The Folds of Irony in the Penny Press!

Oh, the multiplicitous ironies in the latest batch of the Penny Press I consumed at my little hole-in-the-wall periodical-reading restaurant! Everywhere I turned, it was inescapable!

Take last week's TLS for example. Nicholas Thomas reviews the new biography of Captain Cook by Frank McLynn and finds it wanting. That verdict itself might not be so surprising - McLynn can often run hot and cold even with the same reviewer - but the context in which it's delivered is positively riddled with irony, because in pillorying McLynn, Thomas (a specialist in South Pacific art and history and a very amiable guy) raises the spectre of that greatest of all Captain Cook biographers, John Beaglehole - only to pillory him too! We're told Beaglehole's book is "marred by an opinionated style" and actually has the temerity to draw conclusions about its illustrious subject:

Beaglehole's Cook is almost narrow-minded, an indefatigable, practical rationalist, remarkable for his clear grasp of geographic, navigational, or nautical problems, and his single-minded approach to solving them. He is great, in Beaglehole's mind, in part because he has none of the sentimental or philosophical frippery of the eighteenth century around him.

The irony here of course being that if Thomas finds a book like Beaglehole's - vast, authoritative, utterly absorbing, beautifully written - wanting, he undercuts any credibility he'd otherwise have in finding any other book about Cook wanting. We might listen to a critic who called the latest Boris Akunin novel a disgrace to the great Russian literary tradition, but we instantly stop listening if that same critic says War and Peace is also a disgrace to the great Russian literary tradition, and we don't just disbelieve him about Tolstoy - we associatedly disbelieve him about Akunin even if we haven't read him.

A similar piercing irony crops up in the latest Harper's. That issue features a long and leapingly enthusiastic review of Christopher Hitchens' Arguably by Terry Eagleton, and the piece contains ironies of its own, mainly deriving from the fact that like every other 'review' of this big fat essay collection, it's really a boisterous stiff-upper-lip encomium - for a guy who isn't even dead yet. "He could tell you just who to talk to about Kurdish nationalism in the southeastern Turkish city of Batman, as well as what to order in the only decent restaurant there. He can give you the lowdown on everyone from Isaac Newton to Gore Vidal, Oscar Wilde to Muhammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab..." Etc.... in every case, those 'can's are just itching to be 'could's - and it gets in the way of reviewers assessing the ample weak spots of this collection.

But the piece is part of a larger irony too. Hitchens has achieved most of his current notoriety for his brattish nose-tweaking to the concept of religion (particularly all the young people I know who adore him adore him for that reason), the sort of 'you adults are just DUMB to believe this stuff!' braying most of us got out of our systems in high school. But another essay in the same issue of Harper's could serve as good ammo for Hitchens' numerous droned-over debate opponents: Alan Lightman writes a piece about modern cosmology that contains a digression worth quoting in full:

... according to various calculations, if the values of some of the fundamental parameters of our universe were a little larger or a little smaller, life could not have arisen. For example, if the nuclear force were a few percentage points stronger than it actually is, then all the hydrogen atoms in the infant universe would have fused with other hydrogen atoms to make helium, and there would be no hydrogen left. No hydrogen means no water. Although we are far from certain about what conditions are necessary for life, most biologists believe that water is necessary. On the other hand, if the nuclear force were substantially weaker than what it actually is, then the complex atoms needed for biology could not hold together. As another example, if the relationship between the strengths of the gravitational force and the electromagnetic force were not close to what it is, then the cosmos would not harbor any stars that explode and spew out life-supporting chemical elements into space or any other stars that form planets. Both kinds of stars are require for the emergence of life. The strengths of the basic forces an certain other fundamental parameters in our universe appear to be "fine-tuned" to allow the existence of life. The recognition of this fine-tuning led British physicist Brandon Carter to articulate what he called the anthropic principle, which states that the universe must have the parameters it does because we are here to observe it.

Carter's principle forms the basis for a 1988 book called The Anthropic Cosmological Principle by John Barrow and Frank Tipler, one of the most persistently thought-provoking books of the 20th century, and it's ironic to fin that principle being elaborated cheek-by-jowl with more regurgitated Hitchens Got-baiting.

And there's irony to be found over in the latest Atlantic, in which Benjamin Schwarz reviews Higher Gossip, the new posthumous collection of literary journalism from the pen of John Updike. I'm no fan of Updike's book reviews - too bland, too timid, too falsely everyman - but as he always does, Schwarz actually makes me think about perhaps revisiting the guy's work. Certainly Schwarz ranks that work - a vast collection - highly:

This huge body of work, 4,314 pages in all, secured Updike a place among America's few great men of letters (since Edmund Wilson's death, only Gore Vidal and Updike can be added to the pantheon).

The irony of that outrageous parenthetical should be abundantly clear already, but just in case it isn't, here's a bit from the second half of Schwarz' book-column this month, on the fourth volume of the official history of the Bank of England:

Nevertheless, this book contains probably the most revealing record of a central bank's struggles in the modern era. (Others might bestow that crown on Allen H. Meltzer's magisterial an plainly written multivolume A History of the Federal Reserve, but that great work is more strictly a monetary history, and Meltzer doesn't treat the Fed's other duties, such as bank regulation, in the same rich detail as Capie does the actions of the Old Lady.)

