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  • Readings

    Hot on the heels of the previous "dueling reviews" of The News From Paraguay comes the following reviews of the National Book Award-nominated Florida, by Christine Schutt. Scott Esposito of Conversational Reading joins me to review the book, and, as you will see, in this case a critical duel of sorts has actually broken out.

    In Our Faces

    By Scott Esposito

    Toward the end of the movie, A. I., a disastrous “collaboration” between Stephen Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick, our protagonist, a little robot boy, is stuck at the bottom of the sea safely beneath a plate glass. Just out of his reach is his adopted mother and like the wanton little puppy that he is, the robot boy pays single-minded vigil over the visage of his beloved parent, his pathetic little eyes pressed up again that glass for all of eternity.

    Florida is more than a little bit like that scene. It’s an almost drastically sad story about Alice, a young child who has lost her mother and is shuffled from surrogate parent to surrogate parent. Unlike the robot in A. I., Alice is separated from her mother by social workers and spends her childhood with her aunt, uncle, and grandmother. Like the robot in A. I., however, Alice harps on the same pieces of information with such single-minded fascination that one begins to wonder if she is not a robot after all.

    The book is narrated in lyrical strands of thought that range in length from one paragraph to a few pages. Schutt is clearly able to turn a nice phrase, and early on her descriptions of Alice’s mother, aunt, uncle, grandmother, and Arthur (kindly domestic help) are quite nice. We quickly become familiar with characters, places, and the alienation that Alice, abandoned in every sense of the word, is suffused in.

    I was ten–ten was my age when mother left for good, and this sleep-over life began. I was sleeping at my Uncle Billy’s desert house that time we took the Dutchman’s trek, and I drank my water early, and Uncle Billy would not share his. He said, "Let that be a lesson to you, sweetie."

    But then an unfortunate thing happens: like ingratiating guests that have no sense of space, Florida’s characters remain crowded up against our faces, apparently ignorant of the fact that they must do something. Instead of delving much into these characters’ pasts or exploring their future, Schutt keeps relating their present in repetitive detail. The problem isn’t that time doesn’t pass (it does) but that the events that transpire are so muted and are so seldom contrary to the characterizations Schutt establishes early on that the book feels locked in stasis. In other words, the basic relationships between Alice and her surrogate parents don’t really change, they only get described in greater and greater detail. It’s an interesting trick and Schutt pulls it off quite conclusively, but it doesn’t create the sort of book that holds a reader’s attention.

    It must be said in Schutt’s favor that Florida is an exquisitely written book. Schutt has chosen to write Florida in the form of a prose poem and her skills are up to the challenge. The writing is at once unencumbered and elaborate, full of sentences that stand at once sturdy and aesthetic like Greek columns. Few as they are, Schutt’s words carry substantial heft and are clearly chosen by a patient author with a careful eye.

    It’s unfortunate then that all this fine writing was in service of such a poorly plotted book. Schutt’s unremitting repetition of the same sad facts strips the story of its poignancy and dignity. After a certain amount of hearing how Alice’s mother’s boyfriends are jerks, how her father died in a car accident, how her uncle is a grubbing ass, Florida simply loses its ability to depress us. Even the acute pain of a dentist’s drill will become dull if it is prolonged indefinitely, and Florida, considerably more passive than a drill, forces readers to concoct their own entertainment. One begins to imagine what a book Florida would be if Alice had any personal agency, if she ever did anything for herself, or even if we knew more about the Alice who doesn’t exist only in relation to the adults in her life. One begins to think what a fine book Ms. Schutt, with her clear aptitude for writing, could have made if only her focus had not been so singular, so severe.

    On page 113, placed in italics at the beginning of the book’s fourth and last section, are words we are clearly not supposed to miss: “Plot abandoned in favor of insight.” In Florida, Schutt only garners the first half of the equation, “plot abandoned.” The insight is not forthcoming. In theory, I have no qualms with Schutt’s desire to abandon plot; certainly there have been many, many anti-narrative books that have held a reader’s attention with as much force as the most suspenseful of novels. The works of Gilbert Sorrentino come to mind, as does Gravity’s Rainbow, Underworld, and many of Borges’s stories.

    The thing, however, is that these works justified their lack of plots with gripping insights and incredible details. Generally, a reader’s attention is held through dramatic suspense, but many works that have jettisoned a narrative focus have provided, in exchange, such original thoughts, details, and insights that the plot was hardly missed. These fictions are such a feast of delights, or the ideas at work are so well elaborated, that it is okay that there is no drama. Unfortunately, what Schutt has chosen to present of Alice’s life is far too familiar to work in this way—it is neither interesting insight nor original detail. The best I can say is that it is well-written and that, for a while, the language keeps the mind occupied.

    Accumulations of Detail

    By Daniel Green

    If the primary substantative complaint (as opposed to simple whining on the part of publishers) about the 2004 National Book Award nominees was that "big" novels full of ideas and ambition, novels written in the literary version of Cinemascope, were ignored in favor of more modest, more exquisitely crafted fictions, Christine Schutt's Florida must certainly have been exhibit one. It is the very antithesis of the engaged social novel, the grand narrative, the "compelling read" straining to be a blockbuster.

    And I rather like it.

    Florida is a thin wisp of a book, without question, and its pleasures are to be gathered gradually, through a quiet accumulation of detail and episode, recalled moments from the narrator's past that are revealed in a kind of associative memory chain that makes up in continually freshened insight –prompting the reader to remain receptive to such revisions–what it might lack in narrative momentum. Although the novel has a story to tell, the narrator's compressed account of a life spent dealing with, first, the death of her father, and, subsequently, the mental instability of her mother, both of which necessitate that she be raised by an aunt and uncle, that her childhood memories be of a child trying to understand what has happened to her childhood, this story can't be separated from the method of telling it.

    In recording the events of her materially comfortable but emotionally restless life, the narrator, Alice Fivey, seems clearly enough attempting to make it settle down for herself, to give it the kind of stability a precise and evocative language can give it and that can provide her with a perspective by which to really perceive it whole. The result is less a novel structured through narrative revelations that lead both protagonist and reader to some final moment of recognition or understanding than a prose portrait the last flourishes of which merely complete the realized work. This requires a certain degree of detachment, even neutrality, toward her own life story on the narrator's part, and indeed Alive Fivey seems to regard her past with a certain dispassion, although this does not mean there is no feeling in her account, no human connections to be made between Alice's lyrically fragmented story and attentive readers. Indeed, Alice provides affecting accounts of both aunt and uncle, who seem hardly more certain how to form a family than Alice herself, of her grandmother, Nonna, unfortunately unable to communicate with her granddaughter, and of the family chauffeur/handyman, Arthur, to whom Alice arguably feels a closer bond than to any member of her actual family.

    For this reader, it is the very effort to find the words that will evoke her past and clarify her present problems–she has not altogether avoided some of her mother's self-destructive habits–that makes Alice Fivey's story emotionally engaging. It's an effort that avoids sentimentality and easy pathos, even though Alice is depicting a set of lives that do turn out sadly enough, that fail to bring much happiness or accomplishment despite their promise and material advantages. At the end of the very first chapter, Alice writes:

    . . .We all smiled a lot at the breakfast table. We ate sectioned fruit capped with bleedy maraschinos–my favorite! The squeezed juice of the grapefruit was grainy with sugar and pulpy, sweet, pink. "Could I have more?" I asked, and my father said sure. In Florida, he said it was good health all the time. No winter coats in Florida, no boots, no chains, no salt, no plows and shovels. In the balmy state of Florida, fruit fell in the meanest yard. Sweets, nuts, saltwater taffies in seashell colors. In the Florida we were headed for the afternoon was swizzled drinks and cherries to eat, stems and all! "Here's to you, here's to me, here's to our new home. One winter afternoon in out favorite restaurant, there was Florida in our future while I was licking at the foam on the fluted glass, biting the rind and licking sugar, waiting for what was promised: the maraschino cherry, ever-sweet, every time.

    Of course, no one in the family ever does reach this Florida (the mother does find her way to a sanitarium that will be "her Florida"), although Aunt Frances and Uncle Billy eventually do settle in Tucson, a desert location that seems more symbolically appropriate to the familial desolation Alice experiences than the fertility of Florida.

    Still, whatever empathy one has for Alice Fivey and her family, however much one finds Alice's narrative compelling, depends finally on the quality and sharpness of Schutt's prose. And her writing has plenty of both.

    Old dead hands prayered, a draped arrangement of draping skin, a fleshy hem colored to look alive by the gentle mortician. Nonna was in the casket, and I was at her side, yet "the glazing eyes shunned my gaze," or that was what I was remembering about her as we drove to her internment.

    Arthur had driven us–Uncle Billy, Aunt Frances, me–through a gardener's rain that gullied the tent as we stood at the site, Nonna's gravesite, brighter greens, June, plate-sized peonies beaten in the downpour, the coffin shiny.

    Who can forget? some said. Description of the too long-alive, now dead. The homily went on and on, and Arthur had to wait.

    Who would have guessed there was so much left to say?

    At the novel's conclusion, Alice is visiting her mother at a nursing home, where, prematurely aged, she has had to be confined:

    The wind is an assault and the sound of water bewilders her, and I wonder: What does she think? Does she think?

    "I have to go home now, Mother." Good-byes, those little deaths, rasp my throat, but I am not sure she has heard what I have said. I am not sure she understands what we are looking at: so much water and the line that is the other side. Mother is in the sun; she is in her Florida. Squinting in that tin box of refracted light, she has to frown to see, and what does it mean what she sees? The world is a comfort and then it is a discomfort. Mother is all thin hair and vacancy, tears and starts, a small clutch of bones, an old woman, grown innocent.

