Agreeing to Disagree in the Penny Press!

The linear procession that is my weekly plow through the latest furrow of the Penny Press couldn't have started off worse this time around - not even with a 'short' story by Alice Munro: The New Yorker featured a long piece by Jonathan Franzen that was just about as appalling an exercise in narcissism as anything I've seen from somebody who doesn't run a book-blog. Franzen, of course, is the author of Freedom, the big gaseous novel that's going to win the Nobel, Pulitzer, and Zee-Magnee Prizes for Greatest Thing Ever Created By Anybody, Including When God Created the Universe. He's also one of the ground-zero survivors of the suicide of his friend and fellow author David Foster Wallace, and I understand and accept where that confluence leads. It's probably inevitable that some writing would result from it - after all, in such circumstances, even the least literary person in the world might be moved to put pen to paper. Franzen is not the least literary person in the world - he himself has commented many times on his apparently uncontrollable urge to, as he puts it, "narratize" himself - so something like this essay was probably going to happen at some point.

But I find myself asking the same question about this piece - a clumsy half-cloning of a literary appreciation of Robinson Crusoe (for which an expedition to Selkirk Island was enacted, of course - nobody reads at home anymore, silly!) and a reminiscence of a lost and troubled friend - that I ask about so much of Franzen's work: did it have to be so bad? Did it have to show so little thought, or rather, so much completely misdirected thought? I know Franzen would probably say it's his arch and awkward impulses that make him worth our time as a writer, but there's a difference between adopting an arch and awkward kitten and working full-time at the animal shelter.

Franzen's been writing things - fiction, nonfiction, and the pure self-absorption he and Wallace perfected for a whole new generation - for years; how could he not have seen how maladroit this piece would end up being, if he insisted on keeping the mechanical framework of the Defoe device? It's maddening to watch him churn out the requisite travel-essay paragraphs (it's so windy there!), the requisite lies (tobacco addicts always, always, always claim their vacations from the busy world were also vacations from tobacco, when if that's how addiction worked, nobody would be addicted), and the requisite posturing (litt'rary authorities are startled awake and hauled on stage, as though Franzen felt compelled to say, "hey, don't forget - I'm an incredible intellectual heavyweight, in addition to being this shy and sensitive guy") - especially maddening because behind all that stuff, he's actually got something to write about this time. I would have read a Daniel Defoe essay from him with interest, but yoking it so stubbornly like this to a very, very different kind of essay - more interesting, yes, but also more shameful to actually publish - is a beginner's mistake, or else the mistake of somebody who no longer has those 'first readers' every writer needs so badly.

So our author goes to Selkirk Island to read Robinson Crusoe - but also because he has to do something in the wake of his friend's suicide. As a result, neither the trivia nor the trauma is well-served, but the trauma is at least arresting ... and interestingly conflicted. I was surprised - and I shouldn't have been - by the sharpness of the anger in Franzen's writing about what Wallace did. And of course I was fascinated, who wouldn't be, by the new personal details Franzen reveals about Wallace's final year and downward spiral, the idea Franzen has that Wallace considered his suicide to be, in drug addict terms, "one last score" and an act of vengeance against both himself and his closest friends. But just because such details are fascinating doesn't mean I should have been reading them - the personal, wounded parts of this weird piece are the best writing Franzen's ever done, but they should have remained in his journal where they belong. I wish I could get this point through the Yaddo-addled brains of all our most lionized young writers: the reading public doesn't, in fact, need you to "narratize" every aspect of your lives - exercising more restraint and more narrative control would actually make you better writers.

Fortunately, that first course didn't ruin the meal. I moved on to the new Harper's, and once there I did what I now happily always do: I turned straight to the "New Books" column and settled in to read Zadie Smith. I don't know Smith, and I have no idea what she thinks of her new gig as Harper's fiction critic, but sometimes even Irish Catholics know when not to question a good thing, so I just sit back and enjoy the show. I've rhapsodized here before about Smith as a literary critic, and here that rhapsody is put to the worst test the love of any book critic can face: what do you do when a great critic writes about a book you just don't care about?

In this case, Smith writes about Edouard Levy's Suicide and Peter Stamm's Seven Years, and I couldn't care less about either book, which made the going tough. But even so, the wonderful, winning tone, the voice Smith is creating in these columns won me over (finding the right voice being, of course, essential to the long-term business of writing anything) - won me over to her column, that is, not to the pretentious pieces of poop she reviews in it this time around. Here's hoping next month she gorges herself on murder mysteries, or else takes in Black Lamb and Gray Falcon and tells us all about it. And in the meantime, this particular issue of Harper's has one other thing that's enormously worth your attention - no, not that laughably hideous cover illustration, which struck me as a bizarre practical joke until I remembered what century I live in ... no, Nicholson Baker's scintillating essay "Why I'm a Pacifist" is the non-Smith highlight of this issue, a refreshingly meaty essay where I'd expected to find yet more Franzen-style narcissism. It was so good it almost convinced me that some of its daffiest contentions just might be true.

