Mark SaFranko labored in obscurity for years.  He wrote songs, plays, novels.  He supported himself with a series of shitty, thankless jobs that kept the creditors at bay long enough for him to write a bit more.  His youth passed to middle age like this.

I started writing, and all the while, no matter where I was and what my circumstances, I took notes and wrote. Novel after novel, song after song, story after story, play after play. It was a bona fide apprenticeship, with the writers I admired serving as mentors since I wasn’t going the MFA route. And as Miller himself said (and I’m paraphrasing), “a writer must put down thousands of words before first signing his name.”

What I like about the novel Hating Olivia is what I like about SaFranko. It’s a deeply personal story about a guy in love with his art. He’s not the most likable fella; sometimes he seems more in love with himself than with art. Yet at the end of the day, you see he’s lost to the White Goddess. That makes me a little jealous.

The best of this genre of novel (and what might we call it? the semi-autobiographical bohemian artist rant?) make the reader intensely jealous. If the story doesn’t invoke jealousy then it’s quickly dismissed by the reader. I confess that after I read Post Office I wanted to be Henry Chinaski, and there are days when I feel I’ve almost achieved that dream. Almost. The little stretch between almost and already is the gap in which jealousy settles.

I felt the same about Tropic of Cancer. I wished to god I had witnessed those two turds floating in the bidet, and the madam graciously covering them up, angry as hell. That made me jealous.

Not so much when I read Junky. Burroughs seemed to drone on. He seemed the one most given to performance, a life lived as a novelist, a type of performance art. Admirable in its own way, but also terribly boring.

Jack Kerouac made my young self feel it. That burning impulse of the road, travel as experience, life as besotted journey. I ate that shit with a sugar spoon. Tried to live it. Crashed and burned, and when the debris settled I did not have my single scroll like Kerouac did before his liver killed him. I haven’t enjoyed Kerouac in a long time.

Mark SaFranko fits into this long line of twentieth century turned twenty-first century writers, and maybe because his books are coming out now, in his middle age, I can appreciate his story in ways that my younger self could not. If Kerouac was about the road, SaFranko is about the dingy apartment called home. He is Henry Miller retired to his home in Big Sur.

Hating Olivia is about the youngish writer named Max and his tumultuous relationship with his art and his special lady friend Olivia. SaFranko tells of the shitty jobs, the shitty no-jobs, the fights and affairs, and substance abuse. He takes the reader un-haltingly through Max and Olivia’s life together, and in the end, he shines a ray of hope. Max survives Olivia. What’s more Max gets the fodder for the best story he’s ever destined to write.

SaFranko took this nugget of gold first to England and then to France where they loved it. This year Harper Perennial saw fit to offer SaFranko to his native America.
I recommend Hating Olivia, but I do so with a blush. I’m afraid the recommendation says something about myself, something about my own longings and the things I’m willing to part with to feed my need to write. This is SaFranko’s appeal to me.

In his introduction to the book, Dan Fante–another tenacious writer with more international than domestic appeal–says of SaFranko:

I know why I write. I write because I must. I cannot stop. I’m driven by rage and insanity and crushing ambition. Mark SaFranko scares people like me. I believe the guy would rather write than breath. I envy his talent and commitment.

Amen.

I have found my next book to read, started it moments ago, and only a few pages in I’m lovin’ it. The Verifiicationist by Donald Antrim

-Facebook status update of December 15th

I have a thing for greasy diners and coffee shops.  I love ‘em, the smell of stale grease, eggs made to order at all hours of the day and night, surly wait staff, the potential of the place.  Who knows what stimulating conversations might happen, what quixotic plans might hatch there with my ass planted on the ripped vinyl booth with the wobbly table leg steadied by a spare matchbook.

Imagine then my excitement when I heard about Donald Antrim’s book The Verificationist.  The story:  a group of psychotherapists gather at a pancake house twice yearly to unwind and talk shop.

You had me at pancake house.

The book started well, charging out of the gate, throwing psychoanalytical phrases together with syrup and black coffee. Here’s a random sample:

“Leave it to you to choose this place for dinner, Thomas.”

The speaker was Manuel Escobar, the renowned Kleinian. He sat across from me in the booth by the window, and I explained to him, “Breakfast foods, except for cereals that contain inordinate amounts of sugar, have, in my experience, a comforting , anitdepressant quality.”
“I suppose that is true if you are an American,” said Escobar, looking around the room, then waving impatiently to our beautiful waitress.

“Don’t stare.”

“I’m not staring, Thomas. I find adolescent girls enchanting, though not compelling.”

This was from page five. I like the passage because of the obvious thought put behind each turn of a phrase. In a few lines of dialogue and a few descriptive phrases, the reader knows something about these two characters. “Kleinian,” whatever the hell that is, it sounds impressive. Escobar is not opposed to looking at the little girls but he gets his dinner at home. While our narrator sows the seeds of his unreliability by a dishonest display of his own lust for the waitress.