    Who will forgive me if I do not come again?

    "Alice," she speaks, and she looks at me, and it has been a long time since Mother has used my name, which is also her name, as a good-bye, and I think she knows, as once she knew, what will happen to us. "Alice," she repeats. It may be no other words will follow or it may be a downpour of speech.

    Such writing, like the novel as a whole, doesn't call attention to itself, but it is both honest and incisive. Florida is not a novel full of conspicuous ambition and tricked-up effects, which is perhaps why it was dismissed as an NBA nominee for being "slight." It is instead a modest but serious work of fiction that highlights what is perhaps the most important feature of serious literary art in the first place: good writing.

  • TEV vs. TRE

    I'm very happy to say that Mark Sarvas (TEV) has agreed to join me in reviewing Lily Tuck's National Book Award-winning novel, The News from Paraguay. This is the first of a series of reviews of all the NBA-nominated books that will appear on this site over the next weeks. Perhaps this endeavor will add some perspective and some insight on the books that otherwise are perhaps mostly known as the source of a controversy that arose over the NBA nominating process.

    The News from Paraguay

    By Mark Sarvas

    1.

    More than half of Paraguay's population was wiped out in the War of the Triple Alliance. During the six years of the ill-advised conflict (1864-1870), in which the dictator Francisco Solano Lopez invaded neighboring Brazil (which subsequently brought Argentina and Uruguay down on his head), the country's numbers fell from 525,000 to 221,000.

    The impulse for this catastrophic military adventure is traced by some to his 1853 trip to Europe, during which time he was deeply impressed by two things in particular: the imperial grandeur of the French Empire, and a beautiful Irishwoman named Ella Lynch.

    From these under-traveled historical backwaters, Lily Tuck delivers The News from Paraguay, winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Fiction. Any consideration of this novel after the fact must address this controversial distinction that engendered a number of pitched battles of its own. But more on that shortly. First, the book on its own terms.

    Tuck propels the story fast and furiously from the first chapter, in which we learn at the outset:

    At age ten, Eliza Alicia Lynch had left Ireland; at fifteen, Elisa Alice Lynch married a French army officer; at nineteen, divorced and living with a handsome but impecunious Russian count, Ella Lynch needed to reinvent herself.

    Despite a nice of bit of business with the evolving names of Ella Lynch, we feel at the outset like we're in something that's dismaying like a literary treatment of a Harlequin romance. And despite Tuck's fine, restrained prose style, that sensation never fully departs as Ella progresses from her poverty in Paris, to mistress of the heir apparent, to mother of the children of the president (bastard children though they may be), to her final poverty back in Paris. It's the familiar arc of many a bodice-ripper, in which the plucky, self-assured, stylish heroine faces the dangers of the wild. It all reaches an unintentionally hilarious apotheosis in which Ella, protecting her children from rebels, wields sword and dispatches a blackguard.

    Ella looked up and saw two Brazilian infantrymen with bayonets running toward them through the woods. From where he was sitting on his horse, Colonel von Wisner fired at one; in his haste, Colonel von Wisner fired too close to his horse's head and the horse reared and bolted. Left alone, Ella picked up Lazaro's sword, which lay next to him on the ground, and standing up, she faced the other infantryman. The man was black, a slave probably, and startled to see a woman, he did not fire right away. Ella saw him frown then open his mouth to say something but he was too late. Before the man could shut his mouth or move to defend himself, Ella pursued her next advantage, that of a left-handed fencer, and lunged forward with the sword. She cut him in the neck.

    The narrative beats that comprise The News From Paraguay more or less conform to the romantic archetype. Beautiful woman down on her luck catches the eye of powerful man. Abandoning the comforts of the known, an arduous journey is undertaken. Headstrong heroine arrives intact in foreign land, is established in comfort by her lover, provides offspring. Withstands the slings and arrows of jealous backbiters and schemers, pines for home, is susceptible to the advances of lovers. Enemies begin to coalesce and collaborate. The center cannot hold, things begin to fall apart and inner reserves of pluck are summoned. In the end, tragedy envelopes all. There's even a pair of fat, evil sisters. Can a glass slipper be far behind?

    This summary is, perhaps, a bit glib. It's clear that Tuck has stumbled onto an episode of history whose players and events have captured her imagination. And amid these machinations, we're treated to remarkably detailed and vivid glimpses of Paraguayan life. Although it's a short book, Tuck introduces many characters, travels over a wide and diverse landscape, and is a trustworthy and diligent tour guide. She manages to render the supporting players vividly and memorably, and they subsequently linger in memory. But Tuck herself concedes a central difficulty in her Afterword: " … the need to explain and the need to dramatize are often at odds." And in the end, The News from Paraguay feels more like a history lesson than a novel.

    This may be partially attributable to Tuck's choice to use a coolly omniscient third person voice. Although there is a taut, spare elegance to her prose, an absence of flourish, this leanness creates a distancing effect that extends to her treatment of her central characters who remain frustratingly opaque. One is unsure what to make of Ella, who fiddles as Rome burns. Neither her letters to a friend in Paris detailing her newfound life nor her journal entries–the news from Paraguay–mention the brutalities of the Lopez regime. As the population is being slaughtered, Ella's thoughts are primarily for her beloved horse Mathilde. In the end, Ella seems irretrievably vain, shallow and selfish. Clearly, Tuck has chosen to lay these events before us at from a distance and allow us our own conclusion. But as the self-destruction of the Lopez administration reaches its climax, the depiction of unrelenting cruelty, violence and paranoia, though no doubt accurate, becomes tedious and numbing, particularly with no real sense of Ella's reaction to the madness that surrounds her.

    Tuck can also be surprisingly heavy-handed at moments. When the arrival of a new opera is mentioned, it is none other that La Forza del Destino–historically accurate, no doubt, but decidedly portentous. Elsewhere, during a fencing lesson, Ella is taught the technique of fléching, "a very difficult position because the fencer cannot protect himself and he cannot stop halfway. It's a total commitment to attack." It's one of several oddly on the nose moments for so skilled a writer. Similarly, motifs and symbols are dutifully deployed throughout in what begin to feel like a workshop exercise – pairs, particularly brothers and sisters, dot The News from Paraguay, as do miscarriages and cigars. The color blue is frequently deployed to tie together the elements of this canvas. (Although Ella's eyes are gray, they are mistaken for blue.) And then there are the parrots.

    Ella and Lopez first meet when a (blue) parrot feather falls from Ella's hat, and parrots figure prominently throughout. Lopez advises his son (too late) that it's "Bad luck to kill a parrot," and the sickening of the birds in an aviary suggests the imminent disintegration and collapse of the country. And perhaps Ella – with her superficial dispatches to Paris – is the ultimate of parrots, as she increasingly adopts Lopez' positions in her letters home. In the end, la forza del destino is unavoidable and parrots die, Mathilde the horse dies, loved ones die and, of course, hundreds of thousands of Paraguayans die, the result of Lopez' ill-fated fléching.

    The final toll is tragically high but The News from Paraguay only occasionally rises above the ploddingly solid – an earnest if minor work.

    2.

    It's a mistake to assume one can know what informed the deliberations of the National Book Award folks. Still, one cannot fully consider this book without looking at it in light of its selection. Is The News from Paraguay the best that contemporary fiction has to offer? Surely not. (Despite 2004's having been, by common consent, a weak year for American fiction, even my own admittedly spotty reading would put The Confessions of Max Tivoli and The Plot Against America above it.) It may be a solid, respectable if somewhat staid effort, but one presumes the NBA is not an award for good intentions or near misses. Since one must take at face value Moody's assertions that no deeper agenda was at work, perhaps the more interesting questions are does the NBA undermine its own credibility with such choices? And does it really matter to a book? The questions are separate but intertwined.

    If I may be permitted leave by my host to touch on an area that I know is a hot-button for him, the clearest measure of whether the NBA matters can be examined by its impact on book sales. An admittedly unscientific measure is to examine Amazon's rankings. The day prior to the National Book Award announcement, The News from Paraguay sat at 3,462. The award shot it up to 44, and it stayed in double digits for – precisely two days. It spent a month in the triple digits before settling back to 2,583, where it sits today. Compare that to Cynthia Ozick's Heir to the Glimmering World–- not nominated for anything –which is ranked at 3,297. Furthermore, last year's winner, Shirley Hazzard's The Great Fire is nearby at 4,029 and Three Junes, Julia Glass' 2003 winner, is ranked 2,525 – a few points above this year's winner. (Only The Great Fire made it onto any bestseller list, and even that one was from the notably independent BookSense.)

    What does this brief and imprecise examination suggest? Well for one thing, if Rick Moody's unstated mission was to elevate hitherto unacknowledged fiction, he appears to have flunked – the sales of The News from Paraguay are more or less indistinguishable from winners from prior years as well as from writers not even nominated. But perhaps the larger conclusion to be drawn is that the NBA doesn't particularly matter, at least from the vantage point of sales. It might succeed at pointing out a title to an audience already predisposed to following literary fiction but, unlike the Oscars, whose Best Picture award generally translates into significant box office impact, the NBA would appear to be relatively toothless. And if it fails to move books, what's the point?

