Category: literature

The British are so much better at ripping idiots apart, as this review of a book on Orwell & Hitchens proves.

What novel do you belong in?

(Evidently, this is not an option)

Last night, I went to the 92nd St. Y for a literary reading. Well, half of a literary reading. The writer I went there to meet was William Gass, one of the best writers in America (and therefore, cynically speaking, one of the least read). Mr. Gass and I had spoken a few times before, to discuss the projects Voyant was working on. I asked him for an introduction to The Place In Flowers Where Pollen Rests (since he and Paul West are friends, I thought he might offer to help us out), but he demurred, saying he was “introduction-ed out.” When it came time get blurbs for the book, Mr. Gass was suffering health problems and wasn’t able to help us out.

It was gratifying to see (okay: hear) him read last night. The selection was from a new novel. Referring to the labor that went into his previous novel, The Tunnel, he remarked, “I hope this one won’t take me 26 years to finish.” It was a chapter called “The Inhumanity Museum,” and it detailed the contents of his lead character’s top-floor rooms, in the home he shares with his elderly mother. The character, a music professor at an Ohio college, has accumulated newspaper clippings of all manner of human atrocities, in scrapbooks, pinned to walls, hanging from carefully placed strips of flypaper, “like niggers strung up on lampposts to teach someone a lesson.” At one point, reading a chronological section from the clippings, Mr. Gass broke from the reading and invited us to insert our own present-day atrocities. He chose one from a Feb. 15 newspaper, mentioning how several vials of smallpox were retained in labs, after the disease had been destroyed in the wild. Activists insisted on not killing the remaining samples, so as not to knowingly make any species on earth extinct.

The reading (35 minutes or so) was astonishing. The motif of the work was that the lead character’s fear that the world would end had been replaced by the fear that the world would live. Mr. Gass pressed utterly beautiful sentences into the service of a character’s unremitting hatred. I was reminded of his Paris Review interview from the late 1977, where he said,

“What is psychologically best for a writer is what produces his best work. I suspect that in order for me to produce my best work I have to be angry. At least I find that easy. I am angry all the time . . . My work proceeds almost always from a sense of aggression. And usually I am in my best working mood when I am, on the page, very combative, very hostile. That’s true even when I write praise, as is often the case . . . I also take considerable pleasure in giving obnoxious ideas the best expression I can.”

The articulation Mr. Gass brought to the character’s rage was sharply contrasted by the evening’s other reader, T. Coraghessan Boyle, who treated the upper east side audience like a drinking crowd at a comedy club. Mr. Boyle strode to the podium in black Tommy Hilfiger sweatpants and red Chuck Taylors, and tried to “warm us up” with witty banter, or a simulacra thereof.

Mr. Boyle proceeded to read a chapter from his new novel, Drop City, about a fictional commune in 1970. His reading was, to put it bluntly, atrocious. The sentences were leaden, serving only to tell the reader/listener “what happened next.” And what happened next is that the lead character gets the shits after shooting and cooking a deer. The audience found lines like “He needed toilet paper. NOW,” to be the heights of humor. During Mr. Gass’s reading, they only laughed during a section in which the narrator implores the rotting world to “fuck on,” beginning each paragraph with that sentiment. As though, in 2003, an old man saying “fuck” is cause for schoolyard titters.

Mr. Boyle’s reading went disastrously well. The audience ate him up, as though he was “the poet and prophet of our age” (fuck you, LA Times), rather than a second-rate screenwriter. Because that’s what his reading of Drop City was: a screenplay. There was nothing in the writing that needed to be written, rather than spoken. No interior life beyond the cardboard, easy sentiments of his commune-dwellers. Bad writing.

Problem is, most everyone was there to see him, not Mr. Gass. After the readings, there was a book signing/wine reception in the art gallery, where two lines formed. Mr. Gass’s line had perhaps 25 people, while more than a hundred waited to see Mr. Boyle. I got on Mr. Gass’s line, and found myself engaged in a strange conversation.

Two elderly women stood behind me, and one of them mentioned, “He seems so angry. I thought his reading would turn pleasant at some point, or that the character would find something good in the world.” Her companion clucked, and agreed that it had been rather depressing.

I turned to talk to them, and said, “Well, he’s fueled by rage. It’s inside a lot of what he’s written.”

One asked, “Has he written many books?”