But, much to my surprise, the real saving grace of my Penny Press trawling this time around came from a source I'd almost completely discounted: the good old Atlantic, whose slide into just another Beltway glossy has been decried here and elsewhere. Much to my dismay, I've come to associate the Atlantic with reading disappointment, and certainly a glance at this issue seemed to confirm that: a 'genius' issue without one true genius on display, a 'culture' issue as though that were a special, distant place (Selkirk Island, perhaps?) for which we should designate an isolated visit once in a while ... and that Editor's Note! Has 2011 yet seen so vertiginous a combination of arrogance and cringing? The Editors intend, I think, to offer some kind of justification for their decision to include to short stories in their 'culture' issue even though they've long since banished fiction from their ordinary (non-culture?) issues. Airy words are aired about the special qualities shared by the two stories in question, one by Stephen King, the other by Mary Morris, but I knew better than to get my hopes up, and I was right: the stories have a lot in common, beginning with the proudly-declared triviality of their origins and ending, I suppose, in how boring and awful they both are, but when the Editors describe them as "entertaining, interesting, and gloriously open," they're adding a whole lot of sawdust to the bread.

No, it wasn't the special 'cultural' offerings on hand that made the issue for me: it was the workhorse rear-end (...) of the thing that did the trick, as always. Once all the 'geniuses' are done being interviewed about how incredible they are, the real power-hitters come out, and we get three fantastic essays in a row. Ta-Nehisi Coates writes the impossible: an essay about Malcolm X that I actually found interesting. Christopher Hitchens reassures me that his medical treatments must be going well, because he turns in a long and utterly beguiling essay on yet another subject that doesn't usually interest me at all: the poet Larkin and his various smutty doings. And best of all, towering over this week's Penny Press offerings, there's the mighty Benjamin Schwarz, writing about James M. Cain's novel Mildred Pierce - and in the process writing about yet another subject that doesn't interest me at all: Los Angeles. Only a whole lot of money could ever possibly induce me to visit Los Angeles again, and nothing on Earth could make me re-read Mildred Pierce - and yet there I was, eagerly lapping up every word Schwarz wrote about both, solely on the basis of how wonderful those words are:

Moreover, in Mildred Pierce, Cain wrote the greatest work of American fiction about small business. He made compelling the intricacies of real-estate deals and cash flow, of business planning and bank loans, and of relations with suppliers and customers ("She had a talent for quiet flirtation," as Cain explained of Mildred's technique, "but found that it didn't pay. Serving a man food, apparently, was in itself an ancient intimacy; going beyond it made him uncomfortable, and sounded a trivial note in what was essentially a solemn relationship.") He rendered the plodding method and the fundamental gamble of small-time commerce - the foundation of Los Angeles's service-oriented economy - not just absorbing but romantic.

As usual with this critic, I could go on quoting (Hitchens on Larkin is equally quotable), and reading this piece by him and that piece by Zadie Smith (and knowing that Sam Sacks is there, every week, over in the Wall Street Journal) reminded me yet again that the current state of heavyweight American book-criticism is in good hands. Even if they all occasionally write about books I wouldn't cross the street to read.

Worst Fiction, 2010!

It would be audacious to offer a common link for so many works conceived in so many different environments over so many years, and yet offer it I do! I read a great deal of fiction in 2010 and watched with keen interest as some books succeeded and others failed. I sifted not only matter but motive, and during my Nightmare Summer of Homelessness, I became extra-sensitive to scams and phony sincerity, as street people must. And once I gained the provisional shelter of the crude lean-to where I currently live, I found those newly-sharpened instincts a great help when scanning the New Fiction shelves at the Boston Public Library. Authors will always give you their motivations for writing - "I guess I'm just a simple storyteller," or "my characters demanded life," or some such clap-trap, and no doubt there are tiny little germs in their books that actually interest them.

But this year an animus was as obvious as it was distasteful., Virtually every offender on this list was born of a calculating cynicism of such staggering self-absorption as to provoke homicidal rage. Not 'what do I feel?' but 'what kind of deal?' prompted these monstrosities, but the real irritant is the arrogance of 'you'll take what I give you, and you'll have the reactions I dictate.' Not one of these novels is sincere, but worse: each one of them, in their own way, mocks sincerity with a bland hatefulness that can only be achieved by authors who've already been paid.

So here they are, the worst of the very bad! As in Dante's Inferno, we'll arduously ascend to the very bottom (or something like that):

10. The Three Weissmanns of Westport by Cathleen Schine - Admitting up front that this wretched novel partially owes its place here on the list to the faults of others in no way lessens its own copious faults, nor does alluding to the book's own Dark Predecessor. It's true that Schine herself is not responsible for the embarrassing glut of Jane Austen pastiches choking the market these days, but she is responsible for all her own book's hackneyed dialogue and coarsely-orchestrated feel-good moments. And she's certainly guilty of hoping the same thing all the other Austen-defilers hope: that some of Jane's wit and insight will automatically attach to any book that parodies or imitates her, even a book as bad as this one. Hoping doesn't make it so, and that ought to be the final nail in the coffin of all such books, but we better not expect it. And there's also the aforementioned Dark Predecessor: Schine's The Love Letter was not only a viciously cynical, lazy, and horrible scrap of trash, but it also stands as yet untoppled as the Single Worst Novel Ever Written - only with no Internet back then for me to say it, just lots of ranting snail-mail letters to long-suffering friends. The enormous sin of that earlier book is a heavy burden to bear, but The Three Weissmanns of Westport commits plenty of sins of its own and dares its readers not to count them, and that would have earned it a spot on the list anyway.

