Promoting the Book (Inter Alia #5)

Last week, for the first time, I held in my hands a copy of my first book of fiction, A Field Guide to the North American Family. The experience is often likened to that of holding one's firstborn child, and if the comparison seems hyperbolic in terms of intensity - this was more of a low-boiling excitement than a world-altering epiphany - it seems to capture the peculiarly unmixed nature of the emotion. In the words of Edith Piaf, Non, je ne regrette rien.

And now it's time (as you've probably inferred), to promote this puppy, which should be hitting shelves in the early days of October. And what to do? The media industries are so saturated in advertising strategies that not to advertise has itself become an advertising strategy. It's no longer possible to be Thomas Pynchon or Don DeLillo - at least, unselfconsciously. Jonathan Franzen learned this the hard way. At the other extreme, self-promotion stunts designed to land oneself on the gossip sites seem to rob authors of one of the few things that still separates them from Hollywood - their inherent dignity.

A complicating factor in my case is the unusual degree of collaboration involved in making the Field Guide. The book's design is remarkable, and I had very little to do with it. I thus have a warm feeling not only toward the design team (Christopher D Salyers assisted by Eliane Lazzaris), and the press (Mark Batty Publisher) but to independent publishing as a whole. Richard Nash makes some good points about "the sausage factory" in his recent LBC post, but as his publication of Wayne Koestenbaum's Hotel Theory shows, there are certain books that only the existence of the independents makes possible. Books that must be seen to be believed. And though I feel weird saying it, this is one of them.

And then there's the photography. Over 100 established and emerging photographers submitted a total of 700 images for consideration to the Field Guide website, of which 63 were chosen to appear in the first edition, alongside the text of the novella. Tema Stauffer, Gus Powell, Brian Ulrich, Grant Willing (who shot the image above)... These photographers gave generously of themselves, free of charge, and they're doing fascinating work independently of this book, in a field whose dynamics resemble those of publishing. I feel a bit like Duke Ellington, or Lyle Lovett with his large band. Or maybe like Ian MacKaye of Fugazi, at whose feet I learned that it's best not to shove, and that reaching an audience on your own terms doesn't have to mean selling out.

That is, I want not only to have you read my words, but also to call attention to the community that made it possible. So I think, in the coming weeks, I'll try to use this space to direct your attention to the work of my collaborators, rather than to write too much about my own end of things. I'd like to start with Timothy Briner, a Chicago-based photographer who contributed the image for the chapter "Secret" in the Field Guide, and whose "Boonville, USA" project documents the death and life of America's small towns, to moving effect. Take a gander at www.boonvilleusa.com. And thanks, in advance, for being part of the journey.

(image courtesy of Timothy Briner).

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 7:34 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

The Dark Rises Into Your Local Theater

For those of you who still haven't come to terms with the fact that the Harry Potter franchise has ended, might I suggest Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising series? In the wake of the success of the Harry Potter films, the second book in the series, The Dark Is Rising has been made into a motion picture, with a release date in early October.

Although the poster and initial information regarding the movie don't look particularly promising (if low production values and child actors don't give you pause, the preview's dialogue certainly will), the books themselves are excellent and should provide succor for young (and young at heart) Potterites interested in continuing their journey into the realms of fantasy.

The story follows a boy, Will Stanton, who learns he is the last of a magical race known as the Old Ones. This revelation is soon followed by the realization that he must use his newfound powers to battle an evil force known only as "The Dark" (it's rising, don't you know.) Of course, in the grand tradition of young adult fiction, it's not enough that Will has to deal with the nefarious powers of some ancient evil, he also has to overcome the trials of "growing up." The books are set in Great Britain in the sixties and seventies and Cooper combines a winning look into British life at the time with extensive use of Arthurian legend and Welsh mythology to tell a story that, although somewhat lacking the light touch Rowling brought to Potter, never fails to entertain.

As for the movie, for better or worse, I fully plan to spend ten dollars and two hours of my life this fall reliving the many hours of my childhood spent engrossed in the saga. Here's hoping it delivers.

Bonus Link: A review from the book's release in 1973

- Ben Dooley @ 7:25 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Two Good Things

• USA Today is running an excerpt of Denis Johnson's much buzzed about new doorstop Tree of Smoke.
• The New Yorker Food Issue, to my mind the highlight of the New Yorker publishing year, has arrived. Somehow I look forward to this one as much as I did the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue when I was twelve. Much of the good stuff isn't online, but you can get a taste of the food writing on offer with a series of short essays under theme "Family Dinner." Aleksandar Hemon, Gary Shteyngart, Nell Freudenberger, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, David Sedaris, Anthony Lane, and Donald Antrim are on the menu.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:18 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Fry and Laurie: From Footlights to Fiction

From the venerable halls of Cambridge University in the early 1980s, emerged two of the finest comedic minds in British Comedy. From their years as writers and performers in Cambridge's Footlights troupe, through their acting stints in Jeeves and Wooster, various seasons of Blackadder, and especially their brilliant BBC sketch comedy series "A Bit of Fry and Laurie," Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie have spent the better part of my life making me laugh, often uncontrollably, and (occasionally) like a blithering idiot.

In the 1990s, Stephen Fry reached perhaps a wider audience with his pitch-perfect performance as Oscar Wilde in Wilde, and as for Mr. Laurie, well, unless you've been spending the last three years on Pluto, you've probably heard of a certain brilliant but tormented diagnostic genius named Gregory House.

All of which leads me to this: For years I've been fully aware that both Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie are also accomplished novelists. And despite my knowledge that they, separately and together, could seemingly write and perform anything, comedy or drama, brilliantly, in any medium, I still held off reading their critically acclaimed novels. When I eventually relented, I did so with enormous trepidation. Maybe I was worried that they wouldn't reach the same heights, in my estimation, as they already had in other media.

I needn't have worried.

Hugh Laurie's first novel, The Gun Seller is a comical, first-person account by one Thomas Lang, former soldier, now a civilian, who finds himself drawn into a bit of intrigue involving state-of-the-art weaponry, international terrorism, and well, the love of a good woman (Or is she a femme fatale?). The story moves along at a fast clip, building tension, and saying a few things about human morality along the way. And as it was published in 1996, it reflects that now almost nostalgically quaint post-Cold War, pre-9/11 era.

But it's all recounted with a savage tongue planted firmly in cheek. Describing the facial features of one of the parade of brutes who for various reasons want to kill our hero:

We find that Rayner's ears had, long ago, been bitten off and spat back on to the side of his head, because the left one was definitely upside down, or inside out, or something that made you stare at it for a long time before thinking 'oh, it's an ear.'

While Laurie's The Gun Seller is a comic-thriller pure and simple, Stephen Fry's 1991 debut novel, The Liar seems a bit more layered. It tells the story of Adrian Healey, and shifts back and forth through various stages of his life. We see his English 'public school' adolescence - a lovelorn time spent genuinely yearning for Hugo Cartwright, one of his fellow classmates, while trying on other personae for size - rebel, actor, schemer. We see him a few years later studying at Cambridge and later still traveling to Hungary in the employ of one Professor Trefusis. On A Mission. Adrian's mendacity proving to be his most appealingly useful trait. The one thing others can count on.

There's a thriller bubbling underneath involving codes and ciphers, and a 70s update of the Enigma cipher machine. But all of the plot machinations serve to sharpen the focus on Adrian's character. As Trefusis tells him:

"I am a student of language, Mr. Healey. You write with fluency and conviction, you talk with authority and control. A complex idea here, an abstract proposition there, you juggle with them, play with them, seduce them... You recognize patterns, but you rearrange them when you should analyze them. In short, you do not think. You have never thought... You cheat, you short-cut, you lie. It's too wonderful... You are a hound of hell and you know it."

As good as The Liar is, Stephen Fry's second novel, The Hippopotamus, is even better. His Ted Wallace is a giant of a character - a sly, sarcastic, 60-something jaded poet and critic. Unfailingly polite when social or family circumstances dictate, he saves up his venom and unleashes it on us, the gentle reader.