Hee. So: the choicest irony of all - Schwarz is certainly leaving at least one name off his list of great 20th century men of letters. It could just be an old-fashioned modesty, but I'm guessing otherwise. I bet the idea never occurred to him.

 

An Additional, Deeper Irony in the Penny Press!

Perhaps the greatest irony in the week's Penny Press also cropped up in The Atlantic, where historian Taylor Branch responds to some of the many reader opinions generated by his recent article about college athletics. In that article, Branch outlines the enormous amounts of money colleges make off their 'amateur' players, who are technically student-athletes and who don't get paid. Certainly there are iniquities in that system, but Branch chose to underscore them in an untenable way: by reviving the old college-athletes-as-slaves argument and hammering on it.

Such a gambit raised a few hackles, most certainly including my own, and in this latest issue, Branch responds:

Let me respond to Steve Donoghue on the slavery analogy. He is one of many readers who find it extreme and inaccurate, but I stand by the comparison because I think it illuminates patterns of thought. My analogy was qualified, of course. College athletes are not literally slaves. However, they have in common the fact that immense wealth has been create from their skilled, diligent labor, in such a way that denies them the full rights of American citizenship.

... Anyone who wonders how slavery survived so long would do well to ponder the NCAA. It rests on fiat an inertia. People shy away from considering its basic justification, because there is none. Similarly, people once despised the abolitionists, not in defense of slavery in principle, but precisely because they were upset that the abolitionists were right.

 

My grandmother would have said "Stop digging before you bury yourself." First, you can't stand by a comparison that's flawed not at its fringes but at its heart, any more than you can qualify an analogy by vitiating its central tenet. College athletes aren't denied any "rights" as American citizens that all other college students aren't also denied; the "rights" to which Branch is alluding have been specifically abrogated by the athletes themselves, when they entered their colleges and Big Ten universities with their eyes wide open. Those athletes don't get nothing in exchange for their physical skills - and they get a whole hell of a lot more than the slaves in Branch's analogy did: not just food and shelter, but a free ride at their school (often to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars that non-ball-bouncing students actually have to pay) - a degree from Yale or Brown or Stanford. Yes, the schools exploit the popularity of college athletics to generate money off the 'diligent' work of these athletes, but the 'pattern of thought' illustrated is greed, not ownership. And there's plenty of greed to go around; as I pointed out in that earlier post, the entire superstructure about which Branch achieves such moral indignation is built on the greed of its student athletes and their parents. And their greed would be utterly unrecognizable to the slaves in Branch's analogy - they're hungry not to be free but to be multi-millionaires in four years or less. They know that they're not allowed to demand a multi-million salary while they're students - they voluntarily become students anyway, to play the long odds for those multi-millions the instant they graduate. There is no part of that reality which compares in any way with slavery, a system whose inhabitants entered into it involuntarily, with no hope of freedom, much less mind-staggering wealth. What Branch should have written this time around was "Look, the more I researched the iniquities and inequalities of college sports, the more hot under the collar I got, and in rage I wrote those slavery-comparison bits, but I see now I went too far."

And even such a backtrack wouldn't explain that second quoted paragraph! People despised abolitionists because they hated the fact that abolitionists were right? As with the slavery analogy, so too here: it's almost possible to forget that the writer of this nonsense is in fact one of the greatest historians America has ever produced, author of the incredible America in the King Years trilogy that should be required reading at every college and university in the country (this is, of course, the deeper irony). I know he must know this, but after reading that second quoted paragraph, I feel compelled to point it out anyway: Racists hated abolitionists because they thought those abolitionists were "nigger-lovers" - most certainly NOT because they secretly knew slavery was wrong. Slavery in America flourished because bigots actively used the Bible and majority tyranny to enforce it - not because of some self-loathing Freudian contortion.

I've almost never read such a statement from a working professional, and I can't account for it. We're all entitled to our occasional howlers, but yeesh - to put it mildly, William Lloyd Garrison would have been amazed to learn that the mobs screaming for his blood were actually agreeing with him ...

 

 

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.

Calculating Column-Length in the Penny Press!

The November Atlantic has one of those big special features that always sound more interesting than they end up being. In this case it's "Brave Thinkers," and the whole it can be painlessly skipped, or skimmed. Ditto the now-obligatory piece on the so-called Tea Party, a phase of national mania that should no more be covered in The Atlantic than it should be in Natural History. In earlier Stevereads entries, we've lamented the increased commercialization of The Atlantic - lamented the fact that half a dozen very intelligent young people of my acquaintance skim or skip not only the magazine's special features but the entire magazine itself. A hundred years ago - hell, twenty years ago - that would have been unthinkable.

Times change, yes, and writing priorities change (except, I'd hope it goes without saying, here at Stevereads), and The Atlantic moved out of Boston - so really, we're lucky it still boasts any of the intellectual spirit and gravitas that made it great.

To get that, I always turn to the back pages of every issue, to the Books section run by Benjamin Schwarz, and this time around, I was pleased in triplicate when I got there. The books-and-the-arts section of The Atlantic this time around features not one, not two, but three of the greatest books-and-the-arts critics alive today, all rubbing against each other cheek-by-jowl. The only thing more enjoyable than that would be having all three of them over here for wine and all-night book-chat.

