Bros Before Prose

In the new issue of GQ (April 2013), there’s a feature called The New Canon: The 21 Books from the 21st Century Every Man Should Read. It’s not something that I take too seriously, since this is the same magazine that decided last year to promote bucket hats as a spring/summer accessory. Still, I’m compulsive about literary lists, especially when they provide the opportunity for me to see how far I’ve journeyed off the contemporary literature track.

The list, as the introduction puts it, is “numbered but not ranked,” which is to say that it provides no guidance at all, except perhaps how to fit these entries in for space. It’s also exclusively fiction, which is fine, since I don’t read poetry and that issue already has a column on “this season’s best memoirs,” a genre that really could take a break.

So here’s the numbered but not ranked list:

  1. The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen
  2. The Human Stain – Philip Roth
  3. The Road – Cormac McCarthy
  4. White Teeth – Zadie Smith
  5. True History of the Kelly Gang – Peter Carey
  6. 2666 – Robert Bolano
  7. Tree of Smoke – Denis Johnson
  8. Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned – Wells Tower
  9. The Fortress of Solitude – Jonathan Lethem
  10. Pastoralia – George Saunders
  11. Runaway – Alice Munro
  12. Austerlitz – W.G. Sebald
  13. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
  14. Gilead – Marilynne Robinson
  15. The Art of Fielding – Chad Harbach
  16. Netherland – Joseph O’Neill
  17. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Diaz
  18. The Line of Beauty – Alan Hollinghurst
  19. Saturday – Ian McEwan
  20. The Yellow Birds – Kevin Powers
  21. The Namesake – Jhumpa Lahiri

Not bad! I was expecting more knuckle-headed bro-prose, a fiction equivalent of Tucker Max or Timothy Ferriss out there. Lucky for me, I’m so outside the loop on contemporary writers that I don’t even know who would qualify for that category.

So how do I measure up to GQ‘s literary bar? I’m amazed to see that I’ve read eight of the 21 books on their list. I thought I was far more esoteric than that:

The Corrections • Back when it came out, before I worked out my belief that life is too short for shitty novels. I read it in the month after 9/11, so I wasn’t thinking straight. Cut me some goddamned slack, alright?

The Human Stain • Maybe my least favorite of Roth’s American Pastoral books. The GQ writeup cites it as “the best book on sex, scandal . . . and political correctness in the Lewinsky Moment.” It’s also about a black guy passing for white, but that’s part of what makes it my least favorite of those books, and probably why GQ doesn’t include that in the “best” part. Also, they write, “Roth coined the famous phrase ‘ecstasy of sanctimony’,” which I swear to God I have never heard/read until this weekend.

Austerlitz • Hands-down best book on this list. You need to read all of Sebald’s books. I was going to write “novels” there, but Sebald’s writing defies the fiction/non-fiction categories in a much more interesting way than the spate of writers who spice up their memoirs by creating utterly false events. Stop wasting your time reading silly blogs and go read Sebald!

Cloud Atlas • I’m a fan of Mitchell’s work and loved the Pynchon/Calvino meta-structuring, where the novel is built like a series of nested narratives in a symbolic logic sequence (not, as GQ writes, “six rollicking story lines connecting disparate-seeming characters through reincarnation”). It jumps genres and offers plenty of thrills, along with profound thoughts on various modes of art. Give it a read.

Gilead • I’m hoping to get Marilynne Robinson on my podcast someday, once I’ve read some of her essays. She’s able to write about quietness, earnest faith and day-to-day life much better than her contemporaries. I want to reread this one before I start on her followup to it, Home.

Netherland • One of the first novels I read on a Kindle, so I’m thinking maybe I need to cut it some slack, because I wasn’t used to the reading experience and not knowing how far along I was in a book. I enjoyed the first chapter, but felt it dragged on pretty interminably after that. Enough people I respect dig it enough that I think I need to give it a reread.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao • I’ve gone on record saying that it’s a good novel that feels like a prose-adaptation of the Hernandez Brothers’ Love & Rockets comics, with the Dominican Republic standing in for the Palomar parts. I mean that pretty much as a good thing, but I also mean, “Those characters feel like they were lifted from Beto and Jaime’s strips in ways that feel really obvious to me but might not occur to critics and readers who aren’t familiar with the source matter.” That said, I consider my recommendation to be far better than GQ‘s: “Because we’ve heard heard a book talk like this one: ‘Dude, you don’t want to be dead. Take it from me. No-pussy is bad. But dead is like no-pussy times ten.'” Seriously: that’s the entirety of their recommendation. Nothing about the history of the Dominican Republic, nothing about nerd culture, nothing about the female punker characters.

Saturday • I was on a bit of a McEwan kick a few years ago, but wound up feeling like he was a writer who was working almost completely to match E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel. This one, about a London surgeon whose life gets uprooted when he’s stuck in traffic because of an anti-war (Iraq) march, didn’t feel as formulaic as Amsterdam, but still felt somehow . . . modeled. It gets points for having a House-like medical diagnosis play a major role in the plot.

That wasn’t so bad. The only one I regret spending time on was Franzen.

What about the ones I haven’t read? I’ve got that Cormac McCarthy book on my Kindle, but never started it. Never saw the movie, either.

I feel like I would’ve been compelled to read Zadie Smith if she’d been around when I was a student at Hampshire, and that notion has totally repulsed me from even giving her a shot. Which is to say, I’m quite cognizant of my irrational biases. I try to overcome them, but there are only so many hours in a day. I went to a college that had no course requirements but did have a “third-world expectation”.

I was intrigued by the PR for 2666, but I lay down and it passed.

I thought about reading Tree of Smoke several times over the years and even considered buying it this morning when I saw it on bookcloseouts.com, but I opted to buy some John Hodgman books and the Complete Poems of Philip Larkin instead.

I’ll likely get around to that George Saunders collection; I really dug CivilWarLand in Bad Decline when I read it (c. 1996), but I haven’t been much of a short-story guy in recent decades. Now that he’s in vogue again, I’ll put off reading him for a while.

I know I really need to get to Alice Munro, and will.

I think I have a copy of that Lethem novel in my library, but I may have traded it in when I went through The Mid-Life Culling.

I heard that The Art of Fielding is utterly mediocre. That’s another one that got a huge PR push from literary venues, and apparently left some readers feeling like they’d been swindled. B.R. Myers tore up the publicity machine behind it, which was fun.

I don’t know anything about the other ones. Let me know if you think I’m missing anything there.