9. How to Read the Air by Dinaw Mengestu - It's a neat little irony that Mengestu's thin, meager novel is mostly about the many and multi-layered lies African ex-pats tell almost compulsively, and this book is a very good example of how a work of fiction can also be a sustained lie. African ex-pat Jonas Wondemarium (that surname wouldn't be significant, would it? geez) is the alleged center of this book's many trite stories, but the real point here is the novel's unspoken but deafening proclamation: "I, the author, am an African ex-pat! I am a cottage industry! No matter what garbage I serve up, you must call it 'a searing examination of exile and community' in the New York Times!' If the author's name were Daniel Miller, this novel would have been called an idiotic, farcical bit of laziness. But the book-world is enamored of the exotic and will venerate any old crap as long as it carried a rifle across the veldt when it was eight.

8. The Scent of Rain and Lightning by Nancy Pickard - You know you're in trouble when an author feels the need to pack not one but two cliched abstractions into the book's very title, as if she just can't wait to set about the task of boring her readers. Some ineffable logic dictated that this book couldn't be called The Scent of Rain or The Scent of Lightning, and that same logic governs every page of this tired, lazily-written story about an old murder, a new trial, and a conflicted family forced to confront What Really Happened That Night. Every character here is a cardboard stock-type out of some tepid Bonanza re-run, except there's no Hop Sing to make saucy insults on his way back to the kitchen.

7. Hester by Paula Reed - Nathaniel Hawthorne should count his blessings it's Jane Austen getting all that pastiche attention and not himself, if this ridiculous 'sequel' to The Scarlet Letter is any indication of the bullet he dodged. Hester Prynne, telepath. You have been warned.

6. All That Follows by Jim Crace - The standard line here in condemning a putrid little squib like this from an internationally-regarded novelist like Crace would be to say "how are the mighty fallen" or "a rare misstep" - but that standard line would be wrong, since Crace has been egregiously over-estimated since the moment he first set pen to paper. No, the correct response when writing about this flaccid story of sad sack Leonard Lessing (not Moring but Lessing, get it?), a wannabe radical tyrannized by the women in his life, is "more of the same." Crace has always thought it acceptable to waste the readers' time (and money) with pointless, meandering digressions on any little subject that happens to be fascinating him at the moment he sat down to his computer. As a result, his stack of tellingly slender novels are as stinky and insubstantial as a rack of farts. This novel, like his previous two, doesn't even bother to conclude - it just appears, offends, and vaguely dissipates.

5. The Privileges by Jonathan Dee - Also criminally overrated, Dee turns in a lazy, cliched novel about money-grubbing power couple Adam and Cynthia Morey (not Lessy but Morey, get it?) and their messed-up kids and their glamorous lifestyle and their maniacal greed and Adam's risky investment practices and the inevitable etc. etc. Not one sentence of this novel is energetic; not one paragraph was profitably revised, not one ounce of heart is present throughout this whole exercise of socially-relevant 'topical' fiction reduced to the mindless driving of cap-and-piston.

4. The Instructions by Adam Levin - Take a young author who hasn't stopped writing shit since he was 12 years old, include every single uncrafted bit of journal-keeping about every single subject that has ever passed through that author's head, create a crassly-manipulative shred of a plot starring not only a disillusioned young boy but a Jewish disillusioned young boy, take the resultant 1000-page disgustingly self-indulgent manuscript to a publisher who encourages such blockhead prolixity instead of scorning it, and you have The Instructions by first (and very much hopefully last) time author Adam Levin, here channeling David Foster Wallace and producing a book very nearly as awful as all those by his Dark Master.

3. The Four Fingers of Death by Rick Moody - Much like the tripartite godhead, the three books that comprise our Dark Trinity of the Worst Novels of 2010 are really one novel, and yet three separate faces of cynicism. And as with most expressions of cynicism, the core quality is contempt for the audience. This kind of evil, uninformed cynicism has achieved the state of considering the reading public to be contemptible stooges, sheep who'll nibble on any rotten lettuce presented to them. how these three authors must have chuckled at their monuments of mockery were bought and talked about! How they must have smirked at a press so willing to play their game! And in some ways - although not the most important ones - Rick Moody's opus of obscurity is the worst of the three, an act of open hostility against his readers. His hack writer protagonist Montese Crandall is introduced, mocked as an ineffectual C-lister, and then handed the book, as if Moody were saying "Let's both of us - me and you readers - sit back and marvel at how bad this all is." But what he's really saying is, "These totally unconnected things - Mexican wrestling, baseball cards, etc. - momentarily interested me, and this was the first idea I had of how to string them all together; I didn't try any harder because I've already cashed my check." Moody has famously been called the worst writer of his generation; he provides ample evidence for this in The Four Fingers of Death.

