Meta in Madrid: Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station
Posted on | January 23, 2012 | No Comments
I came to Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station via the bandwagon. I first learned of the novel from James Wood’s New Yorker review, which left me intrigued: a novel about the uncertainty of language, expat angst, and the appropriation of history in the quest for an authentic self? I may not be a poet adrift in Madrid, but a year spent scouring Berlin for self-referential metaphors left me prepared to sympathize.
Adam Gordon is a poet, insofar as he will admit to a profession at all, passing the year in Spain on a prestigious fellowship. He’s technically supposed to be conducting research for a long poem about the Spanish Civil War, but really, he spends a lot of time smoking spliffs, roaming the Prado, and arranging his face in ways that will absolve him of having to speak: “I realized with some anxiety that [Teresa] would expect me to be upset, very moved, that I needed to be so in order to justify my abrupt departure from the others. I turned back toward the fence, licked the tips of my fingers, and rubbed the spit under my eyes to make it look like I’d been crying, repeating this until I felt there would be enough moisture to catch a little light or at least make my face damp to the touch.” When his face fails to garner the sympathy and attention he requires, Adam composes lies about his parents—a dead mother, a fascist father, both sweet upper middle-class Kansans, alive and well.
While Adam Gordon bears some resemblance to Sartre’s Roquentin or even the Underground Man, his is a very twenty-first century kind of anomie. He not only has to worry about whether his experiences are mediated—his over-exerted consciousness interfering with the business of authenticity—but also about whether the world is forcing him to mediate it by yet another degree. The internet and cell phones interrupt the fantasy of the artist abroad, leaving Adam to construct a reality in which they don’t exist. He pretends he doesn’t have internet access in his apartment so as to maintain the extinct feeling that distance is not just spatial but spiritual. In one of the rare breaches of Adam’s well-kept isolation, his friend Cyrus reports on witnessing a drowning in Mexico, worried his girlfriend has thrilled to the experience: “She was shaken up in her way… But she also seemed excited. Like we had had a ‘real’ experience.” Naturally, their conversation takes place in gchat. Read more
The [Insert Superlative Here] Books of 2011: My Year in Reading
Posted on | December 20, 2011 | 2 Comments
I recently, and much belatedly, got around to reading Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism. It’s brilliant—not a word I use easily—and really deserves its own post, but there is a point on which Frye and I disagree, in practice if not in theory. “The demonstrable value-judgement,” he claims in his introduction, “is the donkey’s carrot of literary criticism, and every new critical fashion…has been accompanied by a belief that criticism has finally devised a definitive technique for separating the excellent from the less excellent.” Attacking Matthew Arnold for his effort to establish a pecking order among the great poets, Frye writes witheringly: “We begin to suspect that the literary value-judgements are projections of social ones. Why does Arnold want to rank poets?” His dismissal of such exercises is indisputable but for one omission: lists are fun. There’s a satisfaction to the categorizing and ordering, to the confidence of knowing in your bones that one book is better than another. It may not do justice to the works at hand, but the brain—or my brain, anyway—can’t help itself. And so, without further ado, my year in books:
Best New Novel(s): As discussed a couple posts ago, I came down favorably on the new Eugenides, but not for the reasons I anticipated. I was excited by the idea of a novel that took on novels as a subject, by the promise of a meta-masterpiece from an author I trusted to get it right. Instead, I found that The Marriage Plot has gotten too much credit for making a coherent claim about literature and not enough for its simpler pleasures as a Bildungsroman.
