Craig Raine's "Julia and Byron"

Just a quickie here to say that I think this story in the new New Yorker, "Julia and Byron," is really excellent. Craig Raine is a new name to me; he's a British poet and literary editor, apparently, and does indeed write ficiton like a poet.

The story's first two-thirds documents a woman's fight against, and death by, cancer; and for all of that time the reader assumes that this is the ultimate subject of the story. Her name is Julia; we don't even realize she is married until she's nearly dead. At this point, the story enters the present tense, and Byron appears. He ushers her into death: "She smiled and water came out of her mouth and she died in his arms."

Can we take a moment to appreciate how strange that sentence is? Three independent clauses strung together without punctuation, offering each as the others' equal. It's a poet's sentence, with incredible balance and rhythm and economy.

From here on in, the story is Byron's. While Julia lies in state ("...the molded symmetrical smile began to pull to one side. It began to look like a smirk"), he reads her diaries and learns how rotten he was to her for all the years of their marriage. And the story ends this way:

For two years he was a grief Automat, crying unstoppably at the mention of her name. Then he remarried--a younger woman--and was a difficult husband.

I could do without the Automat, but that's otherwise what I would call a brilliant ending. It reminds me of Ann Beattie during her minimalist years--there's a refreshing confidence here that I haven't seen in a while. "We don't need to go through all that denoument, do we?" he seems to be asking us. "No, we don't, thanks then." And the transfer of point of view from Julia to Byron is similarly unfussy--she dies, he takes over.

There's a respect for the reader here that I admire and am flattered by--he knows we'll get it, he knows we don't need the window dressing. Everything is rendered in a lovely shorthand...it's delicate.

I would not mind some more New Yorker stories like this.

JRL's new books, Amy's new baby

This is not a promotional blog, but I think it's worth telling our readers whenever one of us puts out a new book. And I've got two of them, coming out this Tuesday. One is a reissue of Pieces For The Left Hand, the 100-stories collection first published in the UK in 2005; the other is a new novel, Castle. You can buy both of them direct from Graywolf here.

There is also going to be a book tour, or more specifically a series of small book jaunts, starting today, here in Ithaca. Schedule is below. I'd love to see a few of you at the readings--if there's one near where you live, stop by and introduce yourself!

Sat Mar 28	3:00pm	The Bookery II, Ithaca, NY
Thu Apr 2	4:30pm	Goldwin Smith Hall, Cornell U., Ithaca, NY
Sun Apr 5	2:00pm	Newtonville Books, Newton, MA
Tue Apr 21	7:30pm	Community Bookstore, Brooklyn, NY
Wed Apr 29	TBA	Powell's Burnside, Portland, OR
Thu Apr 30	7:30pm	Elliott Bay, Seattle, WA
Thu May 28	TBA	Pete's Candy Store, Brooklyn, NY
Tue June 16	7:00pm	Prairie Lights, Iowa City, IA

Finally, big congrats to Moonlight Ambulette, who has produced a Moonlight Ambulino, the latest member of Litblogs: The Next Generation. Congratulations, Amy, she's a peach, and we dare you to name the next one Flannery.

Endings. What are they supposed to be, exactly?

So here's an open question to the readers of this blog. When it comes to endings, what the hell do you want? I ask this because "lousy ending" is perhaps the number one book review complaint. "Promising, but he wrote himself into a corner." "Good book, but the ending was a letdown." I can't tell you how many reviews of my work make criticisms like these. The "wrote himself into a corner" one really rankles, as it suggests that the writer is incompetent--that he doesn't know how to end a book. In my case, when I got that one, I was enraged: I ended the book in question precisely the way I wanted to, and was perfectly satisfied--at the time anyway.

Personally, I am rarely disappointed by a book's ending. Almost never, in fact. If I like a book all the way through, I almost always like the way it ends, too, unless the writer tries some audacious and/or desperate thing that falls flat (I'm sure we can all name a few examples of those). Books that just kind of stop are perfectly OK with me. So are epilogues that describe the future, or flashbacks, or unrequited affairs, or unsolved mysteries.

Ultimately, I don't care what a book is about. All I really care about is the experience of reading it--of the writer's frame of reference to the world, of her way of seeing. Of course I am attracted by certain subjects--crime, artistic endeavor, intense cogitation in narrative--but ultimately it doesn't matter. What's important is the human fabric of the book: the voice, the characters, the way one thought flows into another. I like texture and nuance. I like odd juxtapositions and interesting problems.

I wonder if people who desire certain kinds of endings, or have particular expectations for what an ending should do, are people who care too much what books are about. Could that be the problem? Or is it something else? Because honestly, I have never read a review in which the reviewer suggests alternate endings that would work better. They never say what they want! They only say they were disappointed.

Is it "closure" people want? I hope not. Resolution? The pieces fitting together? High drama? Secrets revealed? Lyrical flights? Somebody help me out here. I honestly believe that many good books cannot have satisfying endings--that some of the best books just simply can't be ended. There is nothing wrong wtih this. Some stories need to be this way. David Foster Wallace wrote a lot of them--that's one of the reasons I liked him.

When you don't like the ending of a book--putting aside big, dramatic blunders--what is it exactly that you don't like?