What would I have swapped onto that list? I don’t have a ton of post-2000 novels on under my belt, but I’d make a place for Gould’s Book of Fish by Ricahrd Flanagan. I’d also replace The Human Stain with Everyman, Roth’s book about an old Jew who dies. Glen David Gold’s Carter Beats the Devil is more compulsively entertaining than any book on the list. I’d put Max Brooks’ World War Z on, as well as Richard Price’s Lush Life and Elliot Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity. Maybe Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists is better than one of the books I didn’t read. I bet it is. Walter Kirn’s Up in the Air? Probably that, too. Which kinda makes the point that there’s no way to establish a “canon” nowadays, especially not an instant one like this. I still wonder what books from, say, 1980 onwards will be read in 25 years, but that’s the sorta thing that occupies my otherwise idle cycles.

I have to give the GQ editors some credit, even if some of their actual recommendations/precis were laughably bad. Unless these selections were just bought by publishers’ PR departments, they seem to have some interest in relatively intelligent contemporary fiction. Their recommendations certainly weren’t as horrific as I feared it’d be.

Still, doesn’t mean I’m going to buy a bucket hat any time soon. Nor these.

[More literary ramblings await at my podcast, The Virtual Memories Show.]

Another Year, In The Books

The year began with a novel about a dying newspaper and (just about) ended with a novel about the eternal sleaziness of newspapers.

According to the list of All The Books I’ve Read, I finished 32 books in 2011; several were re-reads, one was a Kindle Single, one was a play and another was a novella. I’ve decided that my year-end post should be a look back at those books, what I made of them, how I came across them, and any other recollections or observations I can make about ’em.

First, I oughtta note that 32 books isn’t that much. I mean, all told, the Great List shows that I’ve finished around 600 books since I began keeping the list in the fall of 1989, when I started college. That puts me a little above the “average” of 27 books a year, and it sure makes me regret that 2-year run in 1997-98 when I couldn’t finished a goddamned thing. But with math like this, even if I up the pace to an even 30 books a year, there’s still no chance I’ll ever work my way through my library.

Which is why I’m glad I came across this page in Kevin Huizenga’s latest issue of Ganges last week; shows I’m not alone in thinking about The Math:

 

The year’s big reading project, as I wrote about earlier, was Anthony Powell’s A Dance To The Music of Time. I’d rather not write about those books individually in this post, since I’m still a bit muddled about the first half of the series. It took me a while to get into the rhythm of Powell’s writing, and I think the three WWII novels (books 7-9), plus their immediate successor (Books Do Furnish a Room), mark the high point of the cycle. But, like I said, I’m going to leave off writing about them, except in terms of where they fall in sequence, and focus on the other 20 books for this post.

Also, because of my prose-bias, I won’t go into the comics that I read over the year. However, there’s one comic I read in 2011 that trumps this entire list: Jaime Hernandez’s conclusion to The Love Bunglers, in Love & Rockets #4. I wrote about this a little during my heart scare in October, and I want to reiterate: what Jaime achieves by the end of that comic, capping off 30 years of stories of Maggie and her world, is a perfect piece of art.

On with the show:

The Imperfectionists – The year began with Tom Rachman’s 2010 novel about a dying, Rome-based newspaper patterned after the International Herald Tribune. Each chapter follows a different character in or around the paper, and it does a great job of delineating the various occupations and beats of that workplace. However, the only people I knew who’d appreciate that backdrop would also be terribly depressed by the newspaper’s demise, so I didn’t pass it on to anyone. I think it was recommended via Amazon, and the Kindle edition was only $5.00, so hey.

Shortly after finishing that book, I turned 40. I also began A Question of Upbringing, the first book in Powell’s series. I read one each month, so just mentally slot those in between the other titles listed here. I’ll put the full list & chronology at the end of the post.

The Age of Innocence – I decided to read this after New York magazine ran a “Greatest New York Ever” feature, and Sam Anderson selected Wharton’s book as the greatest New York novel. I was intrigued and gave it a shot (free on my Kindle). I had no idea Wharton was this good. Scorsese’s decision to adapt it made perfect sense to me, although I couldn’t bear more than 10 minutes of his adaptation, since it relied so heavily on voice-over of Wharton’s prose, rather than, y’know, adapting it into a visual medium.

Anyway, I loved it, thought it did a wonderful job working through the social mores of post-Civil War New York, and felt it would’ve been more awesome if Archer, at that pivotal moment, went hardcore, killed May and went on the lam with Countess Olenska in Europe. But then the book would’ve had a much different reputation. I got at least one other person to read this, and she enjoyed the heck out of it, too.

1959: The Year Everything Changed – I met the author, Fred Kaplan, at a book party in NYC, and told him how much I enjoyed his columns on Slate. I mentioned that I hadn’t read his 1959 book yet, and he was much less angry about that than Greill Marcus was when I once told him that I hadn’t finished reading Lipstick Traces. (I still haven’t.) After that evening, I picked up his book on the Kindle. I enjoyed his version of that history, even if it did trick me into giving On The Road another shot. (It still sucks.)

A lot of this literary year was spent trying to get out of my own historical moment. The Powell books, of course, cover a chunk of the 20th century, and Kaplan tries to get at the ways in which 1959 shaped who we became in the succeeding decades.

Arcadia – The next couple of books play fast and loose with the notion of time and history. In March, I read Tom Stoppard’s play for the bazillionth time. This reading was preparation for seeing it performed on Broadway (which I wrote about here). It’s such a beautifully constructed work, I can’t begin to do it justice.

Time’s Arrow – Martin Amis’ story of a Nazi war criminal who doesn’t realize that his life is unspooling backwards. It’s narrated by a nascent consciousness in the head of a man who is coming to life and being delivered to his house by an ambulance. It’s a sick experiment in how to write about atrocities and innocence, and Amis, of course, is up to the job. It’s a difficult feat, clueing the reader into what’s going on while the narrator itself has no idea. I can’t say I recommend it, but it kept me enthralled. I assume he wrote it after someone offhandedly remarked that you can’t write in a sympathetic voice about a doctor who worked the concentration camps.

(I once passed on Amis’ London Fields to a coworker who generally likes my pass-alongs. She gave it back to me unfinished and said that she hated all the characters and didn’t want to read about them anymore. I can understand that entirely. I think I’m going to read Amis’ Money sometime in 2012, and I’m beginning to wonder if he’s ever had any likeable characters.)

Slaughterhouse-Five – I figured Time’s Arrow‘s not-so-Bloomian precursor was Vonnegut’s novel about the bombing of Dresden, in which the reality of the war is so horrible that the lead character retreats into nonlinear time and a science-fiction world of alien abductions. I hadn’t read this in years, and didn’t enjoy it too much, this time around. I’m betting it falls into my category of Lowest College Denominator.

The Leopard – Then I read the book that I would trade all the other books on this list for. I bought Lampedusa’s novel around 10 years ago on God knows who’s recommendation. It was the reverse of a wine cellar; while the book stayed the same, I matured enough to read it. I read a lovely recommendation of Lampedusa’s work in The Wall Street Journal and decided it was time to give it a shot. When I finished the novel, after wiping away some tears, I thought, “I’m so glad I got to read this book before I died.” Perhaps I’m just mistaking literary achievement to my growing sensitivity to stories of men watching their lives pass by, but I think The Leopard has some eternal qualities to it. I reread it 3 months later and keep it on my nightstand as a fallback for when I’m not interested in reading my current book.