But not everything I read makes it onto Apostrophe, and my other favorite novel this year is a kind of zanier, and in its way more ambitious, obverse of The Marriage Plot. I expected The Tragedy of Arthur, by Arthur Phillips, to be all tricks and little substance. Phillips is an author I’d never taken particularly seriously, mostly because unlike the writers with whom he shares a demographic—Eugenides, Franzen, Lethem—he doesn’t beg to be taken seriously. I read and liked Prague a few years ago, but in the kind of way that made me want to go live out my expat fantasies in Budapest rather than in the kind of way that made me want to keep reading his work. Phillips’s apparent lack of interest in jockeying for literary status makes The Tragedy of Arthur’s vexing questions of authenticity and authorship all the more intriguing: What makes a work great? Where does artistic power end and consensus begin? He’s talking about Shakespeare, but one might ask the same questions of some of his peers. (Was Freedom really that good?) I could take or leave Phillips’s faux-Shakespeare play (or is that only because I know it’s not Shakespeare?) but the novel posing, Pale Fire-style, as an introduction to the play manages to do what The Marriage Plot couldn’t quite: it uses fiction to address, and challenge, some of our most closely-held assumptions about why and how we read. It’s also, I should add, extraordinarily funny. Read more
Tags: Anatomy of Criticism, Arthur Phillips, Geoff Dyer, Heinrich Böll, Irmgard Keun, Jeffrey Eugenides, Joseph Roth, Northrop Frye, Téa Obreht, Teju Cole, The Marriage Plot, The Radetzky March, The Tiger's Wife, The Tragedy of Arthur, Tom McCarthy, Vanity Fair
In Which I Take Bravo’s “Work of Art” Far Too Seriously
Posted on | December 1, 2011 | No Comments
I recently started watching the Bravo show “Work of Art”—not that I needed much of an excuse—after reading some of Jerry Saltz’s New York Magazine recaps. What was an art critic, whose very currency is taste, doing in the wilds of reality TV?
That competitive art-making should land on television was probably just a matter of time. ”Work of Art” has all the ingredients that have made “Project Runway” and “Top Chef” so successful: a visual creative process with an end product that can be held up for judgment. Sure, art likes to imagine itself a world apart from food and fashion, but the boundary between art and commerce has always been blurry. It’s not for nothing that the prize in one episode was a chance to have a piece sold at auction; monetary value is the easiest, if not necessarily the best, measure of artistic value. (I suspect the literary world hasn’t eschewed the reality TV limelight out of some high-minded aesthetic idealism; it’s just hard to see the telegenic potential in bunch of sun-deprived poets pattering away at the keyboard.)
“Work of Art” does have one difference from its sibling shows, however, in that it attempts to bring the language of criticism to television. Where “Project Runway” and “Top Chef” have external criteria by which to measure the output of the contestants—is it well made? is it wearable? how does it taste?—“Work of Art” has no language for judgment besides what is good. And explaining what makes for good art on television is no easy exercise. The strange thing about watching the show is that it’s easy to tell which pieces are successful and which are failures simply by looking at them, but the language of the “crit”—as the judging sessions are called in art-school fashion—do little to illuminate why. A sequence of drawings based on New York Times photographs of Libyan soldiers, by the increasingly evil Lola, is, if not exactly MoMA-worthy, at least compelling. A pile of money drenched in fake oil and banded together with ribbons of newspaper is embarrassing. Read more
Performance Art in Prose: Kirsten Kaschock’s Sleight
Posted on | November 30, 2011 | No Comments
My latest piece for the Barnes & Noble Review is on one of the stranger novels I’ve read this year: Kirsten Kaschock’s Sleight. A more positive review than mine also ran this week, in the Philadelphia Inquirer. It’s a polarizing enough book that I recommend reading both.
In her novel Sleight, Kirsten Kaschock has set herself a near-impossible challenge: the creation of a new, multidisciplinary art form that she can only communicate in words. Set in an almost-alternate reality where people have names like Kitchen and Marvel and “sleight” is a prestigious cultural institution with its own rich history, the novel centers on two sisters, Lark and Clef, who have spent their lives training as sleightists. Although temperamentally at odds, they’re inextricably bound together by their art. In their divergent approaches to sleight—Lark is tortured and delicate where Clef is steadfast and cold—they become twinned allegories of artistic creation. [More here.]
Tags: Barnes & Noble Review, Kirsten Kaschock, Sleight
Of Dating and Derrida: Jeffrey Eugenides’s Marriage Plot
Posted on | November 3, 2011 | 3 Comments
Fall has arrived, the season of weighty novels. Much like Freedom did this time last year The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenides, has launched our annual referendum on The Novel in the 21st Century. As Evan Hughes noted in a moving piece on their generation of writers, Eugenides and Franzen are both working in the gaping hole blown open by David Foster Wallace, who managed to marry the cynicism of Pynchon and DeLillo with the moralism they left behind. Can good old-fashioned realism recoup its losses after Wallace paved a new way forward?
Franzen set out to answer this question with a bravura performance: a big, thumping, occasionally sloppy novel that made its case by packing contemporary subjects into a work that, on a technical level, might as well have been written in 1878. Eugenides, on the other hand, comes at the question head-on. The Marriage Plot reads as a kind of syllabus—a primer on the linguistic turn and the classics it consigned to the dustbin.
