Yes, I’ve been neglecting my blog lately, a situation soon to be remedied. In the meantime, check out this piece by Louis Menand in the latest New Yorker. It’s about one of my favorite preoccupations, the literary marketplace, and not incidentally features an author I recently nominated for the Underrated Writers Project:

In 1987, Paco’s Story, by Larry Heinemann, won the National Book Award for Fiction. The acclaim that greeted this selection was less than universal, and the reason — no fault of Heinemann’s — is that 1987 was also the year of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Morrison’s novel was a finalist for the award, and it had been widely regarded as the favorite. We can assume that she was disappointed, and we know that her friends were, because, after Beloved also failed to win the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction (which went to Philip Roth’s The Counterlife), forty-eight of them published a statement in the Times Book Review. “Despite the international stature of Toni Morrison,” they complained, “she has yet to receive the national recognition that her five major works of fiction entirely deserve: she has yet to receive the keystone honors of the National Book Award or the Pulitzer Prize. We, the undersigned black critics and black writers, here assert ourselves against such oversight and harmful whimsy. The legitimate need for our own critical voice in relation to our own literature can no longer be denied.” A few months later, Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Five years after that, Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize.James English has a lot to say about this episode in The Economy of Prestige (Harvard; $29.95), his ingenious analysis of the history and social function of cultural prizes and awards.

(Perhaps this will go part of the way in explaining how I could describe a National Book Award winner as underrated. For a full understanding, read Close Quarters.)

From Larry Heinemann, Black Virgin Mountain: A Return to Vietnam (2005):

At the end of the summer [of 1968] I had no idea what I wanted to do …. I enrolled at Columbia College, a small arts school here in Chicago. The school had an open admissions policy — no SATs, no long drawn out selection process, no nothing; basically all you needed was a high school diploma and a checkbook. Since I had the GI Bill, I was money in the bank, and they were definitely glad to see me. I was one of the few veterans among the students. I took a writing course because everybody knew it was a snap “A” and you didn’t have to work; what the hell.* * *

Then the teacher cracked open a thickish-looking book and started reading a story about a bunch of guys on a ship out in the middle of the ocean somewhere; somebody sights a whale and everybody jumps on these little boats they have, and rows after it; one of the boat crews finally run it down, harpoon it, and the mate (smoking a pipe all the while) kills it by stabbing it in the heart with a lance longer than the spread of your arms while the animal thrashes around spitting up great shots of gore through its spout hole; and finally when one guy says that the whale is dead, the mate takes the pipe out of his mouth, sprinkles the dead ashes in the bright bloody water, and says, yes, both pipes are smoked out.

You could have heard a pin drop in that room, and I’m thinking, that’s a body count story. I was never much of a scholar, much less a student of anything, and I asked, what story was that? Well, of course, it was Melville’s Moby-Dick, and the teacher looked at me like I was some wandering alien just in off the street.

* * *

Melville’s novel is about a lot of things (including a deep understanding of and pleasure in American English and the tall tale as a story form, the same as Whitman and Twain), but it’s also a shitty-job story; reading it, you get a keen appreciation why the passing of that work of slaughterhouse butchery is not mourned.

* * *

And I took my cue from Melville. Look at it this way: at one level being a soldier is just like any other work with its rules and results, punch-in and punch-out, make-work nonsense and shortcuts, and such. Do a job right and there is almost a physical satisfaction; but how can a soldier feel good about the work he does — combat as work simply cannot be as satisfying in that way as ordinary-wages work. War produces an astonishing, pervasive ugliness, and that’s all. To my mind a soldier’s job is never done well, simply done with.

I would write about how the war worked; barracks language and barracks life; what the tracks were, what it was like to run the roads, and what it was like to plow your way through the woods, making your own road by knocking down trees one after another; how ambushes were supposed to go and what happened when an ambush went terribly wrong; the firefights and battles and what happened after ….

Heinemann’s first novel, Close Quarters, was published in 1977. It is being reissued as a Vintage paperback in August 2005 to coincide with the publication of Black Virgin Mountain.

A little later today I’ll have my review of the Chicago Tribune’s Sunday book section. While the book section was pretty thin — the theme this week was baseball books — the cover story of the Sunday magazine focused on Chicago novelist Larry Heinemann, whose new book, Black Virgin Mountain: A Return to Vietnam, comes out on Friday. I’ve been immersed in Heinemann, Vietnam novels, and war novels in general over the past couple of months, so I’ve got some observations to share about that. I also did a piece on Heinemann’s new book for Chicago Public Radio, which is supposed to air this coming Sunday.

As my events list shows, this week and next represent the peak of the spring literary season in Chicago, with thirty-odd events over the next 14 days. If you could be several places at one time, you’d get a good year’s worth of literary events on Tuesday alone, with Hemon at Northwestern, Winterson at the Newberry, Elizabeth Gaffney at Barbara’s in Oak Park, and Pierre Joris down in Hyde Park. Toward the end of the week, it’s poetry, poetry, poetry. (See the right-hand column for links.)

Joris (bio) lectures on Celan on Tuesday afternoon and reads from his own poetry, as part of the Poem Present series, on Wednesday night. This is the literary event of the spring, as far as I’m concerned. (A melancholy thought: I said the same thing at about this time last year.)