Three things I’m looking forward to:
* Frank Kermode writing about B.S. Johnson in next issue of the London Review of Books.
* Reading Carol Shield’s “Segue,” a chapter from her unfinished novel found in the posthumous Collected Stories recently published in the UK and Canada (but not the US, strangely).
* The Summer Issue of the Chicago Review, with a special section on Christopher Middleton. (Hmnn … maybe it’s out already.)
From Allan Seager, Amos Berry (1953):
Along about this time they had invited the Rickerts over for dinner. I had been out somewhere and I came in about 10 o’clock. In the friendliest voice she had used to me in weeks, she asked me to come into the living room and join them. They had the bridge table set up and they were drinking Scotch and soda out of Mother’s best tall crystal glasses. I could tell right away I had been entered in a contest. The Rickerts had only one child, a fat girl named Linda whom they had shipped back East to school, and my mother was going to “come it over them” by showing them unobtrusively how wonderful it was to have a splendid son. It was my cue to look good and I didn’t mind at all because you like to show off at that age and you always take your parents’ part against outsiders. Walt Rickert asked me questions about sports and colleges and courses of study and at last he said, “What are you going to do when you finish college?” and I said without any hesitation, “I’m going to be a poet.”
That lost my parents the contest. Walt Rickert laughed until the tears ran down his face. My father’s face had a kind of smile but my mother’s face was blank and closed as it always was when she was furious. I stood there blushing and hating every one of them because I thought I was making a right answer. I still believed what they said in high school which was, that poetry was fine and to write it was honorable at least. I shouldn’t have done any thinking.
Can there really be a restaurant called A Rebours? After reading that review I might be tempted to go to St. Paul, but it would be madness to risk spoiling such an unforgettable experience by a clumsy change in locality.
I think I’m going to open a restaurant in Chicago called Mort à Credit.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t believe I’ve ever mentioned Dale Peck on this blog. That’s mostly because every time I consider it I hear a little Johnsonian voice in my head:
I would advise you Sir, to study algebra, if you are not already an adept in it: your head would be less muddy, and you will leave off tormenting your neighbours about PECK, while we all live together in a world that is bursting with sin and sorrow.
Nevertheless, I’m going to make an exception today because Robert McFarlane has some really useful things to say in this week’s TLS:
The recurrent problem with Peck’s denunciations of bad writing, however, is that they are themselves badly written. He excels at the metaphoric mix-up. In an aggressive essay on Sven Birkerts he warns that “a critic whose own hands are stained with so much carelessly spilled ink ought to be more careful about the mud he flings”. Just so. In a self-justifying afterword concerning his critical belligerence, he observes that: “My sharpest barbs tend to be directed at writers I genuinely admire, or in whom I see genuine, wasted talent. This is because I think of myself as kind of mother hen, not so much of writers, but of the novel itself. Fiction is like dance: it’s susceptible to the egos of its practitioners.” Faced with this paragraph — moving as it does with such spellbinding clumsiness between harpooning, poultry and dance — one might conclude that Dale Peck is not a man to trust on matters of literary tone.
Exactly! I must admit, though, that I’ve read essays by Peck that don’t include these faults, which means I’m continually trying to decide whether he’s a buffoon or a serious critic. I’m not bothered by his much-commented-on cruelty; the bigger problem for me is his bad writing and (since they’re inseparable) bad thinking.
McFarlane is also good on James Wood, whom he (and I) prefers to Peck, though not without reservations:
What shaped the nineteenth-century novel, Wood declares, was that it had something to push against — something “to comprehend and to resist.” By implication, the contemporary novel has nothing to “resist”; there are no new forces of “oppression.” Existing as it does within a frictionless torrent of trivia, it has lost its shape and its purpose; or rather, it has become a muscle-bound, brainless parody of itself, bulked up on the steroids of data and story. But, what, one wants to ask Wood, of the “oppressions” which have so palpably afflicted the past forty years? The oppressions of rapacious consumerism, say, or of autocratic governments, or, at the level of the individual, of depression.
McFarlane may be overstating the case, but there’s a more than a kernel of truth here. Just because novelists aren’t resisting doesn’t mean there’s nothing to resist. And too, I like his summary of Wood’s notion of “hysterical realism.”
Finally, McFarlane turns to Critics at Work, a volume of sixteen interviews with American “cultural critics,” which for him immediately provokes “a nostalgic fondness for Dale Peck.” Says McFarlane, “The content of the interviews falls short even of the entertainment so awkwardly advertised by their titles.”
I’ve often felt the same about academic papers. If it’s imagination you’re after, you’ll find more of it in fiction and poetry; if you want funny, clever, or topical, you’ll have better luck with the popular press. Why should someone who’s spent a lifetime understanding, say, Proust, want to bore us with his jokes and puns? Ugh! Is there a scholar in the house? What do you have to tell us about Proust?
