So I'm especially interested today, for a number of reasons, to see this item from The Guardian, in which John Banville has annotated a copy of The Sea.  One of the nine screencaps is below:

The annotations are called out on the website, and I found this one most interesting and amusing:

p.88 [on 'succubus'] 'Really should get hold of a dictionary. I'll be interested to see if he/she got to the end of the book before selling it to the second-hand shop. Could have exchanged it for a Chambers or a Shorter Oxford.'

The notion of Banville with a dictionary should resonate for anyone who has read him.  I was also struck by this one:

p.244 'Never noticed before the pre-echo of p.264. K[afka] is right, one works in deepest darkness.'

It always fascinates me when writers detect their influences after the fact.  In contrast, I suppose I should confess that my second novel is heavily indebted to Banville's own The Book of Evidence - nothing after the fact there.  I recently worked my way through the book, taking it apart, trying to figure out how he could break so many rules and still have the book succeed marvelously.  Here's a sample of my own, far messier, marginalia:

I cannot figure out why this keeps posting on its side, but you get the general idea. I will leave it to future readers to determine how well I've internalized the lessons of this novel but I remain devoted to my idea that if you are a writer and there is a book you adore, there is no better exercise than stripping the thing down to its foundations to see what it's made of.  

"You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive" is the observation that launched a thousand films, sequels, and imitators. The first words (after "How are you?") that Holmes says upon meeting Watson in A Study in Scarlet have become the template for all that follows: A display of extraordinary, apparently superhuman deduction, seemingly arbitrary but, upon closer inspection, the result of the methodical assemblage of a handful of details. Other men see; Holmes observes. And who among his fans has not, even briefly, imagined that we, too, might observe as Holmes does?

Maria Konnikova takes this impulse and gives us hope in her first book, Mastermind: How to Think like Sherlock Holmes, although the book might be more accurately titled How Sherlock Holmes Thinks like Sherlock Holmes. Readers looking for a prescriptive program to turn them into Holmesian cogitation machines may come away disappointed. But those seeking to understand the neurological and psychological underpinnings of the great detective's mind will find a knowledgeable guide in Konnikova.

A slim, rigourously nuanced book, Intermission tells the story of how [Bill] Evans’s family try to support him in 1961 when he is devastated by the accidental death of Scott LaFaro, bass player in his celebrated trio. His protective elder brother Harry knows he is a drug addict and fears the worst.

Jazz novels are always so hard to pull off (Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter succeeds; Morrison's Jazz does not), but I've always been so intrigued by the Evans/LaFaro relationship.  LaFaro was a prodigy, killed obscenely young, whose influence is still felt among jazz bassists.  It sounds like a fascinating read.

Thinking back on the lives of one's parents and making comparisons with one's own life can be a dizzying exercise. It startles me to realise that when my father was the age I am now, past my mid-60s, he was long retired and preparing with more or less ­equanimity for his dotage.

The essay includes a remarkable photo of an eight-year-old Banville.  You can read it all here.

The Modern Era begins, characteristically, with a revolution. It is commonly called the Protestant Reformation, but the train of events starting early in the 16C and ending-if indeed it has ended-more than a century later has all the features of a revolution. I take these to be: the violent transfer of power and property in the name of an idea.

We have got into the habit of calling too many things revolutions. Given a new device or practice that changes our homely habits, we exclaim: "revolutionary!" But revolutions change more than personal habits or a widespread practice. They give culture a new face. Between the great upheaval of the 1500s and the present, only three later ones are of the same order. True, the history books give the name to a dozen or more such violent events, but in these uprisings it was only the violence that was great. They were but local aftershocks of one or other of the four main quakes: the 16C religious revolution; the 17C monarchical revolution; the liberal, individualist "French" revolution that straddles the 18th and 19th; and the 20C "Russian," social and collectivist.

The quotation marks around French and Russian are meant to show that those names are only conventional. The whole western world was brooding over the Idea of each before it exploded into war, and the usual dates 1789 and 1917 mark only the trigger incidents. It took decades for the four to work out their first intention and side effects-and their ruling ideas have not ceased to act.

You can read a longer portion of this excerpt here.  

Details here.  See you there.