It’s “about” a prince in Palermo in the 1860s, when Italy is in the process of unification and the merchant class is on the rise. The prince understands that the nobility’s days are numbered, but must negotiate his family’s wellbeing as long as he can, while he comes to grips with the younger generation’s ascent. And he’s SO so human. Lampedusa evokes this entire world, with its nobility, its clergy, its militia, its tradesman, its upstarts, its cosmos. I hope you get to read it sometime.

Here’s what I read from it last night, before turning in:

Between the pride and intellectuality of his mother and the sensuality and irresponsibility of his father, poor Prince Fabrizio lived in perpetual discontent under his Jovelike brow, watching the ruin of his own class and his own inheritance without ever making, still less wanting to make, any move toward saving it.

A River Runs Through It – Maybe I spoke too soon about trading all the other books for The Leopard. I’d probably keep Arcadia and I think I’d also keep this one. This is another countless reread for me. I don’t remember why I decided to read it this past summer. It had just been made available on the Kindle, so perhaps that prompted it. More likely, I wanted to read something beautiful and familiar and see if it, too, affected me differently at 40.

(I don’t think any book changed for me so dramatically as my 2010 reread of the Iliad. It’s a little embarrassing that it took me four journeys to Troy before I finally developed a sympathy/understanding for Achilles, but there it is. This time around, I was transfixed by that notion of the epic hero, caught in the fate of being the center of the poem, giving up family, future and love to become the world’s first great literary subject. I wish I’d kept up with my idea of writing about Achilles & the Iliad throughout the past year, but I always let myself get sidetracked. Like now.)

Weirdly, Maclean’s novella about fly-fishing and grace didn’t change too much for me this time around. In some respects, it’s the book that helped shepherd me along into my “boring old fart” mode. Which isn’t to say that it’s a boring book; rather, its assuredness of voice and lovely-yet-stark depictions of the lives of the two brothers and their family helped me appreciate silence and the absence of literary pyrotechnics.

(It also helped me form some sorta background for trying to understand Terence Malick’s Tree of Life. Emphasis on “trying”.)

Nemesis – A short Philip Roth novel about a polio outbreak in Newark in the 1940s. Roth belatedly tied this one to his recent short books and called them The Nemesis Quartet. I’m a huge mark for the first book in that run (which we’ll get to shortly), but the other 3 all feel like sketches more than real novels. But then, Roth’s nearly 80 and has achieved enough over the years that he’s earned the right to perform some minor variations.

What’s most interesting about this one is the narrator, who starts off as a first-plural “we,” but eventually shows up and plays a role in unspooling the later aspects of the tale. He also undercuts a lot of the simplistic thinking of the earlier pages, in a conscious reflection of the lead character’s mental limitations. It’s a neat trick, demolishing the lead’s earnestness and self-seriousness like that.

Bespoke: Savile Row Ripped and Smoothed – I read this memoir of Savile Row tailor Richard Anderson in one day. It was the first time I’ve read a book that quickly in years, and sure, it wasn’t Proust, but it was pretty fascinating. I’ve become interested in menswear in the last year or two, and one of the blogs I follows recommended this one. Anderson does a great job of conjuring up his apprentice days, while lamenting the lack of training in the contemporary scene. The best parts, as with many of the UK memoirs and novels I read this past year, involved the strange characters he worked with, and the oddball initiations he underwent.

One of my resolutions for 2012 is to have some shirts made for me by a tailor. I have the cash to do this, but I also have a bit of anxiety about sitting down and talking about fabrics, cuts and styles with someone who knows a bazillion times more about them than I do. Of course, that’s preferable to working with a tailor who doesn’t know that stuff better than I do, but I have Novice’s Worry. I’ll tell you how it works out.

The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive – I wrote about this one earlier in the year, and my thoughts about it haven’t changed, so just check out that post. As noted there, I discovered it via an author interview on the Monocle Weekly Podcast. Sadly, Monocle changed its format a few months ago, as part of a move to 24/7 audio broadcasting, and I found the weekly podcast unlistenable. I’ll try to get back to it next year, since it did turn me on to some neat books and music, including the incomparable sound of W&Whale.

Everyman – Last summer, the dad of one of my best friends died suddenly, so I felt the need to return to this short Philip Roth novel about an old Jew and his illnesses. I wrote about it pretty extensively in my Man Out Of Time piece about my favorite books from the previous decade. I fear I’ll return to this one again and again, as death grows in stature around me. I only have it on my Kindle, but should probably get a print copy. You know, for the permanence.

Zero History – I saved William Gibson’s oddball new novel for my first trip to his stomping grounds in Vancouver. It was enjoyable enough, but seemed to eschew any real plot or stakes until maybe 25% from the end. It’s gotta be tough to integrate a plot with the sorts of observations and atmospheres that Gibson’s so good at making/evoking, but this one really felt like he forgot about the plot until he came up with a big synchronized set piece of a caper, then perfunctorily snapped it into place. Vancouver sure was pretty.

The Junket – This was a Kindle Single, a short e-only piece. It was written by Mike Albo, who co-wrote The Underminer, a kinda black comedy novel I read a few years back. This single was hyped by The Awl, a blog I follow, so I gave it a shot. In it, Albo chronicles the bizarre circumstances by which he was fired from the New York Times, where he was a freelancer writing the Critical Shopper column. The incident highlighted the Times’ self-serving, contradictory, disposable treatment of freelancers, and Albo’s relative poverty reminds me that I made a good decision to stick with trade magazine editing all these years.

I like the idea of Kindle Singles, in terms of being able to publish long-form (but not book-length) work at a lower price point. Non-fiction books often feel to me as though they’re padded to reach a certain page count, so I’m in favor of writers knowing when to stop.

The Leopard – I read it again, 3 months later. Still on my night-stand.

The Finkler Question – I’m dismissive of conspiracy theories about Jews controlling the media, but I’m hard-pressed to come up with another reason for this book to have won the Man Booker Prize in 2010. I mentioned in an earlier post about the circumstances in which I bought this one for my mom. It was only $5 on the Kindle, so I got it for myself. I know I’ve told people — and you, dear reader — on numerous occasions that “life’s too short for crappy novels,” but I really did think this was going to improve. It’s sad that I was so wrong.

Wise Blood – Who knew that droll comic Norm MacDonald and St. John’s College would have an overlap? Thanks to Twitter, I discovered that Norm is a voracious reader who holds contemporary fiction in even greater disdain than I do. For the book club that he hosts in the 140-character medium, Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood was a recent selection. I’d never read her, and didn’t think I’d have time to read that one before the club started its discussion. Still, I filed her away with hopes of getting to her sometime in 2012.