Not sure why this turned into a rant, but there you have it …
Finally came across an online version of James Atlas’s review of Langer’s Crossing California, which I mentioned the other day. I found this courtesy of Jim Coan’s Fiction Review Source, a fine site that provides a chronological listing of book reviews in major newspapers that have online editions.
There is a modest literary subgenre—still insufficiently robust to affiliate with the city’s great lineage of Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Richard Wright and, of course, Bellow—that might be labeled Chicago post-1960s fiction. I would list the Hyde Park novels “Endless Love,” by Scott Spencer, and “Family Pictures,” by Sue Miller; the stories of Stuart Dybek, Alexander Hemon and Maxine Chernoff; Rich Cohen’s “Lake Effect,” an account of growing up on the North Shore in the 1980s (a memoir, but let’s include it anyway).
To this slowly growing shelf should now be added “Crossing California.” Adam Langer has achieved the considerable feat of writing a novel that’s at once comic and bleak, and that captures, in the stalled careers and thwarted longings and failed relationships of its characters, the pathos and sadness of life.
Yesterday, reading Waggish Reads Proust, I came across this quotation:
The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance.
The passage comes from the opening chapter of Swann’s Way (page 20 in my Moncrieff, page 27 in Waggish’s Kilmartin), the first book of Proust’s multivolume masterpiece. But it immediately reminded me of my favorite aphorism from Flaubert:
Comme l’on serait savant si l’on connaissait bien seulement cinq á six livres! (How wise one might be if one knew only some half-dozen books well!)
I first saw the Flaubert in Nabokov’s essay “Good Readers and Good Writers,” in Lectures on Literature. Coming across the same sentiment in Proust raised some suspicions — I’m always suspicious when it comes to Nabokov — and I thought I’d try to track down the source.
Nab says it comes from “Flaubert in a letter to his mistress.” Sure enough, a little Googling comes up with the letter, dated 17 February 1853, to Louise Colet:
Tantôt j’ai fait un peu de grec et de latin, mais pas raide. Je vais reprendre, pour mes lectures du soir, les Morales de Plutarque. C’est une mine d’érudition et de pensées intarissable. Comme l’on serait savant, si l’on connaissait bien seulement cinq á six livres!
Plutarch’s Morals — who’da thought? Anyhow, Proust must have picked up the “few books” notion from his idol. Bien sûr, that means Nab is off the hook. I’ll get him next time.
Incidentally, I’d never read Flaubert’s letters before: charming stuff. Wouldn’t any letter of mine be improved by this closing?
Adieu, je n’ai rien á te dire; je n’ai pas l’énergie de t’écrire. Avant de reprendre mon travail, j’éprouve toujours ainsi des hébétements de tristesse. Ton souvenir vient par dessus et m’achéve. Je sais que cela passera, c’est ce qui me console. Il faut donner quelque peu á la faiblesse humaine et lâcher la bride á la mélancolie; c’est le moyen qu’elle soit plus calme. Adieu encore, mille baisers partout. Ma prochaine sera plus longue; et toi, écris-moi de longues lettres. Á toi, á toi. Ton Sam
Radio news: My review of Irene Zabytko’s When Luba Leaves Home is now available in the Hello Beautiful! archive (direct link here). I think it turned out ok, though I might add a little more Foster Hewitt next time around.
Speaking of next time around, if things go as planned I’ll be on the air again this week reviewing Ward Just’s new novel. That’s Sunday morning, 10 am Central, WBEZ 91.5 in Chicago. Also via Internet live feed. All the cool kids will be listening.
Incidentally, this past Sunday’s show had a great panel discussion on Millenium Park, featuring the irrepressible Stanley Tigerman. If you’re interested in such things, the segment should be up in the Hello Beautiful! archive this week or next.
While I’m on the subject of radio, on Thursday night Milt Rosenberg (WGN 720AM) is doing his quarterly book review show with critics Alan Gitelson, Dan Tucker, and Penelope Mesic.
I’m just starting in on the novels of B.S. Johnson, but so far I’m in agreement with Nicholas Lezard and The Complete Review: Johnson is surprisingly funny and accessible for an “experimental” writer. I’m reading Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, wherein bank-clerk hero Malry decides to approach his life as a balance sheet: every offense received is a debit, for which he is entitled to exact a payment (or credit). For example, he gets a piece of junk mail advertising flower bulbs. Feeling “slightly Debited at the waste of his time,” he “promptly Credited himself by sealing the envelope without putting anything in it and going out at once to post it.” The left side of the ledger records the debit:
May 3 | Bulb importuning | 0.03
And the right, the credit:
May 3 | Bulb firm’s reply-paid envelope returned empty | 0.03
Other debits include:
Oct 1 | Unpleasantness of Bank General Manager | 1.00
Oct-Apr | Branch atmosphere, as described | 4.50
Oct-Apr | Specific lambastings from Chief and Assistant Accountants | 2.30
May 3 | Unpleasantness felt in presence of Reverend | 0.04
June 2 | General diminution of Christie’s life caused by advertising | 50.00
The Complete Review has a good account of this book (Grade: A) on their Johnson page, but here’s another passage, highlighting the casualness (at least in this case) of Johnson’s “experimentation.” I also enjoyed the discussion between Christie and his mother regarding what the reader might want to know about her.
