On a street called buy and sell
Sorry for the long absence. I’m starting a new job while at the same time winding down my old consulting practice. Basically means I have two full-time jobs through year’s end. Fortunately they exist in different time zones, so I can work from start-of-day ET to end-of-day PT. What fun we’re having!
Anyhow, no time at present to challenge Orthofer’s lukewarm review of The Tango Singer, refute Pete’s stubborn and inexplicable rejection of autobiographical fiction, or tell you how much I love certain poems you’ll find through July 6 in Chicago’s elevated train stations.
Re the last item, this one’s my favorite.
June 21st, 2006 09:49
Make that my stubborn and inexplicable rejection of WRITING autobiographical fiction. (I read plenty of it, most of it quite good–it’s just that my own life is hardly the stuff of great literature.) And yet, my resistance isn’t even particularly stubborn–in fact, my latest novel-in-progress even includes myself as a character, and is very loosely based on a summer I spent in Champaign. But that summer was so tediously dull that if I wrote a literal narrative of the experience it would be so relentlessly boring that even I wouldn’t want to read it. So I invented a bizarre, incorrigable, non-conformist (that is, everything I wasn’t as an MBA student) protagonist to drive the story forward.
All said, I’m not totally opposed to autobiographical fiction. I just can’t see the point of a writer like B.S. Johnson devoting most of his novel-writing efforts to the form; similarly, it seems pretty self-indulgent for writers like David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs making an entire career out of writing a series of memoirs, no matter how well written Sedaris’ and Burroughs’ (and Johnson’s) books are.
June 21st, 2006 10:33
Pete, you call me to my soapbox.
Label me a formalist – I’ve suffered worse – but I fail to see why any subject should be judged unfit for fiction. Last time I looked, the greatest novel of the past 100 years was about nothing more than a day in the life of an ordinary Dubliner. Come to think of it, the refutation your claim – that ordinary life is boring and unworthy as a subject of art – might reasonably be considered one of the greatest and most successful projects of 20th century literature.
Here’s why I enjoy autobiographical novels. All of us face the problem of making meaning out of our lives. This doesn’t, I should point out, necessarily involve creating a “story” to tell about yourself. It does, I think, require achieving enough distance, and enough coherence, around who, and why, and how you are so that you might finally be understood by another human being. The best autobiographical novels do that, and do it in a way pure autobiography cannot.
(This is also, by the way, why I think it’s stupid to denigrate readers who ask fiction writers about the autobiographical elements in their work. I wish more works of fiction were actually worthy of those kinds of questions.)
June 24th, 2006 18:22
I’m glad I found your blog. I almost packed my bags and moved to NYC. =)
June 26th, 2006 08:19
Thank you Sarah. I can only say: mission accomplished! In fact, one of the reasons I started this blog is that it took me ten years living in Chicago to find out about all this great stuff. That’s kind of how it is around here – you have to hang around a while for the city to reveal itself. I thought I’d speed up the process a bit, literarywise.