What Happened to Harper's?

I've subscribed to Harper's Magazine for at least 20 years, since I got out of college. I also subscribed to The Atlantic then, but I always liked Harper's better (all the fiction in The Atlantic, we used to joke, had to have priests, Irish people, or boats in it, if not all three) and then The Atlantic stopped publishing fiction, except for once a year, so I stopped reading it. Harper's stayed good, even great; the fiction was wild and unpredictable (even publishing a whacked-out novel in serial by some crazy guy) and the non-fiction always surprising and smart. I even enjoyed Lewis Lapham's loopy rants. If the mag seemed to be less totally wonderful lately, I chalked it up to the natural cycles of publishing: everyone has their ups and downs.

But could Harper's be... over? You probably heard about the trouble they've been having with their publisher, who is laying off several editors. What it looks like from the outside -- and I certainly have no inside knowledge -- is that the magazine doesn't want to make the compromises it has to make if it wants to survive in the same world as Huffington Post and Gawker and Talking Points Memo and all those other constantly updating, endlessly interesting, free sources of news and journalism and culturey stuff. Their publisher has publicly ranted against the Internet. But is it even possible to be a print-only, general interest magazine anymore?

Well, The Atlantic seems to be doing okay. It has a real, busy, packed-with-news website, lots of bloggers, and it's spiffed up its journalism -- lots of attention getting articles like Caitlin Flanagan's anti-school-gardens screed. That knee-jerk nay-saying stuff is annoying as heck, but it gives people something to argue about. Anyway, The Atlantic feels alive.

Should Harper's take a leaf from The Atlantic's pages? Should they modernize and hyperactivate? Or go down screaming?

David Bezmozgis's "The Proposition"

Back to reading magazines--I have a little catching up to do, as the next New Yorker will probably show up before I've posted about the last one.

I'd never read anything by David Bezmozgis, a Latvian-Canadian writer and filmmaker, but this new story in Harper's looked promising, on account of an excellent title and the dialogue indicated by little em-dashes, which for some reason seems aesthetically comforting to me, these days. In addition, I once did a no-quote-marks book myself and was surprised how bent out of shape a few people got about it...so I feel a kinship.

Anyway. The story is about a physical therapist, an immigrant from someplace, we imagine, not terribly far from Russia. He has set up shop in Toronto and done well for himself being an honest businessman, but his teenage son doesn't understand him and some sleazy people want him to provide a front for their prostitution business. That's the proposition--that he take some easy dough for this purpose. Meanwhile a more recent immigrant from the same place wants to buy his old car.

We don't find out if he accepts the proposition (well--he rejects it. But we know the pimp will be back); rather, in a nice writerly sleight of hand, we see him refuse to sell his car to the recent immigrant, even though he's only 150 bucks short and reminds the therapist of himself, back in the day. And the teenage son is angry at him for not giving the guy the car. But, in the end, the therapist thinks,

It was for his son's own good. One day he would appreciate what his father had done [...] Life was painful and hard, and it did you no good to pretend otherwise. This was what he needed to understand.

The end.

Oh, the irony!!! I doubt I'm alone finding this ending a little unsatisfying, given that we have seen this very transferrence played out about a zillion times over the past 75 years of immigrant-themed fiction. Let me say that, overall, I like this story pretty well--the pimp and the prostitute who visit the physical therapist's office are particularly terrific--but it seems styleless in delivery and overly familiar in tone.

The therapist, by the way, is Roman Berman, apparently the subject of a previous story of Bezmozgis's, from a book of stories which James Wood digs big time, and which he compares to the stories of Chekhov and refers to as "true examples of storytelling." Hmm. I realize that we are supposed to recognize Wood as the arbiter of all things literary, but this seems like a stretch to me, at least based on this piece. It's good, but the reason Chekhov is good is that he is unmistakeably Chekhov at all times, whereas Bezmozgis, at most times, could be anyone at all.

That said, the anyone he might be is a pretty good writer, and perhaps I would like more of him. I'll check out Natasha and Other Stories but resist, for now, the mesmerizing power of the Woodman's cry.

Alice Munro and Real Life

I first read Alice Munro in college, when a friend pressed Lives of Girls and Women on me, saying that I would relate to it. She was right. I loved that book not because I admired it, but because Munro said things about my life at that moment that I hadn't even noticed before. My own life felt larger and more rich because of her life.

But it's not her life -- it's fiction, right? I'd always assumed that there's a strong autobiographical source for much of AM's fiction, if for no other reason than the recurrence of certain motifs: the inappropriate lover, the sick mother, the bourgeois husband. And one other that I might not have noticed if it weren't for the latest story in Harper's: drowning.

"Miles City, Montana" is the big drowning story, with one drowned child in the back story and an near-drowning in the front. There's one in an old story, "Walking on Water," and a sunk car with people in it in a later story. I think there are more. Anyway, enough to make a person wonder, "So... what is it with Alice Munro and drowning?"

You wouldn't ask that of a memoirist -- she would tell you right out, and that would be that. One of the reasons I prefer fiction to memoir is because fiction lets the writer work through variations on a theme. In one story the protagonist is just a witness to a drowning; in another story she's at fault through neglect; in another she's completely to blame.

What really happened? Munro would probably say it doesn't matter, and I guess it doesn't. Knowing wouldn't make me get more out of the stories, or cause me to like them less. Still, wondering about her real life has always been a part of my experience reading AM -- thinking about how what really happened gets turned around and comes out as fiction is endlessly fascinating.

New Harper's

There's lots of interesting stuff in the February Harper's -- not the least of which is a story by Alice Munro. Whoa! I've been watching her stuff like a hawk since about 1989, and I don't think she's ever been in Harper's before. Does that mean the story was rejected by the New Yorker? They don't take everything of hers, nutty and depressing as that may seem (if they reject her, the rest of us might as well close up our lemonade stands and go home). I think I saw AM in the Atlantic, before they quit publishing fiction, and I read a marvelous something of hers in the Guardian magazine this summer.

But I'm saving that for later. Jonathan Lethem has an intriguing, if excessively clever, essay on plagiarism (it's plagiarized!) and Ian Jack, soon-to-be-ex-editor of Granta, asks why so many young novelists feel the need to thank page after page of people in the back of their books. (His idea is that writing has become a collaborative effort these days; I would argue instead that's it's all about a growing sense that publishing is a fancy cocktail party you should be grateful you got invited too -- and if you don't write your thank you notes, you can forget about another invitation.)

I also really enjoyed reading the Notebook (which used to be where Lewis Lapham posted his crazy/brilliant screeds) which is by Barbara Ehrenreich this month. Listening to her promote her new book on NPR, I thought she'd gone all soft (it's about "collective joy," which I don't doubt exists, but which I certainly can't vouch for) but no: she's as acerbic and smart as ever. The most recent NYT Magazine has an article on a new academic discipline: "Positive Psychology," which instead of focusing on problems and pathology, teaches students ways to be happy, like taking yoga and volunteering. Though I certainly don't want to knock volunteering (or yoga) I found the whole thing disturbing for reasons I couldn't quite put a finger on, but to my relief Ehrenreich does it for me.

But what is truly sinister about the positivity cult is that it seems to reduce our tolerance of other people's suffering...If no one will listen to my problems, I won't listen to theirs: "no whining," as the popular bumper stickers and wall plaques warn. Thus the cult acquires a viral-like reproductive energy, creating an empathy deficit that pushes ever more people into a harsh insistence on positivity in others.

The older I get, the more I admire bad-ass middle-aged ladies.