The story is this: Recently fired as a newspaper theatre critic, Wallace is retained by the terminally-ill niece of an old family friend to, essentially, pay an extended visit to that old friend and his family, and report "anything unusual" back to her. The jaded poet becomes a spy. We, and he, are left in the dark as to what, exactly, we should be looking for. But gradually the fog clears. In an astonishingly moving bit of back-story, we learn of Albert, the secular, spiritually disenchanted Austrian-Jewish grandfather, who returned to Vienna in the 1930s to try to bring his cousins back to England with him:

In that awful little room with its imponderably hateful smell, a smell that took all the dignity and colour and strength away from him, his tweeds, his expensive luggage and his small blue passport, in that dreadful stinking room he swore a new loyalty, to his people - his stupid, moaning and cosmically irritating people, whose religion he scorned, whose culture he despised, whose mannerisms and prejudices he abominated.

We also, in the present, get a sense of the unusual circumstances that Ted was dispatched to uncover. And what began as scathing social satire with a bit of a mystery gradually forming underneath, turns into a rich, stunningly written novel full of tension and eventual catharsis. It's a fantastic read.

There are several other novels and at least one memoir in the Fry and Laurie canon, and I'd be astonished if they all weren't written with the same penetrating wit and fierce intelligence. The halls of Cambridge would expect nothing less.

- Andrew Saikali @ 7:38 AM ~ comments: 5 ~ Links to this post

 

Bombay Dhamaka: Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games

Borges tells us of a civilization where cartographers produced the perfect map: one "whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it." In the next breath, he concedes that this map was useless. Though Borges titles his tale "On Exactitude in Science," it might serve as a parable for the novelist. One sets out to document a time, a place, a series of events... but even a single escalator ride (as Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine has shown us) can take up 50,000 words. It turns out that the novel, that capacious canvas, demands selection. Compression. Let this protagonist stand in for an army. Let this page break signify the passage of years.

In his new novel, Sacred Games, Vikram Chandra sets out to map contemporary Bombay, and despite his many achievements, the novel threatens to become as boundless and ungovernable as the city itself. I don't mean that Sacred Games is too long; I'd happily sit through another 900 pages of Chandra's balanced prose, provided that each paragraph felt necessary. But if the same conversation occurs three times in the course of Chandra's novel, he feels duty-bound to report each exchange. If a peripheral character has been scarred by the Partition that occurred 50 years ago this month, Chandra insists on telling us how. If a character takes a notion to cruise penis-enhancement websites, we get a list of URLs.

The set-up is promising: Inspector Sartaj Singh, a sartorially adept member of the Bombay police force, is tipped off to the whereabouts of gang leader Ganesh Gaitonde. Gaitonde eludes capture in the style of a Roman senator - packing himself off to that great hoosegow in the sky - but the circumstances of his death disclose a plot that dwarfs any of his previous crimes. In alternating chapters, Sartaj races against the clock to thwart the conspiracy, and Gaitonde narrates, from beyond the grave, his own rise to (and fall from) power.

Its potboiler conventions lend Sacred Games a measure of glitter, but it's as an anthropological investigation that the novel strikes gold. The novel's linguistic curry, spiced with Hindi and Urdu slang, delivers a taste of the polyphonic vitality of Bombay. A few vividly rendered locations - Chowpatty Beach and seedy Indian restaurants and a Sikh temple - evoke the entirety of Sartaj Singh's world. (One senses always the teeming masses in the background.) And the various sectarian fault-lines of present-day India are fully, fictionally realized: not only does the author see them, he evaluates them. He instructs, as well as entertains.

Likewise, Chandra excels at procedural detail. He depicts the corruption and brutality of Bombay police-work with a journalist's eye for minutiae. If Sartaj Singh begins the book as a cipher, time chips away at the uneasy peace he's made with the demands of his job. Eventually, we see him longing, underneath, for something better. Here is Sartaj contemplating a bomb-scare:

"He was at his desk, in his dingy little office with the weathered benches and untidy shelves. Kamble was hunched over a report. Two constables were laughing in the corridor outside. There was a little pool of sunlight from a window, and a pair of hopping little sparrows on the sill. And all of it was dreamlike, as gauzy as the wafting of early morning. If you let yourself believe in that other monstrous thing, even a little, then this ordinary world of bribes and divorces and electricity bills vanished a little."

This last clause, cascading from the immoral to the amoral, suspends Sartaj between detachment and attachment. Detachment, attachment: isn't this the dialectic that keeps our great cities alive?

Gaitonde's character moves in the opposite direction. As an outlaw, he begins the book with a certain charismatic capital, but the repetitiveness of his megalomania - "Ganesh Gaitonde Makes a Film"; "Ganesh Gaitonde is Recruited"; "Ganesh Gaitonde is Recruited Again"; Ganesh Gaitonde Gets Plastic Surgery - depletes our interest. And here the novel's more-is-more aesthetic runs up against the more-is-less principle of Borgesian cartography.

Pankaj Mishra, similarly vexed by Gaitonde, has pointed to Chandra's ambition to transcend the bourgeois morality of the Western novel. But Chandra wants Gaitonde, like Hannibal Lecter, to interest us precisely because he's bad. And Hannibal was more engaging on celluloid than on the page. Gaitonde starts out round, but ends up as two-dimensional as a movie poster. It's a shame, too, as Chandra can invest a supporting character like Sartaj's partner, Kartekar or his boss, Parulkar, with real weight. And in the case of Sartaj's mother (the focus of one of the book's four historical "insets," or novella-length digressions), he can bring a character fully to life.

Those insets, indeed, contain some of Sacred Games' strongest writing. But they read like aborted novels, tangential to this one. Against the fine descriptions and effortless historical significance of an inset such as "The Great Game," the Gaitonde-Sartaj plotline devolves into lunacy: nuclear terrorism, international espionage, and an evil-criminal-genius-cum-Vedic-guru. Chandra wants to license this "filminess" by appealing to the kitchen-sink aesthetic of Bollywood, but he fails to master the requirements of genre fiction, which are, in their own way, as demanding as those of realism. The palpable tension and richness of Sartaj's quotidian life dissolve just as they should be deepening.

Ultimately, Sacred Games comes off as a very serious book and a very silly one glued on to the same spine. This may well be part of Chandra's program. But inclusiveness doesn't always deepen our engagement in a fictional world. Sometimes, it can enforce a curious distance from it. Craving immersion in a perspective, we instead find ourselves standing outside a teeming flatness, unsure where we're supposed to look.

Notwithstanding Chandra's debt to the realist doorstops of Dickens and Thackeray, the dissolution of point-of-view is (arguably like Bombay itself) a postmodern phenomenon. And perhaps in its Dhamaka plot, its refusal to reconcile the filmi and the literary, and its overwhelming expansiveness, Sacred Games corresponds more exactly to the city Chandra loves than a shapely narrative could. Still, fiction is no science. It is the art of illusion - useful illusion - and I look for this gifted writer, in his next novel, to focus his impressive energies toward some brighter (if not bigger) bang.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 8:21 AM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

Books You Can't Read: A List of Bookish Objets

1. British artist Su Blackwell's wonderful book-cut sculptures
2. Discharged books from the Stanford library find new life as a bar
3. Part Joseph Cornell box, part book about Joseph Cornell boxes (for more info)
4. A selection of works by Georgia Russell, Cara Borer, and other artists whose medium is books
5. German designer Werner Aisslinger's storage modules, made of books, and then there's Housefish's shelves made of books
6. Secret hiding place book-boxes
7. Donald Lipski's statue for the Kansas City Public Library
8. J. Crew's variations on the chic librarian: Library bookshelf cardigan & library charm bracelet
9. Raymond Waites library wallpaper & a bookcase "mural"...
10. And finally: Ever wanted a marble bust of Schiller? Burns? Voltaire, Darwin, Plato, or Dante? Look no further

- Emily Colette Wilkinson @ 8:35 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Blogging Around the World