I include this anecdote not to parade my musical taste (or lack of it) before you, but to illustrate how possible it was, in that pre-Internet era, to willfully opt out of the zeitgeist. (It's still possible, but the shame is harder to escape, and generally requires secluded cabins in remote woods.) As grunge was roaring out of Seattle to hypnotize and unsettle a nation, my 30-year-old self was including Blue Swede on mixtapes. The only meaningful impact the movement had on my life was the sudden robust availability of high quality messenger bags. I missed all of it. Nirvana. Pearl Jam. Kurt and Courtney.

Of course, the era didn't pass me by entirely: the headlines were inescapable, especially Cobain's Hemingwayesque coda, and Love's ongoing, embarrassing theatrics. But I must admit that, prior to picking up Hole guitarist Eric Erlandson's Letters to Kurt, I had never listened to a Hole, or even a Nirvana, album all the way through. Yet I was intrigued by the book's format: a sincere preface followed by 52 almost impressionistic sketches that displayed, at first glance, a certain lightness of touch, a (perhaps unsurprising) musicality in the prose.  Erlandson, present at the creation as Love's co-founder of Hole, seemed a promising guide to all I'd missed, even if he was guilty of occasionally overstating his place in the grand scheme. (He can sometimes read a bit like the actor in Shakespeare in Love who summarizes Romeo & Juliet as being "about a nurse.") Something about Erlandson's disarmingly earnest tone initially engaged me more than I expected: "All those fallen female archetypes. Little girls wearing mother's heels and apron." I began to consider the possibility that this book might have value as something other than a post-grunge artifact, yet another piece of the true cross for Cobain obsessives to fetishize. Perhaps, coming to the work unburdened by the albatross of Cobain's martyrdom, I was uniquely well placed to consider its purely literary value. A small reward for missing a cultural moment, it turns out, and harder to accomplish than I imagined.

There’s something else in my past that I only recently realized contributed to my perseverance in writing poems, and that is my love of chess. I was taught the game in wartime Belgrade by a retired professor of astronomy when I was six years old and over the next few years became good enough to beat not just all the kids my age, but many of the grownups in the neighborhood. My first sleepless nights, I recall, were due to the games I lost and replayed in my head. Chess made me obsessive and tenacious. Already then, I could not forget each wrong move, each humiliating defeat. I adored games in which both sides are reduced to a few figures each and in which every single move is of momentous significance. Even today, when my opponent is a computer program (I call it “God”) that outwits me nine out of ten times, I’m not only in awe of its superior intelligence, but find my losses far more interesting to me than my infrequent wins. The kinds of poems I write—mostly short and requiring endless tinkering—often recall for me games of chess. They depend for their success on word and image being placed in proper order and their endings must have the inevitability and surprise of an elegantly executed checkmate.

The book's not merely good; it's Pulitzer Prize-quality good, so much so that readers might find themselves wishing it had been published last year so that the Pulitzer committee could have saved themselves the bother of a hung jury, and just given its damn award to Fountain.

"Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.” 

Patterson, it should be remembered, turned in a review of my novel that so was vicious that Gawker - Gawker - was prompted to ask "what's up with that."  How preposterous do you have to be for Gawker to call you "mean-spirited"?

I'd have higher hopes for the new Slate project if it wasn't deploying television critics to review real books ... 

In "The Third Man," in the immortal Ferris-wheel scene high above postwar Vienna, Orson Welles as Henry Lime implies that he has been selling diluted penicillin to Viennese hospitals but asks his lifelong friend Joseph Cotten if one of those little moving dots down there (one of those human beings) could really matter in the long scheme of things.  On the ground, he adds:

In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed - but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance.  In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce?  The cuckoo clock.

I learned, or Richard learned - we've forgotten who learned - that Graham Greene, who wrote the screenplay of "The Third Man," only later published ther preliminary treatment as a novella, and the cuckoo-clock speech does not appear either in the novella or in the original screenplay.  Greene did not write it.  Orson Welles thought it up and said it.

I'm essentially unsympathetic to D'Agata's argument, as I've been to those who came before and forced the rubric "Creative Nonfiction" upon us, which continues to encourage writers to take all sorts of questionable liberties with the facts.  If you want to make it up, as I've always said, write a novel.  On the other hand don't - I don't need the competition.

I'm a quick study ...