Ironically, it's the very quality of his assembled material this time around that must present something of a problem for Schwarz, and here I'm using classic Miss Marple thinking, in which the goings-on in humble little St. Mary Mead are asserted to form instructive parallels with the big teeming metropolis. Because I once had Schwarz' job, and it could get mighty frustrating.

My St. Mary Mead was scenic little Iowa City, where for a time I was the Arts Editor of a local newspaper. And the frustration comes from the fact - surely immutable regardless of the size of your venue - that those special features? Those Tea Party bloviations? They require space, and there's only so much of that to go around. In Iowa City, the special feature - indeed, the only thing most Iowans considered 'news' at all - was sports. The unbroken mastery of Dan Gable. The mighty empire of Hayden Fry - these were the things our well-intentioned but lowbrow publisher wanted to see in the back section of his paper; all that artsy-fartsy crap was just good as garnish.

The result was that some of the most handsome, muscular young men in the newsroom could sometimes act like out-and-out beasts. There were many, many days where their hunger for the limited number of pages we shared between us was nothing short of ravenous - and when any self-respecting Arts Editor had to brave their monosyllabic objections and fight for the right to review every dumb Woody Allen movie that came down the pike.

I don't imagine that pitiless calculus ever really changes when you're talking about the physical print media (you'd think it would be eased a bit online, where space is more or less infinite, and yet my colleagues at  Open Letters patiently inform me that there simply isn't room for all the giant-killer-shark reviews I'd like to run...). I imagine Benjamin Schwarz has to deal with a species of it himself, and that must be frustrating.

Never more so than in a case like this, where the acerbic, hyper-intelligent B. R. Myers and the rollicking, lancingly smart faux-bumpkin Clive James have to divvy up that limited pages-space with Schwarz himself, who's as passionate as Myers and as pithy as James and at times exhibits a moral faith in the redemptive power of literature that both those old salts either seldom feel or wouldn't ever confess. The three of them together are riveting reading (kind of like when all the big guns at Open Letters are firing simultaneously, although there may be a touch of St. Mary Mead in that too).



The calculus is frustrating for Atlantic readers as well, since when confronted with a limited amount of space and giants like Myers and James wanting chunks of it, Schwarz does what any arts editor would do: he abbreviates himself in order to free up room for his guests. In this issue he's writing about H. L. Mencken's translation to the firmament by being inducted into the Library of America ("Better late than never" is the dry-ice way Schwarz opens his review), and he's fantastic as always:

Mencken told American intellectuals that their country's popular culture - not just its folk culture - was a worthy, in fact vital, subject to scrutinize. True, Mencken's jaundiced view could lapse into a sterile cruelty (in this he resembled his admirer, Evelyn Waugh, who had an appointment to meet him the day after Mencken suffered the stroke that ended his creative life). But usually he regarded the carnival of his country's buncombe with an indulgent horror. To hate like this is to love forever.

(In the classically waggish manner, Schwarz doesn't bother to identify the source of the slangy adaptation of his final line - we're all adults here, after all). Mencken is one of those authors I've never warmed to - his verbal showmanship has always seemed to me to be mocking not just pretension but intellect itself - but that's one of the things we want our best critics to do: take up the praise-song of some figure we hate and make us reconsider (I could tell you all sad stories of the valiant efforts along these lines I've made myself, and yet my OLM colleagues remain close-,minded about the glory that is the Legion of Super-Heroes). I wanted Schwarz to make the whole case, to present the full-length definitive Mencken piece he could make so glorious. Instead, I got six paragraphs.

Then we were on to B. R. Myers and another province of the critic's role: championing gems that are unjustly overlooked. Myers makes a regular side-show out of doing just that, but the practice carries perils - foremost of which is that you can back the wrong horse. In this issue, Myers backs a nag called Patrick Hamilton, a much-neglected novelist of the early 20th century who richly deserves to become entirely neglected. The advocacy here never goes anywhere, mainly because Myers sticks to the OLM-style review in which copious quotes from the matter under consideration are served up for the reader. When it comes to Hamilton and his wretched prose (it's not even purple - it's more a dirty orange), just one of those quotes should be enough to send all but the most masochistic reader sprinting for the hills. Still, the spectacle of the effort is reassuring: even Myers, it turns out, is human enough to have a soft spot for lost causes.

And then there's the glory of this entire issue, a review by Clive James of Larry Stempel's new history of that greatest of all American art forms, the Broadway musical. James is a ruddy-faced wizard, and although his long, discursive essay here is a soup-to-nuts review of Stempel's book, it's also a fantastic, fast-paced, and eminently quotable mini-version of that Broadway history itself.

James is in top form here, and if this is the essay for which Scwarz had to make ample room, the trade-off is almost worth it. The priceless (and pricelessly phrased) observations follow so fast one upon the other that it's tempting just to quote them all, but I'll restrict myself to a couple:

"I'm gonna wash that man right outta my hair ..." Ensign Nellie Forbush sings that line three times in one stanza, as if it were an interesting line in the first place. It isn't, but just try for a moment forgetting it. Some alchemy of words and music, some enchanted something or other, benumbs the critical powers.

or this, about the casting of Rossano Brazzi for the lead in "South Pacific":

As European and distinguished as a Romanesque cathedral with only superficial bomb damage, Brazzi was perfect in every way but one. He was lying when he said he could sing. When Rodgers and Hammerstein found out that he couldn't carry a tune any further than a few inches, they insisted that his voice be dubbed, even though Brazzi himself was adamant that he could do the job. Dense as well as proud, he never got over not being allowed to, and for much of the filming, as the recorded sound was played in so that he could make with the mouth, he behaved like a beast with its amour propre on the line. They could have got me for half the money.