Then I got a mailer from St. John’s about next year’s Piraeus continuing education program. Here’s the opening page:

The ancient port of Athens, the Piraeus, is a lively juncture of departures and homecomings. As in the days of Socrates, it represents the pulse-point of the community. A reunion, a chance encounter, a new beginning, an opportunity to reinvent one’s self — all these possibilities exist at the Piraeus.

Join Us.

St. John’s College, in cooperation with the Alumni Association, is pleased to offer Piraeus 2012, a continuing education program for alumni. We invite your participation, and we strive to awaken the curiosity that stirred Socrate to venture down to that port and led to journeys that shape our thoughts and lives today.

Among this year’s offerings? A four-day course in Annapolis on Wise Blood and six of O’Connor’s short stories, led by two of my favorite tutors (no professors at SJC) from the school. The brochure read

Flannery O’Connor’s southern gothic stories and novels have the power, character, and plot of Greek tragedy. In Wise Blood, her first novel, and these six stories, which are poignant, often hilarious, and always disturbing, her characters have life-changing experiences that raise profound questions about grace, trust and the nature of the good. O’Connor is sensitive to the appearance of spirit in the world as she pursues the meaning of life, love, and destiny. [And serial commas.] Join us in reading this singular writer, as she searches the recesses of the human heart.

Yes, that’s my idea of a great mini-vacation. (There’s also a six-day course in Santa Fe in August on Thucydides, but I doubt I could get away long enough for that.) I stopped at that new & used bookstore where bought The Finkler Question and ordered the Library of America hardcover of The Works of Flannery O’Connor. I’m trying to be nice to that store and order a book every so often. I see it like this: if they’re brave/stupid enough to open a bookstore in this retail environment (it recently celebrated its first anniversary), then they deserve some sorta patronage from me.

That said, it’s like shopping with one hand tied behind my back, compared to using Amazon. I get to pay full price, wait several days for the book to arrive at the shop, and then drive 15 miles each way to pick it up.

So what did I make of Wise Blood? Well, I liked it more than Norm did, and think it was a much more accurate approach to life-with-religiosity-and-without-God than The Finkler Question. Can’t wait to talk about it next May/June!

This took me into December. After I finished the last book in the Dance, I thought I’d take it easy for the rest of the year. Then Christopher Hitchens and Vaclav Havel died, and I got drawn right back into devouring books.

Scoop – Hitchens had praised Evelyn Waugh’s 1938 novel of muckraking London tabloids several times, so I gave this a read shortly after CH’s death. I’ve long regretted that I had no journalistic background before I became an editor. I think it would’ve helped my news/feature writing immeasurably, instead of the nondescript style I’ve employed for years. It probably also would’ve helped me to ask the right/tough questions during interviews. But here I am, a 17-year vet of the trade rag biz, so I must be doing something right.

In Waugh’s book, a “country life” columnist who lives in quiet seclusion (in a typically demented old money mansion) accidentally gets sent on assignment to darkest Africa to cover a civil war. When I write “darkest Africa,” I mean that Waugh comes off racist as fuck. If you can see past that, it’s a very funny novel, and Hitchens maintained that the behavior of reporters hadn’t changed in the decades since Scoop was published. Given the phone-hacking scandals embroiling Murdoch’s newspapers, we can see that the behavior just adapted for new technologies.

The Trial – I’m embarrassed to admit that I hadn’t read any of Kafka’s novels before this, just some of his shorter stuff. I cribbed some of my knowledge of his work from Introducing Kafka, a primer written by David Zane Mairowitz and illustrated by Robert Crumb. Crumb’s adaptations of Kafka were gorgeous, but Mairowitz’s interpretations were a bit . . . pedestrian, I think.

I was prompted to start The Trial after I read this quote from Vaclav Havel in a New Yorker writeup:

“I am the kind of person who would not be in the least surprised if, in the very middle of my Presidency, I were to be summoned and led off to stand trial before some shadowy tribunal, or taken straight to a quarry to break rocks,” he told a startled audience at Hebrew University, in Jerusalem, less than six months after taking office. “Nor would I be surprised if I were to suddenly hear the reveille and wake up in my prison cell, and then, with great bemusement, proceed to tell my fellow-prisoners everything that had happened to me in the past six months. The lower I am, the more proper my place seems; and the higher I am the stronger my suspicion is that there has been some mistake.”

As someone who’s always considered himself a fraud and is so convinced that he’s going to be ground down by larger forces that he’s saved them the trouble by grinding himself down, I appreciated Havel’s position. What I didn’t get from past readings of shorter Kafka (A Hunger Artist, The Metamorphosis, et al.) was the sheer humor of his writing. Midway through The Trial, I thought, “Charlie Kaufman’s screenplays make so much more sense now.”

Sure, The Trial is an “unfinished” novel, just like The Castle, but their very nature shows that no conclusion is possible. These all-encompassing bureaucracies perpetuate an unknowable notion of power, because knowledge would strip it of its authority. So, instead of rooting for a persecuted character to triumph, the reader is left to laugh uncomfortably at the increasingly bizarre tableaux in which he’s placed.

Hitch-22 – Which brings us to the end of the of the year. I’m glad I wrapped up with this one. Hitchens’ memoir came out shortly before he was diagnosed with the esophageal cancer that would lead to his death. Like many of the other books I read this year (including Keith Richards’ memoirs, which I have to get back to), it details post-war British life. Given that my mom was born in London during the war, I suppose there’s something meaningful about my interest in this period.

The book is written more loosely than Hitchens’ columns and book reviews. There’s more personal flair, more impression, more “I guess you had to be there”, less argumentation and less circumspection to the prose. It’s a refreshing style for the man who’s final essay collection is entitled Arguably.

The exception is the Iraq chapter, in which he brings his journalistic instincts to bear, likely to try to counter the impression that he was wrong about the invasion. He admits to not even thinking that the logistics of the post-war planning parameters, implications and possibilities would be so bungled by the Bush administration, and stands by his notion that it was correct to take Saddam Hussein out of power.

What I wonder about, and what I don’t think he wanted to address, was whether it would have been possible for this to be done “cleanly.” Just as he came around to understand that Stalinism was not an accident but a necessary result of Communism, is it true that any “regime change” operation by an outside power is necessarily going to become a godawful mess like we have in Iraq and Afghanistan? (The latter being more justifiable, since there wasn’t a real regime to change anyway.) Was it in the nature of Hitchens’ Trotskyism to believe in the viability of “imperialism for democracy”? I wish he’d have gone into this, because I do believe that the “Arab Spring” doesn’t happen without people seeing Hussein dragged out of a spider-hole and brought to “justice.” (Hitch-22 was written before aforementioned “Arab Spring,” of course.) But I also believe that other dictators saw that and doubled down on their own repressive forces, to try to keep such a thing from ever happening to them.

