Guinness Lit

 

I’ve written about bathroom lit and comfort lit, but now, in honor of Saint Patrick’s Day, it’s only natural that I discuss one of my favourite topics: Guinness Lit (actually, a subgenre of the latter category), aka the kind of book that goes well with a pint of “the black stuff” and will get you in the mood to celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day in high literary style. For example, I began declaiming Yeats’ poem “Easter 1916″ this morning, while G. read me some of her favourite play, Translations, by Brian Friel. It was awesome. Oh, and she wants me to make my Irish culinary specialty, soda bread. 

Ireland has one of the most impressive literary traditions in the world: it has produced no less than four Nobel Prize laureates (can you name them all?*) and many of the most important writers of the last 300 years, such as Jonathan Swift, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, J.M. Synge, James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Sean O’Faolain William Trevor, John Banville, Anne Enright, and Colm Tóibín… Not bad for a small island with a population of under 7 million (the Republic has 4.5).

Four years ago, when I had just turned eighteen, I went backpacking around the Emerald Isle for a month and fell deeply in love with it. What struck me about Dublin, especially, was how steeped it was in its rich literary history. I spent nearly all my time there visiting places related to famous Irish books and writers: the Dublin Writer’s Museum, the National Library (with its stunning exhibit on Yeats), the Abbey Theatre, the Chester Beatty Library, the Marsh Library, the Book of Kells and Long Room in Trinity College. I also went on a literary pub crawl and visited countless bookshops—Catach Books and the Winding Stair probably being my top two. Even the Gravity Bar, at the very top of the pint-shaped Guinness Storehouse, features glass walls with quotes from Irish texts describing different parts of Dublin. I love one on Trinity College, from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “The grey block of Trinity on his left, set heavily in the city’s ignorance like a dull stone set in a cumbrous ring…” New to the world of Irish letters, charmed by what I discovered, I soaked all of this in and bought myself a copy of Ulysses in the James Joyce Cultural Center (they’re behind the Bloomsday celebrations that occur every June). For the rest of my trip, I plodded through the book’s labyrinthian beauty (I got about halfway through, and understood maybe half of that).

The Statue of James Joyce, just off O'Connell Stree, in Dublin

Inside The Winding Stair bookshop.

Really, there is no better way to celebrate Irish culture on Saint Patrick’s than by reading something Irish. I personally suggest a short story (although I must admit I’m biased because that’s what I’m writing my undergraduate thesis on, so my head is filled with them); the form is often recognized as a particular speciality of Irish writers (critics believe this is because short stories tap into the rich tradition of gaelic oral tales). Irish short stories are still very much appreciated—as attested, for instance, by the publication of the Granta Book of the Irish Short Story last year. Suggestions? Frank O’Connor remains the master for me; he writes moving and simple portraits of Irishmen and women. Try “The Cornet Player Who Betrayed Ireland” and “Guests of the Nation” (you’ll find them both in the Penguin mini modern classics series), which explore the human implications of politics. My favourite of O’Connor’s remains “My First Protestant,” about a man’s disillusionment concerning religion and Catholic-Protestant strife.  There are lots of other great Irish short story writers. Joyce’s “The Dead” is a classic, as is Elizabeth Bowen’s “Summer Night” and Sean O’Faolain’s “Midsummer Night Madness,” although my favourite of his is “The Lovers of the Lake,” about two headstrong middle-aged lovers who discover the depth of their relationship by doing a pilgrimage to Lough Derry. For something more modern, check out Colm Tóibín’s “A Priest in the Family” (from his collection Mothers and Sons), a pitch-perfect story about a case of Catholic sex abuse, from the point of view of the mother.

What Guinness lit are you going to pick up today?

*W.B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, and Seamus Heaney.

International Women’s Day (in Books)

Alice Munro

It’s International Women’s Day, and some ripples can be felt in the literary world as, for instance, the longlist for the Orange Prize for Fiction (the only literary prize judged by women that considers novels written exclusively by women) has been unveiled today. This year’s list presents the usual wide array of nationalities and genres, with a preponderance of historical fiction (although that seems to be something of a trend in prize nominations these days).

I think this day is a great opportunity to give female writers some love, so I wanted to share my thoughts on three women writers I adore. The first is Alice Munro, a Canadian short story writer whom I constantly mention on Twitter and who’s been a very important inspiration for me. Munro is a very wise and very humble writer, who continues to produce excellent stories with a remarkable consistency. If you don’t know much about her, I would recommend that you buy her Best Stories volume, but also that you check out this article her friend and fellow Canadian Margaret Atwood wrote about her in The Guardian.

Diana Athill

I’ve also written before about my second subject, the British editor and writer Diana Athill, whose memoirs remain among the most funny and moving books I have ever read. In her volumes of memoir Athill offers a true master class in writing, and also an honest portrayal of her life as a woman. I haven’t read her latest book, Instead of a Book (the title is a nod to her first book of memoirs, Instead of a Letter), which is a selection of letters she sent to the American poet Edward Fields over the span of 30 years, but I mean to pick it up very soon.

As for my third pick, I consider her one of the great underread writers of the 20th century: Elizabeth Bowen. Bowen wrote a large number of exquisite novels from the 1920s to the 1960s, and many of them are masterpieces of authorial voice and human psychology. I’d never heard of her before university but she now ranks among my favorite writers. In fact, I like to think that if I were to complete a PhD thesis (which I won’t), I would write it on Bowen because I believe her prose can undergo rigorous examination and study and still remain beautiful.