I brought a dozen books to class, pretty randomly selected from the titles that arrive every month.  I did limit the selection to novels, and tried to weed out any obviously awful candidates, but for the most part these were books I knew little or nothing about.  I recognized some authors, had dipped a few pages into some of them, but I did try to be as random as possible.  

I put the books out on my desk and I invited my students to come up and quickly grab a book.  I told them not to try to match their taste, not to look for authors they knew - in fact, to avoid looking at the book altogether if possible.  Just grab one.

They took them back to their desks and I asked them all to read the title they'd drawn for our next class. The request was not greeted with universal enthusiasm, until I began to explain the idea behind the experiment.

I told them that we all - myself included - can easily become victims of our readerly prejudices.  (I wonder how many great books I've missed, insisting that I don't care for historical fiction.  Wolf Hall?)  I also said in the age of Amazon, which thinks it's a good idea to pair every book you buy with other books just like it, we increasingly risk falling into a narrow little echo chamber.  It's great that everyone is reading A Visit from the Goon Squad, but how many lesser known titles get lost every year in that rush toward the One Big Thing.

I reminded them that Paula Fox enjoyed a remarkable renaissance simply because Jonathan Franzen had randomly plucked her book from the shelves at Yaddo.  And I told them that every serious writer I knew was open and experimental and willing to take a chance on any number of books - not just the things we know we like. 

Surprise, surprise.  More than one student came back admitting they'd loved a book they'd otherwise never read.  And one student didn't like a book she fully expected to love, but she had immersed herself in solving the problem of why the book did not work for her, and closed in on what she took to be the inauthenticity of the voice.  In order words, she was thinking like a writer.

Flash in the pan?  Life-changing moment?  Remains to be seen.  Follow my account and see for yourself.

St. Aubyn’s books are at once extremely dark and extremely funny. In “Bad News,” Patrick visits New York, where his father has just died. “It was late May, it was hot, and he really ought to take off his overcoat, but his overcoat was his defense against the thin shards of glass that passers-­by slipped casually under his skin, not to mention the slow-motion explosion of shop windows, the bone-rattling thunder of subway trains and the heartbreaking passage of each second, like a grain of sand trickling through the hourglass of his body. No, he would not take off his overcoat. Do you ask a lobster to disrobe?” In “At Last,” a minor character is described as having three drawbacks as a guest: “She was incapable of saying please, incapable of saying thank you and incapable of saying sorry, all the while creating a surge in the demand for these expressions.” Meanwhile, the humor is deepened by our sense that the dazzling pyrotechnics of Patrick’s banter have become a source of pain. In his own witticisms, he now hears echoes of the “pure contempt” of his father’s mocking humor.

I'm actually considered stamping my passport and making the trek from the Palisades.  Details here. Even I can't get there, you should most definitely go.

Time after time I've taken to these pages to decry the idiocy of Elmore Leonard's inexplicably lauded 10 Rules of Writing, to absolutely no avail.  No decent interval can pass before someone out there notes them approvingly, and I'm forced back to the keyboard to object.

The latest offender is Olen Steinhauer, who says the following in his recent review of Leonard's latest novel, Raylan:

In an essay that appeared in The New York Times in 2001, “Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle,” Elmore Leonard listed his 10 rules of writing. The final one — No. 11, actually — the “most important rule . . . that sums up the 10,” is “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.” It’s a terrific rule. In fact, I liked it so much that I passed it on to a creative-writing class I once taught.

It's actually a silly, empty rule.  If I were to put that rule in front of my students, here's what I'd tell them:  That it's one of those bits of seemingly clever writing that, upon actual closer examination, says nothing at all.  First of all, what - exactly - is "writing that sounds like writing"?  Does Shakespeare sound like writing?  Does Ondaatje? Does Zadie Smith?  Does Faulkner?  Does Pynchon?  It is a useless measure.

What one presumes Leonard is saying, given the other dumbed-down rules on his list, is that he eschews what we commonly refer to, for want of a better term, as lyrical prose.  One imagines he would have John Banville, Joseph O'Neill and Teju Cole busily erasing their manuscripts.  On the other hand, if he doesn't mean that, perhaps he means writing that, because it fails - because it is, essentially bad writing - feels "written".  So, basically, fix bad writing.  Thanks a whole heap, Elmo.