Criticizing other writers

We just got back from a few days out of town, visiting some friends. The friends are writers, and they invited some friends over for dinner, and the friends' friends were writers too. And then we went out and bumped into some more writers.

It was all a lot of fun--I like meeting other writers. But it's easy to see how the literary world can come to seem awfully incestuous. I've resisted many times, on this blog, the notion that contemporary literature is nothing more than a big clique, and that all that matters is who you know--the notion is cynical and reductive. But knowing lots of other writers is nearly inevitable, especially if you study or teach at a college, and for the most part it's desirable, too.

It becomes problematic, though, when you wish to perform the geuinely useful act of substantively criticizing other people's work. What if you end up on a panel with that writer someday, or have to deliver a reading together? What if that writer reviews books, as well, and yours falls onto her desk?

The screenwriter and novelist Derek Haas left a comment to the last post, in response to the thumbs-down I had just given his thriller. As you can see (and as he further proved in a subsequent email exchange), he's a good sport with a thick skin. But not everyone's like that. Indeed, hardly anyone is, and that's too bad.

Writers should criticize one another, respectfully and carefully. To offer only praise for the things you like doesn't quite constitute a useful dialogue--if something bugs you about a peer's work, and you can support your views, you ought to be able to express them, calmly, without the fear of making an enemy--and you should have the humility to accept similar criticism yourself. Of course, this is a hopelessly idealistic approach: in one of my many rants about book reviewing, I have probably said that the only people who are really qualified to review books are other writers. But other writers have prejudices and allegiances that are hard to overcome, and the results often come off either as hopeless snarking or professional backscratching, delivered with a wink.

I was talking with some colleagues about book reviewing, and I said that I preferred getting an intelligent bad review than a positive puff piece. And one colleague turned to me and said, "Bullshit." Well--she's kind of right. I certainly would prefer a ditzy rave to a thorough intellectual thrashing. But most of the reviews I've gotten that flattered me the most are ones that, at least in part, took me to task for subtle weaknesses in my work. One memorable review, in praising a recent book of mine, took the time to dismiss my first two, and my main reaction was, "Whoa--they actually read the first two." What I meant, I suppose, is that I would rather be read carefully than praised thoughtlessly, and accept the possibility that I might be found lacking. I think most serious writers feel the same way. We want to be part of something alive, something rigorous, not merely players in yet another form of casual entertainment. We need to keep one another on our toes, to have the respect to give and receive criticism.

All of this is on my mind, as I have a new book coming out next week and am bracing myself for negative reactions, or, worse, no reactions at all. I hope I can learn something from the former, but if I can't, I fear I will end up on my knees, begging the world for faint praise.

Thrillers and class

Can we talk for a moment about the world of mysteries and thrillers and its bizarre obsession with class? This week I went to the library and took out my usual stack of crime fiction, hoping one or two of the half dozen would work out all right, and this blurb caught my eye. It's on the back of the Peter Abrahams novel Deception, and is taken from a review by Michele Ross, published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, of Abrahams' last book, Nerve Damage:

I swear, if one more literary person says in that oh-so-condescendng tone, 'Oh, I don't read ... mysteries,' I'm going to take a novel by Peter Abrahams and smack him on his smug little head.

Where do I start? Good god. I suppose the obvious place is to ask who on earth these "literary people" are who hesitate, repulsed, before uttering the word "mysteries." As a literary person who spends almost all of my time with literary people, I have never met one. Indeed, some of the best recommendations for mysteries that I get come from the English department at Cornell, where I enjoy the benefit of an informal mystery-trading ring with, among others, a wunderkind Shakespeare scholar, one of the world's premier poststructuralists, and a department secretary. In other words, just about everyone enjoys mysteries, and there's really nobody who needs to be smacked on the head.

Of course I'm not going to blame Abrahams for his reviewer's comments. This is my third try at Abrahams, and I made it farther than ever before. But now I give up. He's not bad, but the book is so packed with "good writing" that I can't see the plot for all the fog; "good writing" in this case refers to the florid metaphoric overdescription of mundane detail that writers fill their books with when they're out of their depth. Meanwhile, the protagonist of Delusion is a sexy airhead who can't put two and two together. A pass, for me.

Next on the pile is The Silver Bear, the debut novel, about a contract killer, from screenwriter Derek Haas. It's appealingly slim and gives good flap, but the ponderous first-person narrative lost me within sentences. This is from the first paragraph:

If you saw me on the street, you might think, "what a nice, clean-cut young man. I'll bet he works in advertising or perhaps a nice accounting firm. I'll bet he's married and is just starting a family. I'll bet his parents raised him well." But you would be wrong. I am old in a thousand ways.

Uh huh. Of all the things this narrator can open his story with, he feels the need to tell us, right up front, that he IS NOT MIDDLE CLASS, OKAY?!? What professional murderer would care to ever say any such thing? This isn't the character speaking, here, it's the writer speaking to the audience, assuring them that they will be soon enjoy the frisson of empathizing with somebody outside their immediate value system. This reminds me of why I rarely like any first-person killer novels; I just never believe that this person would be talking at all. Even my favorite thrillerist, Lee Child, occasionally indulges in first-person narratives from his hero, Jack Reacher; these are terrific books, but when you read them, you have to block from your mind the absolute knowledge that Reacher would never in a million years say so many words at once.