ANYWAY: outside of that chapter, I thought the book was fantastic. I enjoyed the literary scenesterism, the parlor games with Amis, Rushdie, Fenton and the like. The chapter about his late (1988) discovery of his Jewish roots was fascinating, inasmuch as he found himself somehow adopting Jewishness as a tenacious culture while remaining atheist and contending that Israel is essentially an outlaw state. (Which returns to those issues of religiosity, God/godlessness, and ethics, via Wise Blood and The Finkler Question, but in yet another direction.) I’m simplifying, but he doesn’t exactly get into the question of where Jews were supposed to go after the war. Except for the part about how Jews were co-opted into the ethnic cleansing practices of post-war Poland.

I found myself quite sad by the time I finished Hitch-22 (and this year), rent by the fragility of life, the voices that are stilled, the books left unwritten, the books left unread. I haven’t made any firm reading plans for 2012, certainly not on the scale of that Powell project, but I’m confident I’ll come up with something.

I hope you enjoyed this rambling recap, dear reader. I have a mild interest in other fields (sports, menswear, technology) but really, the only question I can ask to show that I care is, “What are you reading?”

Unrequired Reading: Junebug

Just in time for July 4th, it’s a collection of my tweeted links and retweets, for those of you too lazy to get on Twitter and follow me @groth18!

First up, the retweets!

RT @MoCCAnyc (MoCCA): Kirby vs Marvel in the NY Times

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RT @KenTremendous (Ken Tremendous): Wow. RT (@parksandrecnbc) The Ron Swanson Mosaic. Be sure to grab our free hi-res poster! #ParksandRec

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RT @tnyCloseRead (Amy Davidson): David Remnick on the Big Man: Bloodbrother: Clarence Clemons, 1942-2011

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RT @kylevanblerk (Kyle Van Blerk): Need. This. Bookcase.

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RT @simonpegg (Simon Pegg): Memorable ink from the US book tour: 1 and 2

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RT @kylevanblerk (Kyle van Blerk): animalsbeingdicks.com That is all. Have a good weekend.

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RT @MarylandMudflap (Scotty L.): Etch-a-Sketch was really onto something. I wish I could shake the shit out of everything in my life when I need a fresh start.

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RT @scottmccloud (Scott McCloud): OMG OMG OMG http://llamafont.com

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RT @normmacdonald (Norm Macdonald): I’d have to be pretty hammered to see “Thor”.

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RT @DwightGarner (Dwight Garner): Daniel Okrent (I think) said it in Esquire (I think) in the 80s: “John Coltrane & Johnny Hartman” = best LP ever recorded. I’m a believer.

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Anyone know where #ProfessorZoom got his doctorate? #justwondering

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Cover story: #magouflage

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Nazis tend not to design great synagogues? I prefer #BattlestarJudaica! #FrankLloydWrong 26 Jun

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Is #Cars a vehicle (ha-ha) for Intelligent Design?

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Blind drunk: #notreally

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Neat #PhilipRoth interview: #idontreadcontempofictioneither

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If I ever have to move again, I have no idea what I’ll do with all the books. #unpackingtheshelves

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Long-ass @BobMould conversation on wrestling, Catholicism, breakups and more: #seealittlelight

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@SimonDoonan: wildly pro-Jew. #yay!

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I am SO glad I didn’t watch the last six episodes of @TheKilling_AMC: http://bit.ly/mEhcSL #stillsevenhoursiwillnevergetback

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I wish it hadn’t taken me so long to think of #WeAllKilledRosieLarsen. Still, glad I didn’t watch the last 7 episodes of @TheKilling_AMC

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First, only time #AnnaNicoleSmith will be compared to #BleakHouse.

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#SalmanRushdie offers up seven wonders (those Goya paintings the Prado are creepy as all get-out)

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The Girl with the Caffeine Addiction? #TMCM

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NYT sez: Life could be better if we blow off property rights, the environment, consumer safety, etc.: #highspeedrail

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Introvert Myth #11: they don’t get Twitter.

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Time-Traveling Male Sea Monkeys Make Bad Mates

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Great moments in terrible casting, via @fuggirls (No #JessicaAlba as geneticist and/or blonde in #FantasticFour?)

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Accidental Chinese hipsters: #umm

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Bust 2.0? “If you squint just right, our business is actually booming!”

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Do we expect too much of books? #iknowido #ralphwaldoemerson

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(Un)happy Bloomsday.

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Krypto’s got quite a pedigree: #superdog #legionofsuperpets

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Rockin’ the GTH turban: #sikhandyoushallfind

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Mandelbrot, P.I.?

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No Mexican in Paris? WTF? I can’t even call this #firstworldproblems

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Why I never took up smoking: #cheapjew

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The Enhancer: “Yeah, but have you ever Disneyed . . . HIGH?” #weed

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#Masa loses one star for F-U (by @samsifton)

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Haberdashed!

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“Not only is it okay to hate #LeBron, but it’s a fucking character flaw on your part if you do not.” #nbafinals

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Anybody know what this is? #snakeonahike #herpetology

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My hometown: a toxic mess that CAN’T be cleaned up, after multiple Superfund attempts: #ringwoodnj #eatlead

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#JoeJackson & #TheRoots do #SteppinOut on @latenightjimmy

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Apparently, I need to alternate my annual Toronto trip with some Montreal action.

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i found my thrill on N***** Hill? #plaqueremoval

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Never trust your parents, especially when you’re home for the holidays: #drugdeal

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#Seth’s lovely eulogy for his father: #nosethdoesnothaveatwitteraccount

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Every mall should have a bomb shelter: #shoptillthebombdrops

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Puyehue makes an ash of itself: #underthevolcano #alsooverthevolcano

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I’ll get to these right after I finish #ADancetotheMusicofTime. #johnswartzelder #simpsons

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Sunfart: #justsunfart

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Greatest pwnage ever? #nadal #federer #toughcall

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To prize integrity is to fear disintegration” (via @asymmetricinfo)

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Escapistism.

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It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World: Greatest. Cast. Ever.

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@comicsreporter on his hoped-for DC relaunches. #bwahhaha

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Kirby. Gods. Watercolor. #nuffsaid

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@michaelbierut on comedic design (sorta): #talkingfunny

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We will be like birds.

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#GeneHackman: “He tried”

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#UmbertoEco on reading and not reading: http://bit.ly/jFXAQZ

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#Francesa = #Jeter?

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“You cook?” “I’m French.” #MelanieLaurent #aurevoirshoshana!