    Well, clearly, the point is to acknowledge the best that this country has to offer. And that seems, at least to me, like a worthwhile goal in and of itself, but on that score the NBA, at least recently, appears to have an uneven record at best. The 90s saw titles like Sabbath's Theatre and The Shipping News share space with the likes of Cold Mountain. And for all its ambition, The Corrections was a disappointing mess that probably claimed the award on momentum.

    Which brings us back to The News from Paraguay. Setting aside for the time being post-modern notions of "best" or "better" (no doubt legions of MFAs are spitting out their Ticonderoga No. 2s in apoplexy), it seems reasonably clear that it isn't the best American book of the year, not by quite a bit. Can an award survive and stay relevant with such oddly hermetic tastes? Time will tell. The NBA isn't going anywhere, at least not soon. But it appears headed toward mattering less and less.

    Old News

    By Daniel Green

    I've never been sure what the purpose of historical fiction is supposed to be. Merely to re-create the past? Why? It is, of course, interesting enough to discover what "things were like" in the past, but what does reading a novel about the past–deliberately presented as "about" the past–do for us that just reading well-researched history can't provide? A fuller sense of character? The pleasures of narrative? So much so-called popular history is written as if the unfolding narrative and its cast of characters was indeed a novel that it's hard to see how a narrative about history that calls itself "fiction" really differs much from nonfiction history, except that the author considers him/herself more at liberty to alter minor details to suit dramatic convenience.

    Some historical novels try to burrow beneath the received wisdom about history, or to illuminate some of its blurrier quarters, and while this is a praiseworthy endeavor, it's still hard to see how such an effort ought to be considered "literary" rather than a useful adjunct to history-writing. If the idea is still to re-create the past so we might consider it as the past, I'm still not clear how such work really advances the cause of fiction-writing.

    Other ostensibly historical fiction, such as Robert Coover's The Public Burning or Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, aren't really concerned with reproducing history but rather with interrogating it, forcing it to testify, as it were, to the veracity of accepted representations of it, to the hidden truths behind these representations that have been hidden so well their revelation seems as surprising as any unexpected plot twist in a skillfully told tale. For these writers, "history" becomes just more material for the novelist's imagination to transform, at times simply offering itself up as the inspiration to the novelist's own powers of invention. (Other novels that belong to this category: DeLillo's Underworld, Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor, T.C. Boyle's Worlds End, Pynchon's later Mason and Dixon.) Such writers approach history not as the ersatz historian hoping to recount the past but as literary artists for whom the past can be turned to use for present purposes. Is this the best approach for the novelist (or reader) interested in events from the past as subjects for fiction?

    Lilly Tuck's The News from Paraquay again raises all of these issues for me as a reader of fiction, but unfortunately it doesn't much clarify them, except to suggest that the Coover/Pynchon approach finally does seem the more interesting. I don't think it's a bad book, but neither can I see why it really needed to be written in the first place. My awareness of Paraquay and it history is increased slightly (although, sadly, it would seem its past isn't substantially different than its present, both entirely representative of Latin America's troubled political history), but I probably could have learned as much, probably more, from reading a straightforward historical account of mid-19th century Paraguay. Moreover, the Paraguayan dictator depicted in the novel seems as predictably brutal and self-obsessed (with a dollop of superficial charm) as any other dictator, coming across as little more than a stereotype, and his mistress, on whom the novel ostensibly focuses, isn't really made to seem any more distinctive as a literary character. She's mostly quite unsympathetic in her indifference to what's going on around her, and it's difficult to tell whether this is the response from the reader Tuck was attempting to invoke, or whether Ella Lynch is meant to be some sort of proto-feminist in her assertions of self and her ability to survive. I have to confess that finally I myself didn't really have a strong reaction to her one way or the other, largely because I couldn't engage with her as anything other than a "historical figure" being put through her paces in a novel of mere historical re-creation. She remains rather ghostly.

    The novel's episodic structure works reasonably well, and some of the individual episodes are affecting enough. Those scenes toward the end of the book depicting the ghastly consequences of the dictator Francisco Lopez's insane decision to go to war with Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina are particularly well-rendered. In general, the novel's account of the living conditions of 19th century Paraquay–the oppressive heat, the diseases, the primitive tools available for enduring such conditions–seems authoritative, and is in some ways the feature of this novel that one remembers most after reading it. But, again, this is the sort of thing one could discover by reading actual histories of the country and the period, and I, for one, don't really very often look to novels as an alternative way of gaining such information.

    The writing in The News from Paraguay is never less than capable, at times rising to a kind of restrained lyricism that nevertheless avoids any obviously "poetic" language. Most often it gives the impression of aspiring to an accuracy of detail that would give the story being told the requisite degree of plausibility, as in the descriptions of Ella's ocean-crossing from Paris to Paraguay:

    The sea was black, the waves, large arching ones, were veined and capped with foam. The booms swinging, the spars cracking, the ship bucked its way through the heavy sea: first landing heavily in a trough, as if to rest for a moment, before another wave broke over its bow, sending water rushing and swirling on the deck and forcing the passengers down below; then pitching up again.

    On the one hand, such a style seems perfectly appropriate for a novel that seeks to capture the feel of life as it's lived for characters otherwise relegated to the past, to the superficial features of their already completed "life story." Certainly a historical novel of this kind needs first of all to seem credible. But finally that's really all this novel manages to be. I kept waiting for Tuck to draw on the novelist's most precious resources–stye, imagination–and transform the story of Ella Lynch and Franco Lopez into something more surprising or strange (beyond the "exotic" setting), frankly into something more interesting as a purely literary creation. But she never really does.

    I do like the way in which the novel is fragmented into often brief accounts of relatively self-contained moments and sometimes veers off to give us glimpses of the lives of characters other than Ella and Franco. In particular, the stories of the women surrounding and waiting on Ella can be quietly moving, perhaps even more so than Ella's own story. (Although in the end this is probably a liability; is Ella meant to be such a cipher that all of the color is drawn off onto the other characters?) Among the fragments are passages from Ella's letters and diary, which do their part in forward the plot, but again even hearing about these events in Ella's own voice doesn't ultimately accomplish much toward making her a compelling character.

    Fans of historical fiction, fiction that slices off a piece of the past and presents it to us as "drama," that converts figures from the past into reasonably convincing characters that seem to approximate what these figures might have been like, would probably enjoy The News From Paraguay well enough. If you really want to know what a place like Paraguay might have been like 150 years ago, this novel might be worth your time. However, had it not won the National Book Award, and had I not set myself the task of reviewing it for that reason, I probably would have stopped reading it after the first 50 pages or so. It seems to me a competent, but finally rather perfunctory novel that neither illuminates the past in any particularly discerning way nor reimagines history so that its bearing on the present becomes any more urgently apparent.

  • Blood from a Stone

    In a review of Jay Parini's biography of William Faulkner, J. Peder Zane writes:

    We hope that biographies such as Jay Parini's "One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner" will illuminate such episodes. Where did Faulkner get the fortitude to continue chasing what the world and experience saw as only windmills? How to explain the grand artistic leap that produced "The Sound and the Fury"? Perhaps if we know how he did it, we might be able to accomplish the same!

    Surely this can't be the reason why otherwise intelligent people would want to read a biography of a writer, particularly one about a writer so disinctive in his accomplishments as Faulkner. Perhaps the idea is that the reader might learn not how to write like Faulkner, but how he summoned up the "fortitude" to continue writing in the face of all evidence that it wasn't getting him anywhere. One could imagine some readers who might be curious about such a thing, but if they have to see the reality of a writer dedicated enough to his talent and his vision to keep at it despite what the world seems to think of him corrorborated in a biography, those readers aren't likely to be the type to "accomplish the same" to begin with.

    Why should we want to read biographies, perhaps multiple biographies, of writers whose primary claim on our attention is that they were writers, presumably producing work good enough that we continue to read it? I can't think of any viable reasons why we should. The facts of writing itself, the wheres and hows and how oftens, aren't that interesting, and it is these facts that define the writer's "life" insofar as we ought to have any interest in most writers' lives at all. We should settle for the primary fact that a particular writer found the time and the appropriate circumstances in which to write. Everything else is gossip, at best a record of the sorts of things a writer did when he wasn't writing, which again ought not to be of much concern to us since what separates a writer from everyone else, aside from those facts of writing already mentioned, is the work left behind.

    What do biographies usually tell us about that work? In my experience, very little. Perhaps there are some truly great biographical works–Ellman's on Joyce, Edel's on James–that provide insight into their subject's work, that provide us with a way of approaching the work we can't get elsewhere, but unfortunately such books are few and far between. I'm sure Parini's book is perfectly competent, will give its readers a satisfactory enough sense of what Faulkner's life was like. Since Parini is himself both a novelist and a critic, it's quite possible what he has to say about Faulkner's books is interesting as well. But if I want some additional commentary about the books, I'd rather turn to a critical book Parini might want to write about Faulkner's work rather than a biography, which almost inevitably gets caught up in discussions about where ideas came from, upon whom certain characters are based, what episodes in the writer's life were transformed into fiction. I'm more interested in the ideas themselves, in experiencing the characters in their artistically embodied forms. I'm more interested in the fiction.

    Zane concludes his review by declaring:

    Many questions surrounding Faulkner's life are even harder to answer. Parini does not adequately explain the source of Faulkner's signature achievement: Yoknapatawpha County. Parini focuses on that "matchless time" from the late 1920s to the early 1940s when Faulkner produced at least a half dozen masterpieces, but can't begin to explain why his writing fell off thereafter. And the biographer doesn't explore the suicidal tendencies that fueled his drinking and later his horsemanship (which almost killed him on several occasions).