The  point, of course, is that these kind of lists, while sometimes amusing, rarely have anything to do with the real work of writing.  (I prefer to paraphrase Deborah Eisenberg to my students - you can do anything you want, provided you can do it.)  And it's dispiriting to see people who should know better trot these rules out yet again as some touchstone of great writing.  They aren't.  As the TLS so wisely pointed out about this list when it first appeared:

The eleventh rule is: If you come across lists such as this, ignore them. The rules may sound sensible enough, but, with the exception of No 5, each could be replaced with its opposite, and still be reasonable advice. Leonard complains that, while reading a book by Mary McCarthy, he had to "stop and get the dictionary" - as if it were a form of pain (William Faulkner, who broke most of these rules whenever he wrote, complained of Hemingway that he "never used a word you had to look up in the dictionary"). And what is meant by "leave out the part that readers tend to skip"? If every writer tried to be as exciting as Leonard, there would be no Brothers Karamazov, no Anna Karenina (remember those exquisitely boring sections on agronomy?), and the shelf reserved for Dickens or Balzac would measure about a foot. Banish patois, and we lose a library of fiction stretching from Huckleberry Finn to Trainspotting. As for dialogue, if Leonard samples Henry James, he will find "remarked", "answered", "interposed", "almost groaned", "wonderingly asked", "said simply", "sagely risked" and many more colourful carriers (these from a page or two of Roderick Hudson). Should they all be ironed out into "said"?

So what do you say, gang?  Let's give the rules a rest for the rest of 2012?  Because I have, you know, shit to do.  I can't be here schooling you every time out.  Peace out.

I've never cared much for David Gates's criticism.  His intelligence is obvious but his reviews tend to be hobbled by smugness or self-regard - how I have longed to reach out and pop the "I" key from his keyboard - and his attempts at humor have always felt strained to this reader.

However, I thought his review on Sunday of Elliot Perlman's novel The Street Sweeper, despite its cruelty, was exceedingly instructive, and would serve my Novel IV students as a handy precis of what to avoid in their fiction. Gates's lessons, highlighted in two particular paragraphs, should probably hang above the desk of any beginning novelist (a category of which I still consider myself a member).

Novel IV is an advanced class, so it's primarly workshopping.  The weekly lessons of Novel I-III are dispensed with in favor of sustained, detailed examinations of weekly submissions.  But I took time out at the beginning of class to walk through Gates's review.  This was the first of the two essential paragraphs:

... no decent writer should have to repeat variants of the line “Tell everyone what happened here” 12 times in two pages of a scene at Auschwitz; it takes on the robotic affect of the People’s Microphone at an Occupy rally, and it loses force with each use. The Auschwitz scenes, based on the testimony of real-life survivors, will break the stoniest heart — how could they not? — but even here Perlman can’t let ill enough alone. Two women about to be hanged for resisting the Nazis are described as “wingless sparrows,” as if the genuine pathos needed to be amped up with a sentimental image. Near the beginning of the novel, Perlman can’t resist framing the nightmarish murder of Emmett Till, and of the four black girls killed in the bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church, as a literal bad dream, experienced by his untenured Columbia historian. The well-read Perlman may have had in mind Stephen Dedalus’s line in “Ulysses” about history’s being a nightmare from which he was trying to awake, but will any reader find this dream plausible rather than just thematically convenient?

In this advanced workshop, I have taken to advising my students to be as thorough and detailed as they possibly can; to banish the word "nitpick" from their vocabulary; and to understand that if they fail to bring a rigorous, thoughtful sensibility to these critiques, there is surely someone waiting out there who will feel no similar reluctance.  And it's  sad day for the author if that person happens to be a Times reviewer.   This first paragraph contains any number of amateur traps I warn my students about, particularly the last one - to beware of moments that exist solely to serve authorial convenience.  But it's the second paragraph that is a gold mine of "Don'ts":