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No one said, “I wish I kept up on Twitter more”? #regretsofthedying

Man Out of Time: The Books

Introduction | Music | Movies | Comics | Sports | Books

On the evening of January 4th, 2009, I was settling in to write about a post about my favorite books of the past decade (2000-2009), the final part of my Man Out of Time series. I was in the middle of my second paragraph when I got the terrible news that one of my good friends had been found dead of a heart attack. Yesterday was the first anniversary of Sang’s death, and the best way I can think to honor his memory is to get back to those books and what they mean to me.

(Actually, the best way to honor Sang’s memory came up last April, when I took his best friend to the final New Jersey Nets game to be played at the Meadowlands. Sang & I had plenty of good times watching the Nets at the arena during their run to the NBA finals in 2001-02.  I think of him every day.)

At a year’s distance, “the decade” still doesn’t make much sense to me. Literature, it’s been argued, has fragmented in ways that reflect our multicultidigital age. My attempts at following literary websites have been fruitless; RSS feeds pile up with entries about books I’ll never get around to reading.

Last week, I walked through a used bookstore I once adored, and I thought, “A generation from now, kids aren’t going to believe these places existed.” Half an hour later, I visited an upscale liquor store nearby and had a far more engaging conversation about gin than any I’ve had about books in months.

Pessimistic? Sure! I know I make myself out as some sorta classics snob, but I did manage to read nearly 80 books from the decade during its span. (I’m even reading a contemporary novel right now!) Sure, some of them were terrible, and very few of them would crack the top 10 of favorite books that I read for the first time during the decade, but my point is that I haven’t avoided all contact with the books our of times. I just have ridiculous standards.

For the record, here are my favorite non-recent books I read for the first time that decade, just so you know what the competition is like:

Essays – Montaigne

Middlemarch – George Eliot

The Power Broker – Robert Caro

In Search of Lost Time – Proust

The Beast in the Jungle – Henry James

Clockers – Richard Price

Little, Big – John Crowley

Alcestis – Euripides

With Nails – Richard E. Grant

Norwood – Charles Portis

Ajax – Sophocles

Yeah, I could swap out a couple of those books with ones from the past 10 years, but I did introduce myself to some awfully good older books during that span. I don’t mind being a bit out of touch with contemporary fiction, as long as I’m reading great work from the past.

Back to this era: I wrote a long post in the middle of the decade about the failures of modern literature. In it, I mentioned an evening I spent with book reviewer and fiction-writer David Gates and my pal Elayne, a writing prof at NYU. I asked them what books from 1980 onwards would become “canonical” (for lack of a better word). Which of today’s books did they think people would still be reading passionately 50 years from now?

“And,” I said, “take Philip Roth off the table.”

Me, I can’t take Roth off the table. He’s in my DNA. And on Christmas day of 2009, a few days before decade’s close, I read Everyman, Roth’s first short novel in what turned out to be his Nemesis Quartet. It was a one-day read on my Kindle, beginning in the early morning at my in-laws’ home in rural Louisiana.

I was puzzled by the shape of Everyman, which begins with a man’s funeral and tries to depict the marriages, illnesses and compromises that made up his life. As with every Roth novel I can think of, the women are more vessels for displaced anxiety than characters, but at least this novel admits the absurdity of our elderly Everyman trying to put a move on a young lady whom he meets out for a jog. It’s a crushing, painful scene, putting the lie to the notion that “though much is taken, much abides.”

Recent novels by Roth tend to go into great detail about specific crafts or vocations. The pinnacle/nadir was the glove-making segment in American Pastoral. In Everyman, that craft is grave-digging, and the unnamed lead character’s conversation about the subject is with the man who will shortly dig his. I’m certainly not doing it justice, making it sound obvious and heavy-handed. In an interview with the Guardian, Roth talked about the title of the book:

Everyman is the name of a line of English plays from the 15th century, allegorical plays, moral theatre. They were performed in cemeteries, and the theme is always salvation. The classic is called Everyman, it’s from 1485, by an anonymous author. It was right in between the death of Chaucer and the birth of Shakespeare. The moral was always ‘Work hard and get into heaven’, ‘Be a good Christian or go to hell’. Everyman is the main character and he gets a visit from Death. He thinks it’s some sort of messenger, but Death says, ‘I am Death’ and Everyman’s answer is the first great line in English drama: ‘Oh, Death, thou comest when I had thee least in mind.’ When I thought of you least.

Everyman didn’t take hold of me right away. When I began writing this post a year ago, it was an afterthought. But after Sang’s unexpected death, I’ve found the book inescapable. Does that make it my favorite? I suppose it has to. It may become the book I remember and return to most often from this era.

Here’s the best of the rest, by my lights.

Favorite Fiction of the Decade

Everyman (2006) – Philip Roth

Gould’s Book of Fish (2001) – Richard Flanagan – The runner-up. I just adore this novel about painting, Tasmanian penal colonies, love, storytelling and, of course, fish. I buy extras of the hardcover, with its beautiful, subtle color printing, to give out to friends.

Up in the Air (2001) – Walter Kirn – So much better than the movie. The narrator is apocalyptically messed up, not just “trying to make a connection,” and the depictions of corporate life and constant travel are tremendous.

Lush Life (2008) – Richard Price – I was torn between this and Samaritan, which are similar in tone. I guess I just liked the setting of the Lower East Side more than Samaritan‘s stand-in for Jersey City.

Carter Beats the Devil (2001) – Glen David Gold – One of the best page-turners ever. One of my pals said he started reading it one evening and the next thing he knew, his wife was asking him if he wanted orange juice with his breakfast.

Seven Types of Ambiguity (2003) – Elliot Perlman – I’ve never read Empson’s literary treatise of the same title, but I adored this Australian novel of obsession, love and disconnection.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) – Junot Diaz – I liked this a bunch, but I’m perplexed as to why critics didn’t figure/point out that it’s largely a prose mashup of the Hernandez Bros.’ comics.

The Immensity of the Here and Now (2003) – Paul West – The first real post-9/11 novel. I published it back in my micro-press days, and I still think it deserves an audience. You suck for not reading it.

Favorite Non-Fiction Books of the Decade

Moneyball (2003) – Michael Lewis – A year in the life of the Oakland A’s, as they try to use smarts to overcome their small-market status. It’s a fantastic book about revolutions in information and how smart people can identify market inefficiencies. Plus, it has an anecdote about Jamie Moyer that’s one of my favorite baseball stories.

The Good Rat (2008) – Jimmy Breslin – Through testimony transcripts and reporting, Breslin uses the story of Burt Kaplan, who ratted on some killer mafia cops in NYC, to evoke a weirdly more innocent era of evil.

George, Being George (2008) – Nelson Aldrich, Jr. – I got this for Sang a few weeks before he died. He’d made some remarks about wanting to get published in the Paris Review, so I thought he might dig this oral history of George Plimpton and the magazine. I kinda doubt he got around to reading it.