    But then, you can't get blood from a stone. Parini's biography is about as good as it will get, which suggests the need for a different approach. Faulkner requires the kind of attention that has been lavished on another enigmatic William, Shakespeare — a speculative biography modeled after Stephen Greenblatt's brilliant "Will in the World" or a novel such as Richard Nye's masterful "The Late Mr. Shakespeare." Only by discarding convention can we hope to one day know this unconventional man.

    I suppose readers interested in such voyeuristic subjects as Faulkner's drinking or his "horsemanship" might be disappointed in Parini's handling of them, but I can't imagine that anyone interested in Faulkner's fiction rather than his flaws as a human being would care even a microbit about these things. And why Faulkner's "writing fell off" after the early 40s–although I would argue it merely became more uneven–is less important than the fact that it did. The "why" question can even be answered more immediately by looking at the writing itself: Faulkner wrote less well, the concrete explanations for which can be discerned by examining the work itself carerfully.

    What would it mean to "explain the source of Faulkner's signature achievement: Yoknapatawpha County." Explain what? Why it is his "signature achievement"? Read the books and find out. Where an analogy to such and such a location or dwelling or geographical feature depicted in the novels might be found in or around Oxford, Mississippi? Who cares? How Faulkner brooded on the history and social realities of Oxford and its environs and was able to transform it all into compelling fiction that also managed to capture something essential about the American south? This is indeed an interesting question, well worth a book, but unfortunately a biography is not the sort of book that is going to be able to answer it very effectively.

    As to a "speculative biography" along the lines of Greenblatt's book on Shakespeare: Why on earth would we need such a thing? Greenblatt has written a "biography" meant to compensate for the lack of known facts about Shakespeare. We know the facts about Faulkner. No "unconventional" reshuffling of these facts is going to shed any more light on Faulkner's work. (If we knew the facts about Shakespeare, no such biography of him would accomplish much, either.) I don't know if it's true or not that "Only by discarding convention can we hope to one day know this unconventional man." I still can't figure out why anyone wants to know the "unconventional man" in this way in the first place. Read the books, dammit.

  • In Defense of It’s a Wonderful Life

    Gerard Baker calls It's a Wonderful Life "Frank Capra’s hymn to sentimentalism." Nonsense. Sentimentality is created through an excess of sentiment or feeling–in excess of what is warranted by the situation from which it arises–and It's a Wonderful Life is not excessive in any respect. It's a skillfully made film in which the strong feelings the film does evoke–but not until the very last moment–are manifestly appropriate and entirely well-earned. It is not only among Capra's least sentimental films–both Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (also great movies, nevertheless) come closer to sentimentality–but it is among the least blatantly sentimental of any of the classic Hollywood films, few of which really avoid sentimentality altogether or for very long.

    I have always found it rather puzzling that It's a Wonderful Life became a Christmas-time perennial in the first place. What it has to say is actually quite un-American: wealth corrupts, the powerful are out to get you, ambition is overrated, the "American Dream" itself only leads to nihilism and despair if pursued to its logical conclusions. Some say that the character of Mr. Potter is overdrawn, a caricature of the rapacious businessman (compensating for his own deficiencies), but I don't think so at all. He's monomaniacal, indifferent to the consequences of his actions for other people, dedicated to the proposition that owning everything and operating it all according to his own notions of efficiency and bottom-line results are what life is all about. In other words, he's everything the modern CEO has proven himself to be.

    Sam Wainwright, the film's "entrepreneurial" character, comes off no better. He's every bit the braying jackass his constant "hee-haws" suggest he is. Something like Sam's life, escaping Bedford Falls, "doing things," making his mark on the world through his acquired skills, is what George Bailey dreams for himself, but of course the film shows that these are not things worth aspiring to. They only separate you from life as it's really lived, blind you to your own real talents, to your own humanity, and the film finally suggests that George is well rid of them. How many Yale undergrads are going to benefit from this advice?

    It's a Wonderful Life is one of the few Hollywood films, maybe the only one, to show its protagonist going through an authentic existential crisis. He's forced not just to think about what his own life has been about, but he confronts the prospect of annihilation itself, literally looks into the void of his own nonexistence. The extreme close-up of Jimmy Stewart's terrified face, looking in utter despair from side to side after his own mother has denied him, as if he's looking for some other universe to inhabit than the nightmarish one in which he's currently trapped, is, to me, one of the most frightening and truly emotion-provoking images I think I've ever seen. This is hell indeed.

    George Bailey is authentically plunged, through circumstances not of his own making, into an episode of despair so profound he seriously considers suicide but after pondering the implications and the possible consequences of his act (and finally this is what the encounter with his guardian angel and the subsequent nightmare vision of Bedford Falls, though rendered symbolically as narrative, really comes down to) decides to try living again. This is sentimentality? How many of us can really say that?

    It has become more fashionable to deride Frank Capra for his sentimentality, even his hypocrisy, since the publication of Joseph McBride's Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success. This is a dreadfully-written, -researched, and -argued book that makes much of the fact that Capra came from a bourgeoise background and was a registered Republican. It becomes the main prop for the book's argument about Capra, that he and his films were not what they seemed, were instead simply opportunistic excuse for Capra to become famous while making movies whose "progressive" themes he didn't really believe in. This is again all nonsense. Nobody who bothers to examine Capra's body of work could say the best of his films are anything but superbly made comedies of American life that could not have the impact they do if Capra hadn't believed strenuously in his own artistic integrity. Ignore anyone who comes speaking of "Capra-corn."

    I first saw It's a Wonderful Life when I was helping to teach a large undergraduate film class at a Midwestern university in the early-to-mid 1980s. We sometimes forget that this film has been a "classic" Christmas movie only for the last 15 years or so. Before that it was almost forgotten. I think it was forgotten because it is indeed a disturbing film that seemed both at odds with its Christmas setting and not really consistent with our notions of what Hollywood studio films are like. I can't really say why it was embraced in the superficial and ill-informed way characterized by Baker's remarks, but I do recall that when I watched it for the first time I was overwhelmed by it. It may have been the first movie I had ever seen that did truly earn its happy ending. I also recall that the students in the class seemed genuinely moved by it. Unfortunately, while some people may still claim to be moved by it, most likely it is no longer possible for their response to be genuine.

  • Lost in the Funhouse

    Ray Davis (Pseudopodium) suggests that, while such books as Nabokov's Pale Fire and Cortazar's Hopscotch can be appropriately labeled "experimental" fictions, the fiction of John Barth is instead only a "generic" member of a category that has come to be identified as "experimental fiction." Barth's work, presumably, simply makes a number of familiar moves that have been accepted as "experimental" in this generic sense.

    I would agree that such a category exists, and that those writers who could be consigned to it do indeed mostly reprise certain recognizable techniques or repeat what have become by now fairly well-worn tropes. But I can't see how Barth belongs to this category. Many if not most of the techniques in question (techniques of self-reflexivity, self-reflexively applied) were actually introduced by Barth in the first place, and the idea that conventional fiction had become "exhausted" in its ability to keep serious fiction afloat–and that a new kind of fiction able to confront this fact head-on was needed–was Barth's idea.

    Certainly Barth had his own precursors. In "The Literature of Exhaustion," he cites Nabokov, Borges, and Beckett as the kind of technically adventurous writers whose company he would like to join, and, even further, praises Borges for his recogniton that no writer is truly original–such a writer would be unreadable, would make it so difficult for us to find our literary footing that the effort wouldn't finally be worth the trouble–but in effect is merely commenting on what's already been done. ("Pierre Menard," for example.) Thus Barth acknowledges that all literary writing is, in this broadest sense, generic writing. Moreover, Barth also confesses that he himself is a writer who "chooses to rebel along traditional lines," perhaps only inviting the charge that he's really not very innovative after all, merely imitative of his own favorite innovators–who themselves aren't really innovative, either, etc., etc.

    But I really don't see how anyone could read Barth's early work, from The Floating Opera to, say Chimera, and conclude that Barth is not engaged in a fairly earnest kind of literary experimentation. If any of these books seem deriviative at all, they would be the first two, The Floating Opera and End of the Road, which are not only fairly conventional narratives (with a few modernist flourishes) but also embody "existentialist" themes of a kind rather popular in the 1950s/early 1960s. On the other hand, The Sot-Weed Factor clearly shows Barth looking for inspiration elsewhere than modernism, specifically 18th century picaresque narratives. The picaresque had not been entirely abandoned, of course (The Grapes of Wrath), but I think Barth can genuinely be credited with refocusing attention on the picaresque specifically as an alternative to both modernist introspection and the well-crafted realistic story. This may not be sui generis experimentation, but it seems to me that in the context of the time it is undeniably a literary experiment.

    Giles Goat-Boy is an even more thoroughgoing effort to reconfigure the mid-century American novel, and to explore more fully the potential of "archetypes" (a la Borges) and of what Robert Scholes called "fabulation." . Although I myself find it less compelling than The Sot-Weed Factor (it's an example of the "art of excess" that's finally just too excessive), again I find it hard to believe that many readers could attempt this novel without finding it quite a singular work of fiction, at least within the context of postwar American literature. Forty years later it can try one's patience, but this is because Barth was trying to do too much, not because he was just working over a formula inherited from his literary forebearers.