Elizabeth Bowen

These three women have written about many things and many kinds of people, but where they excel is in their portrayal of women in all stages of life. They write about bright-eyed, perspicacious girls who peer into the world of adults and feel it’s sharp sting—like Athill, humiliated in front of the stable-boy whom she is in love with as a girl in Yesterday Morning. They write about disillusioned young women who take their fates into their own hands, like the female protagonists in Bowen’s To the North. They write about middle-aged women who recognize their faults and rebel against those who would constrain them—Munro’s women are nieces (“Connections”), daughters (“The Moons of Jupiter”), wives (“The Bear Came Over the Mountain”), lovers (“Corrie”), and  mothers (“Deep Holes”) in this situation, for better or for worse. The write about quirky, charming, resolved old women, which they have themselves become (or, in Bowen’s case, became before she died in 1973). Here are three truly first-rate writers. 

So, which are female writer are you going to pick up and celebrate today? 

Reviewing Reviews

In this age of proliferation for both literary prizes and book reviews, it was only a matter of time before a prize would be awarded to the best book reviews of the year. This prize now exists: created by the website Omnivore.com, which recycles culture reviews from newspaper and magazine websites, The Hatchet Job of the Year Award is meant to celebrate “the angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review of the past twelve months”. The idea is that, with the decline of newspaper readership in favor of tweets, blogs, and reader reviews on sites like Amazon, the very important job of the true book critic must be honored in some way. The need to praise real, thought-out book reviewing is especially important since newspapers have begun to imitate the web-model themselves in recent years by publishing short, hip book reviews that are more like blurbs or ads than actual content. The truth is, newspapers and magazine should continue offering with pride what anyone with access to the internet can’t do: professional, objective reviews that evaluate books thoroughly, put them into context, and draw comparisons with others works. Because they have the resources, newspapers can provide this kind of in-depth analysis for every review they publish. Then, it’s the reviewers job to keep the standards high and offer something more than a plot summary and a bit of recycled pros and cons. Maybe this prize will help book critics achieve the recognition they deserve

I am becoming increasingly aware of the difference between run of the mill reviews and in-depth, meaty analyses. Often, really good reviews won’t even tell you if the book is bad or good. True reviews are not only there to tell if you should buy the book or not; they’re supposed to draw in material from the outside to help understand how specific books are to be appraised, and then pick at the smallest details to assess their intrinsic qualities. A good example are the amazing pieces over at the New York Review of Books. These are lengthy, in-depth reviews of books that are really essays about the books and the authors who wrote them. Recent excellent examples are the review of Joan Didion’s latest memoir Blue Nights and the phenomenal essay Julian Barnes wrote on Joyce Carol Oates’ own memoir A Widow’s Story.

It’s unfair, however, to say that you can’t get good content on social media. Sometimes, they do provide close contact with really brilliant literary thinkers. I’m thinking of people like Charles May, who, for quite some time now (by internet standards), has been producing consistently  insightful work on his blog, Reading the Short Story. May is an academic who has specialized on the form of the short story; his blog is a collection of his thoughts about books, reviews of contemporary and older short stories, and responses to comments and questions about the form. It’s a very interesting project, and a trustworthy source about authors and books who are worth reading; nowhere else on the internet will you find a lengthy review of a single short story by Alice Munro. 

Among the nominees for the Hatchet Job of the Year (see the shortlist here) are the wonderful classicist Mary Beard, for a Guardian review of Rome, by Robert Hughes, in which she spotted dozens of unacceptable and frustrating mistakes in the chapters about the city’s ancient history (high school level stuff, like confusing CE and BCE, apparently). Mary Beard has declared on her blog that she is not expecting to win the prize. For her, the review she wrote on Hughe’s book was simply part of her job. Reviewers, she writes, should act as “gate-keepers”, lest a book’s success depend entirely on “the size of its publicity budget and the enthusiasm of its publishers’ tweets”. In fact, Mary Beard is a little bit alarmed, because she fears that her review of the book may have been lauded above all others because these other reviewers may have either omitted to mention the erroneous material, or else failed to see it entirely—two “ghastly” prospects. Words of wisdom from a truly admirable woman (as a side note, I saw Mary Beard host the “ancient booker” event at the Cheltenham literary festival last year—she was great). If she wins, she will have gotten herself a year’s supply of potted shrimp. 

Barnes Gets his Booker

 

 

 

 