Okay, scratch Derek Haas. Bring on the new Stephen King, Just After Sunset, which, let me say from the start, is in places really good. A few stories in here--"N.", "Harvey's Dream", "The New York Times At Special Bargain Rates"--are some of the best things King has written, so hooray for that. "Harvey's Dream" is particularly creepy.

But as regular readers of this blog already know, I consider King to be the king of class paranoia, and he doesn't disappoint. Here we have Henry, the soon-to-be-divorced husband of the protagonist of "The Gingerbread Girl," reacting to the news that she'll soon be visiting his working-class father's beach house:

"The conch shack." She could almost hear him sniff. Like Ho Hos and Twinkies, houses with only three rooms and no garage were not a part of Henry's belief system.

This is classic King--in a world of ghosts, monsters, and murderers, pretension is the ultimate enemy. Of course, Stephen King is very smart, and loves all kinds of literature, and can't resist referring, in his books, to all the great writers, musicians, and artists he has enjoyed in his life. And there is nothing wrong with that. But when he puts this knowledge into the minds of his characters, we get passages like this, from "The Things They Left Behind":

I even remember something one of those South American novelists said--you know, the ones they call the Magic Realists? Not the guy's name, that's not important, but this quote: [long quote from "the guy"]. Borges? Yes, it might have been Borges. Or it might have been Marquez.

Right. One of those guys--it's not like I care. I mean, I don't sit around, like, reading all the time, man. Mostly I repair my car and watch sports, but you know how it is, Mac, the way those Magic Realist quotes stick in your head. To be honest, it really fuckin' bugs me.

This post could go on for pages, as you probably know, if you read mysteries and thrillers. The question, of course, is why? Why is class paranoia the default mode for the thrillerist? You would think that the entire genre was made up of people whose greatest fear is that somewhere out there, some elbow-patched lit prof is thinking he's superior to them. Of course the genre was born in the pulps, which didn't used to get any respect; but of course now they do, they're taught in college classes, and oceans of ink about them have been spilled over the dissertations of the world. King especially is now widely lauded as an inspiration for all manner of literary fiction; he's certainly a powerful force behind my new novel.

Crime and thriller writers need to evolve. It's time for them to assume the habits of self-confidence and literary ambition that people like Stephen King have earned for them, and stop trying to have it both ways.

The Cradle is not simple

Congratulations to W6 friend Patrick Somerville for this terrific review of his new novel in the New York Times. Somerville, whom I interviewed back in September as part of the Writers At Cornell series, is the author of a good story collection, Trouble. I liked those stories, and I like Somerville, but The Cradle is, in my view, a huge leap forward for this writer, and a testament to how much life is still left in straightforwardly written psychological realism.

I'm very suspicious, I should mention, of the whole "simplicity" thing. A few years back, there was a bit of hulabaloo when the long-blocked Tony Early rolled out a new, un-ironic version of himself in Jim The Boy, a book that I didn't like much. This was also around the time of the whole Jedediah Purdy thing, and it all seemed, at the time, a step back not just from postmodern angst, but emotional complexity, and I grew suspicious of anything that smacked of the New Simplicity.

Patrick's story collection is very guy. All the stories are, in some respect, about their protagonist's tussles with the notion of masculinity. And the novel, too, is a guy novel. Which is not remotely to say it's for guys to read. Indeed, it differs from the stories in the beautifully open moral and emotional qualities of its main character, a guy named Matt, whose pregnant wife, Marissa, has asked him to go find the cradle she slept in as a baby. The request is irrational in the extreme, and its fulfillment likely to be fraught with difficulties, but Matt decides to do it.

At first, the book takes the form of a fairly conventional quest narrative. Matt enounters a lot of strange characters, and gets himself into various apparently picayune situations, in the course of searching for the cradle. But when he finds it, he finds something else, as well--an intolerable situation, related to Marissa's own upbringing, which Matt alone has the power to rectify. The novel stops being about the quest and starts being about more important things--about being an adult, about having the courage to do the right thing, when the right thing is unimaginably complex and undesirable. Furthermore, this narrative is crosscut with a second one, about a mother terrified of her teenage son's impending military service in Iraq. This story line is set ten years after the main one, and it's unclear for quite a long time how they're connected. But they are, and they dovetail beautifully, magnifying and elaborating upon the book's already quietly established themes.

The prose is clear, funny, and supple; the characters are humanely drawn and wonderfully convincing. The whole thing is only a couple hundred pages. The book reminds me of a few of my favorite short novels--The Optimist's Daughter, The Name Of The World, Winter In The Blood, and I expect to return to it often. It's about hope and responsibility in the midst of chaos and confusion, which, in this spring of our discombobulation, may be just the ticket.

Ambition, and DFW's unfinished novel

You'd think that knowing all the facts would make you feel a little better about the outcome. But this New Yorker piece about David Foster Wallace's life, death, and career just makes me feel worse. I knew I would miss him, but I am surprised at how often I think of Wallace: at least once a week since his suicide, I've come across something, some cultural phenomenon or political imbroglio or literary controversy, and instantly regretted that Wallace would never see it, never know about it, never weigh in on it. His patterns of thought are permanently imprinted on my mind--more so than those of most people I actually know. That's because he put more of himself into his work than any other writer of my generation. He laid it on the line.