    But it is Lost in the Funhouse in which Barth most purposefully engages in literary experiment. So singlemindedly does he do so, in fact, that readers who encounter this book now, shorn of the context in which it was both so controversial and so influential, might think it dated, a relic of an era in which experiment in fiction could be so noteworthy. (They would be mistaken to judge it so, however, as it is an example of the sort of fiction that, in Barth's own words, is still "au courant" but also "manage[s] nonetheless to speak eloquently and memorably to our human hearts and conditions, as the greatest artists have always done.") Here readers will find: a story in the form of a cutout Mobius strip; a story narrated by a spermatazoon on its journey of fertilization; a story in which the narrator (the author's recorded voice) pleads with the author himself (standing by) to put it out of its misery; a story narrating its own coming-into-being; a story about speaking in tongues in which each of six brief speeches is "metrically identical" to the Lord's Prayer; a story that takes the notion of story-within-story to its hilarious limits; and stories such as "Life-Story" and "Lost in the Funhouse" itself, perhaps the prototypical and most influential metafictions in postmodern American literature.

    Again, perhaps reading such stories after close to forty years of "experimental" fiction by other writers coming to terms with the implications for the future of fiction these very stories themselves brought into the open makes it easier to see how their innovations are to some extent coterminous with the practices of other forward-looking writers throughout literary history, might even by this point seem overused. But that in 1968 Lost in the Funhouse was unlike anything else being done by Barth's contemporaries (with perhaps the exception of his like-minded colleague Robert Coover) seems to me indisputable.

    Barth is perhaps legitmately vulnerable in his later work to the charge of repeating himself, of abandoning the kind of focused experimentation to be found in Lost in the Funhouse in favor of a more lighthearted self-reflexivity drawing on Barth's own life and probably more interested in depicting his native Chesapeake Bay region than in advancing the cause of innovative fiction. Books like Letters, The Tidewater Tales, and The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor have their pleasures (I find the latter to be a particularly affecting novel), but certainly Barth's reputation as an important American writer could not really rest on them, however much they add to a critical consideration of Barth's work as a whole. And I do believe Barth will ultimately be judged an important postwar writer, largely because of the accomplishment of a book like Lost in the Funhouse, which, however much it absorbs the influence of writers such as Borges and Nabokov, also transforms that influence into a frequently outrageous kind of comic fiction that discloses the many ways in which storyelling can trip over its own narrative feet, but in the process demonstrates that fiction still has plenty of innate if unexploited resources from which it might continue to draw.

  • Ultimately Pointless

    The biggest problem with Julian Evans's "The Return of Story" in the December Prospect is that its central contention, on which the burden of his anti-aesthetic argument is placed, is simply wrong. "In the cinema" Evans writes, "a core of narrative innocence survives across a spectrum of values represented by Spielberg at one end and Abbas Kiarostami at the other. In the novel, however, story has gone down in a blaze of modernist attitudes. . ." Clearly Evans doesn't really read very many of the scores of novels published every year in both Great Britain and the United State. If he did, he would certainly discover that almost all of them–perhaps not exactly 100% of them, but pretty close to that–do indeed tell stories, and almost as many (90%? 95?) tell very traditional stories of a sort Evans's most conventional "storyteller" from the past would immediately recognize and heartily endorse.

    (Evans is notably reluctant to name names in his indictment against contemporary novelists for abandoning narrative, but he does cite Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie. Come again? Amis doesn't tell stories? How did I miss that? And Rushdie? Midnight's Children? Perhaps one could call this novel "magical realism," but since when has magical realism done anything but tell stories? One Hundred Years of Solitude? If Evans has indeed read these books but still would claim they don't tell stories, he's a pathetically poor reader.)

    But Evans gives the game away when he praises Fitzgerald's "The Rich Boy" because it "consists of a linear narrative managed by a modern consciousness." It's not that modern/postmodern novels jettison narrative altogether, it's that they don't stick to linear narrative. One might have thought that the history of fiction in the 20th century had at least demonstrated that stories don't need to be "linear" to be stories or to engage a reader's attention, but apparently not. Apparently most of this fiction is to be dismissed as so many "literary bleeps and squeaks," although Evans is assuredly mistaken if he really thinks fiction will be returning to the practices of the past in some ingenuously earnest kind of way ("down with self-consciousness!") or that the fiction characterized by "modernist attitudes" will just disappear. It prompts one to ask: If Evans really dislikes what fiction has become, why does he bother with it all, even to deplore it? He's stuck with it, so perhaps he should just console himself with the "narrative innocence" of movies. (Except that we all know that "the cinema" at its best lost its narrative innocence a long time ago as well.)

    (The bit about "modern consciousness" takes us into James Wood territory, and I have made a resolution to not go back there again, at least for a while.)

    What Evans really dislikes is art itself, at least as far as it has dared to sully the innocence of fiction: "The histories of the novel and of storytelling ran together until the early 20th century; since the 1920s, that history has been one of formal drift, away from the novel as a social form that described how characters live in relation to others. . ." It's telling that, for Evans, any deviation at all from the tradition of "storytelling" must be "drift," almost literally, given the language here, some kind of ethical betrayal. To be a muddle-headed aesthete, even to be interested in the aesthetic qualities of literature at all, has long been anathema to a certain kind of critic, grounds for accusing writers of being morally deficient, but why, for example, would it probably not occur to these critics to declare, say, composers too interested in art, too attentive to the needs of form over those of morality? Even the most conventionally tonal music is by its very nature about form, about the relationships between sounds and the interaction of purely musical qualities. Is fiction not allowed to explore the possibilities of the linguistic medium in something like the way music explores the possibilities of the aural medium? Why when a fiction writer does this is he/she more likely to be considered some kind of malefactor?

    Furthermore, Evans is again simply wrong in his assertion that "The histories of the novel and of stroytelling ran together until the early 20th century." This is a common, but mistaken, belief about the development of fiction even in the 19th century. Evans cites Henry James as one of his storytelling heroes, but who would say that James's real preoccupation was telling stories? That he wasn't more interested in the "how" of storytelling–point of view, style"–than in the "what"–events, narrative progression, the details of "what happens"? For some reason it is assumed that the great figures of literary realism were also tale-spinners, but who can read Chekhov and say this? His stories are about character, situation, revelatory moments. As far as narrative is concerned, in most of them almost nothing happens. The fact is, the more fiction "drifted" toward realism, the less it focused on story at all–"story" was an artificial construction that was not faithful to the way real people actually experienced their lives.

    But for Evans, fiction is not about individuals at all, which is presumably also an ethical breach: "Novelists may want to write narrowly or widely; but the novel remains a social form, and our fiction should communicate that whatever identity we may have is composed not merely of ourselves but of others. The novel, in its fully realised state, exists to reflect on those links between us – on their making and breaking. How can it do that other than through stories?" Evan's assumption couldn't be clearer: novels are not about art, they're sociology. Moreover, they're a particularly smarmy form of sociology, in which we are lectured to about our duties to others. They're a handy form of indoctrination and propaganda. Stories just keep it simple. And Evans's superior insights are apparently not restricted to moral issues: He also knows what novels are really for, has somehow acquired a knowledge of what they would appropriately be like in their "fully realized state." It's always nice when a critic is able to share his god-like wisdom and set poor novelists straight about what they ought to do.

    According to Evans, one of the judges of the most recent Man Booker prize has finally learned her lesson. "Reading 132 books in 147 days," she is quoted as saying, "you learn a great deal about why so many novels – even well-written, carefully crafted novels, as so many of those submitted were – are ultimately pointless." And thus we arrive at what always turns out to be the crux of the matter for people with the attitude toward fiction exemplified by someone like Julian Evans: novels must have "a point," they can just be "well-written" and "carefully crafted." For Evans, the point must be "social," but for others it need not be socially redeeming per se. It just needs to be something more than "mere" art–indeed, more than "merely literary." This attitude, while ostensibly looking out for the welfare of literature, actually couldn't be more dismissive. Who needs literature, anyway, when you can just go around making points?

    Myself, I love pointless novels. They can even tell stories, but when they start to "communicate" to me about our shared identities, I stop turning the pages.

  • SF/Fantasy

    What follows is the third in a series of "dueling reviews" to appear on this site–although readers may conclude that in this case, as in the previous reviews of Gilbert Sorrentino's The Moon in Its Flight, there's not that much dueling going on. Nevertheless, Matt Cheney (The Mumpsimus) and I have teamed up to review a recent science fiction/fantasy anthology entitled Polyphony 4, published by Wheatland Press. Since much of what I discuss in this weblog would generally be described as "literary fiction," I wanted to extend my horizons to a consideration of genre fiction as well. And I would like to do more. (Hint to any bloggers or writers who might want to join up with me in a future such set of paired reviews.)

    FROM POLYPHONY 4 TO POLYPHONY 4.1: A BETA-TEST IN THE SLIPSTREAM MAKES THE MEDIOCRITY GO DOWN

    By Matthew Cheney

    Within the cosy ghetto of serious science fiction and fantasy readers, the term "slipstream" is sometimes used as a label for stories that linger in the liminal borderlands between die-hard genre definitions. The fourth volume in the Polyphony anthology series, edited by Deborah Layne and Jay Lake, offers just over 400 pages of such stories, but only a quarter of those pages are of a particularly high quality, causing me, at least, to feel that reading the book was more akin to slipping into a swamp than a stream.