And the winner is... Photo courtesy of telegraph.co.uk

The first few weeks of October are always an exciting time because of two very important announcements, which are made around this time every year: the laureate for the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the winner of the Man Booker Prize. While these two announcements are a big deal in the book world, and generate a lot of critical and journalistic content, there really is little reason for me to get that excited. Every year, I feel increasingly bored by the Booker’s shortlist, and while I’ve read a handful of past winners (sometimes, almost exclusively because they had won), I just don’t feel as compelled as I once did to read them, or even to go out and buy the most recent winner. It seems to me a lot of Booker-winning books end up loosing some resonance after some years. I mean, we still talk about some of the past winners like Margaret Atwood, John Banville, and Yann Martel; but what about Vernon God Little’s 2003-winner DBC Pierre (the shortlist that year included Oryx and Crake and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane) or Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road (1995)? Not to mention the winners in the 70s and 80s, almost all of which I’ve never heard of. As for the Nobel, well, ever since I started getting excited for that prize, circa 2007, I’d never heard of the writers who won it before the announcement itself — and only after Doris Lessing’s victory did I go out and buy one of her books (it was The Cleft, I wasn’t disappointed). That says a lot either about the Swedish academy’s knack for picking obscure geniuses, or else my own ignorance of writers outside the popular circuits. Either way, it’s a known fact that there’s a disconnect between what authors people are reading and talking about (at least in the English-speaking world), and what authors the Swedish academy are reading and talking about — which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. This year, the winner is the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, on the grounds that “through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality.” On the Nobel Prize’s website, they have house poll that asks you if you’ve read him or not. 82% of the people who answered the poll haven’t. Still, I’m quite happy with the win, especially because it’s apparently been expected for a long time. Every year journalists would go to Tranströmer’s apartment building on the morning of the announcement in case he won the Nobel the world’s biggest literary prize. The poet’s wife would bring them tea and biscuits. Every year, they left disappointed; someone else won the Nobel. This year, there efforts — and, more importantly, Tranströmer’s efforts — were rewarded. 

But back to the Booker, which is our main subject today. It’s become quite controversial this year, and it’s even spurred the creation of a new (as yet unfunded and unnamed) prize, in order to fill the gap left behind by the Booker’s interest in “readability,” the most loaded term in the book world these days, and the one this year’s panel has decided to put at the forefront of their judging criteria. The debate between literary and commercial fiction is hot stuff these days, but it must be remembered that the Booker Prize has always sought to recompense books somewhere between the high and mid-brow.

In this context, Julian Barnes’ victory for his short novel (more of a novella, really) The Sense of an Ending surprised and pleased many. Barnes — white, male, sixty-something, of the McEwan-Amis-Rushdie generation — represents the establishment in British letters, but also a bit of a black sheep on the grounds of his experimentalism with form and his continental outlook. Moreover, this was his fourth Booker in nomination, and critics seem to agree that his book was by far the best on the shortlist. So the literary seems to have won over readability in the end, whatever that means. 

An added bonus: I think The Sense of an Ending also has the most beautiful cover out of all the books on the Booker shortlist.

Although I’ve — shamefully — never read anything by Barnes myself, I must say I’m quite pleased with his victory. I’ve been interested in him from afar for some time, and I think he really is an important and extremely intelligent writer. His short story “Sleeping with John Updike”, published in The Guardian a couple of years ago, is very well done, and his 2000 Art of Fiction interview with The Paris Review, which has a lot to do with France and French Literature (Barnes is an inveterate francophile and one of the most popular British writers in France). I was also very much impressed by a masterful review Barnes wrote last year for Lydia Davis’ new translation of Madame Bovary (a book Barnes admires, and calls “the first great shopping and fucking novel”), in which he shows of his shrewdness as critic, translator, and essayist: 

So we might fantasise the translator of our dreams: someone, naturally, who admires the novel and its author, and who sympathises with its heroine; a woman, perhaps, to help us better navigate the sexual politics of the time; someone with excellent French and better English, perhaps with a little experience of translating in the opposite direction as well. Then we make a key decision: should this translator be ancient or modern? Flaubert’s contemporary, or ours? After a little thought, we might plump for an Englishwoman of Flaubert’s time, whose prose would inevitably be free of anachronism or other style-jarringness. And if she was of the time, then might we not reasonably imagine the author helping her? Let’s push it further: the translator not only knows the author, but lives in his house, able to observe his spoken as well as his written French. They might work side by side on the text for as long as it takes. And now let’s push it to the limit: the female English translator might become the Frenchman’s lover – they always say that the best way to learn a language is through pillow talk.

Barnes, obviously, is an astute thinker, a skillful writer, and a witty person. His Booker is well-deserved, and The Sense of an Ending will certainly end up with my name on it under the Christmas tree this year. Hopefully by then I’ll have picked up some of his other books. 

Follow the Owl

The owls have assembled and J.K. Rowling's big announcement has finally been released!

I know the internet is echoing with this news, but it’s a big deal for a lot of people (and especially people of my generation who’ve grown up with Harry & company) so it felt wrong to just pretend it never happened. A couple of weeks ago a blank web page containing the words “Pottermore: Coming Soon” and J.K. Rowling’s signature was launched. The page linked to a video on YouTube with a countdown leading to yesterday, July 22, noon (British Time), when Rowling would make a big announcement to the world. Speculation as to what would be announced abounded, although it was clear a new book in the Harry Potter series was out of the question. It had to be either some kind of website that would enrich the experience of the Harry Potter world, or else the release of the e-books of the Harry Potter series. Yesterday, at noon, I was on YouTube with (I’m guessing) hundreds of thousands of other people to find out what the announcement would reveal…

…and it turned out to be both of those things. In the video, a slightly cold Rowling sitting on a brown leather sofa, which alternated with clever animations of a Harry Potter book being cut up into elegant shapes, announced that Pottermore will be “an online reading experience unlike any other”. What does that mean? It means the same story we know so well will be retold on the website, but Rowling emphasizes one crucial addition: “you”. That is, us: the readers. So Pottermore will be a kind of retelling of the stories, with added elements of participation, interaction, and sharing. It’s free, and the big plus is that J.K. Rowling will be participating in Pottermore herself, by adding material from the Harry Potter world that she’s been holding back for years. Sources online state that among these is a youthful romance between professor McGonagall and a muggle, as well as details as to how the Dursleys met. Enough to make any Potter fan pounce on the new product. In the press conference that accompanied the announcement, Rowling explained that Pottermore will start with the first book in the series, which will now be fully illustrated, and allow readers to enter into the story more fully by focusing on interactive moments, like shopping in Diagon Alley, mixing potions, and answering question to find out which house they belong to. If you get selected in Slytherin, Hufflepuff, or Ravenclaw, for instance, you’ll be privy to a new quarter of a chapter with information about these houses, because Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone only follows first year students into Gryffindor.