It’s not easy to write a short story on such a small scrap as “a group of psychoanalyists hang out in a dinner.” To write a novel on the same premise is even harder. Making something interesting happen with such a premise (ie. plot) is Herculean, and in the Verificationist, Antrim does not lift that world on his back, though he tries his best.

To construct some semblance of a plot, Antrim has a conflict arise between Thomas our narrator and one of his colleagues, Bernhardt.  The conflict involves throwing toast across the table and it ends with the narrator being hoisted aloft by his colleague and held suspended in the air.

I felt a hand on my arm. It was Bernhardt’s. This man’s hand grasped my arm–the fingers wrapping tightly around my forearm, pinching my arm–so that I could not move or shake free to throw the toast.

“Get your hands off me, Richard.”

Drop the bread, Tom.”

As always, when dealing with an unpleasant dispute over professional conduct or ieology–ours was, after all, a professional pancake gathering–I looked, hopefully, to other factions for support.

“Tom, Richard is right. We don’t want a food fight tonight. I’m sure it would be a tension reliever, but everyone is already having such a pleasant evening. Can’t we just drink our coffee?” This from Maria…

This incident occurs around page 25. Again, I love the succinct way Antrim uses language. He moves the story with the description and bits of conversation.

But from this point onward, the story begins to bend and bend and bend till it breaks.

Bernhardt, in order to further restrain the narrator, continues to hold Tom up in the air, and the next 150 pages are narrated from this height, every disconnected thought that flows through the narrator’s pinched head gets in the story.

Here is a portion from a four-page paragraph. I include the first bit of dialouge:

For a moment I hung there. Bernhardt, his breath tickling the hairs sprouting from my ear, whispered:

“Say Uncle.”

That was when I felt the sadness coming on. It was not surprising, given the circumstances. How often are we, as adults, raised up and carried like babies–in public!–softly spoken to by a man whose face we cannot see, a man who is enormous and powerful, terrifying, as he holds us aloft? Try this somtime if you don’t believe me when I say that the experience will make you weep with sorrow and regret for all the trouble you have caused–will cause–the people most dear to you. My thoughts, naturally, went to Jane. Here came Jane, the image of her, filling my mind and my heart, that night in the Pancake House, that evening in Bernhardt’s arms–Jane! Jane!–filling my heart with pity and shame. She is not a monster to me. Not at all. I am the one, not she, who remains, after all our years together, frightened by love. Or I should say that I am frightened, and so is Jane; we are frightened in our different though complementary ways.

And on. And on.

I sympathize with Antrim as a writer.  His pinched style, the overuse of participial phrases, clipped half sentences that are strung together, like pearls, with the commas as thread; these things I understand because I’m drawn to these devices too.  I like it when the words on the page flow, when I feel as if each sentence and extended paragraph hands me off to the next.  I see in Antrim’s Verificationist the same sense of pacing and wordsmithing that I try to bring to my own writing.

Yet, Antrim made me yawn.  By the end, I didn’t give a damn about Thomas or his analyst buddies.  I didn’t even much care for the pretty waitress or the pancake house.

A novel with no intimation of story whatsoever, Writer would like to contrive.

And with no characters. None.

Plotless. Characterless.

Yet seducing the reader into turning the pages nonetheless.

-David Markson This is Not a Novel

I don’t like what’s happening to me. I’ve started hating everything I read. Reading is my long-time lover, but she just doesn’t turn me on right now. I tried to deny it, tried making excuses, but I have to own my feelings.

Every bit of contemporary lit that I’ve read lately has left me cold, wondering “what’s the point?”

My most recent disappointment was Mary Robison’s Subtraction.  Robison wrote this one in the mid-nineties, and without knowing a thing about her autobiography, I feel like she’s given me a thinly-veiled autobiographical slapdash of a novel.  Substraction is basically plotless.  It is one of those overly self-conscious, character-driven stories where none of the characters feels particularly warm.  Perhaps writers as they grow into their craft must seek more extreme sources of inspiration (hand-gliding or S&M, for example) in order to avoid writing a boring novel about an aimless writerly life.  Sometimes this “still life with a writer story” works.  Hell, Bukowski made a living off it, as did Henry Miller and various Miller imitators, but I personally don’t get a charge from these stories.

I was similarly disappointed with Jim Harrison’s The English Major.  Majorly  boring.  Harrison’s story purports to be a road novel about an old man rediscovering his life.  I don’t mind road novels, but the best road novels make you want to get on the road.  The English Major made me want to go to sleep.

Both Harrison and Robison put their eggs in the character basket, hoping that their lively prose will illuminate these eccentric characters and make us love them, perhaps even reveal something about ourselves and our society in the process.  Both, in this reader’s opinion, fall short.