Anyway, the enormity of this loss is finally beginning to sink in. As Rhian said to me the other night, Wallace's ambition was a force that held all other writers aloft. No matter how lazy any of us was feeling, we could always be assured that Wallace was trying harder than everybody else. He was a leader, and there is really nobody to replace him. Oh, there are lots of excellent writers around our age, doing very fine work. But none of them has the personal and professional cachet that Wallace did--he was virtually synonymous with Contemporary American Literature, and it always made me proud to be engaged in the same kind of work as him.

That's not to say he was a writer of great books. I don't think he ever really produced one--he produced great bits of things. There's greatness in all of his stuff. But all of it was interestingly flawed. According to that New Yorker piece, he seemed to know this. His ambition was always three steps ahead of his ability. That's the mark of a great artist, in my book. His struggle to write the present unfinished novel, The Pale King, is incredibly sad and moving to behold.

This excerpt, "Wiggle Room," strikes me as pretty terrific, though I'm sure that it will soon be drenched in haterade, as was the previous excerpt. I am more confident than ever in my long-held opinion that Wallace was both the most nerdy of writers and the most sentimental, and these excerpts suggest that he was trying very hard to actualize his own truest self, the one that I have always been rooting for him to bring to the fore.

The lesson to take away from this, for all of us who write fiction, is to stop being such wimp-assed pencil pushers and get out of our comfort zones once and for all. Wallace isn't going to cover us anymore. If contemporary literature is going to be taken seriously, we're going to have to make literature worth taking seriously, even if it fails, as so much of Wallace's brilliantest stuff did. Otherwise we'll be relegated to the cultural footnote the film industry has been stuffing us into for years. Fiction writing should not be an amusing affectation. It should be the ultimate expression of being human, as Wallace thought it should be. Try harder. That's what we all have to do.

As for the unfinished novel--I'm looking forward to seeing what this thing is, and imagining what it might have been. Clearly Wallace wanted it out there--he left it neatly organized for his wife to find, and I think he would have had no trouble destroying it, along with himself, if that's what he felt was necessary. Perhaps it's a message to all of us who aspired to be more like him: this is as much as I could do, you take it from here.

Fakers

The writing continues apace. I now have 120 pages of...something. It's a strange sensation: I have never prepared so little to write a book. I took some notes a while back but I don't know where I put them. Everything is coming from the constant cogitation I expend on the project every day. Continuity errors are doubtless piling up, and I dread having to face them later, but I'm having more fun writing than I have in years, which is more than ample compensation.

Anyhow, now that I have gotten over the initial push into "can't give up now" territory, I'll be posting more frequently. Please return to your original regimen of visiting the blog!

Today I want to offer a bit of praise for a friend's book. Paul Maliszewski's Fakers (weird--the dust jacket at that link isn't remotely like the one I have in front of me) is a loosely structured collection of essays about literary frauds, including Stephen Glass, James Frey, and J. T. Leroy. Maliszewski also writes about writers who write about fakes (Peter Carey), the nature of tall tales, and the literary world's meta-appreciation of the specious "spectric school" of poetry. The book opens with one of the writer's own brushes with controversy: Maliszewski, while grudgingly working for a business newspaper in Syracuse in the late nineties, began a psudonomous ironic letter-writing campaign to the paper, and ended up writing parodic editorials under several assumed names, which his editor published in earnest, believing their authors to be real people. The plot unraveled, of course, and Maliszewski ended up being threatened by the FBI. The story is crazy and very funny (and is not even, in my view, the most interesting of Paul's pseudonomous exploits--but you'll have to ask him about that), and sets the tone for what proves to be an intelligent and highly entertaining exploration of frauds and why we fall for them.

One thing that occurs to me reading about these writers--particularly the memoirists "LeRoy" and Frey--is that they have to be admired for their shrewdness. They understood that, by and large, publishers aren't interested in good stories so much as stories that tell people what they want to hear. The world, these writers decided, wants street-smart victim narratives, and so that's what they wrote. The writers are to blame for their frauds, of course. But insofar as they are literary monsters, they're the monsters the publishing industry created, the result of their endless pandering to conventional tastes. Which of course brings me back to one of my hobby horses: the sad misapprehension that publishers can maintain a 12% profit margin while remaining culturally relevant. But you don't need to hear that again.

There's one quite surprising story here, as well, about, of all people, Michael Chabon. Chabon evidently delivers, from time to time, a lecture entitled "Golems I Have Known," in which he relates the (ultimately redemptive) story of his discovery that a favorite writer of his from childhood, a man named Colby, was actually his neighbor--and a discredited Holocaust memoirist, a faker. The lecture itself, it turns out, is almost entirely a fabrication. Chabon doesn't make any particular claims about the lecture's factuality, but he doesn't call it fiction, either, and many of his listeners assume the story to be true. Maliszewski interviewed Chabon for Fakers, and addresses, very effectively I think, the moral pitfalls of the situation. Is Chabon merely doing what he's good at--that is, inventing a story--for a greater good: to convey the power of the imagination, and remind listeners of people's capacity for forgiveness? Or is he snatching for himself a bit of the moral authority that a connection to the Holocaust can confer on a writer? In the end, I don't know, and neither does Maliszewski. Chabon doesn't seem to, either.