The whole piece is like that; James has reached the point in his critical life where his unabashed inclusion of himself in the very substance of what he's writing about is just something he does as a matter of course - he no longer cares about the narrow confines of feigning impersonal objectivity, if he ever did care about them, and his fans wouldn't have it any other way. The point is, he delivers the goods, every time, which a smart writer once described as the only inescapable obligation of any author.

Needless to say, I wanted this particular Books section to go on like that forever, these three magnificent critical voices, so unlike each other but so united in their abiding conviction that this stuff matters enough to bring your best thinking - and your liveliest prose - to bear on it. I'm not going to reconsider Mencken any time soon, and I'm never, gawd help me, going to read another Hamilton potboiler again, and I am (um, to put it mildly) already a big fan of the Broadway musical (that hypothetical wine-and-books evening would almost certainly end, around 4 in the morning, with James and I bellowing our endless mental repertoires of Broadway songs known and unknown - we could sell tickets!), so in one cramped way of looking at things, I 'got' very little out of this issue.

But in all the ways that matter, I'm inestimably richer. So the Hawkeyes can go suck eggs. So there.

In the Penny Press! The Atlantic Fiction Issue 2010!

The Atlantic Fiction Supplement is here again, and the trouble once again starts right away. It doesn’t seem like I’ve had a full year to recover from the numerous outrages of the previous Fiction Supplement, but then again, I was hoping this new one wouldn’t have any outrages.

Instead, it’s chock-full of them, starting with the cover by Marcos Chin, an image of two readers: she’s got an electronic reader! He’s got an old-fashioned book! He’s got a little dog! She’s got a big dog! They’re both so absorbed they don’t realize they’re about to turn a corner and run into each other! I’m sure Chin’s underlying idea (beyond simply riffing on the motif of the covers of the last twenty New Yorker Fiction Issues) is that the delivery device of reading, be it paper or electronic, is largely irrelevant: either way, you still get absorbed, and either way, you still leave yourself open to serendipity. But the message any dedicated reader can take from the cover is very different: that reading is only a prelude, that it’s all about display, that it can’t ever be a goal in itself.

That would fit with this issue, in which there’s far more display than substance. It’s difficult to know how much of this is due to the Atlantic’s ongoing unholy alliance with the Canadian arts festival Illuminato, although surely some of it is; even the colorful full-page insert ads for the festival littered throughout this issue don’t really take pains to hide the fact that books and literature aren’t anywhere near the point of their hoopla (as far as I can tell, John Malkovich is). And the one little sop to reading and literature that’s included in those ads only increases frustration levels.

The offending item is an ad for a seminar on “Fiction in the Age of E-Books,” in which, we’re told, “four eminent writers join the deputy editor of The Atlantic to examine the most revolutionary development affecting literature today: the advent of the e-book. What does this mean for the future of literature? Is this the death knell of print or the start of something new and possibly better?”

Leaving aside the fact that the last question is misleading (it could easily be both at the same time), the fact is, if e-readers do turn out to be bad for literature, they’ll have had lots of help from The Atlantic. In the publisher’s note that starts off this issue, Jay Lauf informs us:

… and this year we have launched a direct-to-Kindle fiction series with Amazon.com, offering two new stories from both celebrated authors and emerging talents to Kindle users each month.

And non-Kindle users, you automatically ask? Well, they don’t get to see those two stories a month; they’re more effectively barred than was any hopeful peasant from a 12th century monastery library. So much for the dawn of something new and possibly better.

[caption id="attachment_989" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="atlantic photo emilio guerra"][/caption]

Still, for the purposes of simple concentration, all this could be overlooked if the issue’s actual contents were worth the year-long wait. If you’ll recall, there were gems amidst the garbage last time around, especially “The Laugh” by Tea Obreht. It’s annoying but still possible to simply skip the exclusionary promises and the innumerable Canadian tourism ads if you’re drawn on by the promise of some really good short fiction.

Alas, that’s a mostly empty promise. There are seven short stories in this issue – a mere pittance compared to the amount that The Atlantic could be publishing and, I presume, once again a tiny fraction of the submissions they got for this issue, but still a hefty amount for most people to read in an afternoon. They could satisfy, if they were uniformly as good as a year-long wait would imply. But instead, they’re mostly place-holding exercises or turgid first drafts, so your year-long wait is rewarded by an afternoon of irritated sighs and angry page-flipping. Maybe it’ll all be easier on an e-reader.

The process can be speeded up by immediately discarding the deadweight. Since I actually read every one of these things from start to finish, I can help with that. For instance, there’s “The Silence,” an obligatory contribution by T.C. Boyle about a man and his insufferable wife at a vow-of-silence retreat in the desert. The thing is told in bobtailed little chunks, and in the first one of these, the man sees a dragonfly and longs to talk about it – a dragonfly, a creature of ponds and swamps, right there in the heart of the desert! And his wife shortly encounters a giant tarantula – right there on her bed! Boyle’s actual point of all this seems to be, “hey, what would happen if people took a vow of silence but then all this STUFF happened that they really, really wanted to talk about?” Yeesh. And this guy’s the headliner.