Based on various reviews, I had expected The Marriage Plot to be a fictional disquisition on the viability of the novel in the wake of theory. The ingredients are all there. But as it turns out, this is not the book Eugenides has written. Whether the title is a feint or whether Eugenides has misread his own work I can’t say, but here is what The Marriage Plot is not about: literary theory, Victorian novels, and, the uncanny resemblance of the character Leonard Bankhead notwithstanding, David Foster Wallace.
Yes, the characters within the novel engage with these motifs. Some of Eugenides’s best scenes are those set in an undergraduate semiotics seminar at Brown. “Right up through her third year at college, Madeleine kept wholesomely taking courses like Victorian Fantasy: From Phantastes to The Water-Babies, but by senior year she could no longer ignore the contrast between the hard-up, blinky people in her Beowulf seminar and the hipsters down the hall reading Maurice Blanchot,” Eugenides writes. This new currency in literary cool lands Madeleine in Semiotics 211, which begins with a would-be Derrida disciple introducing himself:
Um, let’s see. I’m finding it hard to introduce myself, actually, because the whole idea of social introductions is so problematized. Like, if I tell you that my name is Thurston Meems and that I grew up in Stamford, Connecticut, will you know who I am? O.K. My name’s Thurston and I’m from Stamford, Connecticut. I’m taking this course because I read Of Grammatology last summer and it blew my mind.
Yet what theory means for the novel is a question that ranks somewhere between why Leonard Bankhead hasn’t asked her out and where to meet her parents at graduation in Madeleine Hanna’s catalogue of anxieties. Semiotics 211 may ask Madeleine to investigate the relative merits of realism and poststructuralism, but Eugenides’s own novel seems uninterested in putting these competing aesthetics to the test. Once his characters are launched into the world—Leonard and Madeleine to a genetics lab on Cape Cod, Leonard’s would-be rival Mitchell Grammaticus to a year of spiritual questing in India—Eugenides mostly lets the matter drop. Read more
Tags: David Foster Wallace, Generation X, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, literary theory, The Marriage Plot
Like Things Glimpsed From a Train: James Salter’s Light Years
Posted on | October 20, 2011 | No Comments
I’m in the throes of a renewed love affair with James Salter. Every time I read Salter, I conclude all over again that he’s the best living stylist in English—and apparently I’m not alone. In his introduction to Light Years, Richard Ford writes, “It is an article of faith among readers of fiction that James Salter writes American sentences better than anybody writing today.” With A Sport and a Pastime, he secured his place in the small pantheon of novelists who can write about sex without seeming grotesque or pornographic or pathetic.
But more than a great writer of sex, Salter seems to me the great writer of intimacy. Not sexual intimacy—though that too, of course—but the intimacies of the everyday, the intense relationships with objects, habits, and meals that give life to time. “Life is weather. Life is meals,” Salter writes in Light Years. “Lunches on a blue checked cloth on which salt has spilled. Brie, yellow apples, wood-handled knives.” In Light Years, even as the marriage of Nedra and Viri begins to show signs of wear, these small, tactile relationships remain—in their way no less important: “The days were cut from a quarry that would never be emptied. Into them there came books, errands, the seashore, occasional pieces of mail. She read them slowly and carefully, sitting in the sunshine, as if they were newspapers from abroad.”
I recently read Light Years over the course of almost two months. Initially embarrassed by my slowness, I have come to understand it—it is a book for savoring. For a novel so fixated on the worldly—Viri and Nedra are a model of the aspirational from before aspirational was a word, their inchoate ambition never quite certain of its object—Light Years has an ethereal quality. Salter’s sense of time manages to be both compressed and languorous. He covers multiple decades in three hundred pages. It’s as if he happened to wander into the room for the most essential moments of his characters’ lives and is content to let the rest remain a mystery, even to himself. Here is Salter describing Light Years in his 1992 interview with the Paris Review:
The book is the worn stones of conjugal life. All that is beautiful, all that is plain, everything that nourishes or causes to wither. It goes on for years, decades, and in the end seems to have passed like things glimpsed from the train—a meadow here, a stand of trees, houses with lit windows in the dusk, darkened towns, stations flashing by—everything that is not written down disappears except for certain imperishable moments, people, and scenes.