But the writing of fiction has its own forms of morality. Its code takes a hard line against such silly devices as the historian’s inner conversations with the girlfriend he abjured: “ ‘Adam, . . . you’re trying to turn your fear of the future, your panic about parenthood and professional failure into something noble that you’ve done for me. I never bought it.’ ‘Diana, it’s possible at the one time both to be afraid and to act nobly for another person.’ ” It evenhandedly forbids kitschy generic ingénues — “With dark eyes for falling into and jet-black hair, she could be both serious and funny, often at the same time” — and ciphers like “a charming, delightful woman in her 80s.” It demands that the writer clean up toxic spills of syntax: “A single guest at weddings, couples would admire her appearance almost excessively and, in so doing, embarrass her, never for a moment dreaming she might know loneliness every bit as well, every bit as sharp, as they ever had.” It calls for the renunciation of verbal pomp: “He was overwhelmed by a wave of self-loathing, panic and a sense of loss that, in staccato bursts, flushed the air from his lungs till the moisture in his sleep-starved eyes formed a vitreous glaze that mercifully blurred his reflection in the mirror.” As the Book of John puts it, Jesus wept. All these passages suggest a writer who, whether through inattention or inability, hasn’t engaged effectively with his characters or his language, who won’t or can’t take the work of fiction seriously.

I do warn my students against taking too dogmatic an approach to reading and writing, and I do caution that all rules can be broken.  That said, this paragraph is a brilliant and efficient summary of things to avoid, things I see all the time:  expository dialogue, particularly awful when it's unpacking emotional states; cliches both of language and character; lazy undescriptive descriptions (paraprhasing All The President's Men, I call these non-description descriptions); tangled, inept sentence work and unhinged prose.  It's a bravura paragraph that I will keep close as I continue on the second novel.

I pointed out that Gates is very careful to provide specific examples of all his objections, though we also acknowledged that nearly any sentence can be taken out of context and made to look foolish.  That said, it's hard to imagine any context in which the sentences noted above would work.  (I do think the review's one failing - aside from the current of mean-spiritedness that seems to animate it - is there isn't a single, sustained quotation from the novel to really allow a reader to hear Perlman's voice.)

But that's a quibble and, as I told my students, even the nastiness is instructive and, in its way, salutary - every writer must take the maximum possible care with his or her prose, because when you play in the NFL, the hard knocks are out there.  They are no fun to receive, as I can tell you, but no less instructive for the pain.

I find myself immensely and unexpectedly saddened today at the passing of Christopher Hitchens. We sat up late last night watching video clips on C-Span and Youtube, and downed a surprisingly tearful Lagavullin (neat) in his honor. It seemed the thing to do.

In the light of day, I am trying to understand my intense emotional reaction to the news, reminiscent of what I felt when Tony Judt, another great thinker and writer I did not know, died too soon. And yet, like so many others, I felt as if I knew him. He was always essential reading, even when he infuriated me, as he did often. More than once, I let him have it in these pages, to what point I was never certain – a mouse roaring, surely.

He could be maddening; his writing, at times, hobbled by excess self-regard; a rigidity approaching the sort of fanaticism he decried; and a brilliant rhetoric that sometimes masked weak underpinnings. The last two traits were most prominently on display in his support of the Iraq War, which alienated many, including myself. I was disappointed, but not surprised – his stance seemed utterly consistent with his absolute loathing for the thought police, be they on the left or right.

And yet. These were the same traits that made me love him. Although I share his atheism, I felt his anti-God arguments lacked a certain nuance. Yet I deeply admired his refusal to seek the consolation of a deathbed conversion. I also loved his refusal to renounce his louche ways, his devotion to pleasures both high and low, despite their ultimate cost. And I was in awe of his brilliance, his learning, his instant (it seemed) recall, his stunning wit. I don’t, as a rule, talk much about non-fiction, but I was effusive in my praise for Hitch-22 when I recommended it on NPR’s On Point. 

But of the many Hitches (how many of us claimed the right to call him that, the unearned familiarity?), the polemicist, the political commentator, the contrarian, I think my favorite was the literary critic. Of his all books, my favorite, the one I return to time and again, is Unacknowledged Legislation: writers in the public sphere. If you’ve never heard of it, do yourself favor and add it to your shelves. People will probably remember him for Vanity Fair, but I preferred the remarkable book criticism he wrote for The Atlantic. When the political baggage was left at the door, he was as incisive and insightful a book reviewer as we had. Here he is on Philip Larkin, earlier this year.

