Desolation (and small consolation) in the Penny Press!

I made my faithful way through the main attractions of the latest Harper's in order to reach the end. I read about evil Mormons, and I read some bombastic editorializing, and I read an entertaining little squib of a story by Justin Torres (clearly a young author to watch - still prone to gimmicks, still not quite seeing that they are gimmicks, but with a very alluring confidence in his own prose), but the whole time I was holding my mental breath, waiting to get to Zadie Smith's "New Books" column.

As I've mentioned here before, I consider (somewhat to my surprise, having been underwhelmed by her fiction) Smith one of the best fiction reviewers working today (my Open Letters Monthly colleague Sam Sacks would also be on that short list), and it was an amazing, unlooked-for little gift when she suddenly started writing her detailed, lively pieces regularly for Harper's. She's one of the only literary journalists who can so naturally meld the personal with the professional that her pieces always feel like sparkling, invigorating talk about books, rather than the considered and reworked essays they are. She differs from Sacks in this way; his own reviews are almost awe-inspiringly removed from the purely personal - they read like scripture: "And Jereboam begat Gath, and Gath begat Askelon, and Askelon thought the metaphorical underpinning of the latest Julian Barnes was splenetic at best," etc. Smith will sometimes swoop in mid-review from a stunning textual survey to a childhood vignette on her mother's porch, then back again, whereas watching Sacks attempt such a thing would be as painful as watching William James try out his signature fox-trot on "America's Got Talent!" ... each to their own strengths: neither can Smith match Sacks' gravitas. An author reading a pan of his work by Smith can put the magazine down and say, "Well, that's just your opinion." The same author reading a pan of his work by Sacks (at a surgical 200 words, in the Wall Street Journal) is likely to say, "Well, I think they're still hiring down at the sawmill."

I celebrate all these first-rate critics for their differences (except when they differ from ME, as each and every one of the scamps has been known to do at one time or another), and I eagerly look forward to reading their latest thoughts in the venues lucky enough to have them. Sometimes, this can be distressing - in the latest Harper's, Smith begins by singing the praises of the great science fiction author Ursula Le Guin, and that immediately set off alarm bells. First-rate critics of science fiction are extremely rare, and Smith certainly doesn't qualify (nor does Sacks - "Due to the number of moons in the night sky, the reader must surmise that Equinox of the Lobster-Men does not, in fact, take place on Earth at all ..."). But all begins well enough - she heaps much-deserved superlatives on Le Guin's two masterpieces, The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, and only occasionally does she inadvertently reveal her underlying discomfort with the genre. Whenever her snobbish instincts begin to bubble too near the surface, she taps them off by tossing in a term in German - we get Verfremdungseffekt and Jus for no conceivable reason other than Smith wanting to avoid having her fellow Po-Mo lit-snobs pull her hair in the hallway after class. What remains is a solid, inviting appreciation of Le Guin's work and attitude, which is always welcome.

Smith follows the Le Guin foray up with something in many ways even less comfortable: the latest book by the fantastic Magnus Mills. An author (and, one suspects, a reader) like Smith has absolutely zero chance of ever fully getting an author like Mills, but she's game to try. It isn't a pretty attempt - at one point she starts just jerkily reciting the names of Shakespeare plays in order to regain her balance (call it the book-nerd's "Serenity Now!"), and it's clear the whole encounter has shaken her a bit. She finishes up by wholesale retreating - she runs to the comforting arms of Rimbaud.

And then she drops her bombshell!

I have to fess up to my own irrational fantasy - the one where it's possible to write a novel, teach class, bring up a kid, and produce a regular column: at the moment a speculative fiction for me. With regret I must say good-bye to New Books - at least for a while - and welcome my brilliant successor, Larry McMurtry.

I moaned aloud over my zuurkoolstamppot: No! Perhaps the most important thing Smith shares in common with Sacks - and Clive James, and Ferdinand Mount, and Michael Dirda, and Sam Anderson, and Anthony Lane, and even Christopher Hitchens - is perhaps the one essential trait all first-rate literary journalists must have: humility in the presence of the written word. The author under review might screw up, he might misfire, he might be an idiot - but he's engaged in a holy task, and it trails a holy solemnity behind it. The author might make the biggest mess since God created basset hounds, but the best literary critics take that mess seriously because the act of creation is holy to them (which is why they can get so all-fired angry when a thing is done poorly, or lazily, or insultingly).

Larry McMurtry is 80 years old. He's the author of two very, very good novels (The Last Picture Show and Buffalo Girls) and two great ones (Lonesome Dove and Moving On) - think about that for a minute: two very, very good novels, and two great ones - that's more than almost all authors can do, or even approach. This is not a man who can be humble in the presence of the written word, and with good reason: this is a man in whose presence the written word is humble. Which makes him a great choice to write book-commentary for Harper's or anybody else on Earth - wherever it happens, I'll buy it. But it makes him a lousy choice to write a regular column dutifully reviewing new books. What's he supposed to say, about any of them? Larry McMurtry is supposed to set aside time to make notes on a jaggedly-written coming-of-age story set in contemporary Iceland? Larry McMurtry is supposed to patiently deconstruct the way a precocious author's circus-metaphor goes astray? Larry McMurtry is supposed to be doing this? What's next, making Herman Melville clerk in a customs house?

It won't work. McMurtry will stay on-target for one paragraph, perhaps two, and then the book will be forgotten and the rest of the column will be "and then Renny Price and Wally Stegner and I - all three of us drunk as newts - snuck into Katy Anne Porter's kitchen late at night and commenced a grand attempt to bake her a cake. She flicked the light on and covered us all with a sawed-off shotgun, and it was only a call from Bunny Wilson that saved our hides ..." And that will be undeniable fun to read, but the world of serious fiction-criticism will lose a very high-profile venue until such time as McMurtry sees fit to vacate it.