Fakes only really work in the cultural moment for which they are created. "We're not likely," Maliszewski writes, "to get fooled by the fakes of our fathers." If you have a good eye, and if you're not invested in the mores of the moment, you can spot them as they happen. Rhian, for instance, saw through Stephen Glass in an instant: she identified his psychic-hotline piece in Harper's as bullshit the moment she read it.

Not me, though. I bought it. What can I say? I wanted to believe.

Stealing

Sorry for the long delay--we've been, god help us, writing.

So. I took that picture (sans Alfred E. Neuman head) last week while shooting more or less at random on Fifth Avenue, in New York City. I'd been trying my hand at "street" here in Ithaca for a few months, and though I've enjoyed doing it, and gotten some nice results, it was a little like shooting animals at the zoo. New York, of course, is big game country. The strangers are stranger, and there are more of them, and I was having the time of my life until I spied this woman, with her groovy serape-like woolen wrap, approaching from the direction of 47th Street. She looked confident, intense, well dressed. I shot from the hip without even looking in her direction. She was up in my grill in seconds.

"I can take your film. I CAN TAKE YOUR FILM!"

If there's one thing I know from hanging around on internet photography forums, it was that she could not take my film. Indeed, taking pictures on public property (e.g., a city street) of people on public property is, at least in America, at least for now, perfectly legal.

I argued as robustly as possible with my subject (while Rhian stood over by a bus stop pretending she didn't know me), and continued to endure a barrage of mis-, or perhaps disinformation: she was a photojournalist, so she should know, but what I'd done was illegal, she could seize my camera, I was obliged to destroy the negatives, etc. "I used to be a member of Magnum! And I can tell you it is illegal to photograph people on the street!!"

Well. Magnum, as you may know, is perhaps the world's largest photogrphers' cooperative, and many of its members are, in fact, street photographers. Take, for instance, Bruce Gilden. As you can see in that excellent Street Shots mini-documentary (that's a YouTube link), Gilden is as street as they come, and he isn't shooting from the hip. He's up in people's faces with his flash, and screaming like a madman when they complain. He is also, not surprisingly, way better at street photography than I could ever hope to be, or, to be honest, would want to be. I admire the man enormously, and think his photos are excellent. But I don't want to do what he does. I don't believe I'm capable of it.

Indeed, one of the reasons I started trying street was to overcome some of my natural social inhibitions. Most shots, I sneak. But sometimes people notice I'm shooting and stop to talk to me. I've talked to more strangers in the past six months than the previous five years combined, most of them due to my photography habit. Of course, there are more efficient ways of meeting people, and if meeting people was what I really wanted, I would walk up and introduce myself.

So what do I really want? Simply, to steal.

I'm already stealing, of course, in my work as a novelist--though I don't make a habit of fictionalizing real people, I'm borrowing personal quirks, habits of speech, facial features, etc., from everyone I know, and a lot of people I don't. Like a photographer, I'm observing, documenting and recontextualizing things that don't belong to me, and turning them into something new, that does.

But there's something different about the image, isn't there? Your face is your identity. I can describe your face to a hundred people, and those hundred people will imagine a hundred different versions of you. If they passed by you on the street in New York, they would not recognize you. A novel, ultimately, is created by its reader as much as it's created by its writer. This is why we novelists are afforded so much license to represent, and distort reality...most of the time, anyway.

Take a photo of someone, though, and they are recognized forever. Katherine McIntosh was 4 years old when Dorothea Lange snapped that iconic shot of her migrant mother. Later, McIntosh told CNN (click that link), the photo shamed her family--but it left them determined to improve their lives, which they did. The face of Florence Owens Thompson, the mother in the picture, became the face of hard times. Her identity was taken from her (though she intially did give Lange permission to shoot), and lent to a social cause.

Of course, would we have it any other way? I don't think we would. What Bruce Gilden steals from those around him, he gives to the rest of the world. And we're grateful for it.

Not every street photo, on the other hand, will affect positive social change. Indeed, none of mine will. So again, how come I keep making them? I think I enjoy taking street pictures for the same reason I enjoy writing fiction: as a tribute to the endless variety of human beings. When you take a good picture of a stranger, even a half-decent one, you capture a human moment, a fleeting emotion that will never otherwise be precisely reproduced, not for the subject's family or friends, not for anyone. If you're skillful, or lucky, you might capture something great. But even if you don't, you got something: something real and temporary, that you managed to make permanent and, ultimately, less real.

Less real? Sure. Because every photo is a lie, as well, and herein lies part of the problem with street. The fleeting emotion isn't always representative of the context. Hell, everyone looks like a psycho killer at least five times a day. Paparazzi, for instance, are in the business of making the superhumans look subhuman, and it is because of their intrusiveness (along with the mindless paranoia the era of terror has given us) that the law has of late been striving to limit the rights of photographers. Increasingly, photography itself, as a hobby, as an artistic venture, is considered suspect by some, and even the most innocent of snappers knows better than to hang around that most deeply alive of human environments, the playground.

In the end, though, the major problem with street is that it's a kind of taking. A benign taking, of course, that leaves its subject fully intact and unharmed, but a taking nonetheless. And depending on the kind of person you are, this might not sit right with you. Personally, my feelings are mixed. I wouldn't mind, I tell myself, if somebody was sneaking photos of me. But my privacy, in public, is not important to me, and to some people it is. Of course, those people may be the ones most worth photographing--the ones who are vulnerable, whose faces have the most to say.