The other big news is that there will also be a store on Pottermore, which will be the exclusive place to buy digital audio books of Harry Potter and, more importantly, e-books of the series, which weren’t yet available. This is brilliant, of course, because it means Rowling is bypassing major e-book sellers like Amazon and Apple and keeping control of how this new version of her product will be distributed. According to The Guardian, her British publisher, Bloomsbury, will receive a share of the revenues from these sales, so she isn’t “self-publishing” these e-books, as it were. Pottermore will launch officially in October (for now the website only allows you to enter your e-mail address so you can be notified when registration opens) although the first million people to register on July 31 (both Harry Potter and Rowling’s birthdate) will be given early access and the ability to “help shape the experience”.

Reactions online have been mainly positive, although of course there’s been some amount of ridiculous comments about Rowling is simply trying to make more money. The Guardian‘s Sam Jordison notes how “Rowling and her marketing team have left the rest of the publishing world standing while she blazes a trail into the record books”. The simplicity and force of the marketing surrounding Pottermore’s launch is brilliant, of course; the message in Rowling is communicating is all about giving back to her readership. The New York Times‘s arts blog chose to focus on the sale of e-books on Pottermore, stating that illegal downloads of the Harry Potter books have “frustrated Ms. Rowling and her publishers for years”. The website The Leaky Cauldron, which was been at the forefront of Harry Potter headlines for years, has a gallery with preview screenshots from Pottermore (I’ve put one at the bottom of the page) — it looks very beautiful.

Altogether, J.K. Rowling’s new project is good news both for her, for Harry Potter, and for the development of creative new ways to disseminate books in general. When I was a bookseller, I found it was increasingly difficult to get kids (especially boys) to read the Harry Potter books, because the hype around the books themselves died down rather quickly after the final installment came out. Moreover, these kids had all seen the movies (and even the first movies are getting old, by now), so they didn’t see any interest in reading the books. Now, Rowling is allowing her books to reach a new generation of readers by making the world she created evolve with new technologies which are clearly here to stay. Yes, Pottermore is a brilliantly orchestrated marketing scheme that will generate loads of cash, but it’s also opening up the Harry Potter world to new possibilities, within respective boundaries put in place by the only person who can decide what to do and what not do with it: Rowling herself. You can be certain I will be joining in the fun!

MULTIPLE SOLITUDES Part 3: Literary v. Commercial Fiction

Author Jodi Picoult, photographed with multiple copies of her own novels — bridging the divide between commercial and literary fiction?

A few weeks ago, in a video interview at guardian.co.uk/books, bestselling American author Jodi Picoult made a comment about “the very artificial schism between literary and commercial fiction”. According to her, “commercial fiction writers get money poured into their books for advertising and marketing, literary writers do not. Commercial writers get a much wider print run and reach more people, literary writers do not. Literary writers win prizes and get highly literary reviews, and commercial writers do not.” Interestingly, Picoult adds that whether books and their authors go down the road of literary or commercial fiction does not depend on inherent qualities; rather, these authors sit down with their publishers and decide which way they’re going to go. They choose to be literary writers or commercial writers, and after that it’s all a question of marketing. Picoult, apparently, was first featured as a literary fiction writer, and then made the conscious decision of becoming a commercial novelist because she wanted “to reach as many people as possible”. Her latest book, Sing You Home, debuted at #1 on the New York Times print & e-book list when it came out last March; it was the fifth of her books to do so.

I’ve often wondered why so many books that are intense, interesting, and well-written get good reviews but fail to reach a large audience, while others, which are clearly generic and poorly written, sell so abundantly. I suppose it has to do with the readership. That’s where the divide lies; not everyone reads for the same reasons. I like a good plot once in a while, but (to use a mediocre roller coaster metaphor) for me the thrill of the ride itself is secondary to the characters I get to share it with, the beauty of the view, the strengths and subtleties of the structure. I guess the majority of readers are just looking for the cheap thrills only a blockbuster can provide, all plot and so little content: literature that turns the reader on but doesn’t demand anything in return. It may all boil down to what kind of reader you are. I remember an interview with Alice Munro from a few years ago in which she explained that the people who lived in her small Canadian town felt obliged to read her books because there was a writer among them, although most of them didn’t really like the books because they weren’t used to reading stories that put complex characters and fine writing — not plot — in the foreground.

Is is true, then, that the difference is merely a commercial one? Jodi Picoult may say she pours a lot of time and energy intro crafting her prose, but can she really be compared to high-brow authors, the likes of which win prizes like the Booker, the Pulitzer, and the Nobel? And besides, there are many authors who are difficult to categorize between the commercial and literary. Think of Carlos Ruiz Zafon, whose popular The Shadow of the Wind is not quite high-brow material, but is certainly a step further up the literary scale than Dan Brown. Picoult herself is an author who exists between both landscapes, reaching out from the commercial into the more literary side — her novels certainly qualify higher than other writers with which she shares the bestseller list, she says so herself — while people like Ian McEwan or Jonathan Franzen bridge the same gap the other way round. McEwan’s last novel Solar, for instance, got enormous adverts in the London Underground, and he’s become a household name after the bestselling Atonement and Saturday. Yet, McEwan is a literary author, there’s no doubt about; his writing is intelligent and free of clichés, his stories are intricate, and he has won (and will not doubt continue to be nominated for) prizes like the Man Booker and the NBCC award.