Don't mistake me: it'll be great to have more McMurtry prose in the world, in any venue, at any time. But I'm nevertheless wondering if Zadie Smith might respond to a good old-fashioned letter-writing campaign ...

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.

The Perils of Lordly Disdain in the Penny Press!

The mighty TLS, being the single best literary review forum in the Western world (although surely it won’t be too long before it’s no longer cheekily presumptuous to claim the #2 spot for a certain online venture of growing renown?), is always foremost in the demonstration of literary journalism’s two signature functions: to war down the proud, and to teach the ways of peace to those you conquer.

Ooops – sorry, that’s the ancient Romans, by way of the Aeneid! Although the mix-up is easy enough to understand: after all, the deluge of books is, thankfully, never-ending, and one’s reading time isn’t. And the problem goes one step deeper – because as Mark Twain aggrievedly pointed out a hundred years ago, sometimes the damndest fools are given publishing deals.  Confronted with that fact month after month, the TLS (and every other regular review) can be forgiven for occasionally developing a frontier legion-style mentality toward the books that just keep showing up at the office.

No, the two arts of literary journalism aren’t Virgil’s, but they’re pretty close to Horace’s: at its best, it not only guides us in what to read but also how to read. And of course nobody does that combination better than the TLS.

Take two examples from last week’s edition. First, Martin Goodman reviews The Invention of the Jewish People, a contentious and controversial new work by Shlomo Sand, in which he maintains that the modern Jewish cultural identity is an entirely artificial construct with no basis in history. Sand’s book has received a bit of press (most of it damning), and it’s clearly Goodman’s aim to provide the final nail in the thing’s coffin. When the TLS sets out to do this, the results can be more fun than a barrel of monkeys, and this piece certainly is:

What has possessed Shlomo Sand, a Tel Aviv historian of contemporary European history, to write about a subject of which he patently knows so little? The answer is refreshingly simple. His aim, which he  does not try to disguise, is to undermine the claim of Israeli Jews who come from diaspora communities to have returned to the land from which their people originated.

Goodman writes that the book as “received praise from historians and others who ought to have known better” and proceeds to demolish its historical claims. But as with any first-rate critic, Goodman has deeper goals in mind than simply ripping apart the pretensions of an overstepping book:

So why bother to review such a book? So far as I know, no scholar who works on Jewish history in the Roman period has deigned to pay it any attention. But such lordly disdain is dangerous. The cover of Sand’s book proclaims it an international bestseller, and it has been widely discussed by journalists and on television and radio both in Israel and France, and now in Britain. For the general public, what catches the attention are the headlines, not the arguments or the evidence…

The general public is on the mind of Caroline Miller elsewhere in this issue, where she reviews Zadie Smith’s collection of occasional essays, Changing My Mind. I went into the review a bit tense, since I’ve very much liked Smith’s recent forays into periodical nonfiction – although as a novelist she’s never done anything but frustrate me, as a critical ‘common reader’ in the Frank Kermode/Clive James mode, she turns out to be a delightful and entirely approachable generalist. I could happily see her writing a book of short literature-essays every year (with no further thought ever given to novel-writing), so I was a bit apprehensive that Miller would find her wanting and issue a patented TLS Olympian dismissal.

Happily, no. Miller accurately warns that “Collections of multi-purpose, previously published prose are often bitty and unsatisfying,” but she, too, likes Smith’s version – including its gentleness:

Changing My Mind, whose title is itself a pre-emptive disclaimer, is a far cry from the rebarbative polemics of an older generation of essayists, such as Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens. Connoisseurs of literary bile may even be disappointed by the fact that Smith so rarely resorts to the slam-dunk of the insult.

That ‘so rarely’ is in fact ’never,’ and although it’s the heart of what made Smith’s collection so friendly, it also rubbed me the wrong way (I don’t think good literary journalism has the luxury of leisure necessary to be friendly more than about fifteen percent of the time) when I read the book, and when I read most critical reactions to it. Leave it to Miller and the TLS, then, to offer the much-needed corrective that simultaneously mans the battlements and invites Smith and others like her to join the fight:

Value judgement and tolerance can be awkward fellow pilgrims: Smith often praises writing she believes to be “right” or knows to be “beautiful.” As a corrective to academic dryness this is refreshing. But, as a wider credo, it has little except its superior eloquence to recommend it – and no principle from which to recommend superior eloquence. If we each decide whom to worship, then there can be no arbiter on beauty and truth other than the mass market. If the dreams of our fathers are to be realized in literature, then we need a critical vision to make the case for its value.

With which I of course whole-heartedly agree. The key here is not to be didactic, to allow for the validity of different critical visions while at the same time insisting that some kind of principle-schema is absolutely necessary. If I had a dime for every time some hippie has told me that ‘reading is subjective,’ I would load all those dimes into a shotgun and blast every single hippie back to Hell where they belong. Of course reading is not subjective – but neither is it monotheistic. The key is to find a critic who espouses principles that match your own, and then to slavishly follow that critic and surreptitiously send lumps of money to his Google ads account.

My hope is that Smith’s ‘what I like is beautiful, I hope what you like is beautiful too’ namby-pambyism gives way in the natural procession of things to a more formulated, discriminating sense of criticism that nevertheless doesn’t lose its enthusiastic open-mindedness. How nice it would be, to have a Virginia Woolf working among us again!