I was puzzled. I wondered how two old women find themselves at a reading of William Gass, then actually get on line to talk to him, rather than just head home after hearing his beautifully angry writing, if they had no idea who he was or how much he’d written over the years. It turned out, of course, that there was a story. There always is, I guess.

One of the women brought the other for moral support (I didn’t get either of their names). Turns out that her daughter married Mr. Gass’s son many years ago. From what I gathered, they had two children (Mr. Gass’s grandkids), but there was a divorce (several, actually), and he had become estranged from that branch of the family. I’m not sure, but it may be that he never saw the grandchildren. But, the woman told me, “At the wedding, out of 150 people, he only saw fit to talk to me. He was so interesting to talk with, but I found it so odd that he wouldn’t talk to anyone else at the reception.”

She brought photographs of the grandchildren with her. “But I don’t know how he’s going to react to seeing them.”

“Hmm. Maybe I should go first,” I said, “just in case he flies into a rage and storms out of here.” They laughed, a bit nervously.

Eventually, I got to speak to Mr. Gass. He remembered me from our brief phone conversations, which I found gratifying, and said he”d be pleased to give me a blurb for The Immensity of the Here and Now. I gave him my card and some postcards from Voyant’s other books. He signed my copy of the first trade paperback edition of Omensetter’s Luck. I’m not particularly fixated on getting books signed, but I thought it”d be a good idea to come prepared. And I wasn’t going to carry The Tunnel with me, given the back pain that would have accompanied it.

Later, while I chatted with a woman whose brother brought her to the reading, the two old women came by. “He said he was happy to see me, and took the photos. He even wrote, ‘Thanks for the pictures of the grandkids, Bill Gass.'”

“He signed mine, ‘William H. Gass,'” I told her. “So that’s probably a friendly gesture on his part.”

“Do you think so?” She seemed happy, so I left the evening with a smile. Even though I was mightily pissed off at the legion of poseurs who had come to worship Captain Bullshit and his limp prose.

But I’m not bitter.

Saturday was one BLEARY night in NYC, off gallivanting with my high school buddy Adam. Got back to his apartment around 3:45am, but not before stopping at a “street meat” food cart a block from his midtown apartment.

We met up with Debbie, another high school friend, who was, Adam informed me, Cindy Crawford’s personal trainer. We didn’t remember each other at all from Strath Haven, which may have been for the best. I only attended high school with them for a year (Mom & I moved down to Pennsylvania in 1988, going into my senior year of school), but seem to have more friends from that one year than I do from the 17 years I spent in New Jersey. There’s probably some significant reasons for that, which I’ll go into at a later date.

Earlier in the night, before meeting Adam at the 2nd Ave. Deli (ostensibly kosher, but open on Saturday; go figure), I walked over to St. Mark’s Book Shop, where I thought I’d browse, try to get some ideas for what I’m going to do with the Paul West book’s design. A short, balding, stocky man with sideburns walked past me and around the other side of the shelf I was browsing. I was pretty sure I recognized him, wrestled with the thought for a moment, and went over to confirm my suspicion.

“Mr. Shawn?” I asked.

“Yes?” he replied.

So there I was, standing in the presence of Wallace Shawn. Now, most people who can visually identify him don’t know his name. They probably see him and think of the two great character roles he’s played in the movies: the “That’s inconceivable!” guy from The Princess Bride, or geeky Mr. Hall in Clueless (which he also played in the TV version). Don’t get me wrong; both were fine movies, but I’m pretty sure hearing about those roles burns his ass. It’d irritate ME, if I had higher intentions than comedic bit-parts.

Which Mr. Shawn does. His father, after all, was William Shawn, a legendary editor at The New Yorker. And, beyond all the comedy roles, Wallace Shawn graduated Harvard and Oxford, wrote and starred in My Dinner with Andre, and translated Machiavelli. So rather than bring him down by citing his (gifted) comedic work, which mainly plays off of his cartoonish appearance, I said:

“I just wanted to let you know, The Designated Mourner may be one of my favorite plays ever.”

A smile brimmed his face. “Why, thank you,” he said.

We talked briefly, then I left the store. I thought about taking out my digital camera and snapping a shot of us in the store, but:

a) I didn’t want to draw too much attention to him; and

b) I would’ve had to crouch down pretty far to fit both of us in the frame.

