Tricks of the Trade in the Penny Press!

It's a pleasure to watch practiced hands at work in the roller-derby world of professional letters, and this week in the Penny Press contained plenty of smiles in that department.

Those smiles came even in venues where a reader might expect nothing but sorrow - as in The New Yorker's annual? semi-annual? Far too often "Food Issue," which always features vast barren tundras of bland food-oriented writing that could scarcely interest the grandmothers of the authors (who are invariably mentioned in the pieces, so there you go). "Food" issues, "Money" issues, and especially the dreaded "Fashion" issues of any otherwise-respectable magazine drive this particular reader to the brink of subscriber-despair - and drive me to hurriedly flip pages in search of the non-theme scraps that almost always manage to fall from the table.

In this case, there were two - but oh, they were tasty! First, there was Thomas Mallon's rumination on "the genre fiction's genre fiction," alternate-history novels. Mallon gives proper credit to Harry Turtledove's fantastic 1992 novel Guns of the South and make the very sharp observation about Don DeLillo's Libra that it "has always seemed more accomplished than satisfying." You know somebody's doing a good job covering a subject when you finish the article and just wish they'd kept writing - I'd have loved a wider sampling from Mallon. I assume he's read and loved L. Sprague DeCamp's 1939 classic Lest Darkness Fall, but what about three of my more recent favorites, Douglas Jones' The Court-Martial of George Armstrong Custer from 1976,  Robert Skimin's 1988 Gray Victory, or J. N. Stroyar's massive The Children's War from 2001?

And the trick of the trade he employs in his article? He discusses Stephen King's rancidly narcissistic new JFK-assassination novel with actual adult intelligence and discrimination, rather than the opprobrium it deserves - because King mentions his own work favorably in the book. Sigh.

Right next to that article in the same New Yorker is a fantastic piece by Martin Amis (why is it, I wonder, that some of my least favorite modern novelists are some of my most favorite literary journalists?) about the aforementioned Don DeLillo's new book The Angel Esmeralda, and it brandishes its own trick of the trade right up front. When presented with a book that's a self-evident trifle, a writer of readable prose who's lucky enough to have a trusting editor has several options open to him - and my favorite of these (one I've been known to use myself!) is the one Amis employs here: use the book as a dog-and-pony show for some wonderfully indulgent stem-winding of your own (and get around to your actual review later on in the piece - or, if your Harold Bloom, not at all).

In Amis' case, this takes the form of a nifty little challenge:

When we say that we love a writer's work, we are always stretching the truth: what we really mean is that we love about half of it. Sometimes rather more than half, sometimes rather less. The vast presence of Joyce relies pretty well entirely on "Ulysses," with a little help from "Dubliners." You could jettison Kafka's three attempts at full-length fiction (unfinished by him, and unfinished by us) without muffling the impact of his seismic originality. George Eliot gave us one readable book, which turned out to be the central Anglophone novel. Every page of Dickens contains a paragraph to warm to and a paragraph to veer back from. Coleridge wrote a total of two major poems (and collaborated on a third). Milton consists of "Paradise Lost." Even my favorite writer, William Shakespeare, who usually eludes all mortal limitations, succumbs to this law. Run your eye down the contents page and feel the slackness of your urge to read the comedies ("As You Like It" is not as we like it); and who would voluntarily curl up with "King John" or "Henry VI, Part III"?

Hee. Wonderful stuff. I could read it for hours, whether I agree with it or not (needless to say, I don't in this case - "King John" has plenty of good stuff in it, and Amis shouldn't so readily admit his inability to find the worth in Daniel Deronda). In his tirade, Amis claims that even Jane Austen isn't immune from his theory - he speculates that the only two exceptions might be Homer and Harper Lee. And of course it prompted two natural questions: would Amis be brave enough to apply his theory to his own novels? Or, braver still, those of his father?

One of the oldest and most enjoyable tricks of the trade happens over in the latest London Review of Books (featuring the very first Peter Campbell cover-painting I've ever actually liked - and I'll never get another shot, since we're informed in this issue that the artist died in October): the letter-column rumble! In an earlier issue, Pankaj Mishra turned in a magisterial condemnation (a dismissal, really, at epic length) of Niall Ferguson's latest tome, Civilisation: The West and the Rest, coming as close as he legally could to calling it the steaming pile of smug racist jingoism it is. In the letters column of this latest issue, Ferguson writes an outraged, bombastic reply to that review, claiming he's been libelled and blimpishly demanding an apology. And Mishra, bless him, pens a response that's if anything more tart and damning than the original review.