Amar Bakshi was about five years behind me at my high school in Washington DC, but he has my dream job, traveling the world to author a blog for the Washington Post, taking on the charged topic, "How the World Sees America." I started reading it because of the high school connection (Amar is a friend of my little brother's), but I've become an avid reader of it over time as Amar follows in the footsteps of some of my favorite traveling journalists: Jon Lee Anderson, Paul Theroux, and, of course, Ryszard Kapuscinski. Unlike those masters of the form, Amar also carries a video camera with him to further chronicle his experiences. Since starting in May, he's been to England and India, and now he's back in the States hashing out plans to travel farther afield. It's an interesting experiment from a young writer. Worth a read if you're looking for another blog to follow.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:47 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Where It All Started

Even a New Yorker obsessive like me was surprised to find just how many notable works of fiction and non-fiction made their first appearance in the venerable magazine. Emdashes and her readers have gone to the effort of collecting a list of many such works. It's worth a look as a potential reading list and also just for the "wow factor." Don't forget to check the comments.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:39 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

In The Groves of Academe: A Report from the English Department and Some Thoughts on Graduate School

Graduate school in the humanities, particularly a doctorate in literature, is not a life choice whose value and purpose are necessarily self-evident. Some people look confused when I tell them that I am getting a Ph.D. in eighteenth-century British literature. Most others respond with some version of, "What do you do with that?" What follows is a sustained answer to this question - the why and the 'to what end' of a life, or an interlude, in the groves of academe. If you're wondering what the grad life is like, or why anyone chooses such a life, read on.

I went to graduate school, I'm now quite sure, because I enjoyed nothing more than reading novels, poetry, and plays, and because I didn't know what I wanted to do and because they'd pay me to read books and take classes. Not much, mind you (especially by the standard of the starting salaries my friends were being offered by investment banks) but when you're used to work-study wages and have a morbid fear of suits and cubicles, $20,000 a year (plus tuition, health insurance, free books and meals, a computer, language study, travel to archives abroad...) is a princely sum. Especially when it comes with access to one of the country's most beautiful campuses, an excellent library, and astonishingly bright faculty and fellow students from all over the country and the world. Genteel poverty seems a small price to pay - and sometimes itself a gift - to be a part of such a community.

One of my pet theories is that the American top-tier university is as close as humanity will ever come to realizing a utopia, and Stanford, with its vast expanses of lawn, citrus, fig, and palm trees, flowering vines, and sun-tanned young people, even looks the Edenic, pre-lapsarian part. Certainly now, by and large, universities are in the business of giving students credentials and connections - that is to say, getting them good jobs in finance and business, getting them into the best schools of law and medicine. But if you forget the use-value of a BA from a top-tier university for a moment and consider the texture of college life, the utopian aspects appear.

The physical surroundings are usually beautiful or inspiring; your professors are bright and interesting and challenging, very often the top of their fields (Guggenheim fellows, Nobel laureates, Genius grant winners) - people who are defining the disciplines they teach; all of your basic needs (food, shelter, health care) are met, and even if you've got a campus job and take your coursework as seriously as possible, there still seems to be plenty of time for conversation, parties, intellectual debates, experimentation with sex and drugs (for those so inclined), and other extracurriculars of all sorts. You are free of your parents and not yet burdened by a "real" job, or paying back your student loans, or any of the other weighty personal and financial responsibilities that descend in adulthood. Through your peers and professors you are exposed to myriad cultures, philosophies, theories, and causes, and are free (theoretically, at least) to devote your mind and your life to any one of them, or (less dramatically) simply to take solace or pleasure from Buddhism or Plato or Kant or Shakespeare.

In sum, you are largely free from oppressive responsibilities, in a beautiful place, with unlimited access to gifted people and inspiring ideas. What could be better? And why wouldn't you do it all over again a second time with the university itself footing the bill?

That was my thinking about graduate school. At least, that's what I thought before I started and at the beginning of my time at Stanford. And I still hold my utopia thesis about undergrad. But it is not entirely true about graduate school.

As a graduate student, you go behind the curtain a bit more, and particularly as this relates to professors, it can be rather harrowing. I was fascinated when one of my professors told us about creating a persona: We needed, self-consciously, to fashion ourselves (appearance, theoretical approaches, research interests, even behavior and speech styles) in order to be successful academics in literature. He was only half-serious, I think. But with the persona theory in mind, I started noticing and remembering things: A very beautiful, young female professor I'd had as an undergrad, fond of mini-skirts, high-heels, and low-cut blouses, teaching something called Modernism and the Body - An academic's Elle McPherson, as it were. There was also a Romanticist whose pale complexion, wild hair, large, dark eyes and volatile temperament seemed a quintessence distilled from the Brontes and Shelleys; A scholar of postmodern literature and culture interested in cuteness who embodied her subject ably in a pair of pigtails. Among the dix-huitiemeists, there was a pronounced preference for a rather Samuel Johnsonian turn. And I wish I meant only devastatingly clever quips and deeply humane acts of generosity (which I do), though I also refer to his apparent lack of interest in clean linen (in an era not particularly distinguished for such: see Emily Cockayne's Hubbub: Filth, Noise, and Stench in England) and his possible Tourette syndrome.

This is a minor detail and by no means universally true. It is usually amusing - like people who look like their dogs - and can be instructive in its way. But it is also part of a larger culture of self-importance, self-indulgence, and cultivated eccentricity that can get old: not showing up for office hours and exams, forgetting to send job letters, taking students failings personally and walking out of seminars after yelling something nasty at the class or an individual, attending to matters of personal hygiene in lectures, falling asleep in conference seminars, mystifying the requirements for a seminar paper or dissertation chapter and then becoming enraged when these mystified requirements are not met, asking for changes to a paper and then asking for just the opposite in the next version, using graduate students as pawns in professional rivalries - to name a few generalized examples of the unsavory side of professorial eccentricity.

There are actually worse stories outside of the English department about professors who use graduate students as handmaidens and valets (to pack their bags, chauffeur, entertain guests, do laundry...) but I've never heard those tales first-hand. I also once heard (what I will call a legend) about a professor (English, I think) who, when asked about her sexual preference, replied simply: "graduate students."

But these are not my tales to tell. And, as far as occupational hazards go, the dangers of being yelled at irrationally and occasionally forgotten are mild, I think. Especially when what you get as recompense is a great deal of time in the presence of intellectual brilliance. There is some saying about exceptional people and how one is willing to tolerate in them behavior that would not pass in individuals of lesser personal and intellectual magnetism. I forget the exact words, but the notion, however expressed, is unapologetically elitist and perhaps only evidence that I have been in the groves too long and have had my brains addled. I do not think so.

Intellectual virtuosity can be breath-taking - as breath-taking as listening to Beethoven's 5th or 9th or seeing a Vermeer in person or Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon, or whatever it is, man-made or natural, that you might find completely arresting and captivating. The best professors have minds as agile and flexible - as wonderful to behold in motion - as the bodies of professional athletes. I am waxing, I know, but part of the attraction of graduate school is the faint hope that by proximity to and tutelage from such minds as the best professors have, that we too, we novitiates, will ourselves one day be virtuosos and priests of knowledge.

This is not the case for most. There is a lot of attrition in graduate programs, and even if you do make it to the end and get the degree, many are rewarded for their pains with joblessness, or a "hardship post" (there are many mythical worst places to get a job, the one I know is Southwest Texas Christian Women's Technical Community College), or a string of adjunct positions that make for a gypsy-esque, migrant existence (a year here, a semester there - no job security and often no benefits). The English department at Stanford claims a 90% job-placement rate for its students - if they're willing to go on the market three years in a row. Stanford also has the advantage of being a very small graduate program and so it has fewer students to place.

Getting a job is a yearlong process and extremely competitive and grueling. In the fall you consult the jobs list and see what's available in your field (Medieval, Renaissance, sometimes Seventeenth-Century, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century British, Early American, Romanticism, Nineteenth-Century British, Modern British, Anglophone, Contemporary American, Theory). All of the fields have further refinements (poetry, drama, novels, Victorian, Modernism, Asian American, African American) and subtleties of periodization (long 18th Century, versus 18th Century and Restoration, for example), and this means that the first year you go on the market there may not be any jobs in your particular area of expertise in the country. Of course you'll try to sell yourself for jobs that you're almost a fit for, but it's hard when there's another candidate (or a hundred) who do exactly what a given university is looking for.