2. The Passage by Justin Cronin - The cynicism informing this hackneyed, overwritten pile of poop is naked opportunism trying its damndest to disguise itself in New Yorker affectations. Cronin's overlong post-apocalyptic story of lab-spawned 'viral' vampires and the people who fight and flee them has been ecstatically praised by both the publishing industry and the critics (most embarrassingly Dan Chaon). Its publication made Cronin a multi-millionaire, launched a thousand book-group discussions, and ensured Dakota Fanning a future Oscar - and all he had to do to achieve all this was sell his literary soul on the open market and then lie his face off about it in a million fawning interviews. A post-apocalyptic monster was indeed born out of a laboratory here - the lab was the 1980s, the Apocalypse happened this summer, and now, for the next forty years, It walks among us.

1. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen - The cynicism of our Worst Novel of 2010 is the God the Father of such evil, The Great Author. Franzen's oily, unsmiling acceptance of this horrific honorific is not the least of his many sins, and his arrogance is by far the worst part of Freedom, a big fat speeding ticket of a novel that's as long as it is bland, as strident as it is dull, and as stilted as it is silly. The plot of this mess (allegedly a satire on new-yuppie over-achievers but really a cringing apologia for them, issued by one of their own) hardly matters; what matters is the wing-back chair, the leather elbow-patches, the straight-faced evocation of 'semiotics' and 'subtexts,' the swampy, impenetrable dullness of the thing. Franzen's kind of cynicism is the worst of them all, the presumption of entree into the literary pantheon. On his worst day, Raymond Chandler could write the pants off this pompous clown, but half a million pretentious book-buyers can't be wrong.

Rome indeed and room enough in the Penny Press!

It's been a bad week for good faith in the Penny Press. Bad enough Us Weekly ran a picture of Joe Jonas apparently preparing to kiss a girl (even the National Enquirer would've scrupled at that), worse still that National Geographic should so conspicuously lend its imprimatur to a glorified tomb-raider, but worst of all – at least from our bookish point of view here at Stevereads – is the full-blown orb-and-scepter coronation Sam Tanenhaus bestows on Jonathan Franzen's new novel Freedom in The New York Times Book Review.

The iniquity isn't that Tanenhaus liked the book – because despite appearances, he keeps his personal reactions entirely to himself in the course of a very long, glowing review. No, if he liked the book and wrote it a love-letter this long and gushing, I could live with that. I'd be disgusted, but I wouldn't be nearly as disgusted as I am by what Tanenhaus decided to do instead.

This huge encomium (titled “Peace and War,” as if there weren't already enough travesties going out to Westchester County this week) isn't the result of Tanenhaus really liking Freedom – it's the result of Tanenhaus' entirely political decision that The New York Times Book Review (of which he's the editor) should really like Jonathan Franzen. This isn't high-minded literary debate; it's the cat-fighting that precedes a small-town high school class president election. Oprah Winfrey started things by stepping waaaay outside her comfort zone to nominate Franzen's last unreadably awful doorstop, The Corrections, for her happy, embracing Book Club. Franzen played the 'inchoate integrity' card for all it was worth, and the American public gobbled it up (The Corrections surely contends with Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore and Robert Caro's The Power Broker as the most-bought unread book of the last fifty years). Just last week, Time magazine nominated Franzen as the best novelist since Jesus Christ. Tanenhaus spotted a wave and hopped on his board.

The man's an excellent writer (those of you who haven't read his biography of Whittaker Chambers are urged in all sincerity to drop everything and do so), and that makes it all the more sadly easy to tell when he's not even present for his own review. Pretty much as soon as his first sentence, “Jonathan Franzen's new novel, 'Freedom,' like his previous one, 'The Corrections,' is a masterpiece of American fiction,” it's obvious this is going to be one of those times. All the hallmarks of boilerplate are here, and good boilerplate it is, too – but it bears almost no relation to what Tanenhaus says (or how he says it) when he's genuinely saying what he thought about a book. Instead, it's virtually bent double under the anxiety of the Reviewer's Remorse.

The Reviewer's Remorse goes something like this: I like to think of myself as an independent thinker, and I like to think I run my blog/literary review/library desk/major publishing industry taste-maker with the same amount of independent thinking. But I don't want to be one of those critics who hated Book X when it first came out and now looks like a jackass because it's gone on to become an enshrined piece of the canon. I'll do anything, literally anything, to avoid that.

Even a casual glance at history should amply demonstrate the absolute futility of the Reviewer's Remorse. Names that were venerated a hundred, fifty, or even twenty-five years ago are today nearly-forgotten footnotes. Yes, quickie laugh-getters of the “Rotten Reviews” variety routinely collect all the initial negative notices of now-respected novels like Pride & Prejudice (dissed by a Bronte sister, no less!) or Joyce's Ulysses (famously panned by Virginia Woolf). And yes, such reviews spark a certain frisson – but it's a fraudulent one: it stems from the vague idea that in literature there's a presiding true genius that will out.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The howling irony of Reviewer's Remorse is that it directly inverts the power-structure: critics don't just stand around taking guesses (some lucky, some not) at what the true greats of the literary canon are going to be in twenty-five, fifty, and a hundred years – they determine it. They always have, and they should.