Why do they fall short?  They got nothing interesting in them.  You don’t have to write genre fiction to have a decent (and exciting) plot.  Literary fiction writers, however, seem to have ceded to role of plot to the genre writers.  Markson, as illustrated in the quote above from his This is Not a Novel, succeeded in writing a plotless, characterless novel because he was playing off the vacuous literary fiction of our times.  There will never be another Markson.

As a hopeless romantic, I want to fight for my lover.  I want my reading back.  Please someone write something interesting.

Cobain and Taylor : Strike and Strike

Early in the year, in the cold of January, I got a surprise with Heavier then Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain. I thought Heavier would be a mindless read, something to keep the brain processing words while I cast about for a better book. I read the book while poised next to Skull Creek, a bitter Ozark wind crippling my hands, and the book took me places in the mind I had not been in fifteen years. It was good to go back and remember Kurt Cobain, and Charles Cross, the author, was wise enough to get himself out of the way and let Cobain’s story tell itself without any fanfare. Quality rock ‘n’ roll journalism, and my first Strike of 2010.

I followed up Heavier than Heaven with Peter Taylor’s A Summons to Memphis. Taylor is a writer I had known through short stories, which I had found to be readable but forgettable. I had never read his Summons–the book that made the man a bit of money and won him the National Book Award. Summons was one of the Strikes of the year. Delightfully written, Taylor captures the social anxiety of a Southern family during a time when the idea of the “Southern family” was becoming more myth than reality. The book has pathos.

Walbert and Adams : Gutter and Gutter

After Taylor came a couple of the 2010 gutter balls.

Kate Walbert’s A Short History of Women was on every critic’s short list of the best books of 2009. Almost ten years ago, I was enraptured with Walbert’s novel The Gardens of Kyoto, so much so that I emailed Walbert to tell her how much I loved the novel. Ms. Walbert even emailed me back and suggested I read Elizabeth McKracken’s The Giant’s House. I loved her for this. But A Short History of Women disappointed me. A Short History is a muilt-generational narrative about the feminist movement, starting in 1918 with a hunger strike and ending in 2011 with a young Yale graduate toting Chopin’s The Awakening like the Bible. Something in the tone of the novel bothered me. Linda Hirshman at Slate’s Double X put this something into words in her critical essay “What’s Wrong with ‘A Short History of Women,’ the Novel.”

Both in form and in content, this neutered, novelized history of women teaches that political feminism is passé. No choice has meaning, and no choice makes life better. It takes a very good writer to produce a value-free novel—think Camus’ The Stranger. Walbert is not even close. Some of A Short History is so hackneyed that, were it not for the earnest acknowledgements, you might think Walbert was writing a parody of the history of women, sort of a feminist Colbert Report.

I had a similar reaction to Lorraine Adam’s novel Harbor, another of the 2010 Gutters. This is Adam’s first novel after a life spent in journalism, and I had high hopes. In Harbor Adams attempts to tackle illegal immigration and the war on terror in one fell swoop. There is a great tradition of the social novel in America. Journalists, tired of the lens of reality, find they can express more of our social malaise with fiction. Steinbeck was the master of this American archetype, but then there are folk like Hemingway, Upton Sinclair, even Fitzgerald and Whitman, who came to literature through journalism. But Adams doesn’t make the leap from journalism to literature seamlessly. Harbor reaches for a higher level of language than is warranted for the topic and fails to reach even that. I put the book down before I could finish it, which is unprecedented for me. Harbor, a definite gutter ball this year.

Huneven and Muller : Strike and Strike

Michelle Huneven then rescued my Spring reading in 2010. I blogged about Huneven in March. I won’t say more here, except that Huneven’s Jamesland was one of the 2010 Strikes.

As was Herta Muller’s Passport. I would read anything Muller penned.

Barthelme and Hannah : Strike and Strike

In 2010, I also discovered two short story writer’s whose influence over contemporary literature is undisputed: Donald Barthleme and Barry Hannah. Barthelme and Hannah are very different stylistically, but they both have mastered their form.

Barthelme’s Sixty Stories consistently appears on the syllabi of creative writing teachers. The absurd world Barthelme creates with his stories gives him the nomen “difficult writer,” yet there is more wisdom in Sixty Stories than in most of the drivel published today. I suspect that if Barthelme were still alive, he would be struggling to publish his work. Thankfully, we have him encapsulated forever in Sixty Stories. If you only have time for one of the sixty, read “The Balloon,” a story that David Foster Wallace said “made me want to become a writer” (he said this in an excellent interview with Salon.) You can read a shortened version of “The Balloon” online,.

Hannah’s style is more in the Southern realist tradition than Barhelme. His characters are recognizable to anyone who has spent some time here in the dirty South, but his themes are universal. Hannah, like Andre Dubus, is a writer whose absolute compassion for his characters enlivens all his prose. He’s a Mississippian by way of Arkansas. His death in March of 2010 brought a deluge of remembrances. The best of which is Wells Tower’s interview with Hannah shortly before Hannah’s death, published in the Believer. Read any of Hannah you can grab. I read several collections of his stories in 2010. My favorite was High Lonesome.