You submit recommendation letters from your dissertation committee, a job letter summarizing your dissertation, your research interests, and why you'd be a good fit for the school, your CV, and a writing sample (for some schools it is as much of your dissertation as is finished), and you wait. In November you hear if you've gotten any interviews at the MLA Conference in December (the Modern Language Association is the professional organization for professors of language and literature). The MLA takes place immediately after Christmas every year, and if you've gotten any interviews, these consist of your being examined on anything and everything by three or four faculty members from the school to which you've applied (usually your teaching interests, your dissertation, and some form of thinking-on-your-feet questions about your period).

Of the ten or so applicants interviewed for a particular position at MLA, usually three are chosen for a campus fly-back. These three are flown to the campus sometime between February and March and give a lecture to the entire department faculty. After all of the candidates have completed their visits, the faculty vote and the candidate with the most votes is offered a job. This job offer comes sometime in the spring - or, it doesn't. And then you do it all over again the next fall, and perhaps the next after that too. And that's not even getting into fifth-year reviews and tenure proceedings once you've gotten a job. Alternatively, I am told, one can go into consulting, think-tank and non-profit research, marketing, high school teaching, and archival and curatorial work, but I don't know how often or easily these happen.

"Good work if you can get it," one of my undergraduate professors called university teaching - and that "if" clause is not to be underestimated.

There are other dark aspects too, that come earlier. Studying for qualifying and university oral exams can be devastatingly isolating. I think it's a line in Shadowlands that says something to the effect of "We read to know that we are not alone," but I assure you, in month two - or four, or six - of being immersed in the Cavalier poets, Ranter prophets, Milton, Bunyan, Behn, Swift, Fielding, Smollett, et al, you come to know a loneliness of the most rare exquisiteness. You might also find yourself sobbing a lot about how stupid you are, living on a diet of coffee, red wine, cigarettes, and proprananol, not getting out of your pajamas or brushing your hair, and sleeping badly with dreams of your teeth rotting and falling out. I generalize, of course.

And even when the exams are over, there's a lot of angst and self-hatred among Ph.D. candidates. This probably owes more to self-selection than the atmosphere of graduate school itself, but there's something to be said for nurture in this case too. Literary scholars are ultimately critics and an atmosphere of relentless criticism, can be, well, relentless, as well as somewhat absurd. One of the fall-back ways to generate your own original critical take on a literary work or concept is simply to take issue with someone else's reading: "Blahblahblah's account of Romantic sensibility fails to account for __________ and fatally neglects to consider_____________" or some such. And students and professors use this same technique on each other in seminars and lectures. In the style of negative campaigning, there is a tendency to attack or show-up others' readings of things and thereby to show oneself as supremely clever. There is a slightly disgusting general tendency to perform cleverness - when a speaker's point or question is not to get to the crux of a literary work but instead to announce to all in attendance his or her superior smartness. And then there's the famous jargon - acculturation, narrativity, aestheticize, dialogism... And the continued fondness in literature departments for theorists like Freud and Marx. It can feel petty, ridiculous, and vain - not about literature or history or culture at all, but about petty ego-driven bickering and self-aggrandizement by silly, small-minded people, of which you are one.

I realize I have said very little about literature itself and it is worth mentioning how literature changes when it becomes the object of professional study. I think the ideal way to imagine becoming a professor is to think of yourself as a living counterpart to libraries and archives - a person who becomes a receptacle of knowledge about a particular historical period and its literature. It is your job to animate this knowledge, keep it alive, add to it if you can, share it with students, and impart it to the next generation of scholars (if you get that far). You have to have faith in the importance of the literature and history you choose and you have to be willing to spend a lot of time mentally there. It's odd and anachronistic and hard to explain to those who don't do it. Sometimes it's hard to remember yourself why you do it. You also have to keep caring because there's not much in the way of praise or material gain to keep you going if you lose faith.

There are transcendent moments - when you feel you've gotten a novel or a poem - figured out something true that no one else has said; or an afternoon squirreled away in a rare books room looking at, say, an early nineteenth-century folio of etchings and biographical sketches of "remarkable person" (i.e. dwarves, giants, gypsy queens, cross-dressers, political and religious radicals, a "pretended rabbit breeder") and are utterly absorbed and content. But there are other days (more days, I find lately) when you are full of self-doubt about your intellectual and dispositional fitness for the scholarly life, and doubt about the worth of your research, and the worth of the profession altogether. Sometimes you feel tired of the pressure to have a clever and unique take on every novel and poem and play that you read (and also to remember other people's clever and unique takes on them), and books become sources of anxiety and potential humiliation rather than of pleasure, instruction, or escape.

Horace counsels to seek truth in the groves of academe - and there is certainly some to be had. I have encountered great and instructive minds and literary works in my time in the groves, and though it has brought me no wealth or glory, and may well not get me a job, it has been and is a luxury and privilege. For all of the folly and absurdity to be found in academe, there is something mystical and sanctified and rarefied as well - something I am glad to have known.

- Emily Colette Wilkinson @ 8:57 AM ~ comments: 7 ~ Links to this post

 

Quarterly Report: Potter Rides into the Sunset

Every three months I've been looking at Barnes & Noble's quarterly conference call to get some insight into recent book industry trends and to see which books were the big sellers over the past few months and which are expected to be big in the coming months. Barnes & Noble's second quarter ended August 4th. Almost certainly, it'll be the last time that the bookstore chain will experience the rush of sales generated by Harry Potter, and the company made the most of it, riding the Boy Wizard to results that came in at the high end of its forecast and meeting Wall Street estimates that had been padded with high expectations for the final Potter installment. With Potter coming out late in the quarter, however, the vaunted "Potter effect" was only in play for the final two weeks of the period.

Here are the highlights from CEO Steve Riggio on the Q2 conference call (courtesy Seeking Alpha):

• Harry Potter drove sales higher but knocked Barnes & Noble's profit margin lower thanks to "significant discounting." The book was marked down 40% instead of the usual 30%.
• More Harry - selling well but tailing off: "The book sold even better than our expectations in its first days on sale, but in the following weeks, sales of the book tailed off quite a bit, as it was available in abundant quantity in a large number of mass merchants and non-book store retailers. Nevertheless, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows continues to sell well. It remains our number one best selling hard cover title, and we expect to sell hundreds of thousands of copies through the end of the year."
• But perhaps the Potter party isn't over yet: "We believe that sales of the entire series are going to continue to dominate children's bestseller lists for many, many years. While the Harry Potter cycle may be complete for those who have read the entire series, it is yet to be discovered by millions of readers now and in the years ahead."
• Moving beyond Potter, Barnes & Noble saw "a mix of expected bestsellers from brand name writers and the emergence of a few sleepers." The expected: Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns, Janet Evanovich's Lean Mean Thirteen and James Patterson's two books, The Quickie and The 6th Target. The sleepers: Conn and Hal Iggulden's The Dangerous Book for Boys. Thomas Cathcart's Plato and A Platypus Walked Into a Bar, Denise Jackson's It's All About Him, and Elin Hilderbrand's Barefoot. The fourth Barnes & Noble Recommends selection, Paulette Giles' Stormy Weather also saw "strong sales."
• Riggio also mentioned a recently published book, Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer. Apparently vampires never go out of style because according to Riggio, the book has "catapulted Stephanie Meyer into the ranks of mega bestselling authors. It outsold Harry Potter, toppled it from the bestseller list and it actually became the fastest-selling teen novel in our history."
• And finally, Riggio previewed third quarter releases that are expected to be big: Bill Clinton's Giving, Alan Greenspan's The Age of Turbulence, the late David Halberstam's final book, The Coldest Winter, John Grisham's Playing for Pizza, Alice Sebold's The Almost Moon, and the tie-in book for the Ken Burns WWII PBS documentary airing this fall.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:52 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

A Salute to Grace Paley (1922-2007)

Thumbtacked to the wall above my desk is a line from Grace Paley's Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. It runs: "Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life." Paley could speak of "open destiny" with some authority. A writer to the marrow, she was also a mother, a rabble-rouser, and an inspiration. It must have been hard for her to imagine, working as a typist in the 1950s, that she would someday be honored as a national treasure. That the strikes against her (Radical; Working Class; Daughter of Ukrainian Immigrants; Woman) no longer seem like strikes is a testament to her trail-blazing.