For me, for now, that calculus comes out on the side of doing it, and respecting after the fact the requests of any subject who would have preferred not to be photographed. This is an imperfect solution, but photography, like fiction, is an imperfect art, and its excitement lies, in part, in the friction between what is and isn't permissible. Presently, the law is on my side, and my conscience isn't quite. But maybe, for the purposes of art, that's where one's conscience belongs.

Crime: Three for Three?

Those of you who read this blog regularly know that it's my habit to go to the library or bookstore, borrow or buy a big pile of crime novels, then come home and be really disappointed. This time I worked at it, choosing one known element, one with a good hook (photography) and one that just looked weird. And go figure, they're all good.

T. Jefferson Parker, L.A. Outlaws. Parker's pretty much a conventional American crime novelist, but is among the best of that bunch. He doesn't get too arty or ambitious, but he has some interesting ideas, his writing is never awful and is sometimes excellent, and his characters are very memorable. This new book has three great characters--a wildly implausible girl bandit and folk hero who is an elementary school teacher by day; a contemplative, self-possessed cop and Iraq war vet; and a machete-wielding villain. They make a strange triangle: the cop alternately trying to catch the bandit and falling in love with her, the bandit and the cop trying to catch the villain, and the villain trying to kill everyone. The cop will be in Parker's next novel, too, which pleases me. I like the cut of his jib.

Elizabeth Hand, Generation Loss. This is a highly entertaining quasi-literaruy outing that turns into a semi-run-of-the-mill thriller by the end, with a firey conclusion you will roll your eyes at, and a killer who you knew it was all along. But the protagonist is a washed-up punk rock photographer who is sent to interview a washed-up reculsive art photographer, and photography is not merely window dressing here, but a vital and well-researched element that is integral to the plot and characters. Hand makes the usual accoutrements of noir, like alcoholism, drug abuse, and dark thoughts, seem fresh, as well. A blast.

Thomas Glavinic, Night Work. This translation (from German) is not a crime novel, and I'm not sure why The Bookery thought it was. But that's where I found it. The setup: Jonas, a man in his thirties, wakes up one morning and every human being and animal on earth is gone without a trace. I have to admit I'm only halfway through, but so far he's still alone, yet the book is not only fascinating, but one of the scariest fucking things I have ever read. Jonas's solitude drives him to enter a state that is half sleepwalking, half hyperaware, and minute details take on enormous weight. One scene, where he videotapes himself sleeping, then watches the tape to find "The Sleeper" staring at the camera, his eyes wide open, gave me nightmares. A bit reminiscent of my favorite book of last year, Tom McCarthy's Remainder. The writing is austere and serious without sacrificing its sense of ironic humor. If it loses me before the end, I'll let you know.

EDIT: OK, I finished this last night, and I must say, I think this novel is incredible, maybe a masterpiece. And it definitely doesn't belong in the crim section. It's absolutely unflinching, incredibly depressing, and yet I find it strangely life-affirming. Somebody quick translate the rest of his stuff...

Narrative Momentum. What Is It Anyway?

Earlier today I interviewed Melissa Bank for the Writers At Cornell podcast. Melissa is a Cornell grad, and is in Ithaca filling in for me and Ernesto Quiñonez, who are on leave.

I didn't read The Girls' Guide To Hunting And Fishing back when everyone was raving about it. As Melissa and I discussed in the interview, the book had ridden a particular current of the zeitgeist, one that she had never expected to benefit from, and it was marketed as thinking women's chick lit. This of course is why I didn't read it. But I read it this week, and I liked it, and I liked her newer book, The Wonder Spot, quite a lot more.

The thing I like about them is something that you never read about in reviews of any book, and certainly not on the front flap of the dust jacket: they have an odd approach to narrative. They are not novels, and not really story collections; they're large narrative units composed of loosely arranged medium-sized narrative units, which are themselves made up of loosely arranged small narrative units. They're basically a bunch of anecdotes and jokes mashed together.

And yet, though there are no real plots to speak of, these books have forward momentum, and often that momentum is really compelling. In the podcast, Bank explains that she was trying to give the stories the shape of stories from life--discursive, off-kilter, but still purposeful. And she succeeded. But for the life of me I can't really tell how. The do feel very lifelike; during the interview I told her that, reading them, I never really realized I was being taken somewhere, but was surprised and delighted when I arrived.

One thing Rhian complains about a lot (and perhaps she will comment on this post) is her frustration at trying to make her ideas fit into an organizational scheme, and assume the form of a story. But Bank's books don't bother to do this, and they still feel like stories. And the more I think about it, the more I think that all the books I like have unconventional approaches to plot. Even the crime novels.

Maybe writer's block is the result of feeling detached from your story, from the model story in your soul. Life can do things to tear you away from it--tragedy, or the distractions of home and family, or the pressures of work. You may be generally happy, but the pieces don't fit in the obvious way they once did. In the parking lot of the Agway the other day, Rhian and I were talking about how, during times of stress and slavish adherence to our routines, we feel as though we don't have the small epiphanies we sometimes have, which show us, in an instant, new possibilities for living. Writers need these epiphanies, and they need to put themselves in circumstances that favor them.