    I have positive things to say about the good writing in the book, but first I need let some negative waves crash to shore. Before I can even comment on the content, I have to note that Polyphony 4's pages are pocked with typos, making the whole thing appear to be thrown together before it was ready for prime time. It's asking a lot for readers to take a book seriously when the publishers apparently didn't care enough to make sure the authors' words were presented clearly. I've read uncorrected proofs that have fewer errors per page than Polyphony 4. There may be good excuses — Wheatland Press is a small and honorable operation — but there is no way to excuse the fact that typographical errors are disrespectful to the authors whose work the book presents.

    Speaking of the authors' work… Well, people often call anthologies "a mixed bag", and this bag is so mixed it's muddled. There are a few ways to view this. We could say that the editorial vision is eclectic and that the editors tried to provide something for nearly every taste. Or we could be less charitable and say that there seems to be no editorial vision. I suspect the truth is somewhere in the middle, but the effect is clear: Only a few of these stories truly deserve a reader's attention. Many of the stories could have been effective with some revision and the guidance of an editor. Not every anthology editor considers it their job to help writers revise promising stories, but editors who don't should then issue rejection slips with utter abandon and keep their anthologies short.

    There is a good book buried in Polyphony 4, though, and it is that book I want to celebrate. It begins with "Down in the Fog-Shrouded City" by Alex Irvine, though to get in touch with the inner anthology we will dispense with the last page or so of that story, because the ending is so pat and sentimental that it threatens to destroy every good word Irvine wrote. And he wrote some great ones — the story is marvelously weird, a tale of amnesia and love and monkeys with typewriters.

    Next, we skip to page 169 and Gavin Grant's "A Storyteller's Story". This would be a good piece to start the anthology with, because it is carefully written, it explores ideas of fiction and dreaming and reality, and it treats its audience as if they are intelligent and capable of both thought and honest feeling. It's fairly innocuous fare, but that's not necessarily bad. Save the fireworks for later.

    Polyphony 4 gets better in its second half, and there we've got a few more pieces to choose from. "The Eye" by Eliot Fintushel is prototypical Fintushel, which means that it's hilariously strange and a bit disturbing. "The Eye" is about a very small man who is a voyeur, and his quest for love and friendship in a world of powerful plastic surgery. It's romantic absurdism with fangs, and I suspect it's the sort of thing you either love or hate. I've yet to meet a Fintushel story I hate.

    We have to do to "The Train There's No Getting Off" (a collaboration between Bruce Holland Rogers, Ray Vukcevich, and Holly Arrow) what we did to "Down in the Fog-Shrouded City" and save the best parts while tossing out a lot of the rest. The story is at least twice as long as is justified by its concept or execution, but the first parts offer a compellingly confusing study of fertility and sterility. Dr. Frankenstein recommends that for his version of Polyphony 4 we sever the healthy first thirteen of the story's thirty-five pages from the rot of the rest.

    The next story to keep is Tim Pratt's "Hart and Boot", the kind of story you might get if a schizophrenic fabulist decided to recount the plot of a spaghetti western. Like the two previous stories we've decided to keep, "Hart and Boot" is full of odd and amusing details, which may signal a bias on the part of the first-person-plural guiding you through this book at the moment. On the other hand, the similar narrative and tonal strategies of "The Eye" and the good parts of "The Train There's No Getting Off" may indicate that certain strategies work better than others at piercing the membrane between specific styles of fiction. Absurdism (in this context at least) doesn't seem to lead to earnest mediocrity as easily as other techniques.

    Other techniques are available, though, in the remaining four stories that deserve attention: "Ataxia, the Wooden Continent" by Stepan Chapman, "Tales from the City of Seams" by Greg van Eekhout, "The Wings of Meister Wilhelm" by Theodora Goss, and "Three Days in a Border Town" by Jeff VanderMeer.

    "Ataxia, the Wooden Continent" continues the absurdism, but does so with entries from an encyclopedia of a floating continent full of sentient wood. Consider: "EYE KNOBS: These organs provide vision for the clans of the Ebony Dressers, the Acacia Tallboys, and the Sectional Cabinets. Eye knobs are still collected illegally by the Cannibal Pantries of the Off-True Archipelago and used in their hideous cork gumbos." The story ends with a beautiful, funny, sad creation myth, a nice capstone after so much wit.

    I hesitated about whether to keep "Tales from the City of Seams", because on a first reading the various little stories it includes didn't seem to add up to anything. On reflection, though, I realized I didn't care. Let mathematicians do sums; I'm content with pieces of unarithematized words. Each piece captured my imagination, and in the end the universe coalesces in a restroom. It is unseemly to ask more from a story!

    "The Wings of Meister Wilhelm" is one of the most traditional stories in the book, a story that would even be appropriate for children, but it is captivating and feels fresh because it is all told so well. The young narrator, unhappy at home, takes lessons from a nomadic German violinist who happens to believe in a flying city and wants to build a glider to fly there. It is the kind of story that a book like Polyphony 4 exists to publish — a story that doesn't fit easily into any marketing category (is it a fantasy? historical fiction? young adult?), but which is written with skill and sensitivity and will delight most readers.

    "Three Days in a Border Town" is the masterpiece of the anthology, and the editors have quite rightly placed it last — it must be saved for last, because it makes just about everything else in the book seem pedestrian. It is dense, thick, rich with imagery and, by the end, emotion (though it is not at all sentimental). The prose is sharp and rhythmic, and it makes the second-person narration (which in most writers' hands is cloying) feel natural and intimate. It has some of the elements of an adventure story, but it's an adventure story as filtered through the sensibility of Samuel Beckett, a post-adventure story, a story of the dry, nasty purgatory between adventures. We're thrown into the hangover of lost love, the numbing pain of remembered mysteries. Fantasy and reality confuse each other, history and storytelling don't solve anything, and in the end all you can do is keep walking, and that is enough.

    Other readers might prefer other stories to the ones I have chosen — plenty of readers will be entertained by Lucius Shepard's "The Blackpool Ascensions", for instance, which I thought was a mess — and so the book's size and variety might be justified. The anthology I assembled above from the raw materials of Polyphony 4 (call it Polyphony 4.1) would only contain about 160 pages of fiction. For me, the other pages were a distraction, because I'm a slow reader and prefer to read a book that has been scrupulously, even ruthlessly, edited.

    Kelly Link proved with her anthology Trampoline that it is possible to assemble a rich and consistently interesting collection of stories that defy labels. Polyphony 4 proves just how difficult that task can be.

    MONOPHONY

    By Daniel Green

    Polyphony 4 makes it clear enough that a spirit of experimentation exists among those writers who have chosen to work within the uber-genre of science fiction/fantasy, much more so, if this anthology is at all representative, than among those who still aspire to the putative respectability of "literary fiction." The latter category encompasses a small subset of writers who are in effect granted a license to call themselves "experimental," but the degree to which these writers are truly willing to reconsider the ultimate purposes and unexamined proprieties of fiction is really quite limited. And while occasionally this or that ostensibly unconventional approach manages to create a modest stir or even for a time to catch on as the latest in literary fashion, my impression after monitoring the wandering course innovative fiction has followed over the past twenty years or so is that only a few experimental writers are able or willing to stick to that course very firmly in the face of both complete commerical irrelevance and a general lack of informed critical attention.

    SF/Fantasy of all the genres presumably offers through its fundamental enabling conventions the most explicit alternative to mainstream literary fiction, which, even at its most experimental, mostly aims, in one way or another, directly or indirectly, to capture present circumstances, things as they are, or at least as they can be seen to represent abiding concerns in human existence more generally. Science fiction deliberately foregoes a direct engagement with the world literary fiction confronts more squarely, preferring instead imaginative extrapolations from existing conditions in that world; fantastic fiction ignores the restraints of realism in coming to terms with that world altogether. But the stories in Polyphony 4 don't just exemplify the alternative strategies embodied in their genres. They manifest an obvious effort to question inherited assumptions about storytelling, the basic principles of fiction-making.

    And yet my most immediate response to this anthology was disappointment, even boredom. While the ambitions motivating most of these stories are entirely admirable, the realization of these worthy ambitions is not often equal to the potential for "making it new" the anthology itself represents. Too frequently the stories seem to settle for, at worst, an indulgence in superficial whimsy, at best, a cultivation of the bizarre in situation and event that, at least as I read them, can't bear the weight they're asked to bear when left to provide the primary source of dramatic interest. Somtimes, the piling-up of bizarre details and frankly silly conceits simply substitutes for any further attempt to additionally develop the work into something more aesthetically compelling, as in "Ataxia, the Wooden Continent":

    ATAXIA: A floating continent, entirely composed of wood. Populated by various races of arboids, celluloids, and laminates. Ruled by the priest cult of the Great Lectern at Shellac-Veneer. This magnifcent city surrounds the sacred lectern's base. The cupolas and minarets of Shellac-Veneer rise from the Plain of Lath, Ataxia's central plateau. The Lectern's high priest administers the Holy Ataxic Empire from the Shrine of the Thrones of Nails. Defended by armies of Drillers under the command of the Walking Barn Roof. . .Major Cities: Shellac-Veneer, Cambium, Silo, and Wharftown. Main rivers: The Timber, the Pellet, and the Tanbark. Chief imports: screws, bolts, and brackets. Chief exports: Shovelers and toothpick hay.