But only the honest critics, and this review of Freedom is deeply, blandly dishonest. An honest critic couldn't write “Assaultive sex reverberates through 'Freedom,' and why not? Sex is the most insistent of the 'personal liberties,' and for Franzen the most equalizing. One is at a loss to think of another male American writer so at ease with – that is, so genuinely curious about – the economy of female desire: the pull and tug of attraction and revulsion, the self-canceling wants.”

Do you know what Tanenhaus means by insistent personal liberties? Why he creates the odious euphemism “assaultive sex” when he's talking about rape? What he means when he calls sex the “most equalizing” personal liberty, when that very notion flies in the face of 17,000 years of human experience? Why he equates comfort with curiosity? Why he uses the synonyms 'pull' and 'tug' in parallel with the antonyms 'attraction' and 'revulsion'? What on Earth a 'self-canceling want' is? No? Neither do I. And neither does he. The point of this kind of prose isn't to say anything – it's to sound like you're saying something. It's the smart kid in the back of the class using lazy-clever short cuts to get his homework done. And the assignment here is to make sure The New York Times Book Review experiences no Reviewer Remorse when it comes to Jonathan Franzen.

Fundamentally, this is the way a reviewer writes when he doesn't believe what he's writing. And in this case it's appropriate enough, because in Freedom Franzen has written a nearly 600-page novel in which he doesn't believe a single godforsaken word. Every particle of the book's grotesquely self-indulgent length is pure artifice, pure hypocrisy, pure lie. Franzen started out with the idea of mocking certain things – most especially the specific kind of mindlessly opinionated and entitled suburbanites with whom he spends his every waking minute and whose ranks he himself long ago joined, if indeed he was ever outside them to begin with – but he found he actually liked them instead, viewed them as genuine civilizing forces (just for clarification: you and I, no matter who we are? We're the ones who need civilizing). But rather than abandon the envisioned evisceration, he thought to turn it elaborately, I'm-smarter-than-you-can-even-see faux-satirical, pretending to hate the thing he loves in order to torture it a little. Call it assaultive fiction. And even that quasi-plan fell apart completely, probably after endless nights spent drinking and endless mid-mornings spent speed-writing to make page counts. What's left – what gets published to unprecedented fanfare this week and collects a National Book Award (at least) in a few months – is nothing at all, a rote exercise in verbiage.

It might be fitting that a book whose own author doesn't care about it at all would generate essays from reviewers who don't care about their own verdicts at all, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. When Sam Tanenhaus isn't resorting to Reviewer Remorse hedge-betting blather, he's a first-rate writer, and I prize first-rate writers: I've always wished I were one, and I consider them incredibly thin on the ground. So naturally, after trudging through Tanenhaus lines like “Franzen's world-historical preoccupations also shape, though less delicately, his big account of the home front – the seething national peace that counterpoises the foreign war,” I went in search of some sort of corrective, somebody actually talking about Freedom.

In addition to Tanenhaus, the field of American literary reviews also sports two other first-rate critics of the current fictive zeitgeist, both also named Sam: there's Sam Anderson, who writes for New York magazine, and there's Sam Sacks, who's the editor of Open Letters Monthly and yet reviewed the new Franzen for The Wall Street Journal (one can only assume they pay better, although it's hard to believe they could match the droit de siegneur). These two never let me down; Anderson is funnier than Sacks (this isn't difficult – the spinning ceiling-fan above my head is also funnier than Sacks), but Sacks has an oddly magisterial probity that no critic currently writing can quite match. Between them, they almost always manage to say everything that needs saying about any present-day male novelist (needless to say, they're both flailingly helpless when reviewing women – but then, I don't notice Jill Lepore or Nancy Franklin stepping forward to review Franzen either).

Except this time, alas. Like Tanenhaus, like most of the best critics, Anderson and Sacks are also afflicted with Reviewer Remorse – Franzen must bring it out in reviewers, what with his ostentatiously domestic purview and the odd, Howard Hughesian stretch of time between The Corrections and this new book (a stretch of time Trollope and Dickens would have disdained; a stretch of time not warranted by anything at all actually in the novel; a stretch of time that is almost always, in my experience with writers, caused by alcohol). Like Tanenhaus, neither of these other Sams wants to believe that Freedom could simply be bad, even though, like Tanenhaus, they experienced not one moment of personal pleasure while reading it (hugely significant that both Anderson and Sacks call the book addictive, with all the word connotes of involuntary and even degrading participation). In this context Anderson's rather reaching invocation of David Foster Wallace can be seen as the desperate hail-mary side-step of somebody who knows he's backing the wrong horse and is too invested (or under orders) to admit it. And that's nothing compared to what Sacks does in the Journal – for a writer as reverential of his sources as Sacks is to drag Milton into a review of Jonathan effing Franzen (Sacks also quotes William Blake, gawd help us all, just to make sure nobody gets out alive) … well, no matter what else it is, it's certainly a cry for help.