There appears, now and again, a phantom “I.” “I am going to describe her life from the inside outward, from its core, the house as well, rooms in which life was gathered, rooms in the morning sunlight, the floors spread with Oriental rugs that had been her mother-in-law’s, apricot, rouge and tan, rugs which though worn, seemed to drink sun, to collect its warmth…” Salter is not afraid to be the voyeur of his own characters. Their world is there for him to find. And yet it doesn’t come naturally to him, this sideways relationship to time. When the Paris Review posted a scan of his outline for the first six chapters, it was touching to see his own authorial self-commandments: “Be discursive, oblique, storytelling.”
There’s a reason this post is mostly a sequence of quotations and stray impressions: picking away at Light Years too much feels like a form of sacrilege. It’s the kind of novel that makes people talk about literature as a secular religion—a sacred communion charged with meaning by something beyond itself.
The image that accompanies this post, which I have taken from the MoMA site, is “Dining Room Overlooking the Garden (The Breakfast Room)” by Pierre Bonnard. In the Paris Review interview, Salter says that he was thinking of Bonnard as he wrote Light Years.
Ethnographers of the Everyday
Posted on | October 4, 2011 | No Comments
The new issue of n1br has launched with my essay on Stephen Schryer’s new book Fantasies of the New Class—a study of how the post-war American novel dealt with the professionalization of intellectual culture.
The humanities have been looking a little haggard lately. The UK recently saw government-mandated cuts to university programs; American universities have experienced more of a war of attrition, a steady drainage of students and dollars. The humanities’ abiding self-defense—that art and literature defend values that the free market fails to support—may persuade in and of itself, but the academy has been little inclined to communicate those values in language and teaching that would secure their transfer to a new generation of students. As William Deresiewicz concluded in a review for The Nation on the current barrage of books on higher education, “The liberal arts, as we know, are dying. All the political and parental pressure is pushing in the other direction, toward the ‘practical,’ narrowly conceived: the instrumental, the utilitarian, the immediately negotiable.” The humanities can no longer be counted on to operate as a check against the reductive machinery of a corporatized American culture. [More here.]
Amitav Ghosh Goes Up In Smoke
Posted on | October 1, 2011 | No Comments
I have a review of River of Smoke, the second volume in Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy, up at the Barnes & Noble Review. I’ve liked Ghosh in the past, and the first volume—once I got past its faux-historical vernacular—made for a spirited summer read. The new installment, not so much.
The second book of a trilogy is a bit like the middle set of a tennis match: however engrossing the action, whatever happens at the end will necessarily recolor what happened before. River of Smoke, the midway point in Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy—his chronicle of the Opium Wars, the nineteenth-century contest between the British Empire and the Qing Dynasty over the fate of trade in China—is densely packed with happenings and intrigue without ever managing to come together as a novel in its own right. Instead, it reads as a very long prelude to what one can only presume will be the outbreak of war in the as-yet-unpublished third book. [More here.]
Tags: Amitav Ghosh, Barnes & Noble Review, River of Smoke
Irmgard Keun Comes Back to Life
Posted on | September 21, 2011 | 1 Comment
There is no shortage of literature about World War II, about Nazis, about the Holocaust, but German novels overtly critical of Nazism written in the 1930s are—for obvious reasons—hard to come by. Until I recently read After Midnight by Irmgard Keun, I’d have been hard-pressed to come up with an example.
After Midnight is a slender novella, and perhaps on account of its modest size, it had gotten buried in the pile of books on my floor until a Millions review—occasioned by Melville House’s recent republication—caused me to pull it from the mess. Turns out I’d let myself be fooled by size: these 150 pages are as sharp as anything I’ve read this year. (Her insane biography doesn’t hurt either: an affair with Joseph Roth, a lawsuit against the Gestapo, a faked suicide.)
What separates Keun from the pack—what little of one there is—of German writers processing the Nazi period from within is the fact that she trains her focus specifically on writers and the ways in which they were nullified by fascism. Her narrator for this undertaking could not be more unlikely. Sanna is a nineteen-year-old shop clerk, flighty and self-involved and most significantly, politically neutral in a world increasingly subject to the imperatives of ideology. The darkening political mood in Frankfurt forms the backdrop for Sanna’s smaller dramas. “Suddenly, we felt cold. We were in a hurry to get home. But the SS wouldn’t let us cross the Opera House Square to get to the Bockenheim Road. We asked why not; what was going on? But the SS are always arrogant and inclined to put on airs.” More often than not, the Nazis are an encumbrance. Even when Sanna gets taken in for questioning for “subversive statements,” her fear can’t entirely extinguish her sense of her own sexual charisma. “He had a sort of gleam in his eyes—if he’d tried to kiss me I’d have kicked him in the belly as hard as I could, he could have perished before my eyes for all I cared, the brute,” she says of her Nazi inquisitor.