I have several other bumping-into-celebrities stories that I’ll share sometime. The best one involves meeting demented redneck baseball pitcher John Rocker . . .

Having run out of shelf space, I’ve been placing newly acquired books in a stack beneath my hall table. It’s my intent to read those titles before getting to work on any of the others that are already shelved in my apartment. The books in this “to read” pile are:

Gould’s Book of Fish – Richard Flanagan (in progress)
Rembrandt’s Eyes – Simon Schama (in progress)
Minotaur: Sir Arthur Evans and the Archeology of the Minoan Myth – Joseph Alexander McGillivray (in progress)
Pattern Recognition – William Gibson
The Spooky Art – Norman Mailer
The Art of Happiness – The Dalai Lama
Master Class – Paul West
Ella Minnow Pea – Mark Dunn
The Coast of Utopia – Tom Stoppard
I: Voyage
II: Shipwreck
III: Salvage
The Rush for Second Place – William Gaddis
Mendelssohn is on the Roof – Jiri Weil
Abe: Wrong for All the Right Reasons – Glenn Dakin
The Rainbow – DH Lawrence
Sons & Lovers – DH Lawrence
Cheops: A Cupboard for the Sun – Paul West
Graham Greene Omnibus
The Heart of the Matter
Stamboul Train
The Burnt-Out Case
The Third Man
The Quiet American
Loser Takes All
The Power and the Glory
Possession – A.S. Byatt
All Stories Are True – John Edgar Wideman
Nightwood – Djuna Barnes
Nova – Samuel R. Delany
The Encyclopedia of the Dead – Danilo Kis
Philip Roth & the Jews – Alan Cooper
Gothic – Richard Davenport-Hines
Little, Big – John Crowley
Underworld – Don DeLillo
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – Dave Eggers

One thing to know about me is that I’m a man who qualifies virtually everything. So, to clarify one impression that I’m afraid this list of unread books might give, I’d like to make some points about the final two selections.

I don’t like Don DeLillo’s work in general. I think he’s overrated and tends to obfuscate as a replacement for having something to say. My opinion is somewhat mirrored by B.R. Myers in his Reader’s Manifesto, which was first published in the Atlantic Monthly.

I first tried reading Underworld shortly after it was released, a season that saw strong new works from a number of older writers (Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, and Normal Mailer’s The Gospel According to the Son). I dropped the book after 30 pages, when it became evident to me that DeLillo’s writing was nowhere near the level of those other three authors. During an early passage, a man in the 1950s discourses about the Importance of baseball. I was stunned that a writer with such affection for the game, beginning what many felt to be his magnum opus, felt the need to try to tell the reader everything of importance about the sport, rather than finding a way to show it to us. I decided I had better things to do than subject myself to the rest of the book.

Taking that into account, I’m willing to give it another chance. I saw the book recently in the “to sell” box in my attic space. I thought about something Harold Bloom once wrote in The Western Canon, about several contemporary writers whom he most definitely did not think would reach canonical status. He wrote:

Robert Lowell and Philip Larkin are here [on this list of canonical writers] because I seem to be the only critic alive who regards them as over-esteemed, and so I am probably wrong and must assume that I am blinded by extra-aesthetic considerations, which I abhor and try to avoid.

In that spirit, I’m willing to give Underworld another chance.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is in the same boat. I picked up a paperback copy of the book in Heathrow during a business trip to Milan in the fall of 2000 (a journey that warrants another rambling entry in this blog). I read half the book during the trip, and was astonished at how boring it all was. Outside of a few genuinely touching or funny passages about the difficulties of a 20-something man raising his kid brother, the book was almost completely lifeless. The facile PoMo stance of the author also served to help me develop one of my more severe aesthetic critiques: my dislike of works that make middle-brow people feel smarter than they are. This is a refinement of a principle I used to refer to as the “lowest college denominator,” which I’ll expound on at length some other time.

Suffice to say, inclusion of smarty-pants postmodernist tricks and pre-emptive, but logically specious arguments to counter any critique of his work has placed Eggers firmly in my “lowest college denominator” segment.

But, again, I’m willing to give it a second shot, and I’ll see if I’m wrong.

If there’s any public clamor for such a thing, I’ll provide a link to a bibliography of everydarnbook I’ve read since 1989. I only recently (in the last two years) started writing annotations on those titles in the list, which makes for even more fun & excitement (if you lead a sad & boring life).