An attempt should be made to characterize Christie’s appearance. I do so with diffidence, in the knowledge that such physical descriptions are rarely of value in a novel. It is one of the limitations; and there are so many others. Many readers, I should not be surprised to learn if appropriate evidence were capable of being researched, do not read such descriptions at all, but skip to the next dialogue or more readily assimilable section. Again I have often read and heard said, many readers apparently prefer to imagine the characters for themselves. That is what draws them to the novel, that it stimulates their imagination! Imagining my characters indeed! Investing them with characteristics quite unknown to me, or even at variance with such descriptions as I have given! Making Christie fair where I might have him dark, for an instance, a girl when I have shown he is a man? What writer can compete with a reader’s imagination!Christie is therefore of average shape, height, weight, build, and colour. Make him what you will: probably in the image of yourself. You are allowed complete freedom in the matter of warts and moles, particularly; as long as he has at least one of either.
The following comes from the local papers last weekend. As always, get ‘em while they’re hot. (In other words, access time may expire in the very near future.)
* My favorite Tribune reviewer, Laura Demanski, reappears this week to consider Dan Chaon’s You Remind Me of Me: “I was constantly reminded, as I read, of E.M. Forster’s famous epigraph to Howards End: ‘Only connect.’ But what was for Forster a creed with redemptive power reads, in relation to this novel, like a desperate dream, the end of a plaintive sentence that begins, ‘If I could.’ Why, then, is this lonely novel’s aftertaste so sweet and mellow?” (On a completely trivial note, I didn’t realize Chaon was a Chicago native. And why am I so fascinated by that piece he did in the New York Times Magazine a few weeks ago, reproduced here?)
* Also in the Trib, Alan Cheuse has the first review of Craig Nova’s newest, Cruisers. “He is one of the country’s most gifted novelists, and in nearly a dozen books over the past few decades he has presented a fascinating picture of the skewed dimensions of American life, with his characters ranging from congressmen, to physicians and scientists, to arsonists, to figures from the everyday world we see around us. Each book has been different from every other in terms of character, and though Cruisers is not his broadest canvas, he does make up in intensity, especially in the scenes of naked violence, what he gives up in breadth.”
* Other stuff of interest from the Dark Tower: Zarena Aslami likes Mary Helen Stefaniak’s The Turk and My Mother. Carol Anshaw doesn’t buy Sabina Murray’s A Carnivore’s Inquiry. Hagar Scher surveys three recent novels by Jewish-American women, including Tova Mirvis, who Nextbook brought to Chicago back in May.
* Across the street, the short-timers at Sun-Times headquarters offer a couple of items of literary interest too. Roger Ebert reviews the new Bukowski documentary, which opened in town this week. I like both Ebert and Buk, but can the following be true? “He outsells Kerouac and Kesey, and his poems, it almost goes with saying, outsell any other modern poet on the shelf.” Elsewhere in the paper, our man Kisor says heads up for the new Marilynne Robinson novel, out in November.
When did Los Angeles become such a hotbed of literary events? In my day, we’d get Peter Reading with his broken boombox, and by god we were happy to have him!
During my time as an imaginary Angeleno, I also saw Paul Muldoon read at Loyola Marymount. An elderly woman in the audience kept telling him to speak up, and he kept saying but I am speaking up.
But forget that. In Chicago in July we’re drifting lazily in the literary doldrums, enjoying the weather and able to really pay attention to the occasional writer who passes through. This week it’s Ward Just, appearing at the Downtown Club tomorrow (reservations required), the Bookstall in Winnetka tomorrow night, and the Barbara’s in Oak Park on Thursday night.
As I’ve mentioned before, Just has a new novel: An Unfinished Season. Here’s a little bit:
My father paused there, rising, stepping to the terrace doors. He stood, rocking on his heels, then turned to the phonograph, silent these many minutes. He carefully set the needle down on the record and turned the volume low, so that when Gershwin’s music began again it was barely audible. He said, There will be some things in your life that you’ll never speak about. Not to your wife and not to your children, not to your closest friend. Not on your deathbed. Most often this will involve an episode that you’ll want to forget, something shameful or dishonorable. Maybe only something cheap, a failure of nerve or a failure to comprehend; a failure of character, in other words. But if you lead any sort of real life, you’ll have the other thing too. Something magnanimous, a large-hearted act committed when no one was looking and you won’t want to say anything about that either, because the words will stick in your throat. You’ll know what they are but there’s no reason for anyone else to know. Try to avoid being sloppy about things, Wils. Sometimes I think the only memories worth having are ones that are private.