Finally, though, I think the reason for my sorrow, for my tears, is simply this: There was great comfort in the fact that his voice was always there. Reliably combative, occasionally wrongheaded, always bracing, issuing a challenge that it was up to us to take up. I don’t believe one life is necessarily more worthy than any other, but he was a man who clearly made the absolute most of his time here, squeezed out every bit of experience. He never disengaged. It seems grotesquely unfair that he is gone, that silence remains. That is, I think, worthy of tears.

His friend Andrew Sullivan has been heroically posting tributes all day. They are worth a look.

Cheers, Hitch. Perhaps you and Yahweh are sharing a final chuckle together. Either way, I drink to you.

The French gastronome Brillat-Savarin began “The Physiology of Taste” (1825) by declaring, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.” You are also what you read — or, perhaps, what you own. In my college dorm, a volume of Sartre was casually spread-­eagled across the futon when I expected callers. We display spines that we’ll never crack; we hide the books that we thumb to death. Emily Post disapproved: her 1930 home decorating manual compared “filling your rooms with books you know you will never open” to “wearing a mask and a wig.”

To expose a bookshelf is to compose a self. The artist Buzz Spector’s 1994 installation “Unpacking My Library” consisted of all the books in his library, arranged “in order of the height of spine, from tallest to shortest, on a single shelf in a room large enough to hold them.” Shortly after the 2008 election, a bookstore in New York set out 50-odd books to which Barack Obama had alluded in memoirs, speeches and interviews. The resulting collection revealed more about the president-elect than did any number of other displays of books by and about him.

 

From the November 7 New Yorker, James Wood's "Shelf Life" column on his father-in-law's library:

And in this way, I began to think, our libraries perhaps say nothing very particular about us at all.  Each brick in the wall of a library is a borrowed brick: several thousand people, perhaps several hundred thousand, own books by F.E. Peters.  If I were led into Edmund Wilson’s library in Talcotville, would I know that it was Edmund Wilson’s library, and not Alfred Kazin’s or F.W. Dupee’s?  We tend to venerate libraries once we know whose they are, like admiring a famous philosopher’s eyes or a ballet dancer’s foot.  Pushkin had about a thousand non-Russian books in his library, and the editor of “Pushkin on Literature” helpfully lists all those foreign books, from Balzac and Stendahl to Shakespeare and Voltaire.  She confidently announces that “much can be learnt of a man from his choice of books,” and then unwittingly contradicts herself by adding that Pushkin, like many other Russians of his class, read mostly in French: “The ancient classics, the Bible, Dante, Machiavelli, Luther, Shakespeare, Leibnitz, Byron … all are predominantly in French.”  This sounds like the library of an extremely well-read Russian gentleman, circa 1830 – the kind of reading that Pushkin gave to this standard-issue Russian romantic, Eugene Onegin.  But what is especially Pushkinian about the library?  What does it tell us about his mind?

Most Americans, if they think of Somalia at all, know it only from Black Hawk Down, the 2001 film adaptation of Mark Bowden's 1999 account of the bloody Battle of Mogadishu. Tragic though those events were, they represent a mere sliver of the decades of internal strife that have left Somalia one of the poorest and most violent countries in the world. Moving from Communist rule to dictatorship to civil war, there has been no functioning central government for twenty years. Warlords and clan factions have given way to militant Islam, and pirates terrorize the coastal waters. "That unfortunate country, cursed with those dreadful clanspeople, forever killing one another and everyone around them," is the bleak précis offered by one of Nuruddin Farah's characters. It's to this unpromisingly harrowing milieu that Farah has tirelessly devoted himself for eleven novels that paint a more nuanced picture of the country's woes than one is likely to find on CNN.

He looked at me from across the table, realizing that I hadn’t yet known (he thought he’d told me already); and he said, “I’ve shocked you.” I remember mumbling something non-committal but before I could absorb the news, Steven began talking with his familiar enthusiasm about how he was confident of his chances of beating it, that he was healthy, his t-cell count was good, that he was going to beat it. I nodded and was supportive but later that day in my journal, I wrote one sentence: “Steven is going to die.”

The great Norman Rush is making an altogther too rare appearance in the L.A. area, where he will be in conversation with Mona Simpson at the Hammer on Tuesday evening.  It's the first time that I am cursing the fact that I teach that evening, and I'm tempted to shuttle my Novel III students over to the event.  