I think that it's rare for a good book to have a structure imposed on it. The movement of the narrative has to find its natural shape, and the writer has to assume the state of mind that allows this to happen. I'm not big on "inspiration," the concept. Writing is work, to me, and sometimes it's rather dreary work. But the times that it isn't are the result of everything falling into alignment--the details, the emotions, your life, your story. You can't force it to happen. But at the same time, you don't know how to let it happen on its own. I think this is why really good, really consistent writers are scarce. Such people balance on a knife edge their whole lives, and barely even consider the possibility of falling off.

Being Comfortable

It's bad to be too comfortable, if you're a writer. And I think I mean all kinds of comfortable: financially comfortable, physically comfortable, and comfortable with yourself and your ideas.

Financially comfortable: Inherited money is probably worse than earned money, but both are bad if you can look at bag of groceries you just bought and not think, Hot damn, safe for another week! If you take survival for granted, if there's no possibility of your living in your car next year, you're too comfortable, and your work will show it. It will feel unnecessary.

Physically comfortable: You should never be so comfortable that you can't feel your body. Your chair must be hard, or the room too cold, or there should be a draft. Your desk should be too small. Your work should reflect the truth that you, too, are a physical being forced to exist in a world that has little interest in accommodating you.

Comfortable ideas: If your ideas are comfortable, they're undoubtedly wrong.

Anyway, I started thinking about this after reading a blog post about a young writer who lives with his or her parents. Perhaps things are different in the childhood home of that writer, but as much as I love my parents and enjoy visiting them, I have never been able to write in their house. It's too warm, there's too much food in the fridge, and the carpets are too soft.

Recently I've begun to worry that I'm recreating that kind of comfort in my own house, now. We have numerous rugs on the floors, and a newish couch that doesn't have springs poking out of it. My desk chair came from an office supply store instead of a pile a on street corner, and it feels pretty good to sit in. But what do you expect, I'm a grown-up now and I shouldn't have to pretend to be some kind of desert acetic anymore. Still, I'm pretty sure that too much sitting in a comfy chair will produce those comfy, and wrong, ideas.

Then again, maybe being uncomfortable about being comfortable is enough discomfort. You think?

The Gilded Palace of Sin

I've posted here before about the terrific 33 1/3 series of short books on classic rock albums; I've read about a dozen of them (out of, presently, about five dozen). The books are about the height of a CD and fit on your CD shelf (if you still have one) right next to the album in question. My enjoyment of the series has precipitated an era of closer listening to old favorites and new appreciation for records I might once have dismissed, and the books' size and length makes them perfect for moments of anticipated boredom: I enjoyed Kim Cooper's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, for instance, while waiting in an interminably long line with my family at Disney World. I was the only one having a good time.

The trouble with these books is that, if you are fussy about what you read, you will hate about half. The series' editors have aimed for a broad range of literary styles and approaches, but in so doing have commissioned a few clunkers, and you never know what you're going to get. This is why I was so delighted to see that Ithaca's own Bob Proehl, owner of No Radio Records on Seneca Street, issuer of incredibly long, rambling press releases, ace bartender, and all-around hardcore popular music nerd, has written my favorite book in the series so far: The Gilded Palace of Sin, a chronicle of the Flying Burrito Brothers' 1969 Americana classic.

I'm not going to go into the Burritos' history--I'll leave that to Bob. Suffice to say that they were an offshoot of the Byrds and showcased the songwriting talents of the now-legendary Gram Parsons (and those of bandmate Chris Hillman, though Hillman lacks Parsons' flamboyance and early self-destruction, and thus doesn't get enough credit); and that "Gilded Palace" was their only really great record. They have been lovingly covered by every imaginable current roots-based act, but never got the popular recognition they deserved.

But the point of reading this book is Bob's writing, which is detailed, discursive, and extremely funny. The footnotes alone are worth the cover price; I found myself reading them aloud to Rhian every five minutes until she was compelled to leave the room. "A caveat," Proehl writes early on, in a footnote that follows a Keith Richards quote (he appears to have actually interviewed Richards, by the way--quite a coup), "many of the Keith Richards quotes in this book have been transcribed by the author and should be taken only as approximations of the sounds Keith Richards produced." Later, he writes of having viewed a monumental Elvis Presley exhibition at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, featuring "a dozen iterations of Elvis in [his] gold suit, each one at least twelve feet tall. Filled with a Kantian terror at the sheer size of Elvis and his fan base upon viewing this, I returned home and meekly submitted to liking Elvis's music." Or my favorite, which underscores a highly entertaining tangent about the bling-studded suits of country-music clothier Nudie Cohn:

Years later, Hank Williams, Jr. commissioned a reproduction of his father's burial suit, which he sported when posing such timeless musical questions as "Are You Ready For Some Football?" One can only wonder what a rhinestone suit sounds like when its wearer is spinning in his grave.

Also included is a harrowing description of the events at Altamont Speedway in December 1969 (the murderous anti-Woodstock that marked the decade's end), some highly entertaining musings on the longevity of the Rolling Stones ("Frankly, the Rolling Stones scare the fuck out of me"), and a thoughtful essay on the relationship between dying young and being famous forever.

Highly recommended, along with the record, which I have listened to dozens of times but (shockingly, now that I think about it) never actually owned. I will have to remedy that pronto.