And this is just the beginning, of course. If The New York Times Book Review is comparing Franzen to Tolstoy this week, next week The Sacramento Bee will be comparing him to the author of the Book of Genesis. It's depressing, not only because the book itself is such a completely cynical waste of time but also because of what the coronation says about the American literary landscape. Franzen costs Farrar, Straus & Giroux the rough equivalent of twenty-five talented authors who've never feuded with Oprah, and this makes two novels in a row in which he's done absolutely nothing to compensate for that loss. Is the republic of letters really so hard up for good writers that it needs to go down on its knees to this lazy charlatan? On what meat doth this Franzen feed, that he hath grown so great?

the New Yorker Fiction Issue in the Penny Press!

Well, the New Yorker Fiction Issue is here, and as you'd expect, there's plenty to hate.

I'm less disposed to that hatred than I was in previous years, mainly because I've just recently had a hand in helping to create a Fiction Issue myself (over at Open Letters - plenty of good stuff for you to enjoy this month! More good stuff, if I may be so bold, than can be found in this issue of the New Yorker), so I've experienced some of the frustrations and compromises any group of editors must face in pulling together a double-sized special issue like this one. A freelancer who's multiple-submitted a piece all over creation and hasn't told you, so you only stumble across the fact that you've been scooped two days before deadline, with no time to find an article to take the place of what is now yesterday's news? It happens. A long, scholarly piece that just germinates new typos, no matter how many editorial eyes scrutinize it? They exist. Writers who use the special mission of a Fiction Issue to heap praise on authors who don't deserve it? Oh yes. And then there's the most basic compromise of all, the one that faces every editor of any capacity not just with special theme-issues but all the time: not all writers are created equal. Some of them try their hardest, bless 'em, and only manage to produce marginally-readable prose, whereas others wait until the last minute and flash out brilliant patter. It all adds to the challenge of creating a Fiction Issue in the first place, and it gives me an added dose of empathy for the folks at the New Yorker.

Still, plenty to hate.

Yiyun Li turns in a brief meditation on what it meant to her to read Hemingway during her compulsory time in the Chinese Army - turns out the experience convinced her how much cooler she is than anything written by Hemingway, because books aren't real, because in the end they're simplistic, escapist things. As Li discovered, "All would be well if you lived in a novel." Great way to start a Fiction Issue. Yeesh.

The estimable Roger Angell writes another brief piece (pitched, as so much of his recent stuff has been, as though he himself were roughly 100 - and reminding me that such a sentimental it's-poignant-because-it's-me tone is tedious in any writer, no matter how distinguished, no matter if he really is 100) remembering books in his family's summer cottage in Maine. He turns in a good bit on the scorned art of re-reading:

There's a sweet dab of guilt attached to rereading. Yes, we really should be into something new, for we need to know all about credit-default swaps and Darwin and steroids and the rest, but not just now, please. My first vacation book this year will be like my first swim, a venture into assured bliss.

Good prose, but the same crackbrained premise that underlies this whole Fiction Issue: that "summer reading" or "vacation reading" is somehow a legitimate category, that on vacation (and as I've pointed out before, so many magazines still craft issues like this one as though all summer reading were vacation reading, as though all of us were members of the 18th century London Ton and as soon as June rolls around, we shutter up our town-houses and decamp for three solid months of delicious frolic at our country estates, when in reality we're sniffing some fat-ass's garlic-breath on a jam-packed subway car with no air conditioning, on our way to our same old daily job, winter or summer) it's not only OK but expected to read lighter stuff. Needless to say, I hate this premise, since its most glaring implication is that non-summer reading is a boring chore, a duty we slog through dutifully but unhappily. Angell, firmly stuck in cranky-old-man mode, enthusiastically reinforces that premise, but I can assure you: there are new books on Darwin that would thrill you more deeply than any "beach reading" you're planning this summer. Angell knows this; he's just being a putz, denigrating reading right there in the middle of the Fiction Issue.



I thought I saw a glimmer of relief in the fact that the hugely talented David Grossman wrote an article about the hugely talented Bruno Schulz - but I was wrong! Schulz wrote some wonderful prose and led a fascinating, frustrating life (until it was ended in an anecdote too shopworn to need repeating here), but it turns out he's not the subject of Grossman's article: Grossman is. More specifically, the fact that Grossman used Schulz as a character in his novel See Under: Love. Grossman mechanically recites all the pertinent biographical details about Schulz, but he doesn't take much trouble to hide the fact that what he really wants to talk about is himself, his books, his writing process, etc. Schulz is just there as window-dressing, which is, upon a moment's reflection, a tad insulting for Schulz.

And that's nothing compared to how Thomas Mann would feel if he could come back from Hell and read Aleksandar Hemon's one-page confessional about how much Magic Mountain meant to him. The answer: squat. Reading his three columns of breathless prose, you quickly become aware that the only author who's ever meant anything to Hemon is that hugely talented criminally underpraised author, Aleksandar Hemon. Mann is entirely forgotten almost as soon as he's invoked. It's enough to make me wonder if the editors of this issue aren't playing a prank on the readers; "let's commission what-this-book-meant-to-me" pieces from writers who hate reading." Or something like that.