But Sanna’s very artlessness gives us a window into fascist Germany that is paradoxically acute. Her failure to change significantly, to oblige our demand for a coherent character arc, frees Sanna to catch those around her in their gradual ideological decay. Sanna’s brother Algin, a successful novelist at risk of purging by the Nazi party, first loses his artistic freedom and then loses his grip on his art entirely:
The National Socialists burned Algin’s book. Algin has to write stories which [his wife] Liska thinks are stupid. All of a sudden he’s ceased to be a wonderful writer. As a matter of fact Algin himself often says the stuff he’s writing these days is stupid, dreadful, but it still annoys him to no end when Liska says so. And now he is coming to think it’s not so stupid after all, for he has taken to expressing himself poetically on the subject of nature and the love for his homeland…
And then, on the other side, there is Heini. A willful journalist prone to monologue, Heini provides the novella’s most deliberate critique of Nazism—and with it the most conspicuous mouthpiece for Keun’s own views. “So now you’re thinking of writing a historical novel, are you?” Heini challenges Algin. “It’ll be the work of a eunuch, Algin. A writer in the act of writing must fear neither his own words nor anything else in the world. A writer who is afraid is no true writer.” Yet Heini’s tendentious speechifying, his exhausting irony, render his words just as powerless as those of the defeated Algin.
It may be Algin who threatens suicide, but it’s Heini who makes good on it. In these two figures, Keun maps her fate as it must have appeared in 1937: self-betrayal or death. But then there’s Sanna, who gives Keun a kind of narrative escape hatch: ingenuousness as a vehicle for criticism. It’s the same wily impulse that helped Keun avoid becoming an Algin or a Heini: after her suicide, publicly mourned by Arthur Koestler, Keun snuck back into Germany from exile in the Netherlands.
Blood, Guts, and Literature: Maggie Nelson’s Art of Cruelty
Posted on | July 27, 2011 | No Comments
The Art of Cruelty, I had to assure many people as I was toting it around, is not a handbook; the “art” of the title is literal. Maggie Nelson’s interest is in aesthetic cruelty, specifically how art forces us to confront and negotiate the indignities, violent and otherwise, that people inflict on one another, and whether cruelty committed in the name of art can claim moral cover for itself. As Nelson explains at the outset, “Given brutality’s particularly fraught relationship with representation, twentieth-century art that concerned itself with its depiction or activation often found itself in turbulent ethical and aesthetic waters.” How does one make art about the horrors of recent decades without recapitulating them?
Given that the book treads into relatively heady waters, I was pleasantly surprised to see it land on the cover of the Times Book Review a couple weeks ago. It’s not that it’s academic as such (we know how NYTBR feels about that); after all, it’s published by Norton. Rather, it’s the sort of book that can casually reference Hegel and the Hostel movies with equal authority. Nelson’s efforts to discern what makes for worthwhile cruelty carry her across the artistic landscape, from art (Francis Bacon, Kara Walker) to literature (Ivy Compton-Burnett, Sylvia Plath) to film (Fassbinder, Lars von Trier) to pop culture more broadly (all of reality TV ever). If there is a unifying theme—and sometimes it feels as if there isn’t one—it is that artistic cruelty is admissible when it isn’t of a dictatorial variety. Artists can get away with cruelty when it provokes engagement, ambivalence, and the freedom to reject its tyranny.
Nelson is most comfortable in the register of abstraction. She returns repeatedly to the notion of “space”—the extra breadth created when a work of art refuses to manipulate the viewer, or reader, into a preordained response: “This space exists,” writes Nelson, “when an artist may hope to give other people his or her problems, but also knows the transmission cannot be surely made, and that the fallout is likely to be unpredictable, disorderly.” She tends to advance her argument by quotation, followed by a declaration of agreement or disagreement, rather than allowing herself the room (or space, if you will) to accrue rhetorical momentum of her own. Instead, Nelson throws out references like darts: sometimes they hit, but sometimes they go flying off the board. Read more
Tags: Maggie Nelson, New York Times Book Review, The Art of Cruelty