There’s also the question of academic interest. People are already writing articles and books and dissertations on Philip Roth, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Margaret Atwood. I seriously doubt Picoult will be getting that kind of scholarly attention anytime soon. That’s not a bad thing, however; having critics dissect your works does not necessarily have to be every writer’s aim, it’s not the pinnacle of a writer’s achievement. Picoult writes books that a certain readership is interested in, she reaches an immense audience, she receives lots of attention from the media, and she’s able to write about really interesting moral issues like gay rights and high school shootings. In other words, she’s really good at writing the kind of books she wants to write, and it just so happens that people really want to buy them. The best literary authors are really good at writing the type of books that are a more demanding for readers, that usually (but not always) take more time to write, and that have the possibility of lasting as classics on the literary landscapes. They also tend to sell in not so enormous numbers. Writers like David Mitchell, Salman Rushdie, and Marylinne Robinson are really good at writing these books, but it doesn’t mean their books are necessarily better. They just cater for a different audience.

I found this quote by the modernist poet Ezra Pound last week in the Advice to Writers daily quotes: “The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention.” I think it illustrates the discourse we’re used to hearing about the attitude of literary writers toward commercial fiction. There’s an opposite discourse as well: Lee Child famously declared to the BBC that it would be easy for “popular writers” to write LitFic. While this is untrue, I don’t necessarily believe many literary writers would be good at commercial thrillers or vampire romances either. The truth is there are lots of terrible books getting published within literary fiction, just like there are lots of terrible commercial books that get published, even by the standards of that market (the problem is that even awful books sell if they’re well advertised). The distinction, like so many other things in life, should not be vertical — one type of book is not necessarily better or worse than the other — but horizontal, whereby the goal is simply to please the readers in different ways.

MULTIPLE SOLITUDES Part 2: Genre & LitFic

China Miéville: Redefining genre fiction. Or maybe just writing damn good stories.

There was an excellent interview with China Miéville, the cult fantasy writer,  in The Guardian couple of weeks ago. The article made quite a big deal of important prejudices against genre fiction, as well as the dangers of genres remaining too insular. I’ve become increasingly aware of this issue in the last few years, partly because I don’t read much so-called genre fiction myself, and also since great things must be happening there too. And there are great things going on, there’s no doubt about it — but are there enough people aware of that? For instance, why did Granta mention Miéville in its 2003 Best of Young British Novelists issue, but not include some of his work? Why do the London Review of Books or the New York Review of Books never review or mention fantasy or sci-fi books that are just as good as (and, I’m guessing, often better than)  ”mainstream” literary fiction? As Ursula K. Le Guin, the empress of fantasy and sci-fi, would have it: “When he [Miéville] wins the Booker, the whole silly hierarchy will collapse, and literature will be much the better for it.”

But why do genre authors need this kind of recognition? They have their own journals, they have their own prizes (the Nebula, the Arthur C. Clarke award, the Hugo… Miéville has won all of them) Doesn’t that suffice? Are the members of the high brow literati rejecting genre writers on purpose, or are they just trying to cater for another kind of audience? Miéville and other “weird” fiction writers are trying to bring the genre in which they operate somewhere else, in an effort to remove themselves from the cliché of classic orcs-and-goblins fantasy fiction of Tolkien fame. They’re bringing fantasy fiction out of the box, but seeing the criticism the Man Booker Prize has been receiving and the kinds of books that have won it in the past few years, I’m not sure it’s a good thing for these writers to be swimming towards that particular literary establishment. They’re better off letting themselves drift off to more hospitable shores.

Is it useful at all, then, to have genres? Wouldn’t we better off having a giant “fiction” section, encompassing everything from inter-galactic monsters to bodice-ripping highlanders? Let the readers decide among them, so they won’t shy away from books with dragons or cyborgs that they might actually enjoy. The “Literary” sections of bookstores already encompass so many different kinds of books, would it be that much of a stretch? Let’s remember that Margaret Atwood controversially refuses to label her “futuristic” novels like The Handmaid’s Tale, and more recently Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Floor, as science-fiction. She prefers the term “speculative fiction”, because according to her, science-fiction entails “monsters and spaceships” whereas her stories “could really happen.” I wonder: would Oryx and Crake have been shortlisted for the Booker, had it been tagged as Science Fiction? I certainly hope so, but, alarmingly, I’m not a hundred per cent sure. But then, authors are also able to reinvent themselves and skip between genres. Think of Dan Simmons, who has melded poetry and extremely literary content with science fiction elements in his Hyperion Cantos and Ilium series, but has recently delved in the realm of literary horror with novels like The Terror (the story of the Franklin expedition, with a monster), and Drood (a retelling of Dicken’s last years).

