“Crritic!” — Estragon, Waiting for Godot.
Writers play for the Major Leagues. The Premier League. The First Division. I don’t know which continent you might be on reading this, but you know what I mean: something is at stake, so they go for it.
Take a look at what Jess Row had to say in the Boston Review —
We need critics who set impatient standards, ask uncomfortable questions, and maintain an omnivorous appetite for the unfamiliar, the awkward, the angry, the untoward. Instead, we have a gated community, a velvet-roped garden party, a Brooklyn vs. Cambridge fantasy baseball league. We don’t need critics obsessed with the real, or with whether the novel is alive or dead. We need critics willing to look at the novels that are already out there, going about their business, quietly making the future of literature, whether “we” like it or not.
In a way, this is a self-fulfilling prophecy — writers will come from everywhere. But it’s also well written, exactly right, and an excuse to answer the question – what is out there that we don’t know about?
Johnny Carson once said that you’re as funny as the person next to you, and I’m going to try and do that — make these people look good. The roaring crowd with players running wildly across the pitch, and it doesn’t matter who scored the goal — it’s that noise and joy and frenetic feet that is my literature and is my home. I’m not here to throw fits of pique. Like The Tallest Man On Earth, I come from The School of Happy Screams.
There are different ways of breaking down those at the cusp of this imaginary ‘Major League’ — recent novels (past twenty years, say), first novels, the professional magazines, the college literary magazines, cities where people take pieces of paper out of their pocket and read their work to a microphone and a crowd (i.e., the Cantab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Poetry Brothel in Chicago), and the blogs.
Those who have appeared in the big leagues recently include The Royal Physician’s Visit (which mishandles the opening quote in a clumsy way), Amelie Nothomb’s Fear and Trembling and Hygiene and the Assassin (both deft and witty, but I liked Fear and Trembling more), Borges and the Eternal Orangutan (way too cutesy — also substitutes Borges’s necessary intellectual density with an ominous, portent-filled tone, which — don’t ask me why — seems like the most common misread of Borges there is), Leeches (which suffers from false excitement and employs a plot engine similar to what Douglas Adams’s Salmon of Doubt — and Dirk Gently in general — makes fun of — aimless wandering. The narrator even goes so far as to say of his opening encounter with a dull-witted Gnostic mystery, “Who would know where it would lead me next?”), A Thousand Peaceful Cities (incredible, astonishing, exactly the right sort of trance), and I am sure they will all continue to do well.
OUR FIRST STOP ON OUR CANONICAL PENNYWHISTLE TOUR:
For a while, I imagined that when I finally got myself to Brooklyn, I would knock on the door of one of my friends, they’d open it, give me a once over, and say, “Hey! Evan! Perfect! You’re here. Now you can help my child pack for college.”
Instead I have a slice of Grimaldi’s, the sun is out, and I’m re-reading a copy of Kathleen Alcott’s first novel, which was just sold to Other Press, an independent publisher that uses Random House for distribution. It’s called, The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets, and, oh, what a killer title. From a technician’s perspective, she’s very good at small details — i.e., “the parties held in railroad flats,” “His cheeks are wide and globular, as if they were hiding apples for later consumption,” or, “He does his best thinking in ten minutes after a visit to the planetarium.” Despite some of the things that come to happen in the book, these are the bits that leave me strangely, weirdly, wonderfully relaxed — despite the unyielding encroachment of several sad things — as if — despite itself — the boat of the book rocks back and forth upon waves of verbal élan. Here’s a slightly longer excerpt:
Sundays in our neighborhood: brash, bright, infectious. Whole generations of Mexican families in their church best, the smallest children fussing with their shellacked hair, mariachi bands, orchid plants of every size and color at special prices, street sales, vendors pushing their jingling carts of coconut ice cream bars or churros or bacon-wrapped hot dogs. The smells and sounds Jackson and I delighted in waking up to, an alarm clock of life if there ever was one. I waded through them unnoticed and saw, upon reaching our building, that our bedroom window was open and the curtains playing their simple game of floating in and out of it.
It’s a good book — one that warrants a lengthy profile-piece of its own (but for now, here’s a clip of her reading), and one — more importantly — that I didn’t hack away at with my pen (which is very, very rare) — but let’s not be unfair to the others.
From a just-sold first novel, we can track our way back to a novel-in-progress: Amanda Foushee — whose blog I stumbled across while researching San Francisco and caught my eye with a post that started with “You can tell which babies live in houses with hardwood floors because they do a funny fish dance instead of crawling” — is working on something called The Dusk House, and it’s the story of a young girl named June that seems to be trying out the engine of a Virginia Wolf trance, driving around the book’s figurative blocks to see whether or not it’s a good fit between owner (reader) and vehicle.
Then there are the writers who haven’t even started their work at all — like — for instance — Chip Creek.