The Shakespeare Wars (2006) – Ron Rosenbaum – Longtime VM fave writes about the various ways of interpreting and staging Shakespeare over the years. It got me back into reading the bard. Also, I’m in the acknowledgements of the paperback edition, which has a horrible red cover.

79 Short Essays on Design (2007) – Michael Bierut – The best essays in this book are about the process of design and how it works in the world. The worst are about the uses of design for propaganda. The best outweigh the worst pretty handily.

The Other Hollywood (2005) – Legs McNeil & Jennifer Osborne – An oral history of the, um, adult film business. Wonderfully illuminating stuff.

Chronicles, Vol. 1 (2004) – Bob Dylan – I enjoyed this a lot more than I thought I would. I have no idea how much was “written” by him, but the voice was much more personable and the stories more revealing than I expected. It’s allusive and elusive, in the best possible ways.

Letters from New Orleans (2005) – Rob Walker – A beautiful book about what New Orleans lost during and after Katrina, without the ranting and pedantry of other books on the subject.

And, because you didn’t ask for it, here’s the complete list of novels and non-fiction books from last decade that I read during that period (alphabetically, by author):

FICTION

The Underminer – Mike Albo and Virginia Heffernan

Heyday – Kurt Andersen

Ravelstein – Saul Bellow

The Lemur – Benjamin Black

The Biographer’s Tale – A.S. Byatt

Daemonomania – John Crowley

Endless Things – John Crowley

The Muse Asylum – David Czuchlewski

House of Leaves – Mark Z. Danielewski

Dark Reflections – Samuel R. Delany

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Diaz

Ella Minnow Pea – Mark Dunn

Then We Came to the End – Joshua Ferris

Gould’s Book of Fish – Richard Flanagan

The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen

American Gods – Neil Gaiman

Pattern Recognition – William Gibson

Spook Country – William Gibson

Carter Beats the Devil – Glen David Gold

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Michael Haddon

The One from the Other – Philip Kerr

The Cheese Monkeys – Chip Kidd

Up in the Air – Walter Kirn

The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril – Paul Malmont

No Country for Old Men – Cormac McCarthy

Saturday – Ian McEwan

Number9Dream – David Mitchell

Netherland – Joseph O’Neill

Snow – Orhan Pamuk

Seven Types of Ambiguity – Elliot Perlman

Prague – Arthur Phillips

Plowing the Dark – Richard Powers

Lush Life – Richard Price

Samaritan – Richard Price

Gilead – Marilynne Robinson

Everyman – Philip Roth

Exit Ghost – Philip Roth

The Dying Animal – Philip Roth

The Human Stain – Philip Roth

Radiance – Carter Scholz

Quicksilver – Neal Stephenson

The Confusion – Neal Stephenson

The System of the World – Neal Stephenson

Mergers & Acquisitions – Dana Vachon

Porno – Irvine Welsh

Lit Life – Kurt Wenzel

The Immensity of the Here and Now – Paul West

NON-FICTION

George, Being George – Nelson Aldrich, Jr.

Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko – Blake Bell

79 Short Essays On Design – Michael Bierut

The Good Rat – Jimmy Breslin

About Writing – Samuel R. Delany

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue – Samuel R. Delany

Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva – Patrick Dillon

Chronicles, Vol. 1 – Bob Dylan

Book Business – Jason Epstein

The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood – Edward Jay Epstein

Even the Rhinos Were Nymphos – Bruce Jay Friedman

Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke – Peter Guralnick

Why Orwell Matters – Christopher Hitchens

On Writing – Stephen King

Killing Yourself To Live – Chuck Klosterman

Moneyball – Michael Lewis

When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management – Roger Lowenstein

The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry – Legs McNeil & Jennifer Osborne

A Reader’s Manifesto – B.R. Myers

Why New Orleans Matters – Tom Piazza

The Substance of Style – Virginia Postrel

Intelligence Wars – Thomas Powers

Taliban – Ahmed Rashid

The Shakespeare Wars – Ron Rosenbaum

The Look of Architecture – Witold Rybczynski

The Business of Books – Andre Schiffrin

On the Natural History of Destruction – W.G. Sebald

Love is a Mixtape – Rob Sheffield

Letters from New Orleans – Rob Walker

Master Class – Paul West

Loose Balls – Jayson Williams

Thanks for sticking around till the end of this post. Sorry the Man Out of Time series took so long to complete. I might put up a “what I read last year” post next week, just to continue the torment. Meanwhile, the point of this whole series, I guess, is that I’ve got my own garden to tend.

Introduction | Music | Movies | Comics | Sports | Books

Who am I?

I’m the guy who had four magazines waiting in his mailbox when he got home from work today — Monocle, Sports Illustrated, The Paris Review, and Esquire. I’m the guy who looked at the cover of the latter, muttered, “Lousy better-looking-than-everyone Javier Bardem,” then noticed the words, “PHILIP ROTH PG. 146,” and smiled.

What It Is: 12/28/09

What I’m reading: As is my wont, I did plenty of reading while visiting my in-laws for the holidays. I read Hadji Murat from Pevear and Volokhonsky’s new translation of Tolstoy’s stories, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Everyman, and started Winesburg, Ohio (Note: these were all via my Kindle; no carrying tons of books around on trips anymore). What’d I think?

  1. Tolstoy: Loved the new Hadji Murat and I’m glad P&V turned their attention to Tolstoy’s stories; I can’t wait to tackle Ivan Ilyich, The Kreutzer Sonata and a few others that I’ve only read in Garnett or Maude translations.
  2. Dog, Night, Curious: I enjoyed it, but didn’t think it was Novel of the Decade-level good, which a pal of mine contended. I’m down with “autistic Adrian Mole” as a narrator, but maybe I found the kid’s quirks too similar to my own “one step away from Asperger’s Syndrome” to be entertained.
  3. Dying Jew: Loved it, and was happy it didn’t turn into “elderly dying Jew is still a lion with the ladies.” Rather, starting at the lead character’s funeral and going back through past episodes of his poor health (and some of his sexcapades), Roth manages to convey our universal through the filter of this singular, never-named man (who’s Jewish and from New Jersey).
  4. Winesburg: I was going to start Roth’s next novel, Indignation. I knew it was largely set at a college named Winesburg, and that this was a nod to Sherwood Anderson, but, um, I’ve never read Anderson’s book. So I started that, knowing nothing about it. Seriously. I wasn’t even sure when Anderson was writing, and looked that up this morning (it was published in 1919). As it turns out, Winesburg, Ohio is written in the form of interconnected short stories. Who knew? I’m enjoying the heck out of it, and will report back next week.

What I’m listening to: OK Computer, Spirit of Radio, Oblivion with Bells, Boxer, and other comfort food.

What I’m watching: A bunch of college bowl games. Not my thing, but when in Rome. Also, I watched Three Kings on the flight down. Need to write about that this week.