But Paley's most significant significance (to this writer, anyway) is her voice. In 1959, when vernacular prose and aesthetic refinement seemed like the opposed ends of the literary jumper cables - contact to be avoided at all costs - The Little Disturbances of Man crossed wires, and made sparks. Paley came on like a philosopher and a carnival barker, like a reporter and a poet (which she very much was). Her sentences met her friend Donald Barthelme's criteria for greatness - truth, beauty, and surprise - without the slightest sign of strain. They could rival the richness of Ulysses while seeming as spontaneous as a shout in the street.

In "A Conversation with My Father," for example, Paley's fictional stand-in, Faith, tries to heed her Dad's deathbed request: "to write a simple story [...]. Just recognizable people and then write down what happened to them next." She spins a story about a neighbor whose son becomes a junkie, and her father insists that she end it there. "I had promised the family to always let him have the last word when arguing," Faith tells us,

"but in this case I had a different responsibility. That woman lives across the street. She's my knowledge and my invention. I'm sorry for her. I'm not going to leave her there in the house crying. (Actually neither would Life, which unlike me has no pity.) Therefore: She did change. Of course her son never came home again. But right now, she's the receptionist in a storefront community clinic in the East Village. Most of the customers are young people, some old friends. The head doctor has said to her, 'If we only had three people in this clinic with your experiences...'"

Grace Paley died yesterday, at age 84, having battled breast cancer. But given the buoyancy of her spirit and her passionate engagement with the world, hers is not the kind of death that leaves readers bitter. Rather, it offers us a reminder of our own "open destinies." I'll be raising a glass to Paley tonight, and revisiting her remarkable body of work for years to come.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 1:55 PM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

Why Bolano Matters

I.
Every so often, one feels the great gears of canonization creaking into motion. A long critical essay in The New Republic or the New York Review will direct our attention to an overlooked contemporary poet, or beg our reconsideration of a novelist too long out-of-print. A month later, another such essay will appear in another venue, along with a note announcing the imminent appearance of so-and-so's collected verse, or the retranslation of the magnum opus of such-and-such. An excerpt follows in The New Yorker. The blogs are abuzz. And then, on the front page of the Sunday Book Review, the Times finally catches on.

Okay, this feels a little unfair, a little dyspeptic...and a little too specific to the media centers of the East and West Coasts. Since my college years in the Midwest, I've admired the efforts undertaken by presses like Dalkey, New Directions, New York Review Books, and Archipelago on behalf of world literature. And without the coordinated advocacy of critics (Susan Sontag was a marvel in this respect, as in so many others) I might not have copped to Leonid Tspykin, Witold Gombrowicz, Leonard Michaels... The list goes on and on.

But at a certain point, the law of diminishing returns sets in. If I made time for every overlooked author recommended in the back pages of Harper's - lately a veritable house organ for the redoubtable FSG - I'd read little else. Among other things, literary greatness requires, as William H. Gass has argued, passing tests of time. I may have to wait a few more decades to see if posterity accords Orhan Pamuk's work, for example, the high regard in which present critics hold it. Of if my misgivings about Snow hold water.

All of which is to say that when I finished Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives this summer and walked out of my apartment onto the blazing street, humming as though zapped by business end of a live-wire, wanting to climb to the top of the nearest bridge and shout to passersby that they must stop everything and read this book, I felt, despite the relative frequency with which we (myself included) throw around terms like "genius" and "masterpiece," that I had just been in the presence of the real thing. And that that was a rare and precious gift.

II.
In Bolano's work, emotions tango - terror and fascination go cheek by jowl, laughter rubs elbows with pathos - but an undercurrent of exuberance remains constant, a stylistic signature. Which is remarkable, given the sinister plots that entangle his characters. The Savage Detectives begins (and ends) as the diary of one Juan Garcia Madero, a seventeen-year-old aspiring poet living in Mexico City. Two slightly older poets maudits, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano adopt him as a kind of mascot for their literary circle, the "visceral realists." Madero's first diary entry reads, in its entirety: "I've been cordially invited to join the visceral realists. I accepted, of course. There was no initiation ceremony. It was better that way."

No initiation ceremony? Two months and 150 pages later, Madero will find himself in the backseat of a Chevy Impala with a prostitute named Lupe, fleeing a murderous pimp. Up front, Ulises and Arturo set a course for the Sonora desert, where they seek a vanished poet of the 1930s, one Cesarea Tinajero. This is madness! Yet we feel, in the surging rhythms of the prose (translated by Natasha Wimmer), young Madero's eager acceptance of his fate.

"I saw that Lupe was looking at me from inside the car and that she was opening the door. I realized that I'd always wanted to leave. I got in and before I could close the door Ulises stepped on the gas. I heard a shot or something that sounded like a shot. They're shooting at us, the bastards, said Lupe. I turned around and through the back window I saw a shadow in the middle of the street. All the sadness of the world was concentrated in that shadow, framed by the strict rectangle of the Impala's window. It's firecrackers, I heard Belano say as our car leaped forward and left behind the Fonts' house, the thugs' Camaro, Calle Colima, and in less than two seconds we were on Avenida Oaxaca, heading north out of the city."

In the space of a few sentences, Juan Garcia Madero has earned his wings. He has learned to see the sadness of the whoremonger, to find the gunfire in the fireworks and vice versa. He has become, in the fullest sense of the word, a poet.

Bolano's preoccupation with poetry may strike the Norteamericano reader, circa 2007, as odd. Who even reads that stuff anymore? We are far more accustomed to authors who hang their narratives on nuclear war, crime syndicates, cattle drives... But the long middle section of The Savage Detectives, wherein 52 narrators track Arturo and Ulises through the 20 years that follow their fateful journey north, exposes academic definitions of poetry as far too narrow. For Bolano, as for the Beats, the poem is a way of finding beauty even (or especially) in insalubrious circumstances. Poetry is a synonym for youth, for vitality, for faith in one's own ability to change the world. Poetry is innocence hungering for experience, and vice versa. It is a way of being in the world.

That is to say, poetry signifies as much to Bolano as the whiteness of the whale did to Melville. It functions in The Savage Detectives as Moby-Dick did in the book that bore his name. In his aesthetic innovations - narrative fragmentation, riffs on real historical figures, enjambment of high and low culture - Bolano resembles a number of other forward-looking novelists. But I can think of no other contemporary writer for whom symbolic preoccupations burn so brightly. Scenes, objects, and characters scintillate with political, ethical, and aesthetic significance. Poetic significance. It is the lunatic density of Bolano's symbolism that marks him as truly avant-garde... and also as a vital addition to the mainstream.

For some time now, I've pictured the American avant-garde as a painter stuck in a corner, surrounded by its own slow-drying handiwork. When an artist strikes out in search of the new, she dreams of the rioting audience of Stravinsky's Rites of Spring, of customs agents confiscating pallets of books deemed obscene. And yet, in a culture where dissonance and obscenity are the norm, how is the artist to provoke any reaction at all?

The situation is seen most clearly in the world of visual art, where, with the regularity of changing hemlines, proclamations of the Rebirth of Painting alternate with controversies about religious icons rendered in various forms of bodily excretion. One can, Alex P. Keaton-like, react against the excesses of the father by turning toward the conservative. Or one can push farther, ever farther, celebrating the celebrity, marketing the market, outgrossing the gross-out. The most important work being done, at least theoretically, involves a compromise: some genetic splicing of Old Mastery with the shallow holography of mass culture. Think Jeff Wall. Think John Currin and Cindy Sherman.