One last thing on Barthelme and Hannah: I came to read Sixty Stories and Hannah’s High Lonesome after reading Justin Taylor’s Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever, a remarkable book of stories from the neophyte Taylor. I expect great things from Justin Taylor in the future. He collaborated on an appreciation of Barthelme’s work and has more than a programmatic view of contemporary literature. You can find him all over the interweb’s spreading his views on the state of literature and generally advancing the art form. I appreciate the fellow, and his collection of stories did not disappoint.

Prose and Bowles and Chekov : Spare and Strike and Turkey

This brings us to April 2010. I read Francine Prose’s book about writing titled Reading Like a Writer. My Auntie, a fellow writer, gave me this book for my birthday two years ago, but it mouldered on the shelf because deep down I loathe these writing books and deeper yet I cherish them. What’s beautiful about Prose’s writing book is that she approaches the topic as a lover of books, and all her suggestions are illustrated by generous quotes from Prose’s favorite writers. She has a whole chapter devoted to Chekov, for godsakes. Prose’s book was a solid spare. She knocked the eight pins with the first chapters and picked up the split with her chapter on Chekov.

Reading Prose did two thing for me. First she turned me on to Jane Bowles tremendous book Two Serious Ladies. Seriously, Bowles’ Ladies is a forgotten masterpiece. Read it. Then read it again. Something in the tone of Bowles’s book sparked my own writing fire, after I read it, I started writing everyday again, and deriving more joy from my writing than I have in years.

The second thing Prose did for me: she sent me back to Chekov, and when I start reading Chekov I start writing. I haven’t over analyzed this about myself because I don’t want to jinx it. I am, at heart, a very superstitious author. I have noticed about my writing habits that when the urge to read Chekov hits, I should keep a pen handy, because my brain is going to be filling with ideas. It happens every year. Spring 2010, with a nip still in the air, I had my yearly dance with Chekov, and it was Francine Prose who put me on his dance card. Thank You, Francine. Chekov is a perfect game.

Graham and Watson : Nine Pin and Spare

My wife has an African dream. She wants to live there. She just returned from spending two weeks with some Kenyan friends working at a grammar school. In our life together, Joanna and I are trying to negotiate how to fulfill both our dreams: hers to help women in Africa, mine to write my mind alive.

Enter Philip Graham.

I am a devotee to my Google Reader, which I have stocked with blogs by the young and literate. I came across this interview with Philip Graham in The Morning News. Graham is a novelist and short story writer who has been plying his trade for as long as I’ve been alive. His early married years were spent in the Ivory Coast, where his wife was working for an NGO. Graham wrote most of his early novels there in Africa, but the subject matter was uniquely American. He did not write directly about the expat experience until he was older and back in the States. This piqued my interest.

I read Graham’s novel How to Read and Unwritten Language. The novel was a solid nine pin. Not great but not a gutter. But based on the strength of his biography, I’ll read more. I like particularly this snippet from the Morning News interview. The interviewer asks Graham if the anxiety of putting words on the page dissipates with age. Graham responds:

Oh, I’m much more relaxed about the whole process than I used to be. Basically, all that matters is what appears on the page, I don’t worry so much anymore about publishing schedules. I’m primarily interested in the trial and error of forging the patterns of my imagination’s fingerprint; the grimy marks it may leave on the world comes later.

Brad Watson is a youngish writer in the mold of Barry Hannah. He is a Mississippian and a short story writer. I read his latest Aliens in the Prime of Their Life. This is a solid collection, but not as enjoyable as his first collection, Last Days of the Dog Men. Dog Men was Watson’s breakout collection. Each story features human and dog in a some sort of relationship, not always man’s best friend. With this ploy, Watson manages to enter the world of his characters, whether they be murderous cuckolds or widower granny’s.

Days of Summer

I am prattling too much to maintain the attention of my one regular blog reader. Here’s a streamlined version of the strikes and gutters of the Summer of 2010:

• Tinkers by Paul Harding: Gutter Ball
• The Lonely Polygamist by Barry Udall: Gutter Ball
• The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell: Spare with the last pin leaning almost falling for a strike.
• Collected Works of Isaak Babel: Strike, perhaps a perfect game. It’s a shame more people aren’t reading Babel. He is a Russian gem.
• Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee: Strike. Coetzee, I have decided, is one of the weirdest but most pitch perfect novelists of my lifetime. Costello fits this mold. In 2010, I also read Coetzee’s Summertime and Waiting for the Barbarians. Stikes, both of ‘em.
• Dreamerby jack Butler: Strike. No secret that Butler is one of my all-time favorite writers. Dreamer is one of his later novels (came out in the late 90s); set in New Mexico rather than the South, but it pulls the usual Butlerian themes together. Intrigue, sex, god, shamanism, and even vampires. Butler is/was a genre bending literary novelist when that wasn’t cool.
• The Passage by Justin Cronin: Gutter Ball. The Passage was possibly the worst thing I read all year. Cronin made bank on this sprawling, apocalyptic, vampire romp, and I hope he is happy with his blood money.
• An Invisible Sign of My Own by Aimee Bender: Spare. Quirky. Mystical. Life affirming. I liked this book when I read it, but I have mostly forgotten it.
• Humpty Dumpty in Oakland and Time Out of Joint by Philip K. Dick : Spare and Spare. Humpty is one of Dick’s realist novels set in 1950′s Northern California. Interesting simply for the flesh it adds to the body of Dick’s Sci-fi literature. Time Out of Joint is one of Dick’s early Sci-fi novels that shows his fascination with the future and with how our technological world breaks into the our established world of forms. Again the book is interesting precisely for what it shows of us of the Dick who will later assert his gnosticism with the brilliant Valis trilogy.
• The City & the City by China Mieville: Eight Pin. I am not a big Sci-Fi fan, but I appreciate the work that Mieville does to attract non-fans to the genre. City is a fine read for the non fan.
• Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings by Zora Neal Hurston: Strikes. Hurston is my pre-imminent source for HooDoo literature. A devotee of HooDoo conjur, Hurston recreates her own experiences with this underground, snycretistic, and highly Southern religion. She is always a delight, and her writing informs my own.

Freedom’s Fall

Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom was released in late August, and I got my paws on the book in early September. The book is polarizing. Literary novelists who have been plying their trade for decades, seemed affronted by the publicity that Franzen’s latest book received. How often does a novelist get on the cover of Time Magazine? Book critics, especially those closest to the publishing houses, embraced Freedom. My sympathy leans toward the struggling literary artists rather than the critics, BUT, Freedom ensnared me. The book is a lengthy, twisty-turny War and Peace of a book. In interviews, Franzen repeatedly said that he consciously tried to forget being literary and to simply tell a tale. He succeeded. As much as I might like to dismiss Franzen because of his fame, I cannot dismiss him. He told me a good story; he made my mind travel his roads in much the same way as Dickens does at his best. Freedom was the game-winning strike of my 2010 year in reading.

What’s more, Franzen reminded me of the late David Foster Wallace. I gave up on Wallace in my twenties. I thought I was done with him. I wasn’t. I reread Wallace’s Oblivion and came away with a new love for the man. I also reread Broom of the System. Strike and strike. There is much to be learned from Wallace. I find that I read Wallace more like a writing instruction manual than a true reader. I think this is why I felt I was done with him. I didn’t want any more of his advice. Yet, rereading him injecting life into my own thought life, and ultimately into my writing life.

The Final Frame

As Fall bled into Winter, my reading year ended with a few more gutters and few more strikes. The Commissariat of Enlightenment by Ken Kalfus was a strike, a perfect blend of experimental story-telling and historical realism. Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City was a disappointing gutter ball. I expected more from Lethem, especially since the book came so highly recommended. Lethem stried hard with Chronic City, but there is really no story to Chronic, just a collage of almost-interesting characters. I felt similar to Martin Amis’s London Fields. I sensed that there was greatness in his words, but I could not touch that greatness. Amis earns a gutter ball. By contrast, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum’s Ms. Hempel Chronicle surprised and delighted me. A strike, for sure. Bynum took me into the life of a grammar school teacher and she let me root around there for a few hundred pages. Bynum is a lady I look forward to reading more.

I rounded out the year with some research reading. The story that I’m currently writing features a veteran of the Vietnam war who is obsessed with the novel-turned-musical-turned-movie Showboat, so I spent a few weeks reading Edna Furber’s Showboat. It’s not a bad read. I also read We Were Soldiers Once and Young and I am still reading The Warmth of Other Suns, a non-fiction book published in 2010 about the exodus of Southern Blacks to the Northern promised land. Good stuff.

I read more than I’ve written here, but these are a few highlights. I have to reserve a few that I’d like to blog about individually. Hating Olivia, Charles Portis, Margaret Bolsterli, and All is Lost Nothing is Forgotten. Overall it was a good year for reading. 2011 promises more.

This month Jennifer Egan reads “The Reverse Bug” by Lore Segal.

Jennifer Egan Reads \”The Reverse Bug\”

If you’ve got 30mins to spare, give that time to Segal ala Egan. Delightful to read and delightful to hear, “Reverse Bug,” written in 1989, contains prophetic echos to our own age of terror, but it does so in a subtle, pleasing way.

The Brothers: a novel

I‘ve reading Barhelme (Frederick not Donald). Never read him before, but I heard about him on the blogosphere because of the kerfuffal over his departure from the Mississippi Review. Did he quit? Was he fired? Read about it here. I’m drawn to Southern writers. I especially like Mississippians. I thought Barthelme might be a good reading fit for me.