    Moreover, the editors have not made it easier to appreciate the worthwhile stories that are included in Polyphony 4 by arranging it so that the most tiresomely whimsical and/or hackneyed stories are the ones at the front of the book (the very best story, in fact, is literally saved until last), thus only increasing the possibility that a casual or curious reader will give up on the anthology and conclude that sf/fantasy may not reward further sampling. By my count, the first really good story doesn't come along until page 169 ("The Storyteller's Story"), althought at least four of the following eight stories ("Memree," "Baby Love," "Hart and Boot," and "Bagging the Peak") are also quite good. Of the remaining 100 pages, readers might disagree about the quality of such stories as "The Journal of Philip Schuyler," and "The Wings of Meister Wilhelm" (historical fantasies of a sort), while "Tales from the City of Seams, and "Three Days in a Border Town" are two of the best stories to be found in Polyphony 4, almost (not quite) redeeming the tedium one must unfortunately endure through the largest part of this anthology.

    Perhaps the most significant contributing factor to the general lassitude Polyphony 4 induces is that, with exceptions, the writing itself in most of these stories is really quite lackluster, not at all commensurate with the colorful concepts from which the stories seem to emerge. The very first paragraph of the very first story sets the tone for the mostly flat and stale style of writing one encounters in too many of the stories:

    Emelia's home is in a city where only children are allowed to draw graffiti on the crumbling walls. The old bricks and stones are covered in crude pictographs and stick figures, smoking chimney houses and bicycles with four wheels and two seats. Chalk is a penny a piece, any color to be had. A little old lady with gnarled fingers and crooked eyes sells the sticks out of cigar boxes on street corners, even in the rain.

    The open-eyed wonderment conveyed by this passage cannot, for me, mitigate the otherwise bland prose and the cloying and cliched effect it produces. Overall, the most lasting impression the writing in many of these stories left with me is the sense that all too often their authors were so enamored of the "idea" being pursued they couldn't really bother with composing satisfying prose to go along with it. In the most extreme cases, I could only conclude that the sensibilty informing the stories was finally more cinematic than literary, more concerned with narrative immediacy than with the opportunity to do something interesting with words, at least where style is concerned.

    Nevertheless, if I were to point interested readers to stories in Polyphony 4 that would reward the effort to locate a copy of the anthology, regardless of one's interest in genre, there would be two: Michael Bishop's "Baby Love" and Jeff VanderMeer's "Three Days in a Border Town." I would be hard put to classify the former story as science fiction or fantasy at all: It tells in a more or less straightforwardly realistic but effectively understated way the story of a man who loses his wife in an auto accident and must care for his infant daughter by himself. It is an engaging story that concludes in a quiet but really very emotionally crushing way. "Three Days in a Border Town" is to some extent a fairly familiar tale of the postapocalypse, but its central conceit is executed very effectively (it is thematically integrated in a manner that succeeds in purely literary terms and is not merely clever or fanciful) and the writing is evocative and assured: "When you come out of the desert into the border town, you feel like a wisp of smoke rising into the cloudless sky. You're two eyes and a dry tongue. But you can't burn up; you've already passed through flame on your way to ash. Even the sweat between your breasts is ethereal, otherwordly. Not all the blue in the sky could moisten you." If VanderMeer's story is a good example of what current sf/fantasy is capable of achieving, I would definitely like to read more.

  • Character

    In a recent post at s1ngularity, Trent Walters objects to the paucity of compelling characters in the horror fiction he's been reading for review. He then goes on to speculate about how "character" in fiction is created.

    There are two obvious extremes of characterization (obvious because of their extremity) that help writers to quickly sketch a vividly realized character. One is the crazy or really weird character common to the literary story. Writers do this often to get noticed by a literary magazine, to do something that hasn't been seen. The other is the object or affectation of the character's that distinguishes this character from the others. He's the thin man, the fat man, the girl with the bone through her nose, the three-legged dog, the boy who stutters.

    But neither rendering has much to do with character except that they both quickly sketch what a character appears to be, but appearances don't capture the reality of a character. Actions characterize the character (or, in the case of Hamlet, inaction, which is still an act). . . .

    It may be true that in some fiction–perhaps in horror fiction more than most, although I have my doubts about this–character emerges mostly from "action," but I would propose that in the very best fiction, genre or otherwise, character is actually just an illusion created by the use of language in a particular way–by a writer's style, although the illusion thus created may be more or less a conscious act, may in fact be simply an artifact of the stylistic choices the writer has made to begin with. This may seem a preposterous notion, way too "postmodern" to be taken seriously, so I will further illustrate with examples of writers who couldn't be considered postmodern by anyone.

    It is sometimes said that among the first "realistic" characters in works of fiction are those to be found in the novels of Jane Austen. They seem quite firmly rooted to the soil of real life, restrained in their actions and words in comparison to most of the fiction of the 18th century, where realism tends to be sacrificed in favor of color and dynamism. But isn't this a consequence of Austen's style, which is itself quite understated and restrained? To the extent a character like Elizabeth Bennet seems to us a very levelheaded and quietly witty woman, isn't this because Jane Austen is a very calm and quietly witty writer? What else do we need to know about Jane and Elizabeth Bennet beyond what we learn from this brief exchange early on in Pride and Prejudice about Mr. Bingley: "He is just what a young man ought to be," said [Jane], "sensible, good-humored, lively; and I never saw such happy manners!–so much ease, with such perfect good breeding!" "He is also handsome," replied Elizabeth, which a young man ought likewise to be, if he possibly can. His character is thereby complete." How much of the effect on our perception of character comes from the revelations of "speech" in the ordinary sense, and how much from the fact Jane Austen is a master at composing very sly and exquisitely worded dialogue?

    Likewise, Dickens's characters are usually described as outsized and vigorous (and they are), but how often do we pause to consider how outsized and vigorous Dicken's own style actually is? Don't his characters come across to us in the way they do because of that style? Even the minor characters in Dickens are always vivid, partly because of Dickens's strategy of picking out one or two habits or features and exaggerating them, but also simply through Dicken's forceful and distinctive way of writing, as in this brief account of "Mr. Fang," from Oliver Twist:

    Mr. Fang was a lean, long-backed, stiff-necked, middle-sized man, with no great quality of hair, and what he had, growing on the back and sides of his head. His face was stern, and much flushed. If he were really not in the habit of drinking rather more than was exactly good for him, he might have brought an action against his countenance for libel, and have recovered heavy damages.

    It could be said that the effect of a passage such as this comes more from what is ususually called "voice" rather than style per se, but what else is voice in writing but the concrete effect created on the printed page by an appropriate arrangement of words and sentences and paragraphs? Dickens's style, garrulous but pointed, seemingly ingenuous but actually quite caustic at times ("brought an action against his countenance for libel, and have recovered heavy damages" seems a delicate way to put it, but is really very cutting), might be called "theatrical," but so might all of his characters, their theatricality a reflection of the language used to create them.

    Similarly, the characters in Henry James's fiction, which most readers find quite convincing even when the fictions themselves are judged to be somewhat short on dramatic action, share the obsessed and ratiocinative qualties of James's style. When James Joyce or Virginia Woolf create character through the use of the stream-of-consciousness technique, the characters that emerge, Leopold Bloom or Mrs. Dalloway, aren't compelling because of the "content" of their thinking or even because we're given a glimpse into the way they think, but because of the manipulations of language and expected novelistic discourse that each author performs. Literally, it's the strange way in which the words–broken up, rearranged, discontinuous–are put down on the page. "Character" in Ulysses or Mrs. Dalloway can't be separated from these puposeful arrangements of words.

    To use an example from genre fiction: How much more do we ever really learn about Chandler's Philip Marlowe than we do from the very first paragraph of The Big Sleep, as Marlowe stands before the Sternwood house?:

    It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid-October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

    Everything we associate with Marlowe is here, manifested in this brief but punchy paragraph: his powers of observation, his self-deprecating, wiseass attitude, accomplished through a demotic yet also eloquent style. And in this case it is specifically a writing style, as Marlowe is the narrator of his own adventures, which ultimately makes it impossible for us to separate Marlowe the writer from Marlowe the "character." The "action" in which Marlowe always becomes embroiled is fun to read, perhaps even keeps us reading, but for me such action adds little to my perception of him as a character, which is also always being reinforced by the way in which he describes this action to us.

    First-person narration makes it most apparent that it is style–voice, if you wish–that evokes character, not action, certainly not the quirks or affectations that some writers try to use to force characters into being "vivid," to return to Trent's comments quoted above. Not only is the narrator's own character what we discern through his/her style, but all the other characters about whom such a narrator might speak clearly enough are what they are because of the way this narrator speaks about them. But good writers approach third-person narration in the same way they would a first-person narrator. It is itself a character, a voice, with his/her/its own distinctive way of summoning a fictive world through writing. Perhaps at his point you have to say that character and style are indivisible, but this is where "the reality of a character" has to start.

    There are some writers for whom style supersedes character, for whom the "authorial" character is the main character, and their fiction doesn't suffer in the least from it. Stanley Elkin is such a writer. His characters are believable enough, vivid certainly, but their vividness comes not from any externally imposed "features," fastened onto the characters like artificial limbs. It comes from Elkin's inimitable and inexhaustibly inventive style. Here is a third-person account of Ben Flesh, protagonist of The Franchiser:

    Forbes would not have heard of him. Fortune wouldn't. There would be no color photographs of him, sharp as holograph, in high-backed executive leathers, his hand a fist on wide mahogany plateaus of desk, his collar white as an admiral's against his dark, timeless suits. There would be no tall columns of beautifully justified print apposite full-page ads for spanking new business machines with their queer space-age vintages, their coded analogues to the minting of postage, say, or money–the TermiNet 1200, the Reliant 700, Canon's L-1610, the NCR 399–numbers like licence plates on federal limousines or the markings on aircraft.