The Miéville interview also raises the concept of Literary fiction as an increasingly problematic idea. LitFic, apparently, can be defined as a genre as well, with its own conventions (think Ian McEwan). The problem, according to Miéville, is that LitFic won’t admit to being a genre, and yet asserts its superiority over all other genres. There’s also a massive irony in LitFic being placed above fantasy writing, since the oldest forms of fiction, from Gilgamesh to Beowulf, all have fantastical elements. These kinds of stories are the origins of Western literature, but they’ve recently been relegated to the fringes of fiction. Similarly, the majority of young adult fiction published today combines elements of science-fiction, fantasy, and dystopias. Think Harry Potter, His Dark Materials, or The Hunger Games. But genre is something we grow out of, for some reason — according to Miéville, fantasy writers (and, I suppose, readers) just never do. Or maybe they just don’t get influenced into thinking less of it. The obsession with realism is a fallacy that has remained at the forefront of literary criticism for some time, but it is clearly obsolete as a standard to judge works of fiction.

Last year, Bill Morris wrote a convincing retrospective of Miéville’s work in The Millions. He talks about his own literary education as a reader of “High Brow Rot”, with very few “mainstream” or “genre” books slipping through the literary cracks. Then, Miéville came into Morris’ life, and with his mix of energetic story telling, vivid writing, and engaging worlds, he opened his eyes to whole new worlds. Morris writes: “By the time I finished reading Miéville’s novels I had come to understand that what matters most about fiction is not somebody else’s idea of what’s great, what’s good or, worse yet, what’s good for you. What matters is a writer’s ability to create a world that comes alive through its specifics and then leads us to universal truths. Miéville engages me with his writing because he is brilliant and because he cares about me as a reader, and this, I’ve come to see, is far more precious than a book’s classification, its author’s reputation, or the size of its audience.”

Reviewing all of these statements and what they tell us about the current literary landscape, the only conclusion I can come to is that writers should be praised and rewarded on the basis of good writing, not what they write about — be it time traveling aliens or realistic suburban women.

MULTIPLE SOLITUDES Part 1: Europeans & Americans

Roth v. Callil, USA v. Europe. Who said literature had gone all open and global? Photo credit: guardian.co.uk/books

Much literary dust has been shaken up in the last couple of weeks by several interesting statements and announcements, leaving behind, I have found, many issues hanging and questions unanswered. I initially wanted to write a short post about the issues that most interested me, but as my web-browser tabs became cluttered with more and more related material, I realized I was dealing with something a lot bigger. Here’s the first of a planned series of articles on the multitude of solitudes in the world of books and publishing:

Most recently, on Wednesday, Philip Roth won the Man Booker International Prize (which is awarded to a writer for his entire oeuvre, unlike its cousin the Man Booker, given to a single book). On the same day, one of the three judges on the panel, Carmen Callil (publisher, writer, critic, and founder of Virago Press, a women’s publishing house), withdrew from the judging panel on grounds that Roth was the only author on the whole shortlist (which included writers like Philip Pullman, Rohinton Mistry, Marilynne Robinson, and a reluctant John le Carré) whom she categorically couldn’t accept as a winner. In the article that broke the news of her withdrawal, she calls Philip Roth a case of “Emperor’s clothes” and asks: “In twenty years time, will anyone read him?” Callil’s decision has aroused the frustration of many. She defended her decisions by explaining that deciding the winner was a case of 2 against 1, and according to her “You can’t be asked to judge, and then not judge.”

What’s intriguing is that Roth certainly represents everything Callil is against in contemporary literature. He’s an American, a Jew, and a man; he’s aware of his talent and is open about wanting the Nobel; he writes about male American Jews who have quite a bit of sex. Rick Gekoski, the leader of the judging panel, praised Roth for his amazing trajectory, writing masterpieces 50 years apart. For Robert McCrum (columnist for The Guardian), there is no doubt that Roth is a master of American letters who deserves this prize, and many more (including the Nobel). McCrum also criticizes Callil for stealing the show and buttressing her opinion of Roth with hollow statements (he won’t be read in 20 years time, he writes the same book over and over again). While I do think Callil should’ve probably withdrawn before the winner was announced, I respect her decision because for her, I believe, it’s simply a case of morals and of staying true to her values. She refused to simply cave in to the other judges and say nothing, which is in some ways admirable. At first, I was afraid she’d done it out of feminist spite, digging a deep trench between the sexes: a judging panel made up of two men and a women give the prize to a male, the female judge withdraws — it gives the wrong impression. It turns out, as Callil declared in another interview with The Guardian, that feminism has nothing to do with her withdrawal, or her criticism of Roth, whom, she admits, has written wonderfully about women in some of his books. In her full statement, released yesterday, Callil rather explains her decision by criticizing the judging system itself (which should’ve allowed for a winner whom everyone is comfortable with), as well as calling attention to the lack of translated authors who have won the prize. She noted  that the winner should have “value to the rest of the word”, which she clearly finds Roth does not.

So here we have signs of the true divide: one between the US and, well, the rest of the world. The prize Roth has just been granted is an international one, which can be awarded to any author whose works are available in English. In the video Roth released after he was announced as winner, he speaks of the pleasures, as an author, of being read elsewhere, in translation. But remember that statement Horace Engdahl, who used to be permanent secretary of the Nobel Prize jury, made a few years ago about how the insularity of American fiction meant the Americans couldn’t win a Nobel Prize for literature anytime soon, on grounds that they didn’t read enough non-American literature and didn’t participate in an artistic dialogue with the rest of the world? That was back in 2008. It was Le Clézio, a Frenchman, who got the Nobel that year. If I’m not mistaken, there is currently only one living American Nobel laureate in literature (Toni Morrison). Anis Shivani, reacting to the Roth/Calill announcements this week, in conjunction with Engdahl’s frank criticisms of a few years ago, has written a slightly rambling article over at The Huffington Post in which he claims Roth, and all the other great Americans (Pynchon, DeLillo…) aren’t any closer to getting the Nobel. Why? Americans, Shivani claims, are good at quantity, not quality. They read American books about American lives. If they read about foreign experiences, they do it through Americans with foreign origins (a pattern we’ve seen recently with writers like Junot Díaz, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Téa Obreht). American novels are loud and obnoxious and insular; European novels are modest and unassuming and universal. Shivani’s point is valid, I think; and of course he can only say all of that because he’s American himself.