What I’m drinking: Not much. I never really drink when I’m visiting the in-laws. Although we did have a nice Riesling that Amy’s pal Riece brought over.

What Rufus & Otis are up to: Living it up with their girlfriends, Ruby & Willow. My pal Jason texted to let me know that he & his wife got home one evening, and only two of the dogs were waiting for them in the living room. They panicked, wondering how two of the dogs had escaped (and why the other two stayed). Then they discovered that My Boy Rufus had gotten locked into their bedroom along with their dog Willow. Amy & I figured he pulled some variant of the “oh, we must be out of gas” trick, or invited her upstairs to look at his etchings. But since he has non-functioning genitalia, it was no harm, no foul. Anyway, they seemed to have a great time at our friends’ place.

Where I’m going: Nowhere! I’ll go to the office one day this week, but that’s about it! (oh, and our neighbors across the street invited us over for a New Year’s get-together with a bunch of other neighbors, so we’ll drop in on that)

What I’m happy about: See above! And, being home, where I have my familiar coffee, gin, bed and the ability to curse like a sailor. Which is to say, I like seeing my in-laws, but it sure puts me out of my element in a number of ways.

What I’m sad about: End of another year, blah blah blah.

What I’m worried about: Well, I wsa worried that there’d be all sorts of crazy new regulations on our flight back from New Orleans on Sunday but, outside of a pat-down after the metal detector, there wasn’t anything new.

What I’m pondering: What I’ll read and write (and record?) in the year ahead. Oh, and whether I should update to this blog template.

Publishers at Play

When I was a pretentious young man (I’m older now; but that doesn’t mean I’m less pretentious), the Paris Review Writers at Work anthologies were my Bible. (Or at least my Apocrypha. My Bible was a mash-up of Tropic of Cancer and Inside the Whale.)

I’d seek out the collections at used bookstores. The first volume I picked up, the 5th Series, contained interviews with William Gass (whom I was just then struggling to read), Jerzy Kosinski, Gore Vidal, P.G. Wodehouse, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and more. The interviews were a joy to this self-important, deluded Future Great American Writer, deftly exploring the writers’ histories, influences and literary opinions, while also revealing some of the practical aspects of their writing habits. Each interview was prefaced with a facsimile of a page of the writer’s manuscript or typescript. This was a wonderful touch, a peek into the writer’s editorial process.

(Well, except for the Henry Miller interview, which had a bizarre diagram with the caption, “Manuscript plan of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn, ’embracing planetary conjunction; topographical map of region and monuments and streets and cemeteries; fatal, or otherwise, influence of fields — according to type; Major Events; Dominant Idea; Psychological Pattern.” This may be why I never finished Tropic of Capricorn.)

If I found WaW volumes in a library, I’d photocopy the interviews with my favorites. I still have a folder somewhere with Philip Roth, Harold Bloom, Milan Kundera (I said I was pretentious back then) and others. I began looking up past issues of the Paris Review to find other interviews that had yet to be anthologized.

One of my great triumphs came when I was in Bethesda, MD in 1998 for the Small Press Expo (SPX), an indie-comics event. In a used bookstore near the expo hotel, I found issue #105 with the famed (and uncollected) William Gaddis interview!

At SPX, I met Fantagraphics publisher Gary Groth. I’d been writing mean-spirited reviews for his magazine, The Comics Journal, for a few months at that time. He thanked me for those, joking that it was good to have someone else writing mean-spiritedly in the magazine, because it freed up his time. Then he noticed the Paris Review back issue in my hand and said, “I see you found the one with the William Gaddis interview!”

I felt like I was in good company.

The WaW anthology series, published by Viking / Penguin, ended after the 9th volume in 1992, near as I can tell from abebooks.com. A decade or so later, Modern Library began publishing Women Writers at Work, Beat Writers at Work, Playwrights at Work and, um, Latin American Writers at Work (?), but I never picked those up. (I did grab The Writer’s Chapbook, which excerpted quotes from the interviews around particular themes, such as the audience, character, potboilers, peers, etc. It was a nice volume, but not as satisfying as having the complete interviews.)

In 2006, St. Martin’s Picador imprint began a new series called The Paris Review Interviews (I, II, and III). They’re the same format as the old WaW collections, right down to the facsimile manuscript page. And they collected the Gaddis interview! I still find the interviews pretty delightful, even though I’m no longer harboring dreams of being a Great American Writer. (I 0-fer-ized two of them here and here.)

George, Being George has a lot of good material about the history of the interviews, including the giddy elation some writers experienced when they were asked by George Plimpton to sit down for a Writers at Work session. Rather than excerpt any of those, I instead offer up a passage about the business of publishing the books:

MONA SIMPSON: [George] was very unhappy at one point with the amount of money that the Review had been paid for the various anthologies of interviews. Viking was paying us very little, and they were delaying publications. So Jay and I volunteered to go to this guy we knew at Simon and Schuster to see about moving our books there, and George was all for it. After an extended series of meetings, we got an offer for twenty-five thousand dollars — the current publisher was offering, I think three thousand — and they were really going to push it and promote it. So we come to George saying, “Okay, let’s sign on the dotted line, it’s going to be great.”

Then, at the last minute, George calls our editor at the other house — basically an old friend of George’s whom he’d been working with for years, who occasionally sent him tickets to a ball game. The editor sends George some tickets to the ball game and the whole deal is off. We realized at that point that we couldn’t just go out in the world and do that sort of thing anymore, not even with his permission, because we found that we basically didn’t have power to go against his personal loyalties. It was very embarrassing, because Simon and Schuster was outraged that we were staying with an offer that was about twelve percent of theirs.

I’ve taken several clients to basketball and baseball games, as well as fancy dinners. I like to believe that our magazine offers great value to our advertisers and that the fun times are sorta ancillary, but I’m sure that “relationship-building” activities like this muddle even the most otherwise clear business decisions.

As I said, George, Being George is a pretty entertaining book. Why, it’s right here at the end of my Plimpton/Review shelf!

IMG_1592

Oh, and the fourth volume of the new series — sorry, the IVth one — is coming out next week, so you should get on that.

Unrequired Reading: Oct. 23, 2009

Last night, I had dinner with pals in Brooklyn and walked in the door at 1:15 a.m. (at least 40 minutes of my lateness was due to a two-car collision in the Lincoln Tunnel and two separate construction zones near the Meadowlands that turned magically turned three lanes of Rt. 3 into one). This morning, I drive down to suburban Philadelphia to deliver a flatscreen TV to the winner of a raffle at my annual conference. Because my publisher doesn’t want it to get damaged in shipping.

So while you read these links, I’ll be cruising along the highway, checking out the foliage, trying to stay awake, and wondering how this ever became part of my job description.

Oh, just click “more”!

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