Now Ferguson has been a show-boating very public historian for a decade or so (and he's done some very good work in that time, mind you), so I'm hoping he knows the tricks of the trade himself. The thing to do at this point is write another letter - letter-column slug-fests must be kept going at all costs, as far too few periodicals seem to realize anymore. The thing not to do is call his lawyers about a possible defamation suit. That's a trick of an entirely different trade.






 

A Tale of Two (insert adjective) Writers in the Penny Press!

Lots of great stuff in the New Yorker this week, starting with a classic, gorgeous cover by Eric Drooker (and interspersed with a strong selection of cartoons this time around, quite a few of which strike exactly the right clever, citified tone for a New Yorker cartoon) and moving on to a funny "Talk of the Town" piece by Nick Paumgarten on those two Northwest pilots who overshot their runway by a hundred and fifty miles because they were absorbed on their laptops. Of course lots of commentary's been spilled on this, but Paumgarten is worth quoting at length:

Afterward, they explained that they'd logged onto their personal laptop computers and become so engrossed - not in Farm Ville or porn, or even good old off-line activity, such as a fistfight or a nap, but, rather, if you believe them, in the nuances of the airline's new crew flight-scheduling procedure - that they'd essentially forgotten where they were or what they were supposed to be doing. Which was landing a plane. The equivalent for a text-messaging driver might be for him to veer off a turnpike into a cornfield and drive twenty miles through the corn rows - stalks thumping the hood, G.P.S. lady losing her mind - without once looking up from the task of typing a heartfelt response to a wireless provider's auto-generated telemarketing text. That is, it's almost unimaginable.

Not sure what it'll take for states to enact the very, very obvious legislation needed to ban using cellphones and especially visual media like texting or laptops while operating heavy machinery at high speeds - it can't be deaths, since lots of people have already been killed through just such negligence - maybe notoriety? Maybe somebody texting-while-driving plows straight into the White House street barrier and dies in a hail of automatic weapons fire? Maybe an elementary school bus driver takes himself and his forty little charges off an overpass while texting? It's the dumbest thing in the world that the legislation hasn't happened yet, so I'm increasingly curious to know what the triggering event will eventually be.

But the main attractions of this issue, for me, were two pieces on authors with whom I have, shall we say, problematic reader relationships. Thomas Mallon turns in a long and wonderful synopsis of the literary and sociological phenomenon that is Ayn Rand. At first, I was worried that Mallon himself is one of her legion of mindless worshipers, but I was quickly reassured by some of his great quips about her unendurable books, like these two gems about The Fountainhead: "It is, in fact, badly executed on every level of language, plot, and characterization," and "The novel's dialogue is never even accidentally plausible." Hee.

The other author is Jonathan Safran Foer, whose latest book Eating Animals is reviewed at length in a smart, argumentative piece by Elizabeth Kolbert. Foer's book is also damn near unbearable, but not, as in Rand's case, because it's poorly written - in fact, it - and Foer in general - would be far less irritating if it were possible to simply dismiss it as bad writing. No, Foer can definitely craft sound prose - but what he's done with that ability since he first easily, effortlessly gimmicked his way into public view with Everything Is Illuminated has been nothing but frustrating, and this book is no exception. In it, he hyperventilates about how the prospect of fatherhood forced him to re-evaluate his eating habits ... for every page of the book, he bounces between sounding like he's the first person ever to learn that meat consumption is wasteful and cruel and the first person ever to become a father. The end result is wearyingly narcissistic, despite the large amount of gruesomely fascinating data lucidly presented.


Kolbert soft-pedals a lot more than Mallon ("Some may object" and "others will argue" ... but not much more than a peep or two what she may object or will argue), which may arise from greater politeness or a sense of fellow-feeling (she is, it turns out, a bit insufferable herself, being one of those hobbyist chicken-raisers the entire rest of the country - for various and equally valid reasons - so rightly detests). But you have to give her credit for her well-written not-entirely-hypothetical defense of eating animals, on two grounds: people are, after all, still animals - geared by millions of years of evolution to eat meat, and animals are, in fact, not people - so they don't deserve the full panoply of rights and protections people extend to themselves. She acknowledges that Foer disagrees with both these points, and she goes on from them to make some serious body-blows against some of his book's points (like his wishy-washiness on calling factory farmers evil, or his apparent willingness to continue drinking milk and eating eggs). It ends up being every bit as satisfying as Mallon's piece.

There's other good stuff too in this issue - Jill Lepore writes about the staggering amounts of violence in American society, and Anthony Lane is his usual peppy, quotable self reviewing two movies nobody will remember next week. But for my money (which reminds me: really need to start subscribing to the New Yorker), it's the two literary pieces that sell the issue - just wish they were about less (insert adjective) writers ...