I have been underwhelmed by Brothers. Maybe it’s just a one-off wonder and the rest of his stuff is brilliant. But so far (I have about twenty more pages to read), Barthelme’s story is flat. He drones on with descriptions of all the signs on the highway while his character’s drive around talking with the spunk of dog drool. When the story gets too boring, he’ll throw in an character that flirts with eccentricity enough to hold one’s interest for another scene. The novel seems pointless.

There are some saving graces. The character of Jen (the protagonists considerably younger love interest) fills every scene she’s in. I think I’m finishing the book just to see what happens to her.

But I didn’t really want to blog the book here. Mostly, I wanted to share this one portion where the narrator describes the technology of his day. Barthelme published Brothers in 1993. I remember 1993. One year before Kurt Cobain killed himself.  I was all of twenty.  Barthelme attempts to insert a bit o’ up to date technology, and, as testament to the speed of change, he sounds completely out of date now:

Eventually he mail-ordered a Gateway 486 with a lot of fancy add-ons. He was particularly interested in drawing and painting programs, word processors, and utility programs. He was using Windows, spending hours creating new icons, making drawings that he thought Jen might use in the magazine, doctoring photos to take guy’s heads off…He was also getting new shareware programs off bulletin board systems that Jen set him up with, and going on Compuserve, using Jen’s account to look up information on diseases he thought he might have, or might get, and to download consumer reports, reviews, news. He wondered what the point of a weather map was, inasmuch as the ones on TV were always more detailed and up to date, but he got them, anyway. He was linking into what journalists and excitable futurists were pleased to call the neural net, which was fundamentally mundane but fast and a little magical.

Good ol’ Compuserve. And the “neural net???” If I were reading this today and it had been written today, it might seem quaint, reminder of the way things were seventeen years ago when a Gateway 486 was fast and a little magical. But there is something dulling about reading it and feeling the writing become dated even as injest the words. Maybe it is just some innate desire within me that only wants the new, but I don’t think so. I think I want the timeless.

By way of contrast, I recently reread David Foster Wallace’s Broom of the System. I don’t have the book in hand right now (I was late getting it back to the library. Bad. Bad. Librarian.) or I would include a quote. Foster was/is a master of creating realistic ultra-contemporary narrative with a timeless quality. When he wants to talk about technology, he makes it up, AND the techno-babble usually serves some larger plot point. In Broom, there is the ultra-modern phone switch board that has the tunnel problem. You’ll see the same thing in Infinite Jest with the video system or the replaceable faces. Instead of trying to add some contemporary techno-reference for the sake of saying, “look, my characters are alive in your world, dear reader.” Wallace takes makes technology part of the larger myth that we all recognize without the detail (Compuserve) and relate to on a more visceral level.

I came to Vargas LLosa by a circuitous route.  I was doing a bit of research, reading the communiques of SubComandante Marcos when I happened upon a footnote, written with Marcos usual ironic contempt and referencing the book Captain Pantoja and the Special Service.  This turns out to be a difficult little novel to get one’s hands on in translation.  But, I’m a librarian, so I got my paws on a copy.  It remains my favorite Vargas LLosa novel, though one that got little mention during LLosa’s fifteen minutes of Nobel fame.

A few weeks ago, I picked up Letters to a Young Novelist, LLosa’s obligatory book on writing.  There are some gems in this slender volume.

It is relatively easy to speak of the coherence of a style and harder to explain what I mean by essentiality, a quality required of the language of a novel it that novel is to be persuasive. Maybe the best way of describing essentiality is to explain its opposite, the style that fails in telling a story because it keeps us at a distance and lucidly conscious; in other words, a style that makes us conscious of reading something alien and prevents us from experiencing the story alongside its characters and sharing it with them. This failure is perceived when the reader feels an abyss that the novelist does not successfully bridge in writing his tale, an abyss between what is being told and the language in which it is told. This bifurcation or split between the language of a story and the story itself annihilates the story’s power of persuasion. The reader doesn’t believe what he is being told, because the clumsiness and inconvenience of the style make him sense that between word and deed there is an arbitrariness that fiction depends on and that only successful fictions manage to erase or hide.

And, just as I mentioned in my Van Booy post, here is Llosa’s advice that the would-be writer read, read, read.

Read constantly, because it is impossible to acquire a rich, full sense of language without reading plenty of good literature, and try as hard as you can, though this is not quite so easy, not to imitate the styles of the novelist you most admire and who first taught you to love literature. Imitate them in everything else: in their dedication, in their discipline, in their habits; if you feel it is right, make their convictions yours. But try to avoid the mechanical reproduction of the patterns and rhythms of their writing, since if you don’t manage to develop a personal style that suits your subject matter, your stories will likely never achieve the power of persuasion that makes them come to life.