So you can entirely skip that one, and you can do likewise with “Bone Hinge” by Katie Williams – that’s what I was tempted to do, the instant I learned it was about two young women who are physically joined at the hip. And not at all alike, personality-wise. And who were born during a thunderstorm. This is called lazy writing, and it can be – it must be – ignored without compunction by busy people who don’t have enough time for all the reading they want to do.

[caption id="attachment_990" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="mutual self-deception by jonathan bartlett"][/caption]

The other five stories have slightly more merit, although there are no knockout pieces like “The Laugh” (Obreht’s book is projected to appear in 2011). Ryan Mecklenburg’s “Hopefulness” is a fairly good portrait of a man driven (by his insufferable wife) to confront the emasculation of suburbia; “The Landscape of Pleasure” by Amanda Briggs, about a man’s daughter having a quick, meaningless fling with one of his friends (the man’s insufferable wife has a breakdown when she finds out), is a fairly skillfully atmospheric piece marred by a cheap, chintzy final line; and Stuart Nadler’s “Visiting,” about a man taking his estranged son to meet the grandfather he didn’t know he had (the man lied to his son, and to his incredibly insufferable wife), has some genuine intelligence behind it but eventually degenerates into a story about how amazingly cool and adult it is to smoke. Which kind of chilled my approval, as you might expect.

The two comparative highlights were stories by Jerome Charyn and E. C. Osondu. – but the stress is on ‘comparative.’ Not that either of these stories is bad. Charyn’s, “Lorelei,” is about a professional gigolo/grifter who returns home after decades and meets the girl who first initiated him into the practice of serial fakery, and Osondu’s is about a pure-hearted young man who’s briefly imprisoned because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Both have interesting dialogue, professionally-deployed timing, and no insufferable wives as far as the eye can see (although the poor damaged siren of the former’s title bitterly regrets missing her chance to be one). Either story would have stood out a country mile in, say, an average issue of The New Yorker. The only reason they carry the slight whiff of disappointment in this context is because I, for one, absolutely refuse to believe there weren’t far stronger candidates among the thousands of hopefuls for their spots in this annual issue.

Perhaps some of those hopefuls might have got that shot, except that once again the Atlantic editors have seen fit to put three pieces of nonfiction in their special fiction issue. Two of these are so meaningless as to be almost contemptible: there’s an interview with notable curmudgeon Paul Theroux in which he’s forcibly made to say he has no objections, no real objections, no real objections at all to electronic reading devices (if an exclusive story of his doesn’t appear on the Kindle within the year, I’m the Shah of Persia), and there’s a little excerpt from Joyce Carol Oates that’s so passive-aggressively egotistical it’s virtually incomprehensible (and the point of it anyway seems to be that it deals with the fact that Oates’ famously dead husband was the editorial force behind The Ontario Review, raising once again the specter of Canadian dictation).

[caption id="attachment_991" align="aligncenter" width="157" caption="atlantic illustration by owen freeman"][/caption]

Of more interest – and certainly of more topicality, given how many of this issue’s authors are first-timers – is Richard Bausch’s essay on the glut of ‘how to’ books about novel-writing.

Bausch is a good writer, but boy, can he be a dense one. He upbraids the young generation of would-be novelists who buy and read these how-to manuals on novel-writing, praising the pure mission of literature and urging them to praise it too:

My advice? Put the manuals and the how-to books away. Read the writers themselves, whose work and example are all you really need if you want to write. And wanting to write is so much more than a pose. To my mind, nothing is as important as good writing, because in literature, the walls between people and cultures are broken down, and the things that plague us most – suspicion and fear of the other, and the tendency to see whole groups of people as objects, as monoliths of one cultural stereotype or another – are defeated.

All fine sentiments, but the denseness-factor crops up right away to derail the moral outrage:

This work is not done as a job, ladies and gentlemen, it is done out of love for the art and the artists who brought it forth, and who still bring it forth to us, down the years and across ignorance and chaos and borderlines. Riches. Nothing to be skipped over in the name of some misguided intellectual social-climbing.

I think it was one of the Gabor sisters who once commented that the only important kind of social climbing was done from lower tax brackets to higher ones, and it would to cute that Bausch doesn’t seem to know this – if writing weren’t his career (and if he shouldn’t damn well have known it before he started writing this particular essay). Of course today’s crop of young would-be novelists are going to ignore the rich literary heritage Bausch is talking about here – and they won’t be ignoring it in a desire for ‘intellectual social climbing.’ They’ll be after good old-fashioned money. The fact that Bausch either doesn’t know who Harlan Coben is (or the five dozen similar authors whose works make up the stock-in-trade of every big English-language bookstore in the country) or thinks he doesn’t look on what he does as a job … well, it goes a long way toward explaining the rather steep difference between Coben’s bank account and Bausch’s. God bless Bausch for being a true believer, but the buyers of those how-to manuals want Coben’s bank account. They’d tell the Muses to go jump in a lake, if they knew who the Muses were.