For those of you who don't know Rush's work, you can read what James Wood has to say about the superb novel Mortals here.  To wit:

In the way of all powerfully narrated first-person monologues, Mating occasionally breeds in the reader the desire to escape the constant intensity and interest of the language, as houseguests sometimes want to escape their over-vivid hosts. It is the price that the writer pays for the immediacy of first-person access. Mortals is told in the conventional third person, so that it distributes its effects more spaciously and calmly, as is proper for such a massive work. But Rush has not lost his interest in spoken language; indeed, he has intensified his study, at once funny and brilliant, of what happens to language when brainy Americans get mixed up with it. Mortals is many things, and does many things beautifully, but its central achievement has to be the fidelity with which it represents consciousness, the way in which it tracks the mind's own language. This concern with the insides of our minds makes Rush almost an original in contemporary American writing.

You can also read Rush's Paris Review interview here, in which he says:

It’s a rare reader who doesn’t go to the novel looking for a kind of encouragement to live. No doubt this is because the novel is the rude pretender who stepped into the place of that long-reigning narrative, the religious bedtime story, which, before Darwin and Lyell and those guys, was the only narrative in town. As I write a novel, I’m aware that I’m struggling against the “obligation” to solace. But I want my books to reach only the conclusions that are implicit in the trajectories of their characters. As it happens, bothMating and Mortals have sad outcomes—but optimistic codas. So sue me.

A related question is, when should novels end? I must love big novels, because that’s what I’ve written. It takes a while before you begin to breathe the air the characters breathe. I also like long exchanges, because plots so often turn on nuances in the ways characters understand each other. In moments of madness, I’ve had the fantasy of simultaneously publishing my novels in two versions, Regular and Jumbo. In the book I’m working on now, though, I’m trying to keep everything shorter: shorter scenes, fewer plots, general brevity. But a shorter novel goes against some of my deepest instincts. Dostoyevsky died still intending to write another volume of The Brothers Karamazov. It’s like a knife in my heart that he didn’t.

Go.  Drink it all in.  Send me dispatches.  The details are all here.

UPDATE:  Well, it all works out in the end - I will, in fact, be taking my students tonight.  And the Los Angeles Review of Books posted this fine appreciation yesterday.

Geoff Dyer, an essayist as idiosyncratic and perceptive as Wallace but far more economical, confessed recently in Prospect magazine that he “break[s] out in a mental rash” when forced to read Wallace. “It’s not that I dislike the extravagance, the excess, the beanie-baroque, the phat loquacity,” Dyer wrote. “They just bug the crap out of me. ” Wallace’s nonfiction abounds with qualifiers like “sort of” and “pretty much” and sincerity-infusers like “really.” An icon of porn publishing described in the essay “Big Red Son,” for example, is “hard not to sort of almost actually like.” Within a brief excerpt from that piece in The New York Times Book Review, Wallace speaks of “the whole cynical postmodern deal” and “the whole mainstream celebrity culture,” and concludes that “the whole thing sucks.” Nor is this an unrepresentative sample; “whole” appears 20 times in the essay, so frequently that it begins to seem not just sloppy and imprecise but argumentatively, even aggressively, disingenuous. At their worst these verbal tics make it impossible to evaluate his analysis; I’m constantly wishing he would either choose a more straightforward way to limit his contentions or fully commit to one of them.

Still, I will continue to try and grapple with DFW.  His shadow is too long to ignore.  I am not done yet.  

My latest conundrum came yesterday as I struggled over what to do with my series of New York Review titles.  It's one of several wonderful series I keep, including others from Hesperus, Penguin and Canongate.  If I were truly anal retentive, I suppose I would place each book where it belongs alphabetically.  Zweig's Beware of Pity would go with the rest of my Zweig.  But I confess a fondness for the look of those beautifully designed books all lined up so neatly on my shelves, and so I made one decision based on aesthetics alone and kept them together.  I also have a near photographic memory for the books I own, so I'm confident, for example, that I won't forget that my copy of Simenon's Tropic Moon will be found amid its NYRB brethren.

I anticipate the opprobrium of the purists.  Lord knows, I feel it myself ... 

RB: Do the Banville books get more rigorous editing?

JB: No, the Banville books are not edited at all.

RB: Who, ostensibly, is your editor? Sonny Mehta?

JB: Yeah. He would make some suggestions, which I would take or leave. I’ve been working two to five years on this thing. There is nothing that anybody can tell me about it that I don’t already know.

