Proust would retain the divine without the religion.’ Judaism and Christianity, the enemy creeds of Marcel’s maternal and paternal ancestors, had beautifully canceled out in him. He was what he would remain: a congregation of one.”
Of course it’s also compelling to learn about the provenance of the little phrase in the sonata, or that the source model for Albertine was actually an Alfred, or that the primary model for Charlus is the same as Des Esseintes in Huysman’s Against Nature (Au Rebours).
Also confirms that Swann’s Way and Time Regained were composed simultaneously — one day I intend to read The Search backwards, or at least start with TR and then SW before reading the others. Will most likely read the Tadie bio at one point but not right away. For now, this more than sufficed as an introduction to Proust’s life. Also worth it for descriptions of his late-life appearance as a sort of Jewish Howard Hughes, emaciated, his paper-thin skin blue, his eyes in profile almost Asian, and the bit about his bathetic late-life encounter with James Joyce, not to mention elucidation of the social repercussions/semi-hysterical antisemitism of the Dreyfus Affair.
A beautiful hardback that’s aptly weightier than it should be in a book so slight, with deckled edges, and a sweet Philip Roth blurb on the back.
*
Previous irregularly issued end-of-year rundowns and prestigious award winners: 2023, 2021, 2018, 2017