With ‘special’ fiction issues like this one, I feel like those buyers are one step closer to their goal. I’ll have to hope that some real, bright talent shows up in next year’s issue, to demonstrate the desperate, valiant, shopworn truth of Bausch’s point.

Votaries and Sharecroppers in the Penny Press!

You have to do a little patient skull-duggery to get to the good stuff in this month’s Atlantic. The James Fallows cover article on what America needs to do in order to ‘bounce back’ against the onslaught of underdog India and world-dominating China starts off strong, makes lots of good points, then in the third act veers off into weird we-need-a-new-form-of-government territory (if I had a dime for every time Jefferson’s boneheaded and offhand remark about how the country “needs a little rebellion now and then” was misused, I could buy a subscription to the Atlantic). Amanda Ripley’s piece on what makes a great teacher spends a great deal of time and verbiage arriving at the conclusion that the really great teachers are the ones who work really hard at it and think about it a lot. Timothy Lavin’s profile of a loony-tune late-night radio host went, I’m afraid, right over my head. And Michael Kinsley starts a piece by willfully misunderstanding the difference between a news story and a news bulletin and then flogging an entire article out of that misunderstanding (the article announces that he’ll be heading up a new website created by the Atlantic’s parent company – making me wonder if the dumbitdown.org domain name is already taken).

But once you get to the rear of the issue, some fun stuff can be found. Not, alas, Benjamin Schwarz (he appears to have the issue off, and I’m betting he’s at home reading), but two other stalwarts of the Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan and Christopher Hitchens.

Flanagan, in full snarky-mad fettle, takes on the school-garden craze that’s sweeping her state of California – a craze that’s new to me, in which schoolchildren are assigned time during regular school hours, as schoolwork, to tend to the school’s garden, concoct recipes involving the school’s garden’s produce, harvest that produce, etc. Flanagan’s ire over this movement prompts her to a most excellent high dudgeon, right from the opening salvo:

Imagine that as a young and desperately poor Mexican man, you had made the dangerous and illegal journey to California to work in the fields with other migrants. There, you performed stoop labor, picking lettuce and bell peppers and table grapes; what made such an existence bearable was the dream of a better life. You met a woman and had a child with her, and because that child was born in the U.S., he was made a citizen of this great country. He will lead a life entirely different from yours; he will be educated. Now that child is about to begin middle school in the American city whose name is synonymous with higher learning, as it is the home of one of the greatest universities in the world: Berkeley. On the first day of sixth grade, the boy walks through the imposing double doors of his new school, stows his backpack, and then heads out to the field, where he stoops under a hot sun and begins to pick lettuce.

It’s rare for an immigrant experience to go the whole 360 in a single generation – one imagines the novel of assimilation, The White Man Calls It Romaine.

Hee.



Apparently, the mastermind behind school gardens is a woman named Alice Waters, whose restaurant, Chez Panisse, is renowned among foodies as the height of the gourmand experience. Flanagan is not amused:

… an eatery where the right-on, ‘yes we can,’ ACORN-loving, public-option-supporting man or woman of the people can tuck into a nice table d’hote menu of scallops, guinea hen, and tarte tatin for a modest 95 clams – wine, tax, and oppressively sanctimonious and relentlessly conversation-busting service not included (I’ve had major surgeries in which I was less scrupulously informed about what was about to happen to me, what was happening to me, and what had just happened to me than I’ve been during dinner there).

But her anger over school gardens isn’t born of anti-snobbery (well, mostly) – it’s purely practical:

I have spent many hours pouring over the endless research on the positive effects of garden curricula, and in all that time, I have yet to find a single study that suggests classroom gardens help students meet state standards for English or math. Our kids are working in these gardens with the promise of a better chance at getting an education and a high school diploma but without one bit of proof that their hard work will result in either.

The lack of those results, and the inevitable consequence of that lack, leads her to a ringing finale:

The state, which failed those students as children and adolescents, will have to shoulder them in adulthood, for it will have created not a generation of gentlemen farmers but one of intellectual sharecroppers, whose fortunes depend on the largesse or political whim of their educated peers.

What can I say? Writing that packs that kind of punch is to be welcomed whenever it shows up. Flanagan almost never disappoints, but this is heady stuff, even for her.

Would I could say the same thing about the other interesting piece at the rear of this issue, Christopher Hitchens’ review of W.W. Norton’s The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard!



It’s not a knee-jerk reaction, either. Long-time watchers here at Stevereads will know that I’ve taken issue with Hitchens once or twice before (including once in the letters page of the Atlantic itself), but it’s always at least as much the product of frustration as anything else. The man can be brilliant, after all, whereas the most I myself am ever able to pull off is indefatigable (a word I wanted to work into the title of our favorite literary journal, calling it Indefatigable Letters Monthly – but John Cotter slammed his ale tankard on the table and bellowed “Avast with that talk, Donoghue!”)(actually, he swished his martini glass counter-clockwise and said, “Wellllll, that’s one way we could go – and here’s another” … and “Open” Letters was born). But when he’s insufferable, he’s A-grade insufferable … and he’s A-grade in this piece.

The main problem is that it’s fashionable among New York bookstore workers who read no science fiction to say that Ballard and writers like him (Margaret Atwood’s name invariably comes up in this context) actually wrote it. This particular version of eating your cake and having it too has always bugged me; it’s snobbery trying to disguise itself as open mindedness. “See?” it says, “I read science fiction! I thought The Road was stunning!” If you’re not willing to get down and dirty with the actual tropes of a genre, you’re nothing but a hoity-toit parvenu.