There aren't many such little pieces in the issue, thank gawd, but there's still plenty more to hate. Naturally, R. Crumb will always appear at or near the top of any list. For thirty years, I've been puzzling about this talentless moron's cult popularity, and now I get to match that puzzlement with outrage, because the talentless moron has apparently taken it into his head to illustrate the Bible. Excerpted here in the New Yorker is his rendition of the Book of Genesis, to which he appends the following assurance: "Nothing Left Out!"

Nothing left out, but plenty added in - not only Fat Ugly Amazon Women (they're expected, since they're in every single thing Crumb draws) but also a God with a long white beard and flowing robes, when no such spectacle is described in Genesis. And it goes on from there, cluttering up and uglying up the first chapter in the greatest of all books. In the accompanying brief preface, Crumb says that he occasionally turns to Ecclesiastes for insight, but never the Book of Genesis - because it's "too primitive." So he's got the irony thing down pat.



Wandering in such a desert, I naturally perked up at an article by Louis Menand. As far as deadline-writers go, he's in the upper ranks of those who usually do no wrong, and his subject here, the history of writing workshops in America, is promising. Unlike so much in this New Yorker, he doesn't disappoint. Right from the start, he's tossing the quips like a fine salad:

The workshop is a process, an unscripted performance space, a regime for forcing people to do two things that are fundamentally contrary to human nature: actually write stuff (as opposed to planning to write stuff very, very soon), and then sit there while strangers tear it apart.

Menand is a good deal more generous in his conclusions about writing workshops than I would have been. I have some familiarity with the phenomenon, and I've come to the conclusion that Kay Boyle was write: they should be illegal. Fully one-half of the rot that rivens the entire superstructure of contemporary fiction is caused by writing workshops carefully, lovingly molly-coddling crappy prose all the way to publication (the other half? Hordes of idiot readers clamoring for books to be video games - always completely new, always explosively over-stimulating from the first sentence, anything, as long as it's crack cocaine and not, you know, the boring old experience of reading - because really, who likes that?)(I have a dear friend who sometimes dabbles in this kind of idiocy, though she bloody well knows better; she'll finish a piece of poop by somebody like Yiyun Li and say, "Boy, reading that really made me want to meet the author," when she knows perfectly well good fiction will only prompt the response, "Boy, reading that really made me want to read something else by the author"). So the widespread growth of writing workshops can only be deplored, and Menand gets kudos for deploring in such a balanced, gentlemanly fashion.

And what, you ask, about the fiction in the Fiction Issue?

Plenty to hate.

There's the merely boring - Edna O'Brien turns in a story so long and pointless I kept checking to make sure it wasn't by Alice Munro. I find it hard to believe there were no bigger-name authors clamoring for a spot in the New Yorker Fiction Issue, and O'Brien's presence here makes me dread a Munro-Trevor one-two punch in the Atlantic's Fiction Issue.

And there's the gawd-awful - Jonathan Franzen writes a story called "Good Neighbors" that couldn't be more lazy or narcissistic if it were called "Jonathan Franzen, hung over, sits down to cobble something together for the New Yorker Fiction Issue." Franzen's story is nominally about some yuppies who move into a down-at-heels neighborhood and proceed to gentrify it, but who can concentrate on even so flimsy and gimmicky a plot as that, when you have to wade through cliches, idioms, and already-dated slang to get to it? The yuppies - the Berglunds - ask all the typical yuppie questions:

... how to protect a bike from a highly motivated thief, and when to bother rousting a drunk from your lawn furniture, and how to encourage feral cats to shit in somebody else's children's sandbox, and how to determine whether a public school sucked too much to bother trying to fix it.

Loathsome stuff, yes, and rendered all that more loathsome by the sickeningly solid conviction that it isn't really fiction at all, that it's just a barely-transposed excerpts from Franzen's own 'To Do' list. Reading this lazy, pointless prose tends to make me seethe, as I seethed throughout the entire self-indulgent monstrous length of The Corrections. I keep wondering what ever convinced Franzen that he was a writer, that this stuff he produces is worthy of general publication. I suspect there's a writing workshop at the heart of it.

But I can't only complain about writing workshops, since they sometimes produce gems. The best short story in this Fiction Issue - indeed, the best short story I've read anywhere so far in 2009 - so obviously comes from a workshop that I don't even need to know the biography if its author, Tea Obreht, to know she's spent a lot of time perched at a conference table, murmuring 'constructive criticism' about crapola. Her story, "The Tiger's Wife," is the issue's piece of debut fiction, and it's a stunning debut. Whether or not Obreht ever lives up to the promise of this story is an open question (she has a book coming out in 2010); certainly I've loved New Yorker short stories this much by authors who then disappeared, or wrote garbage for the rest of their lives.

But for now, I can only urge each and every one of you: read "The Tiger's Wife." Go out and buy the Fiction Issue of the New Yorker just for this story.