I met Chip over a dinner with a mutual friend in the North End. He was born in Macon, Georgia, as he’ll mention in a second, and when he brought the fact up, I was sorely tempted to say, ‘I know someone who doesn’t call me from Macon, Georgia!’ in the hope that someone else would have enough of their wits about them to reply, “Wait a second – isn’t that … everybody?” but instead stayed quiet and let others talk. Chip Creek has work coming out in the Harvard Review, Washington Square, and is off to research his first novel. When queried about it, here — by e-mail — is some of what he had to say:
I had a base of knowledge to begin with. I was born in Macon, Georgia (in 1976; I did not grow up there, though), and had a basic knowledge of the place and the people and the history. My family was also a railroad family, so I had some working knowledge of that. When I began researching this material (it was a short story before it was a novel), I started with an old Southern Railway rulebook that had been my grandfather’s in the Twenties, which I was lucky to have. It outlined rules of the road, signals, etc., and I read it cover to cover. (There was actually a signal process in the book which inspired the story’s plot.) I also checked out (and if they were good, bought) many books about the railroad, both technical and narrative. I found a gem of a book called “The Catechism of the Locomotive,” published in the late 1800s, which, in catechism form (for whatever reason), lays out how steam locomotives work. I also picked up books on Georgia, Jim Crow, etc. This was all secondary sources to begin with, just to give me a working knowledge of the time, place, and profession.
Last but not least, this: I don’t know if Amanda MacCleod wants to make a “career” career of writing – it’s so clearly not my place to ask – but she very well could. Like Alcott or Ariana Stern, she could easily take that step – as – with reading all of them – you feel like you’re getting away with something. As a writer, she has the chutzpah to go from this –-
… and then I thought “I am going to delete facebook any day now because the more I hear about completely arbitrary social contacts, the more meaningless it all seems.”
— a perfectly reasonable stance, one several of us share (sometimes I feel like the whole website’s devolved into a gigantic Reader’s Digest-styled competition, i.e., ‘Vote for me to go to the Grammys!’ ‘I might win $120!’, or ‘I know you’re my friend, but can you be my ‘Fan?’ since, clearly, I’d rather devolve our friendship to that level of supplication and distance?), to this –-
But then I thought “How else am I going to be able to access over 400 photos of my friend who does not live here, so that I make studies of her luminous face in order to prepare for a portrait that she surely deserves because she is nothing short of a muse in the most mythological sense and how else to express love than to say hello I miss you and every line that adorns your warm face. Because you love me and I’ll never understand why but I feel so lucky for it so let me paint you, via digital images I have accessed through this social network which professes to be about faces to begin with.”
She rhapsodes(or, rhaps-odes) – that’s the noun-turned-verb that fits best with her (“rhapsodizes” is the easy way out), and it’s one of my favorite forms of writing – which you can see when she talks about Cy Twombly –-
What would meeting you do? I’d almost rather watch you take a meal. Eat a piece of fruit or tear bread from a loaf, drink tea or sip slowly from a glass of wine. Human things. I’d like to see your paint box, sure, but I’d rather hear the stories behind all the sculptures you’ve collected, and your homes, and what they mean. I’d almost rather sit next to you and watch you smoke. What can anyone verbalize in conversation that reaches beyond that which they create?
– or when she kills it in a single sentence –
Drunken convictions: grow my hair to fairytale length, save up money, expatriate.
After I put down Foushee’s book and Alcott’s book and read Creek and all the unnamed others — someone promised to introduce me to every unpublished writer in San Francisco, something I’d genuinely love to see done — I went online and saw Jennifer Egan wonder aloud where on earth the young female writers were and Gary Shteyngart wonder where all the good writers were and David Foster Wallace utter “Ugh” when asked about the state of American Literature and I laughed and laughed and laughed.
A book provides unassailable context. As a tool of engaging with the modern world, it is second to none. There is no news crawling along the bottom. It does not ‘blare.’ No one looks at a copy of DH Lawrence and says, “Do you mind?” (Though — given some of the things the guy has said about ‘blood,’ why not say it, anyway?) It is not a consistently updating feed. It does not come accompanied by the insufferable ‘TV/Radio’ voice. It contains a world and still allows you to go about the rest of your day. Books are axel points forever spinning in a mental landscape that parallels the sky. The baseline for reading everything else should be in this sense of rawness, this sense of being on the field, basking under said points. We may feel like someone may be racing all around us, scoring goals left and right — we may be offended that someone deigned to put the book on the same field as us and mentally pick them apart accordingly – but …
The canonical will stay canonical forever. The critics will spleen their political vents, bury Bergman films by talking about Don DeLillo’s barn, and desperately try and figure out whether or not Michiko Kakutani is the person sitting behind them on the bus. (“Do you think she’ll write a review about us on the bus?” Should we have dressed up?”) Good agents will do their job wonderfully, kindly, and conscientiously. Bad agents will unendingly complain about pitch letters on twitter for every hopeful writer to see. Both will receive overwhelming amounts of e-mail.
They don’t need our help. Hunting for literature is as fun as hunting for new bands – and sooner or later, consciously or unconsciously, a team will form, they’ll walk out onto the diamond, the pitch, or the field, and with the wind in the air, ideologies rising and falling, slang popping up like runaway daisies, they’ll take the ball, the bat, the grist for their skill, and they’ll put on a show.