Cue Hitchens:

As one who has always disliked and distrusted so-called science fiction (the votaries of this cult disagreeing pointlessly about whether to refer to it as “SF” or “sci-fi”), I was prepared to be unimpressed even after Kingsley Amis praised Ballard as “the most imaginative of H.G. Wells’s successors.” The natural universe is far too complex and frightening and impressive on its own to require the puerile add-ons of space aliens and super-weapons …

Hitchens just barrels on from here (without seeming to realize that his rationale, if followed past its cramped use in this instance, would annihilate the legitimacy of all fiction – indeed, all representative art except real-time documentary film footage), high-handedly informing us that although he’s always thought this about the “cult” of science fiction (does he apply the word to Impressionist paintings? Romantic poetry? Even murder mysteries? I bet not), this Ballard fellow is alright – then he spends five paragraphs talking about Ballard’s straight-up historical novel Empire of the Sun.

As is perhaps inevitable in a piece with such a rocky start, further frustrations await, including this rather amazing comment:

Ballard wrote his heart out, especially after the random death of his beloved wife left him to raise three children, so I don’t especially like to say that he wrote too much. (This book has almost 1200 pages). But some of the stories are in want of polish and finish.

The hypocrisy of Christopher Hitchens bemoaning the fact that another writer churned out too much prose is so pronounced as to be almost surreal, but the thing that irked me most about this piece was the unprepossessing sight of a talented writer parading the fact that his mind has always been closed on a certain subject, is currently closed, and will likely remain closed forever. That’s hardly how you want to wind up an issue of the Atlantic.

Ah, but then, that’s NOT how we wind up this issue! No, that honor goes to Jeffrey Goldberg’s asinine “What’s Your Problem?” mock-advice column, which still occupies the magazine’s entire back page, even though its appearance every month for this long must surely have convinced even a blind man that the whole thing is a criminal waste of some of the most valuable magazine real estate in the world. If the goal here is to mimic Harper’s almost equally inane “Findings” end-page, the result is failure – “Findings,” although also a disgrace to the reputation of a legendary magazine, still manages to be bizarrely interesting about once every half-year, for a line or two. There’s no danger of that happening with “What’s Your Problem?” The Atlantic Powers That Be should yank this embarrassment – and if they’re looking for a smart, funny, invigorating one-page ‘literary life’ column to take its place, I’d be happy to see if any of my sharp young colleagues at Indefatigable Letters Monthly wants the gig.

Dastardly Double Disappointment in the Penny Press!

In the course of 2009, I've learned an entirely new and unwanted habit when it comes to the Penny Press: I've learned to approach each new issue of The Atlantic not with suffusing, eager joy but with snakebit wariness. And I've learned this for the simplest, ugliest reason imaginable: the magazine - once the hands-down best in American publishing - has become a faint echo of its former self. Whole issues will unspool now with virtually nothing in them worth reading, let alone saving.

Since I was as devoted to that former glorious self as anybody (in fact, perhaps a bit more so, since I've had a couple of good friends who've worked for the venerable magazine, in one capacity or another), I've naturally cast around for reasons why it's declined. Was it the move of the editorial offices from Boston to Washington D.C.? Was it the slimming down of article-length, in an attempt to cater to the X-Box generation? No single explanation seemed sufficient, but at least, I told myself, there were still bastions on any typical Atlantic table of contents - as derivative as he can often be, Christopher Hitchens can still knock an essay out of the park when he bestirs himself to do so, and the lingering prestige of the magazine can attract some of the best freelancers in the business, sometimes with stimulating results.

And of course there's Benjamin Schwarz, The Atlantic's resident book-critic. He's been called - by me and others - one of the best book reviewers working today, but these last couple of years have tried my patience with my own accolade. I've lost count of how many times in the last few months I've turned to the back of a new issue in the hopes of reading one of his fantastic, meaty ramblings on some hefty tome (that was one of the things that first enamored me of him as a writer - like me, he fancies hefty tomes) - only to find 4000 words on the latest handbag line from Prada, or what hemlines were like in the 1950s (as described by the book under review, a 100 page $1500 coffee table book called What Hemlines Were Like In The 1950s). Months and months would go by without him talking substantively about anything substantial, and of course I asked myself why.

So you can imagine some of the thoughts that went through my head when I saw the cover of the latest Atlantic - in addition to all the other content being advertised, there it was, right at the top left: "The Best Books of 2009 by Benjamin Schwarz." Maybe this, I thought, is the reason, as far-fetched as it seems - maybe he's been saving his energies for a long, engrossing round-up of the incredibly crowded 2009 book season. I squirreled the issue into my shoulder bag and set aside time to curl up with it - not only personally curious, but of course also professionally, as it were, curious, since I myself am preparing my annual Best and Worst Books of 2009 extravaganza here at Stevereads.

