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. 

Long & Short: The Return of the Novella

The original, 1937 cover for Of Mice and Men

I write “return” with a degree of critical care. Did the novella ever leave? If yes, why had it gone? Or maybe it was never really big at all, and therefore isn’t making a return so much as a début. All of this is unclear to me. But what has become definitely apparent is that there’s been a recent surge in interest for novellas. The form is infamously tricky to define, of course. A novella is supposed to be book-length, because it can be published on its own, but not quite novel-length. But then, does the novella exist at all? Maybe it’s just a long short story, or else a short novel. In terms of content and form — this has nothing to do with length — I have certainly found this true on some occasions. Some novellas, like Ethel Wilson’s “Tuesday and Wednesday” and “Lily’s Story,” which are collected in her Equations of Love, feel like short stories that have been inflated. In terms of emotional resonance and narrative breadth, they remain, well, a little short. Other novellas, like James’ The Aspern Papers, are much shorter than novels, but pack the punch of longer, more ambitious works.

 

Some clues as to the return of the novella:

To begin with, there was Julian Barnes’ first Booker victory in October with The Sense of and Ending, which was the shortest book on the shortlist, and has been called a novella by some. Also, last year, the Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris inaugurated the Paris Literary Prize to celebrate the novella, which is awarded to a work of fiction between 20,000 and 30,000 words. And let’s remember how much ink was spilled a few years ago about Robert Bolano’s posthumous masterpiece 2666, which is really 5 interlinked novellas. Also, the American short story genius Jim Shepard’s most recent collection, You Think That’s Bad, contained a novella titled “Gojira, King of the Monsters”, which was also published separately as a stand-alone book. As for publishing houses, Penguin has of course recently had a lot of success with elegant collections of short books: Penguin Great Ideas, Penguin English Journeys, Penguin Great Loves… Last year, they came out with Mini Modern Classics, 50 short pieces of fiction, published as their own, lovely little books, to celebrate 50 years of Penguin Classics. What’s great about the selection is that the editors have generally chosen little-known stories; letting them stand on their own gives them some well-deserved visibility. To be fair, a lot of the stories that make up the books in the series are actually short stories, not novellas. Moreover, from what I can see most of the volumes collect more than one story. Borges’ The Widow Ching—Pirate, for instance, also includes 5 other stories from the Argentine master. The design for the collection is very nice, playing off the silver, black, and white of the traditional Penguin Modern Classics, with much bigger author pictures on the back covers. Penguin has also released 5 production videos for the series: they’re great fun to watch.

More directly novella-related, perhaps, Melville House, which is becoming increasingly renowned for great books and great designs, has published a collection of books called The Art of the Novella, featuring, among many others, Jacob’s Room, by Virginia Woolf, The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville, and 5 different stories entitled The Duel (by Casanova, Checkhov, Conrad, von Kleist, and Kuprin). The whole series is a great idea, and is perfectly executed: the choice is varied and classic, and the designs are remarkably simple and fresh. Their selection is sometimes a little wobbly in terms of form, however: I’m not entirely sure The Hounds of the Baskerville, for instance, is usually considered to be a novella, but that’s another story…

All this attention on novellas is wonderful; for one thing, novellas are awesome. They’re short enough to be read in a few sittings and to be quite focused aesthetically, but they’re also long enough that they have the time to creep into the brain of the reader; they cut out their own space and demand that their issues be addressed. I have a short-standing theory that the act of reading happens en deux temps. Maybe this only happens to me, but I feel like I always need a short period of adaptation when I start reading a book, not really to get used to the characters and the setting so much as to adjust my reader’s ear to the rhythm of the writer’s voice and the linguistic rules of the book’s universe. I believe this is why I can’t immerse myself completely in a book and read long swaths of it in one sitting until I’ve passed a certain point (sometimes this point comes early, sometimes later, never after the midway point) — then all is well and I can drive on to the end, perfectly attuned to the story’s music. The advantage with novellas is that they’re so short and well-formed that even a reading en deux temps can occur quickly. You can begin with two or three short sittings to start immersing yourself in the world of the story bit by bit, like a swimmer gradually dipping his limbs deeper and deeper in cold water, and then finish off the rest of the story in a single, smooth dive. The novella invites you to do all of that in one day, or even a few hours. Ideally, I would suggest leaving a night’s sleep in the middle to allow the shift to occur and finish the novella the next day — it makes the experience last longer. 

Long-winded, baggy novels are great, but I have a particular fondness for the tight focus of short books. Among my favorite novellas are Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Alice Munro’s ”A Queer Streak”, Mann’s Death in Venice, James Joyce’s “The Dead”, Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, Henry James’ ”The Lesson of the Master”, Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Disinherited”, Maupassant’s Boule de Suif, and Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach. Some of these straddle the line with the short story or the novel, but the long and short of it is that they’re just the right length. Plus, they’re all exquisite and quick to revisit. Between lengthy dinners and short shopping sprees, why don’t we all dip into a novella for the Holidays? Happy reading!

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. 

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.