    Though he actually used some of this stuff. G.E. had an anwer for his costly data volume traffic; Kodak had found a practical alternative to his paper filing. He had discussed his microform housing needs with Ring King Visibles. He had come into the clean, bright world of Kalvar. A special card turned even a telephone booth into a WATS line. Still, Fortune would do no profile. Signature, the Diners Club magazine, had never shown an interest; TWA's Ambassador hadn't. There was no color portrait of him next to the mail-order double knits and shoes.

    (It's worth noting how Elkin here describes Flesh by what he's not; all the clutter of detail only produces a stereotype that Ben Flesh mercifully avoids.)

    Here's a first-person narrator, from The Bailbondsman:

    So I'm Alexander Main, the Phoenician Bailbondsman, other men's difficulties my heritage. Alexander Main the Ba'albondsman, doing his duty by the generations and loving it, thriving on the idea of freedom which is my money in the bank, which is my element as the sand was my ancestors'.

    So give the Phoenician your murderer, your rapist, your petty thief yearning to breathe free. Give him your stickup guy and embezzler, your juvenile delinquent and car robber. Give him you subversives and menslaughterers. I like dealing with the public.

    Pretty clearly both Ben Flesh and Alexander Main are really Stanley Elkin. Or "Stanley Elkin," the manufactured authorial presence. In many ways, all of Elkin's characters seem just like all the others, are versions of this most important character, the writer. No one who loves Stanley Elkin's work, as I do, could want it any other way. Who needs characters when you can be carried along by writing like this?

  • Critiquing American Society

    Although Michael Collins describes his ambitions perhaps somewhat more boldly than most, these remarks illustrate a common enough view of the ultimate purpose of fiction:

    "After I was shortlisted for the Booker, I learned that no one reads literary fiction any more". . ."That's because the action–the novel's crises–are all in a character's head, not in on-page action. So I got to thinking about using crime to critique American society, perhaps a dismemberment murder mystery to echo the dismantling of the U.S. middle class."

    Never mind the distinction between "literary fiction" and genre fiction. As far as I can tell, Collins himself has never written the kind of literary fiction he describes, but clearly he thinks of his work as serious nevertheless; even if he did prefer fiction in which the "action" is "all in a character's head," this doesn't preclude the larger goal of critiquing society. Indeed, writers of literary fiction are more likely to think in such terms than those who work in the genres, where in many cases–especially science fiction or detective/crime fiction–some sort of implict examination of "society" is built into the very nature of the genre, almost hard to avoid.

    Those listening to Collins make this remark did not seem to object to the idea that writers might want to "critique society," merely to Collins's further theories about "the peculiar suitability" of the United States to this kind of crime fiction: "Europeans, he said, tend to visit only coastal America, and have no idea of the bizarre religious beliefs and brooding violence exhibited by the mad inhabitants of the territory between New York City and San Francisco." What the author of this Macleans article calls "Collins' naked ambition and political paranoia" apparently did not appeal to this audience, but they surely would not have taken exception to a writer's claim to be "critiquing" society, since the notion that this is what fiction does, at some fundamental level, is very widespread.

    This kind of social commentary, if not exactly political propoganda, is certainly "political" in that it values social or cultural change as the potentially most salutary benefit of writing and reading fiction. Like satire, it seeks "correction" of the flaws and mistaken beliefs it portrays. Such a conception of literature's relevance to its readers views political change and the consideration of essentially political issues to be the most important, if not the only, way for literature to be serious in the first place. Aesthetic achievement is not dismissed altogether, but it becomes at best a trick used by the skillful writer to draw the reader's attention to those sociopolitical concerns that are really what have motivated the writer to begin with.

    How many works of literature from the past have survived because what they provide is deemed to be social commentary, offering insight into the cultural mechanisms and assumptions of a particular time and place? Hardly any. It is sometimes said that, for example, Dickens gives us this kind of window onto the social landscape of his time, but to the extent this is true–and it is partly true–it is a consequence of Dickens's much broader aesthetic ambition to build a whole fictional world, related to the concrete realities of Victorian England, but thoroughly transformed, out of the socially determined materials he had to work with. (And he had no other materials; he lived in Victorian England and not somewhere else.) Works of literature, especially fiction, can always be used by the cultural historian as the source from which to dredge up "information." But a novel or poem or play that can only be used as such a source has already been judged no longer worth reading.

    As I mentioned earlier, it hardly seems necessary to insist that a genre like crime fiction should seek to "critique" society. Given the various conventions of the genre–the focus on law enforcement (or on the attempt more broadly to redress lawless acts), the inherent need to "investigate" a particular social mileu, the search for an explanation, to the extent it can be found, for what motivates people to violate social and cultural norms–a critique of sorts will almost always arise from a crime or detective novel. The hard part for a crime novelist (at least it seems to me) is to find suitable ways of making this intrinsic kind of commentary aesthetically satisfying as the subject of a work of fiction. Literary novelists have on the one hand an easier job–they don't have to fulfill these generic expectations (at least not these particular ones) and ought to be less constrained in the attempt to find aesthetically satisfying forms–and an even harder one–to find such forms absent the inherent interest-value these embedded conventions additionally provide. Perhaps this makes it all the more tempting simply to fall back on "commentary" as fiction's ultimate justification.

    It is not, I hope, simply contrarian to suggest, on the eve of a very important American election, that politics is not the most important, certainly not the only important, endeavor with which a serious-minded person might want to occupy him/herself. Nor is it necessary that he/she engage in social commentary in order to be discharging the duties supposedly assigned to the writer of fiction. If this were the case, it would be much easier, and ultimately more useful, to forego fiction altogether and write political speeches or make documentary films. (There seems to be more money in the latter as well.) It may or may not be true that "no one reads literary fiction any more," although I myself think such a claim is asinine. There are, in sheer numbers, way more readers of serious fiction than there "used to be," given the vast increases in population just over the past half-century. Probably the percentage of serious readers within these populations isn't significantly lower, either. Even if fewer people do want to read "literary fiction," it's precisely because it has increasingly become reduced to an attempt to "critique American society," through the combined efforts of certain so-called literary journalists, by academics, and by the editors of prominent book reviews.

    Given a choice between such lugubrious stuff–at least in the way it is presented–and more artfully done "entertainment," some readers have understandably gone for the latter. (One wonders how popular Michael Collins will be among such readers.) As well: If I have to choose between the social critic and the artist, my vote goes to the artist.

    (Link provided by Sarah Weinman.)

  • Jumping Around

    Two post-World War II novels that seem to me to belong to a tradition of "experimental fiction"–fiction that deliberately and self-consciously manipulates what are taken to be the established conventions of the form and thus provide a fresh perspective on the possibilities of the form–and that together perform a similar kind of experiment with traditional, linear narrative, are Nabokov's Pale Fire and Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch, the latter of which I have just re-read. In each case these novels jumble the order in which the parts of a prose narrative are expected to be related, each allowing the reader several different ways to put the narrative together in the process of reading it.

    Pale Fire's initial gambit is to derive its "story" from the critical annotations to a poem presented as the novel's ostensible subject. The real story, however, emerges from the annotations themselves, shifting the focus to the circumstances and life-story of the annotator. But the annotations can be read either in the numbered order in which they occur, or one can follow the internal references and "jump around" in the notes until this buried narrative has been completely revealed. Hopscotch does something similar, offering up its story either as a series of linear episodes and an additional series of appended episodes and commentaries beginning roughly two-thirds of the way into the book, or as another version of the same story as revealed when read according to an alternative number map (the numbers of the episodes) provided by the author. One can "hopscotch" one's way through the text–as can be done with Pale Fire as well.

    Thus, both novels offer the reader multiple perspectives on the core narrative, creating a kind of prismatic effect by which the narrative itself becomes less important and the way in which it can be put together, the way in which it can be "seen," takes precedence. In each, the underlying story remains the same, but the experience of reading it will be different depending on which route through it the reader chooses to take. Implicitly, each novel suggests to us that a story is just a story, but that the way it is told, the way it is constructed (in this case as much by the reader as by the author) is what finally matters–what finally contributes the "art" to literary art.

    Stories are held in common by novels, plays, films, tv shows, video games. Surely it can't be the story alone, even if it is skillfully told, that commends a given work of fiction to us as worthy of our consideration. Most stories are, in fact, usually told with more immediacy of effect in these other forms than in novels and short stories. (My impression, as I have commented in previous posts, is that all too many current novels are written primarily under the hope they might eventually be made into movies. They are, in effect, movies presented through other means–certainly not through the belief that novels have a distinctive approach to story that can't be duplicated in movies.) A compelling narrative may hold one's attention during the process of its unfolding, but this in itself doesn't make it literature.

    Experimental fiction does its job in reminding us of this fact. Sometimes, as is the case with both Pale Fire and Hopscotch, in doing so it also results in a fully satisfying work of literary art that will continue to stand up to subsequent readings by new generations of interested readers. At other times the experiment leaves us feeling it was interesting as an experiment, but didn' quite rise to this next level. (I would put John Barth's Letters in this category, for example, as well as Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves.) But we usually know when an author is attempting a literary experiment of the sort I am discussing, as opposed simply to trying out a new way of accomplishing an already existing set of familiar aesthetic goals–which is not, of course, itself something to be lightly dismissed.

What Hath the Blog Wrought?

The Dustbin of Literary History

Additional Essays in Criticism

Unbeaten Path
Unbeaten Paths: Reviews of Adventurous Fiction