One of the dirty truths of fiction writers is that we have ideas. Although it is in vogue to suggest otherwise, to pretend that what matters is the art and the art alone, that we aren’t trying to pawn an ideology on anyone, the truth is that good fiction is supported by ideas, what we used to call philosophy, before that term came to mean eccentric white guys thinking eccentric white guy thoughts. Yet, philosophy is, at its core, the exploration of questions that every sentient being contends with, and if a writer has not grappled with these questions and come to some semblance of an answer—even if that answer is simply, “I have no answers,”–then his writing will be nothing short of mental masturbation. To write fiction about folk struggling with life is, in a very real sense, to enter the realm of the philosophical, and the trick of the craft is to tell a story so well that the under-pinning of ideas disappears. One need look no further than Oscar Wilde—the king of “art for art’s sake—to see that this is true, for what would the Picture of Dorian Grey be without those niggling questions of mortality and morality?

Simon Van Booy is a fiction writer (and a damn good one), but in his latest publishing effort, Van Booy lifts the curtain on the fiction writer’s process, revealing the ideas behind the stories. In so doing he also demonstrates a more universal truth: all of our lives are under-girded with the philosophical.



Van Booy chooses three essential questions: Why we need love; Why we fight; and Why our decisions don’t matter. Each question is addressed in it’s own book, titled with the very question, but these are not treatises. Van Booy instead approaches the work of philosophy as editor rather than writer, so instead of reading Van Booy’s direct opinions on the question, he presents the reader with collections of art work, quotations, and selections from great writers and thinkers throughout Western (and in some cases Eastern) civilization.

What is delightful in these collections is Van Booy’s somewhat mysterious choices. With each selection, the reader must raise again the primary question. What does this have to do with Love? With fighting? With our meaningless decisions?

In Why We Need Love, for example, Van Booy includes Willa Cather’s lengthy story “Paul’s Case: A Study in Temperament.” This story is about a young man with an absent mother (possibly deceased, though this is never explicitly stated) and a father who does not understand him. With a feeling of isolation, Paul becomes something of a juvenile delinquent, embezzling funds with which to spend a raucous weekend in New York City. It is a great story, but it is in no sense a love story, and finding it in the middle of this collection, the reader must ask “What’s this got to do with love?” And in asking the question, you see the story anew.

This is what I liked most about Van Booy’s trilogy. He forced me to look at stories, poems, paintings, with fresh eyes.

I read the books in the order I unpacked them from their box: Love, Fighting, and then Decisions. They seemed to lose their power the further I got into them, and by the time I finished Why Our Decisions Don’t Matter, I was beginning to feel that the book did not matter. The first two books, where Van Booy is treating subjective ideas that still have a bit of objective heft (love, anger), his editorial choices seem more poignant and revealing, but book three dragged on. I felt like Van Booy was trying too hard in this last book to make me see life a certain way.

Overall, I applaud Van Booy’s effort to force us to ask essential questions, but in the end, I would like to explore the questions on my own, without his editorializing. I’m stubborn that way.

Having said that, perhaps what is most revealing about these books is the insight into the thought life of a literary artist. Van Booy lifts the curtain on his own process. Every writers at some point in his or her career will sit down to write a book about writing, and almost everyone of them will say, “to be a great writer, you should read, read, read.”

Van Booy, in selecting what he does and in editorializing in the way he does, shows us the books that have shaped his own writing, and more than anything, it makes me want to read his fiction again to see how he incorporates these thoughts and these styles into his own.

Last night, or rather, early this morning, I finished reading Moby Dick for the second time. Often, I had wanted to read Moby Dick again but was prevented from doing so by that same perception of the book that keeps many from reading for the first time, viz. The Boring Parts.

Moby Dick begins with the classic line “Call me Ishmael,” preceeds with several stunning chapters of narrative wherein the reader is introduced to Queequeg the cannibal, the whale fishery, and later the characters of Starbuck, Stubb, and Ahab. These are splendidly written chapters of storytelling that heighten the sense of expectation. The pending voyage–and all it presides–is felt with a sense of dread and wonder.

The ending does not frustrate these early expectations. In the last remaining chapters, the reader is taken into the turbulent brain of Captain Ahab. We see the final chase. We see the ultimate destruction of the Pequod and all the characters we’ve come to love.

But in between this beginning and end is the middle. The Boring Parts. Here we are treated with various depictions of whales. Here we read about the classifications of whales, the history of cetology and the history of whales in pop culture. Here too we are given the almost painfully exact descriptions of the whale’s body, head, fins. Our narrator, not content with the mere surface of things, will say things like “having seen the outer surface of the spermaceti’s cavernous head. let us descend like Jonah to the whale’s innermost being.” This type of description takes up hundreds of pages.

As a long time reader, I have come to believe that the act of reading a great book is a narrative act in its own right. When we read a great book, we enter the story, but we also create a story of our own reading of the book. The books that I remember–and there are many that I don’t remember at all–become situated in the story of my own life journey, and to recall the book is to recall what was happening to me as I read it and to fit the book’s narrative into my own.