RB: You’re honest with yourself?

JB: Of course. You couldn’t write if you weren’t honest. That’s what makes art so valuable. No matter how dreadful the person, the art is always honest. Art can’t be made dishonestly. It just can’t. I mean, you can do it but it will be bad art.

The latest Black, A Death in Summer, is right here on my desk, but it's queued up behind a few others. It's been a bit of a late summer reading binge around here, about which more presently. 

At 1:30 I will be participating in Making it to "The End": Story Staying Power for Novelists and at 2:20 I will be part of the Getting Your Fiction Published panel.  Since I've already got a number of students who have successfully finished drafts, I'd say my thoughts on the former are worth hearing out.  I'm a bit less enthused about the second panel, in that my feeling - grotesquely oversimplified - is that if you are thinking about getting your work published, you're thinking about the wrong thing.  I tell my students time and again that the only thing any of them need to be thinking about is writing the best possible manuscript. Period.  I'll say as much on Sunday.

If you can't make it in person, UCLA does plan to stream things this year.  And I will be noodling around in the morning, taking in a few other panels, including my friend, author and fellow instructor Darcy Cosper who will be talking about Writing Your First Novel (11 am) and Writing With A Day Job (11:50 am).  There will also be great exhibitors including the Writers Junction and 826LA, so do come out for a fine literary Sunday at UCLA.  It's all free.  Hope to see you there.

The possibilities have never been greater, but that doesn't make it easier. E-books do involve lower costs, but only in manufacturing and distribution. Publishing is also about finding new talent, rigorous editing, championing the books you believe in, and all that doesn't just disappear with digital books.

To keep my mind off the temptation to weep uncontrollably, I asked myself which book would make the most fitting final purchase. The buzzards had long since started circling, so the remaining books were already huddling toward the middle shelves, hemmed in by vacant plywood on all sides. When I hit Mark Sarvas up for a suggestion, that sly blogger at the Elegant Variation — with unnerving speed, as if he'd already somehow had the question leaked to him — pointed discreetly toward a copy of Philip Roth's The Dying Animal. Then he resumed fulminating darkly about the evening's events: "Where were all these people six months ago?"

I'm still fulminating darkly, too angry to put down my own thoughts about the closing.  Everything I have to say will likely get me kicked out of my neighborhood.  So you have Kipen's frankly superior musings in my place.  Check them out.  And for those wondering, my final purchases at Village Books were At Swim-Two-Birds, Pictures from an Institution, The Lonely Passion of Judth Hearne and Kate Christensen's latest, The Astral.

Friday, August 12, 2011
7pm-2am
at The Writers Junction
1001 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica 90401
Tickets $8 here

Or roll the dice at the door for your admission price – literally.

 Revisit last year’s wildly popular 24-hour literary marathon with new & returning stars.  This event will feature some of the literary, entertainment, & music world's best & brightest including:

 -Inside The Writer's Room: A Panel – get the inside scoop on a television writers room with showrunners & staff writers including: Liz Tigelaar (LIFE UNEXPECTED, ONCE UPON A TIME), Bruce Miller (EUREKA, MEDIUM), Deirdre Shaw (LIFE UNEXPECTED, JANE BY DESIGN) & more!

-Neal Brennan* co-creator of Comedy Central's CHAPPELLE'S SHOW

-Jillian Lauren author of Some Girls: My Life in a Harem

-Drew Droege comedian & 2010 Outfest Award for Emerging Talent

-Brad Listi author of Attention. Deficit. Disorder

-Mark Sarvas* author of Harry, Revised

-Mark Rizzo* TV/film writer & storytelling veteran

-Ben Weber* actor, writer, Geico Caveman

-Ashaki Jackson* poet

-And many more special guests!

Performances will be going for 7 (not 24!) hours straight, as will the food, drinks, & revelry.  There will be a silent auction, giveaways, & you can check out the amazing workspace that is The Writers Junction.  We will donate a portion of the evening's proceeds to The Young Storytellers Foundation. 

* denotes Writers Junction member

I know, right?  Wow. Astonishingly entertaining. And, apparently, he's here in L.A. for local readers to check out (though three and a half minutes does seem the perfect length for this sort of thing.) Via.