When I turned to the page listed on the table of contents, that's exactly what I found: one page. Under a cliche banner (and spot-illustrated with ineptly drawn hands, for reasons eluding understanding), there were six books listed:

Abraham Lincoln: A Life by Michael Burlingame
The Children's Book by A. S. Byatt
The Third Reich Trilogy (concluding with The Third Reich At War) by Richard Evans
It's Beginning to Hurt by James Lasdun
Mrs. Woolf and the Servants by Alison Light
Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro

Each book is accompanied by a single-sentence summary (and a hand), and heading the whole thing is this line: "For full reviews, see www.atlantic.com/books2009.

I just sat there looking at the crappy design, the inept hands, and the single sentences - it took me a minute or two to realize that I was being directed to the website ... not for a couple of additional paragraphs of outtakes, not for an interview or slideshow with the author, but for the article itself. The blurb on the issue's cover had been true only in the barest, most Clintonian sense of 'by' Benjamin Schwarz.

For the first and only time here at Stevereads, I actually went to the website (after first rescuing my curled-up reading time by pouring over the latest GQ, about which perhaps more later, when I'm not so steamed). By that point my curiosity had taken on a slightly garish hue - I'm certain somebody somewhere at The Atlantic thought this was a good idea, or at least a revenue-enhancing one. As distasteful as I found it, I thought: A Benjamin Schwarz "Best Books of 2009" will be worth the digital debasement."

But the debasement wasn't over yet. When I got to the online feature, I found - the exact same virtually nonexistent crap I found in the magazine itself: the same 'top five' entries (the Alice Munro seems to get a free pass by being included in the issue's graphic despite not actually being in the 'top five'), the same one-sentence summaries, and precious little else. The Burlingame Lincoln biography had a link to Christopher Hitchens' review of the book, and the Byatt and the Lasdun each had links to The Atlantic's "Cover to Cover" feature, in which each book got a paragraph of anonymous plot summary. The Evans book doesn't even have a link to Schwarz's own review of the thing from last spring, let alone anything new from our esteemed book critic. "Read the full review" I was urged to do - but except for the Hitchens piece, there were no full - or even partial - reviews to be found, and none by Schwarz himself, the guy I came to read.

And it gets worse. Those titles were followed by a longer list of 'runners up' - here it is:

Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro
Dominion from Sea to Sea by Bruce Cumings
The Art Instinct by Denis Dutton
The Hundred Years War vol . 3 by Jonathan Sumption
The Hindus by Wendt Doniger
Empire of Liberty by Gordon Wood
The Thirty Years War by Peter Wilson
This Time is Different by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff
Florence Nightingale: A Life by Mark Bostridge
Flannery: A Life by Brad Gooch
Samuel Johson: A Biography by Peter Martin
In the Kitchen by Monica Ali
Reading Dance, edited by Robert Gottlieb
Words in the Air (the Robert Lowell/Elizabeth Bishop correspondence)
Charles Dickens by Michael Slater
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
The Arabs by Eugene Rogan
Northern Arts by Arnold Weinstein
The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth by Frances Wilson
Three Victories and a Defeat by Brendan Simms
Collected Stories by Lydia Davis

Of the books on that longer list, only the first one, the Munro, has a link - to a "Cover to Cover" one-paragraph plot summary. All the others have no editorial commentary at all - just hyperlinks to amazon.com. This "Best Books" list bears not one ridge of a fingerprint by Benjamin Schwarz - given sufficient time and Milkbone snacks, I could teach my basset hound how to cut-and-paste something like this. It's all the more tantalizing that fully half the titles listed as 'runners up' are, in fact, hefty tomes - exactly the sort of dense, in-depth stuff Schwarz used to show a marked predilection for both reading and reviewing. Although I have absolutely no prose to back up my assertion, I'm fairly certain this list does indeed represent Scwarz's favorite new reading of 2009.

But geez, what a crappy, half-assed job it does representing that! There almost no list to speak of in the actual Atlantic issue itself; I set aside both time and myself, opened the issue, and found stuff missing - surely not the shock the magazine's powers that be wish to deliver to the hundreds of readers just like me who must have felt the same thing. And when I followed instructions and went in search of that missing stuff - went in search of Benjamin Schwarz reflecting on, writing about, telling us about his Best Books picks, I found a skeletal list with no accompanying writing at all. Just titles and authors, like the whole thing was generated by a 'Star Trek' style computer algorithm, rather than a dedicated lifelong reader.

Which raises two intertwined questions: First, why couldn't such an insultingly minimal Maxim-style list have been simply printed in the magazine (instead of making readers go hunting online for it), and second, what's gone so badly wrong with The Atlantic that such a lazy travesty could happen at all? Why the primacy given to driving 'traffic' to the website? Why the bait-and-switch in which the actual physical magazine is treated like a chintzy little calling card? Why the barbaric assumption that 20 lines would be more attractive to your readers than 20 paragraphs?

I think the answer to the first question is that The Atlantic wanted every single reader to go to the website out of curiosity to read Benjamin Schwarz's book-picks for the year. And as to why that would be so hugely important to them - well, perhaps it's not the X-box generation or the move to D.C. at all: perhaps the reason for The Atlantic's recent dummification can be summed up in two words: Andrew Sullivan.

And as to why a book critic of Benjamin Scwarz's immense gifts would put his name to something this threadbare - well, I have no answer for that at all.

No need to worry about monkey-see monkey-do, however! My own Stevereads Best and Worst of 2009 won't be skimpy! You'll get your money's worth!