Kerouac I read one summer while languishing in an un-airconditioned apartment in South Arkansas. Jack Butler I first read in Fort Worth, and he almost made me run from a pending marriage…almost. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainence I finished at three in the morning at a Greyhound station in Gary, Indiana, where I was running away from my own depression.

It’s extrememly rare that I read a book twice, and reading Moby Dick for a second time has put me into a reflective mood, particularly because of those Boring Parts. I found these parts much less tedious, more insightful, even compelling, anything but boring. Why?

Thirteen years ago, at the cusp of my undergraduate days, I “discovered” Melville. I was not then a brave reader; I shied away from big books, especially those with a reputation as boring. So, my first introduction to Melville was in his shorter works: Bartleby, Benito Cerano, and Billy Budd. This later work proved the most compelling to me. Billy Budd felt like the perfect story. I wrote a paper for my American Lit class exploring the religious imagery of the novella.

Exploring religion through literature was an obsession of mine at the time. I had spent four years of university immersed in the academic study of the Christian Bible. I learned Greek and Hebrew and spent hours honing my exegetical skill, but I had also been awakened to the beauty and power of literature, and, more specifically, to the glory of words. “In the beginning was the word.”

I like words so much that I spent one final semester of undergraduate doing nothing but taking literature and writing classes. This was an exciting time for me. I felt I was taking all the knowledge learned through long hours of Bible study and applying it to life, for literature seemed like real life to me then.

I was also dating a girl who shared this passion. The two of us played like kittens in the Fall leaves of campus, learning together about love and words, exploring the potential of life, a lived life.

But all this ended with the end of that Fall semester. I moved home to save money and plot my next move, which sould either be to graduate school in English or seminary, for in spite of my love of literature, I had been told and I felt it to be true, that I was called of God to serve him.

Indiana. My childhood home. Here, cut off from my friends, away from my lover, and outside the clarity of university life where epiphanies seemed as common as one’s daily bread, I grew restless and confused. So I read. It’s what I had learned from almost five years of undergraduate. Read. Read like life depended on it, because it does. With nothing but time on my hands, I decided I could brave the big books of the Western canon. I picked up a handsome copy of Moby Dick at my local Barnes and Noble. It would take me months to complete.

I still remember the naive excitement with which I started reading Moby Dick. I read expectantly, feeling like Melville was going to give me a gift, a word of knowledge.

Those first few chapters fell off quickly. I sat in my father’s recliner in front of the TV and read late at night, after my work at a local pizza parlor. The house–my childhood home–was always quiet at this time of night. My father lived and worked hundreds of miles away in Michigan. My brother had moved out many years before. It was only my mother and I, and Mom went to bed early, so the hours of one to five in the morning, the house was mine.

From Dad’s recliner, I first began to contemplate the meaning of Moby Dick. I was immediately drawn to Ishmael. I pictured him as a young adventure seeking man, much like myself. I should add that I came to the book with a preconception from my university lit class that Moby Dick was about human kind’s pursuit of god. Ahab, the epitomized unbeliever, violent in his opposition to God, an opposition rooted in his own experience of suffering. Ishmael, I felt, was the neutral observer to Ahab’s blasphemous obsession.

I had my own misgivings then about god’s goodness, though I had little experience to support those misgivings. As much as identified with Ishmael, I feared the Ahab in my soul, trembled at the notion that he lurked there, beating at the door of my heart and demanding release.

Meanwhile, my life went forward. I decided to attend seminary in the Fall. I opted to enroll at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. I would be in the family business. Moreover, my college love and I were to be married. She and I, separated by the miles, kept up a lively correspondence, and we saw each other as often as we could in those days of cheap gas.

So it was that in the Spring of ’96, I boarded a Greyhound bus bound for Arkadelphia, Arkansas from Evansville, Indiana. I carried two things with me: a diamond engagement ring and my copy of Moby Dick.

I immersed myself in Saramago a few years back whilst living in Chicago. I read his novels riding the El to and from work and in the few spare minutes at the end of my work day.

Our apartment had a deck built between the two crumbling edifices that our landlord generously called carriage houses. One of those was ours. I remember vividly sitting on this deck as a summer sun faded into the gloaming and finishing Saramago’s The Gospel According to Jesus Christ.

As an apostate who spent the first twenty years of my life chasing after the mirage of Jesus, I thought that I had pretty much dwelt upon every aspect of the historical Christ, explored every angle. But Saramago moved me. He made me feel for the man Jesus and I thought he even made a plausible explanation for the unwitting divinity of Christ. Mostly, though, I thought Saramago knew how to tell a damn good story. Better than Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John put together.

There is much to commend in Saramago. He seems to represent a type of literature whose time is gone.

I should add that I also take comfort in the fact that he did not become a full-time writer until well into his 50′s. A fact that is lost on the NewYorker’s “20 under 40″ debacle.