Updike

Alas, dead at 76. I never loved his novels, but I've read and re-read the Henry Bech stories with great enjoyment, and have long been a fan of the essays and reviews. I honestly have no idea what history will have to say about him; I suspect he'll be remembered as the author of the Rabbit Angstrom books. I don't know how well these will age--perhaps not that well. (I'm accustomed to this being a minority opinion.) But his short stories, I hope, especially the early ones, may rally, and come to form his legacy. The best book about him, on the other hand, is easy: Nicholson Baker's hilarious U and I.

I met him once, and told him I'd used a quote from a fanciful essay of his as the epigram for Mailman. He didn't know what the hell I was talking about--not only my book, which it was clear he hadn't heard of, but the essay of his I used, of which he had no recollection. All I can say is, may I live so long, and write so much, that I can't remember the half of it. Sad to see him go.

How will piracy affect publishing?

I've reserved a review copy of the forthcoming Foxit eSlick, Foxit software's horribly-named e-book reader due out next month. It's not new technology, but at $229, this could be the first reader that lots of people actually buy. It also will read pdf's, unlike the abominably proprietary Kindle [note: I've been informed, in the comments, that there is indeed a way to read pdf's on the Kindle, sorry], which is what interests me about it, as I read a lot of manuscripts that are thrown out immediately afterward, and which I'm not interested in reading on a computer screen.

Now, I'm not terribly interested in one of those real-books-versus-e-books aesthetic debates. Yes, we all love the feel of a book in our hands, the discolored paper, the marginal notes blah blah blah blah. Doubtless there will be room in the world for both formats, and nobody alive today is likely to ever see book-lined rooms obliterated from existence. So chill.

But I am interested in the other possible consequences of this technology. So far, writers don't seem to have suffered much from the possibility of cracked copyrighted content, probably because they don't make much money to begin with, and mostly because not many people read literature in this format. But once the practice is widespread (as I've said before, I think it will be, once we have inexpensive readers that look half decent), piracy will probably be widespread as well, and literature might well go the way of music, with a vast percentage of people culturally acclimated to the idea that it is, in effect, free.

There are a few problems with this analogy, though. One is that musicians, at the dawn of file sharing, were already not making much money off of records. The money comes from touring. This trend has been hugely amplified in the wake of Napster, etc., and now many musicians and record companies have come around to also thinking that recorded music is basically free. The moral calculus involved in stealing music has changed, and most music acts don't even consider records a major source of revenue anymore. This doesn't make music piracy OK, of course, but it is now lower in the heirarchy of sins than, say software piracy. (For an interesting read on that subject, check out this Analog Industries post.)

This is bad news for writers, because we make no money from touring. Indeed, at least in the short run, publishers lose money on touring. For one thing, literary readings are generally free. Second, fans of writers don't really need to hear them read. If you love Bruce Springsteen, you are going to buy Springsteen tickets, because much of the pleasure in his music comes from the concept of its spontaneous creation; furthermore, when you go to a concert, you are hearing something unique, not just a rehashing of the record. In a concert, the music is being created now. But if you love, say, T. C. Boyle, you really don't necessarily want to hear him read. You might like to see what he's like in person, but ultimately, it's just going to be a guy reading out of a book, the same book you already read. Literature is cerebral, not physical and extemporaneous. The action all happens offstage; a book is merely its ultimate result. A reading is nice, but it isn't the act of creation. It's a shadow on the wall.

However, there's another problem with the e-book/mp3 analogy, and that is that literature is already free. Indeed, anyone in America can read any book he or she wants. All you have to do is go to your free public library, get a free library card, and check it out. You might have to pay fifty cents for an interlibrary loan. The main reason to buy a new book is that you want it now. (You might also suspect it will have lasting value, and you'll want to read it again.) But ultimately, very few writers make any money off of their books.

Now, I am talking here about Literature. The vast number of books that sell are not fiction or poetry--they're reference, cookbooks, celebrity memoirs, etc., and these books do make money. But for most of us, piracy is not very worrisome. Who the hell is going to steal my book? most literary writers would say, hardly anyone wants to read it to begin with.

This technology could be great for small-time writers who might want to sell novels, say, off their websites for five bucks, the way a lot of independent bands do with their records. But of course the public has to know, and care, that you exist to begin with. Bands achieve this by touring. And I bet a lot of writers would, too, if they could. Unless you're on the self-help lecture circuit, though, you really can't. Nobody will care, because like I said, it's not the physical presence of bands that pack clubs, it's the spontaneous creation of a work of art. And nobody ever danced to Jonathan Safran Foer.

Many of us who are into contemporary music could see the record industry crisis coming from a thousand miles away. Record execs blew it in slow motion, with their reluctance to embrace downloading and create subscription services. Instead they waited too long and tried to shove the genie back in the bottle with lawsuits and DRM. They were "right" to do those things, but it was never going to work.

I can't see the future of publishing, though. Maybe, ultimately, e-books will just not take off the way digital music has. Maybe digital will always be the ugly stepchild of print. In any event, here's my wild prediction: ten years from now, all the best literary writers will be at small presses, who will put out short-run print editions at a premium, while offering direct downloads at a heavily discounted price. And we will all go from not making much money to making almost no money, and we'll all sigh ruefully and accept it.