Reading this, I was reminded of a very insightful piece in the NYRB’s blog by Tim Parks, posted a couple of weeks ago, about two contemporary male writers who couldn’t be more different: the American literary rockstar Jonathan Franzen and the less known Swiss novelist Peter Stamm (who writes in German). The thrust of Parks argument is that where Stamm writes about universal human experiences in a prose so lean that a translation of his work in English doesn’t betray itself as a translation; Franzen, on the other hand, writes in American about America, and some of the things he mentions in his novels to make them more American (foosball, mechanized recliners) can’t even be translated in, say, Italian. Yet Freedom, Franzen’s latest novel (which got him on the cover of Time magazine with the title: “Great American Novelist”) has been massively popular in Europe. Why? According to Parks, because while the novel is defined by its exuberant Americanness, it does so with irony, and eventually rejects the vision of an all-powerful, all-perfect America. Franzen offers a bite-sized, “dysfunctional” version of America that Europeans can be comfortable with: “The more you know about America, which we need to do, the more you turn away from it, which we enjoy.” So for now, it seems, the only way for the US to bridge the gap with Europe is by presenting a carefully constructed version of itself, “warts and all”, while still dealing with inherently American issues, instead of dealing with broader, universal concerns. It’s a poor compromise.

Jonathan Franzen and Peter Stamm — two more solitudes. Photo credit: nybooks.com/blog

Back to our main concerns, however: Was Carmen Callil right in rejecting Roth so absolutely as a great, international novelist? Does Roth, or any other American writer, have a chance of winning the Nobel any time soon? Is there too great a divide between American and European fiction? Are we being too Euro-centric when we talk about “international” or “universal” fiction (after all, Engdahl did name Europe as the pole of literature in his 2008 statement, which is questionable)? Lots of issues here, lots of debates, lots of convincing arguments and counter-arguments — I’d love to know what you think!

Nothing but the Truth

A Widow's Story is the memoir Joyce Carol Oates wrote after losing her husband. What the book doesn't mention is that 13 months after her husband's death, Oates remarried. The question is: does it matter?

I should’ve mentioned Joyce Carol Oates in last week’s post about rapid book writing; Oates is well known — legendary, even — for her amazing productivity. Since the 1960s, she has published over 50 novels and 20 short story collections, and more than a dozen books non-fiction. And were talking about a serious, literary author (whatever that means), Oates doesn’t write trash; she has been nominated for and has won several highly respectable awards, like the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the O. Henry prize. In February 2008, Oates lost her husband of 47 years, Raymond Smith, who was an editor and publisher. Her last book, A Widow’s Story: A Memoir, details the months of acute pain and grieving she went through after her husband’s sudden death. The book was received tepidly by critics, and many of them latched on to a fact which they found immensely important: 11 months after Oates’ husband died, she was engaged to Charles Gross, a neuroscientist, whom she married in 2009. A Widow’s Story, published three years after her husband’s death, doesn’t mention her remarriage at all. 

In an illuminating article in The Millions, “Grief, the Cruel and Fickle Muse”, Bill Morris reviews A Widow’s Story by putting it into context with other so-called grief memoirs, like Joan Didion’s acclaimed A Year of Magical Thinking and Leonard (husband of Virginia) Woolf’s The Journey Not the Arrival Matters (his fifth volume of memoirs, which covers 1939 to 1969 — Virginia committed suicide in 1941). Morris remarks that the fact Oates doesn’t mention her remarriage in A Widow’s Story is a “major — and fatal — ommission.” He adds, a bit harshly, that Oates “has written the most dishonest kind of book there is – one that purports to serve up raw emotions but doesn’t have the discipline to stick to the facts or the honesty to reveal the most basic of truths.” In his review of Oates’ memoir for The New York Review of Books, ”For Sorrow There is Not Remedy”, Julian Barnes reaches a similar conclusion. He states that “there is something unhappy in the omission”. Barnes does not question Oates’s morals — if she is now happily married again, so be it —, he only suggests that “some readers will feel they have a good case for breach of narrative promise” in Oates’ selected, sanitized version of events.

JCO and her late husband, Raymond Smith, in 1972. Photo credits: Bernard Gotfryd, via Guardian.co.uk/books

Should knowing about Oates’ remarriage, something that isn’t included in the book, change the way we see and judge that book? I don’t have an answer to that question. The critics above, and some others, certainly think so. Joyce Carol Oates clearly thought not. She’s written in response of Barnes’ article, defending herself by explaining that A Widow’s Story “was not meant to be an autobiographical work, which would include many, many developments in the memoirist’s life subsequent to the early experience of widowhood, but rather an intimately detailed account of the raw, early weeks and months of ‘widowhood’”. Oates does not see her remarriage as relevant to a story that she wanted to be essentially about her intense experience of grief, because her new union having come to exist after the fact doesn’t change the intensity of that grief as it was being experienced. And yet, according to Bill Morris, Oates mentions in her memoir “that it took her a year and a half to erase her husband’s voice from their telephone answering machine”, by which time she was married to Charles Gross. Clearly, her book does leave the immediacy of experience and moves on to her (at least partial, as far as these things go) recovery. Oates’ has been a little bit naïve in thinking no one would make a remark about her omission, although perhaps she couldn’t foresee that critics would make such a big deal out of it.