The tale is set during World War II - German bombs fall on a city somewhere in Europe, breaking open the wall of a tiger cage in the town zoo and setting free the scorched and bewildered tiger inside. He wanders through the chaos of town and eventually makes his way up into the mountain villages, slowly learning to listen to his instincts, slowly learning how to hunt and kill his own food rather than wait for his handlers to feed him. He takes up residence near a village which Obreht populates with characters who are intensely, unostentatiously real, and as they grow more anxious about the lurking presence of the tiger in the foothills, they decide to organize a hunting party. Obreht's story makes compulsive reading; her descriptive abilities are first-rate:

The day was intermittently gray and bright. A freezing rain had fallen during the night, and the trees, twisting under the weight of their ice-laden branches, had transformed the forest into a snarl of crystal.

... and her comic timing - that rarest of writerly gifts - is well-nigh flawless, as in this moment when the shooter's first shot misses the tiger and it bounds across a frozen lake straight at him:

The tiger was almost over the pond, bounding on muscles like springs. He heard Jovo muttering, "Fuck me," helplessly, and the sound of Jovo's footsteps moving away. The blacksmith had the ramrod out and he was shoving it into the muzzle, pumping and pumping and pumping furiously, his hand already on the trigger, and he was ready to fire, strangely calm with the tiger there, almost on him, its whiskers so close and surprisingly bright and rigid. At last, it was done, and he tossed the ramrod aside and peered into the barrel, just to be sure, and blew his own head off with a thunderclap.

In a perfect world, the special Fiction Issue of the New Yorker would be filled with such gems as "The Tiger's Wife," but no. You have to hunt for such great stuff, sifting through crap in a dozen different magazines, always hoping you'll find something that glows in the dark. It almost never happens, but oh, it's so sweet when it does. Maybe the next Fiction Issue will do it again. I'll read it, and I'll let you know.

A Sad Little Story in the Penny Press!

There's an achingly sad little story in the latest issue of the successfully-redesigned Rolling Stone (gone is the whole pothead oversized-paper-zine format - it's now shaped like an ordinary magazine)(for an unsuccessful magazine redesign, you can turn this month to the Atlantic), an article by David Lipsky on the life, career, and suicide of David Foster Wallace. Wallace's widow and such friends as fellow author Jonathan Franzen go on the record with Lipsky, who crafts a wonderfully told and ultimately heartbreaking story of how one young guy felt his life slip out of his control.

The basic theme is helplessness, and of course that doesn't sit well with me. It's the problem I've always had when confronted with what at one point in the piece is called clinical depression; despite ample evidence to the contrary that I've seen over the past twenty years, I still sometimes reflexively think of it as a more or less elective illness. These people expect to be happy all the time, this thinking goes, and when they're not, they start taking pills.



Reading this Rolling Stone article would cure a more stubborn person than I am of such thoughts. Here is a scrupulously honest, entirely agonizing portrait of a talented young man whose own thoughts and feelings took turns of such wanton strength and wayward direction that he was as stunned and embarrassed by them as anybody. This was clearly not a person just wanting attention or pity - nor, wrenchingly, was it a person who wanted to die. The pattern manifests itself early, when Wallace abruptly tells his college roommate he's leaving school. "He wasn't able to talk about it," the roommate says. "He was crying, he was mortified. Panicky. He couldn't control his thoughts. It was mental incontinence, the equivalent of wetting his pants."

Wallace went to the University of Arizona for his MFA (what is it with that place? Who would voluntarily go someplace where it's 100 degrees every single day?) and sold novels and short stories, and he told that same college roommate that the act of writing brought him some relief: "He once said to me that he wanted to write to shut up the babble in his head. He said when you're writing well, you establish a voice in your head, and it shuts up the other voices. The ones that are saying, 'You're not good enough, you're a fraud.'"

But he was also taking a prescription drug regularly, and when he stopped for a time and then tried to re-start, the drug was no longer effective in calming or regulating his thoughts, his fears, his panics. He's described as "terrified" and "suffering," and by the time you reach the end of the article, you wholly believe it. The piece ends like this:

At the end of August, Franzen called. All summer long he had been telling David that as bad as things were, they were going to be better, and then he'd be better than he'd ever been. "David would say, "Keep talking like that - it's helping." But this time it wasn't helping. "He was far away," Franzen says.

A few weeks later, Karen [Wallace's wife] left David alone with the dogs for a few hours. When she came home that night, he had hanged himself.

"I can't get the image out of my head," his sister says. "David and his dogs, and it's dark. I'm sure he kissed them on the mouth, and told them he was sorry."

Dogs, writing, and supportive loved ones - and it still wasn't enough to save him, because medication (and electro-shock treatment) couldn't restore balance to his brain's chemistry. The article leaves you feeling the exact same kind of pointless, resolutionless sorrow that a sudden, unexpected death often evokes ... except it's also cathartic, because you're actually alive and able to read it all and appreciate how well-done it all is. So Rolling Stone kicks off its first redesigned issue with a stunning piece of nonfiction, and I find myself wishing David Foster Wallace were still alive and irritating me. Suddenly, I miss him.

So good job, Lipsky.