At least these folks are still considered leaders in their field. In American literature, experimentalism is kept like a domesticated animal. For twenty-two hours a day, it sleeps under the kitchen table. Occasionally, when we get bored, we trot it out and put it through its tricks to remind ourselves that, hey, we're as hip as the next guy. But an avant-garde novel is never going to change the way we see the world.

Well, The Savage Detectives blew my pessimism all to hell. Aiming to usurp the throne of literature from Octavio Paz (and, later, Gabriel Garcia Marquez), Roberto Bolano produced something unselfconsciously yet distinctly his own.

Nothing more or less than the sum of the stories told about them, Bolano's visceral realists come alive in a new way. Not only do we see Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano from every possible angle; we see them from impossible angles as well. Among the novel's 52 + 1 voices, conflicting accounts proliferate: The visceral realists are geniuses. They are hacks. They are liars. They are saints. The author refuses to render a verdict. And yet his narrators aren't wholly unreliable: in each version of Ulises and Arturo, we recognize something ineffable and unchanging. However plastic or fantastic, they are always somehow themselves. As we are always somehow ourselves. Among other things, then, The Savage Detectives is a treatise on human nature.

III.
To borrow from Sir Mix-A-Lot: I like big books, and I cannot lie. Bolano's shorter novel, Amulet revisits one of The Savage Detectives' narrators, a poor Uruguayan named Auxilio Lacoutre. When, in the riotous year of 1968, the Mexican army invades the sovereign campus of the national university, Auxilio refuses to be evacuated. For twelve days, she hides in a women's bathroom, subsisting on tapwater and scribbling poems on sheets of toilet-paper. In her disorientation, she drifts into the past... And, bizarrely, into the future, where her resistance - like Ulises and Arturo's exploits - will become the stuff of legend. As a character sketch, Amulet is vivid and hallucinatory, but I found the proliferation of subplots and hazy chronology hard to track. I much preferred the version of Auxilio's rebellion that appears in The Savage Detectives. Like the tales told by that novel's other 52 voices, Auxilio's gains meaning and urgency through its connection to a larger narrative arc.

Of course, much of Bolano's fiction is part of a single galaxy, like Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha. Several short stories, for example, are narrated by a figure who shares biographical circumstances with Arturo Belano (which is to say, with Bolano himself). And Caesarea Tinajero, at the end The Savage Detectives, hints darkly at events that will unfold in 2666.

Still, for the novitiate looking for a quick introduction to Bolano's world, the best place to start may be Last Evenings on Earth, a collection of stories rendered into English, like Amulet, by Chris Andrews. It's all here in miniature: the romantic fatalism, the rich irony, the soupcon of the supernatural, the political depredations, the enigmatic yet incredibly real characters. A story like "Gomez Palacio," in which, simultaneously, nothing much happens and everything does, presents a vision as idiosyncratic, and as existentially important, as Kafka's. Each writer seems to have sprung fully formed from the void.

Which makes Bolano's own story seem all the more implausible. Broke, addicted, and unknown as of the late '80s, the former poet kicked heroin and took up fiction writing to support his growing family - a quixotic pursuit if ever there was one. Bolano would enter his short stories in Spain's many regional writing contests, often winning multiple prizes with the same piece (camouflaged under a variety of titles). By 1999, the massive Savage Detectives had won the Romulo Gallegos prize - Spanish-language literature's most prestigious award. Upon learning that his liver was failing, Bolano raced to finish the even-more-massive manuscript for 2666, his literary legacy to the world, and his financial legacy to his wife and children. Whether 2666 can equal or surpass The Savage Detectives remains to be seen (among English-speaking audiences, at least; Wimmer's translation will be released next year). It seems certain, however, that Bolano's place among the dozen or so great novelists of the last quarter-century is secure... Or anyway, that's how it looks to this correspondent.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 7:21 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Winning Isn't Everything: Victory in War by William C. Martel

This guest contribution comes from Timothy R. Homan, a journalist based in Washington, D.C.

In September, as many Americans reflect on the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, four government reports detailing progress in the war in Iraq will be presented to Congress and the American public. The most anticipated of these is expected to document the findings and recommendations of Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of U.S. military forces in Iraq.

Recently, the White House acknowledged that instead of limiting authorship of the report to Petraeus, as initially expected, Bush administration officials such as U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan C. Crocker, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates will add their take on whether military and political benchmarks in Iraq are being met.

While the scope of the report is limited to progress in achieving benchmarks, the underlying question persists: Are the benchmarks and troop surge moving the United States towards victory in Iraq? Similarly, what constitutes victory in modern warfare, particularly in a conflict such as the war on terror?

Author William C. Martel tackles those questions, from a predominantly historical perspective, in his new book, Victory in War: Foundations of Modern Military Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2007). Martel, a professor of international security studies at Tufts University who has also taught at the Naval War College, argues that since victory in war means different things to different people there is no coherent definition, making it difficult to craft effective wartime strategies.

It's not a new argument, but certainly a timely one, especially since military leaders, policymakers and politicians, all with their own understanding of victory, will contribute to the Petraeus report.

The book begins with brief descriptions (a few paragraphs each) of how military leaders, theorists and state leaders over the centuries have defined victory. Of the 59 thinkers summarized, some are familiar - Mao Zedong and Napoleon Bonaparte - while others, like John I. Alger and Azar Gat, are less so. Still, the format proves a useful tool for comparison, in case you've ever wanted to see how Machiavelli's impression of victory (dominate the enemy completely) stacks up against that of Sun Tzu (avoid any war if at all possible).

Different types of victory - tactical, political-military and grand strategic - are ascribed to the Revolutionary War, Civil War, Vietnam War and others, followed by more detailed cases studies of six recent U.S. military conflicts, starting with the 1986 bombing raid on Libya, a country now in the process of normalizing relations with the United States, and ending with the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Overall, Martel, a regular contributor to the op-ed pages of the Providence Journal, lays out his well-sourced argument in a fairly readable fashion. But in the book's 309 pages of text, there certainly are moments when he lapses into the lexicon of academia. Early on, Martel qualifies the aim of the book, writing, "The intent is to build the foundations of a pretheory of victory, on the premise that such pretheoretical concepts will be useful for scholars who are interested in comprehending, in formal and systematic terms, the relationship between war and victory."

For those not familiar with what pretheory is (i.e. pretty much anyone who isn't a social scientist), Martel offers this explanation: "A pretheory describes the process of conceptual exploration that is designed to identify carefully and observe relationships in a field of inquiry, and subsequently to formulate organizing principles and testable theories."

Martel is more direct when discussing two events that will likely be of high interest to most readers - the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq - while acknowledging their limited achievements.

In Afghanistan: "The outcome of the ongoing Operation Enduring Freedom seems consistent with the grand strategic victory intended (although U.S. policymakers did not use that phrase directly) in that the United States has achieved its objectives - with the exception of capturing (or killing) the top leadership of al-Qaeda and Taliban, Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar."

In Iraq, where the outcome is still murky, Martel writes: "Whether the forces of democratization take hold in Iraq will influence judgments about a U.S. victory, as will the length and violence of the postinvasion occupation and the timing and conditions of the U.S. withdrawal."

While some may want to frame victory against the Iraqi insurgency as a moving target, Martel essentially argues that such an approach misrepresents the appropriate definition of victory for this conflict.

He writes: "While we could describe victory in Iraq on the basis of classic measures of defeat, such as territory lost or gained, defeating the opponent's military forces, or destroying its economy and infrastructure, these measures would be inadequate here because this war is being waged on ideological grounds."

That's something to keep in mind when reading the achievements highlighted in the Petraeus report.

- Editor @ 6:15 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

A Groundling Sounds Off on Shakespeare

My Shakespeare intake is up sharply this season. So far, I've attended about one performance every six weeks. Two comedies (a .333 average), three tragedies (.500), and even one romance (.167). My mother, a high school English teacher, must be pleased with the numbers I've been putting up. And I'm prepared to testify before any grand jury that will have me that the only performance-enhancing drugs I've touched have been brewed from the choicest hops and barley.