The English world of letters probably has an issue with books that appear as memoirs but render only half-truths or blurred realities. James Frey was famously punished in public by Oprah, and all of her devotees, for having substantially exaggerated facts in his memoir of addiction A Million Little Pieces. The French, on the contrary, have made a veritable genre — auto-fiction — out of exaggerating their lives to make interesting books. Writers like Emmanuel Carrère and Catherine Millet do it all the time, except it’s written “récit“, not “autobiographie“, under the titles, and they get shelved with the novels. Memoirs, in English, are shelved with the biographies, are that means they’re non-fiction.

JCO and her new husband, Charles Gross. Photo credits: newyorksocialdiary.com

What Barnes calls “the narrative promise” is the pact that exists between writer and reader that whatever will be in the book is the truth, and nothing but the truth. But then, can the writer decide what is part of that truth? It’s her life, after all. It’s her memoir. She can recount events as she remembers them, as she wants to tell them, can’t she? It probably should be that way, but the rules of honesty and ownership are different in the world of publication. Readers like twists, and they like to know about things that may or may not be related directly with the content of what they’re reading. Does the fact that J. K. Rowling lost her mother, suffered from depression, and lived on welfare support  in the 90s change anything to the quality of the Harry Potter books? Probably not, but it certainly changes the way we understand the series within its broader context, and makes its success all the more impressive. 

Oates finishes her response to the NYRB with the following statement: “However, since nothing seems to arouse reproach in reviewers quite so much as the possibility that the memoirist is less miserable at the time of the writing and afterward than she was at the time of the experience about which she is writing, it is only sensible to include an appendix to remedy this, which I will hope to do.” It’s not an excuse or an assertive defense, only a half-hearted submission to the pressures of criticism. I don’t know if she’ll be doing the right thing in adding this “appendix” to subsequent editions, if she ever does, but she’ll certainly be doing what is expected of her. Unfortunately (or fortunately), that’s the way it works; writers remains slaves to their readers. 

Speed Writing

You need serious speed writing skills for this kind of sensation publishing...

If you thought Nora Roberts and James Patterson were productive writers (they both publish over four new books every year (granted, Patterson doesn’t really write them himself, but still)), think again. Following two events last weekend that grabbed the world’s attention — the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton (now the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge) on Friday, and the assassination of Osama bin Laden by the US military on Sunday — books related to these events are now being published in record time.

The book about the SEAL unit that killed bin Laden is actually more of a lucky opportunity for the author and publisher than a planned commercial tactic. The book, SEAL Team Six: Memoirs of an Elite Navy SEAL Sniper, by Howard E. Wasdin, was scheduled for publication at the end of may. Following the death of Osama bin Laden, Publishers Weekly announced on Monday that the book’s publication would be rushed and should be widely available in the US by the middle of next week. Of course, the book won’t deal directly with the assassination that has spurred such interest in the special counter-terrorism unit, but it should give an interesting insight to those who are interested about life as a SEAL Team Six sailor. The media attention that focused on Bin Laden’s assassination was not always of very good taste, but it was a godsend for the publishers of this memoir. I don’t think many of us realized what “SEAL Team Six” was before we read about it Monday morning. According to The Guardian, the book moved up to 29th place on Amazon’s sales chart on Tuesday, from bellow 4,000 before bin Laden’s death was announced.

The cover for SEAL Team Six employs the bright, block-lettered patriotism common to books on the US military.

Royal wedding enthusiasts have had an even shorter wait for a book about Will & Kate tying the knot. In fact, there was a book published about the wedding in record time: 72 hours after the event. The man behind it is Andrew Morton, also Diana’s biographer, who, according to The Guardian, “picked the photograph for the jacket 100 minutes after the couple kissed, completing the text for the book’s final chapter on the day of the wedding.” Copies of the book, printed in Italy, were delivered to Waterstone’s Charing Cross on Monday afternoon. Obviously, over three quarters of the book was already written before Friday. The only thing the author had to add some details about the wedding day itself, as well as some photographs. The book will therefore only be repeating stuff we saw over the news and online all weekend. Michael O’Mara, the publisher of William and Kate: Their Lives, Their Wedding, has applied to the Guinness World Records for an official record.

On sale only 72 hours after the royal wedding. The first book to come out, but certainly not the last.

This kind of commercial, rapid-publishing phenomenon has been seen before. Shortly after Michael Jackson’s death, in 2009, several writers and publishers had tried to cash-in on the icon’s death, resulting in a tsunami of Jackson biographies, which ranged from the well-researched to the merely gossipy. The phenomenon is bound to get only worse. The growing popularity of e-books and the easy access to live information on web-based platforms means that if a subject is hot, a book can reach the readership hours after the writer has punched in the final period, because publishers can skip the lengthy operation of getting the thing printed and shipped. Naturally, when it comes to making books, rushing it always means botching it. But then, in the market for celebrity bios and sensationalism, no one really cares about quality. The only thing that matters is timeliness.

Time is of the essence — the quicker you get the books on the shelves, the more you'll sell it before the subject is out of fashion.