Here in New York, it's possible to indulge in Bardolatry whenever you want. At least two Shakespeare productions are running on any given night. And of course, the plays are meant to be seen, rather than read. Or so say the experts. This week's Shakespeare-in-the-Park performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream left me wondering, though... are they right?

Having read AMND thrice and having seen four previous stage productions, I was surprised at how many great speeches I'd managed to forget. "The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / are of imagination all compact," Duke Theseus theorizes. "Be as thou wast wont to be," Oberon tells a sleeping Titania, on the verge of reconciliation. "See as thou wast wont to see." On a more Global level, though, the Shakespeare-in-the-Park production was a mess - part Broadway razzle-dazzle, part Three Stooges routine, part Ibsen. Rather than mining the subterranean connections between the play's disparate tones and textures, director Daniel Sullivan seemed hellbent on obliterating them.

Yes, it was free, on a beautiful night in the Park, and yes, there is fun to be had picking holes in any performance. But the contrast between this Dream and Michael Grief's Romeo and Juliet (this summer's other Shakespeare-in-the-Park offering) suggested a crucial lesson for any director of Shakespeare: one must surrender to the imperatives of the material, rather than trying to bend it to one's will. Such a surrender does not slough off the burden of interpretation; indeed, it requires it. But Grief's decisions about the nature of love and lust, the relative costs of innocence and experience, and the place of the individual in society, flowed from Shakespearean preoccupations; whereas the current production lacks a point-of-view on love, on imagination, or on anything at all. Sullivan's rope tricks and glowsticks threaten not just to jazz up but to gloss over A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Grappling with the big questions Shakespeare wrestled into blank verse can yield a refreshlingly classicist take on a play, like Grief's, or something as riotously new as the Wooster Group Hamlet. In the case of slightly weaker source material, such as The Taming of the Shrew, strong direction may produce something in between, like Propeller's excellent staging at the Brooklyn Academy of Music... while commenting on our own times.

When a director aims to displace the Bard's magic with its own, however, I'd just as soon save my money, drag out my brokeback Riverside Shakespeare, and stage a play in the round of my own mind. Which doesn't mean I'd ever pass up tickets to any live performance... provided someone else is buying.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 9:12 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Radio Bookman

I took a peek at the Amazon page for The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by Alvaro Mutis and was surprised to find that the book has vaulted to #533 in their sales rankings (the book previously sported a ranking in the hundred thousands.) Now, I know that Amazon rankings are next to meaningless, but still, it's pretty cool to know that my appearance on Weekend Edition Sunday sent readers looking to pick up the book. I don't think they'll be disappointed.

- C. Max Magee @ 6:30 AM ~ comments: 4 ~ Links to this post

 

Hear, Hear

I'd like to second Max's endorsement of Alvaro Mutis' The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll on yesterday's Weekend Edition Sunday appearance. While many NPR listeners will be familiar with some of Max's other recommendations, Mutis remains relatively obscure in the U.S. I hadn't heard of him until Max forced the book on me in 2003; I promptly devoured it.

Part Conrad, part Divine Comedy, part comic book, Maqroll is actually a set of seven short novels, totaling 700 pages. Mutis' enigmatic protagonist, the sailor Maqroll, moves through a world that seems to be falling apart... mining mishaps, political intrigues, a decaying shipping economy... but imbues everything he sees with a romantic tenderness. Friendship, love, and the inevitability of failure are the only constants.

In addition to its maritime motifs, Maqroll makes great summer reading because of its form. Readers spending hours on the beach can consume the collected Adventures and Misadventures as though it were one long picaresque... while those more pressed for time can dip into its constituent novels separately. Ilona Comes with the Rain one week, Un Bel Morir another. And of course, you'll have something to recommend to friends looking for something to fill the void left behind by Harry Potter.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 5:59 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Welcome NPR Listeners

If you're arriving here after hearing my appearance on Weekend Edition Sunday, welcome! Just to give you a little background, I started The Millions in early 2003 when I was a bookseller at an independent bookstore in Los Angeles. I've since moved on from there, but the blog has stuck around. We now have seven contributors besides me, and we write nearly daily about books and other cultural topics.

If you want to look around, a great place to start is the notable posts on the right-hand sidebar. You can get to the archives by scrolling down to the bottom of the page.

Finally, in case you want to get more info on the books I mentioned during the segment, here are some links to the books on Amazon (I haven't heard the segment yet, so not sure if they edited any of these out):

• Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow
• Pastoralia by George Saunders
• East of Eden by John Steinbeck
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by Alvaro Mutis

Thanks for checking out The Millions!

- C. Max Magee @ 9:58 AM ~ comments: 5 ~ Links to this post

 

The Millions on the Radio

I just got off the phone with Liane Hansen of NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday. The show asked me to be a part of their Summer Reading series, which asks a guest each week what they've been reading, what they'll read next, and what they'd read if they had all the time in the world. Hopefully, I don't sound too nervous (it was my first time on the radio - a little nerve-wracking). But if you want to tune in, it'll be on midway through the show's second hour tomorrow. The segment will be posted on their website as well, so I'll post a link here after it airs.

Update: You can now listen to the segment online if you missed it on the radio.

- C. Max Magee @ 10:36 AM ~ comments: 8 ~ Links to this post

 

Occupational Hazards: Liberation by Joanna Scott

I've written in the past about World War II fiction. I especially appreciate how the genre can illuminate elements of the conflict that history books cannot, for want of specificity and seriousness. I had a child's school-taught understanding of the war until I read a novel, actually. The second part of Ian McEwan's novel Atonement tells of the British evacuation from France at Dunkirk after the Germans overran the country. It was an important event in the war, but one that I had never really learned much about, and McEwan's rich storytelling made me want to learn more.

I've since read quite a bit of World War II non-fiction, but I've returned to novels set during the period as well, as they now help flesh out and humanize the history. In Liberation, novelist Joanna Scott takes us to the island of Elba, off the Tuscan coast, whose inhabitants are caught between the wars great powers. Ostensibly once loyal to Mussolini but then occupied by Germany, Elba is by 1944, as the novel's title suggests, in the midst of a whirlwind liberation by French forces that included an amalgam of colonial outfits, among them a battalion of Senegalese soldiers. Among the Elbans themselves, the chaotic liberation inspires mixed feelings of relief and fear, with the latter being directed toward the African liberators in particular.

The story is primarily told in flashback through the eyes of a precocious ten-year-old girl Adriana, who spends the first night of the liberation tucked away in a cabinet, out of sight of any marauding soldiers. Adriana's mother Giulia sums up the turmoil and confusion of occupation and liberation:

Elba had been liberated. Grosseto had been liberated. Rome had been liberated. What did any of this mean? Not what she'd said to her daughter -- mai piu, a promise much worse than an outright lie. The Germans were retreating? The occupation was over? What, exactly, had they occupied, besides beds and rooms and lavatories?

Into Giulia's home, bucolic even in wartime, wanders a Senegalese soldier, Amdu Diop, 17, who decidedly lacks the temperament for war and fancies himself blessed, "chosen" by God and able to perform minor miracles if he puts his mind to it. Impressionable young Adriana becomes infatuated with Amdu, by his otherness mostly, and he with her for similar reasons. And though some of his countrymen are rampaging through the countryside, Amdu's intentions remain pure and he resolves to come back and marry Adriana one day. He is a gentle young gentlemen.

Of course, not everyone else in Adriana's web of relations and family friends is nearly as enamored of Amdu, and the climate, with bullets and bombs still flying overhead, is one mostly of mistrust. Before long Amdu is cast out.

But Liberation isn't a star-crossed love story - and perhaps this is its main shortcoming. Instead it is recalled in a dreamy reverie by a much older Adriana, now living in New York, as she rides the train into the city. These scenes go into fussy detail about Adriana's fellow commuters yank the reader from the Elban recollection in a not entirely pleasant way. Similarly, Mario, Adriana's uncle and the main "villain" of the novel, occasionally assumes the role of narrator and pulls us away from the book's most engaging characters, Adriana and Amdu. Child and childlike, Adriana and Amdu manage to elevate the book, and Scott crafts a delightful ambiguity for the reader to wade through in the pair's few scenes together. In broader strokes, she paints an atmospheric picture of one of the war's minor episodes.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:22 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Inter Alia #3: Master Blaster

Piqued by Leon Wieseltier's huffy take on James Wood's exodus to The New Yorker, many commentators seemed to overlook the paper of record's tacit endorsement of the proposition that Wood is "brutal," blasting away at our frail eminences. Isn't he that vicious British critic? an English professor recently asked me. In fact, Wood is anything but.

In September, The Quarterly Conversation will be publishing a long essay in which I try to illuminate Wood's shortcomings as a critic of contemporary American fiction, but it feels important to me now to note that these shortcomings arise from Wood's fundamental virtues as a critic, namely his passion for, and faith in, literature... just as Faulkner's excesses are inseparable from his gifts. Wood himself may not assent to E.L. Doctorow's axiom that "excess in literature is its own justification," but he is its exemplar.

Wood incites passionate disagreement - making him a rare nut in the tepid oatmeal of our media culture - and is hard on writers who leave him wanting. Quite often, he is wrong about them. But Wood does not hate books, or even novelty. He presents a pretty persuasive platform for his criticism in his 2005 essay "A Reply to the Editors," directed at N+1. It is, along with his conflicted review of DeLillo's Falling Man, one of the best things he's published recently. For as long as he's at The New Yorker, I'll enjoy reading James Wood, and rising (I hope) to his provocations.

Isn't this what citizenship in the republic of letters is supposed to mean?

[Click to read Inter Alia #1 and #2.]

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 6:23 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Summer Reading

I'd have thought that the whole concept of summer reading lists for high schoolers would have fallen by the wayside, as it would seem to lack usefulness in our testing- and extracurriculars-obsessed education system, but a CS Monitor article shows that it's alive and well (and just in time for that last-two-weeks-of-summer cram).

The article includes some interesting insights on the makeup of such lists and how they've changed over the years.

For the most part, reading lists are still heavy on classics. But consider the differences between reading lists from the 1960s and those in the 1980s. Of the nine most commonly taught books in public high schools in 1963, only one (the 1938 play Our Town) was written in the 20th century. By 1988, the 10 most commonly taught novels in public schools included four books from the 20th century: The Great Gatsby (1925), Of Mice and Men (1937), Lord of the Flies (1954), and To Kill a Mockingbird (1960).

But not all novels take a generation to catapult to required summer reading lists. Some new staples in summer reading lists: Life of Pi by Yann Martel, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon, Monster by Walter Dean Myers, and The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold.

Ten years ago, these reading lists didn't have new books like that," says Alleen Nilsen, Arizona State University English professor and co-author of the textbook Literature for Today's Young Adult. "These are really popular new books."

So what catapults Life of Pi and The Lovely Bones to the elusive reading list club? Both are bildungsromans, or stories of young people coming of age. Ms. Nilsen says this theme is crucial for reading list inclusion, as youth need to feel a connection to the literature.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:17 AM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

Publishing Trend: Histories of India and Pakistan

India's economy is growing at a tremendous clip with its expanding, highly educated workforce competing for jobs with Western economies. Pakistan, whose President-General is allied with the U.S., in many ways has become a crucial partner (and some say a liability) in America's adventures and misadventures overseas since 9/11. Both countries have made the world nervous with nuclear posturing over the last decade or so. So it is natural that on the sixtieth anniversary of both countries' creation via bloody partition, a number of books have recently been published chronicling this pivotal moment in recent history. I've listed five of these books on the birth of Pakistan below (Please use the comments to let us know about any I've missed.)

• Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire by Alex Von Tunzelmann - New Yorker review; excerpt
• India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy by Ramachandra Guha - San Francisco Chronicle review
• The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future by Martha C. Nussbaum - NYRB review; excerpt (pdf)
• Shameful Flight: The Last Years of the British Empire in India by Stanley Wolpert - Times of India review
• The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan by Yasmin Khan - The Economist review; excerpt

The Great Partition and Indian Summer seem to be getting the most press, with both being discussed in a recent Slate article.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:54 PM ~ comments: 5 ~ Links to this post

 

The Ever Quotable Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer made an unorthodox appearance at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, beamed in via video link from his home in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He's apparently not big on technology, however, calling the video-interview system more suited to a "young chimpanzee." The Herald's story on the event includes a number of other classic Mailer quips, including his noting that the many punches he's thrown in his lifetime were "always well considered."

- C. Max Magee @ 9:15 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

A Booker's Dozen: The Longlist is Here

Perhaps the world's most jawed about literary prize has released its 2007 longlist. It features one legitimate heavyweight (who is currently the favorite in the betting parlors) and a few other familiar names. All the Booker Prize longlisters are below (with excerpts where available):

• Darkmans by Nicola Barker
• Self Help by Edward Docx (excerpt)
• The Gift Of Rain by Tan Twan Eng (excerpt)
• The Gathering by Anne Enright
• The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (excerpt)
• The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies (excerpt)
• Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones (excerpt)
• Gifted by Nikita Lalwani (excerpt)
• On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (excerpt)
• What Was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn
• Consolation by Michael Redhill (excerpt)
• Animal's People by Indra Sinha
• Winnie & Wolf by A.N.Wilson

- C. Max Magee @ 7:11 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Lethem the Lyrical: You Don't Love Me Yet

The salient aspect of Jonathan Lethem's latest novel, You Don't Love Me Yet, is that by the end each character has found his and her level. It's quite something: of the seven or so characters there are no winners and no losers. The author's conscientious diplomacy imbues a basically playful book with a certain airy dignity.

Hard to deny that Lethem is a virtuoso prose writer. He is a prize fighter sparring with plot lines in a ring of words. Like the best boxers, Lethem masters the ring - makes it his home - and approaches his craft without fear of getting hurt. Language is for him a sweet science. But just as interesting as the stick and move of the words in You Don't Love Me Yet is the nature of the story. I was impressed with the way in which Lethem approached the complexities and complications inherent to crafting a female lead character, one who comes across as rather emotionally ambiguous - as opposed to Good. Or maybe Lucinda, 29, is simply young.

Lucinda is the bass player in the band, Monster Eyes, a position she relishes for good reason: she's good at it, self-taught and attuned to the varied musical voices that comprise the group. But she is impulsive, indulgent, and easily taken in by The Complainer, a man she meets over what is meant to be an anonymous call-line for which she is an operator. The implication is that Lucinda is both the creative catalyst of the band and also its Yoko Ono. Although her bass playing is the glue that ties the band's songs together, and The Complainer's words the inspiration for the lyrics in the band's most popular number, her lusty infatuation with the seductive older man corrupts the band's artistic integrity. But along the way Monster Eyes does get a moment in the sun.

I "read" this book by listening to it on 5 CDs, performed by the author, unabridged. I use the word performed for good reason. Lethem has innate ability in this area too. He is able to read his work without self-consciousness and with a satisfying definitiveness, a pitch-perfect and distinct voice for each character. Bedwin, the band's guitar player and musical soul, phrases everything he says as a question. It's funny, but it also adds depth to the character, who is shy and introverted. Meanwhile The Complainer speaks in lugubrious platitudes. Because we hear The Complainer's words through Lucinda's ear, one trained for catchiness and not so much profundity, they initially come across as penetrating. But as the book goes on, insights such as "You can't be deep without a surface," in some ways the tart and tangy center of the book's social wisdom, seem trite and tedious. The act of listening to Lethem read his book seemed appropriate because the book is based around sound, the sound of people making music, both literally and, yes, figuratively. I highly recommend the audio version of You Don't Love Me Yet, while wondering if I would have gotten as much out of it if I had merely read it off the page.

The book contains one or two very fine descriptions of ensemble music-making (and a not-inconsiderable dose of sexual steaminess, mm). And yet, one provocative suggestion in Lethem's construct is that rock and roll lyrics are often shallow, transparent. The implication is that the resonance of rock ly