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Solitude becomes the end

By On March 11, 2015 · Leave a Comment · In Book review, fiction, Literary fiction, Literature

I just finished two of the most depressing novels ever. One was great. One was not. Both are, at base, about solitude. It’s not a happy place.

Stoner, John Williams, published in 1965, doesn’t rest on the tip of the collective tongue when it comes to great novels or novelists. Several times the past few […]

I just finished two of the most depressing novels ever. One was great. One was not. Both are, at base, about solitude. It’s not a happy place.

Stoner, John Williams, published in 1965, doesn’t rest on the tip of the collective tongue when it comes to great novels or novelists. Several times the past few years it appeared on my radar. Finally I bought it, and the bookstore clerk raved when I brought it to the cashier. Still, it took me a while to get to it.

In some ways it’s a recast of the biblical story of Job. Shit rains on this guy, William Stoner, son of a Missouri dirt farmer, who becomes a professor of English at the University of Missouri. That’s about where the positivity ends.

The timeline spans pre WWI to after WWII. Stoner’s father sends him off to college to become an agricultural engineer. He returns (briefly) as an English major, then leaves for good to pursue a graduate degree.

Two institutions which can nurture you as an adult, your family and your workplace, don’t for Stoner. His wife should be on meds if they had the right ones back then. His academic department has it in for him. His two buddies, if you can call them that, go to war (WWI) and Stoner does not. One comes home in a box. The other becomes head of the English department. He tries to do right by Stoner but he is contradicted by the larger powers of the academic institution.

The life of the mind becomes the only aspect of life where Stoner finds relief. But it is solitary relief. Even his daughter, with the help of her mother, becomes distant.

In middle age, Stoner has an affair with a young graduate student. She leaves so that they both avoid the inevitable scandal.  He publishes a scholarly book that “was forgotten and that served no use.” He dies of cancer at the end.

Yet, his plight is riveting. His will to survive, to be someone other than a dirt farmer, to progress from physical toil to life of the mind and educate others, to rise above the anguish and his station in life, gripped me. Stoner truly is about shoveling shit against the tide and believing at death that you somehow beat the odds. “…we have our pretenses in order to survive. And we shall survive – because we have to.” (p. 32). ”

And of that useless book, his thoughts in the moments before life is extinguished: “He did not have the illusion that he would find himself there, in that fading print; and yet, he knew, a small part of him that he could not deny was there, and would be there.” The novel and his life end while he his fondling the book.

This isn’t a spoiler because the plot will have nothing to do with your enjoyment. It’s all in the language, the economy, the precision, how haunting it is in its portrayal of a “normal” life. And it is a normal life. We will all find ourselves here, with Stoner, not forever, and maybe not for very long, but at some point(s), for no one lives without doubt about what it all means and why we have to suffer so.

In the end, Stoner is about the reality of life, the pain of the soul exposed by the erosion of almost all things that might protect it with meaning, the things we might have left behind, the connections with others which might live on, but will also end, and how we must rise above it all to keep on, because we must.

“A sense of his own identity came upon him with a sudden force, and he felt the power of it. He was himself, and he knew what he had been.”

[I have to add here that the lyrics at the end of the Moody Blues song, “The Balance” (from A Question of Balance), appeared as I read the ending two weeks ago and those words have not left my head since. “Just open your mind, and realize…the way it’s al–ways been, just open your heart…”]

And so maybe it is because I live in Missouri now, but lived in NYC for many years, and read The Transcriptionist back to back with Stoner, that I pair them in a single blog post. It’s probably not fair. This is Amy Rowland’d debut novel. It also is about the solitary life, in similar ways to Stoner, the discarded life.

Lena, the protagonist, transcribes stories for a major New York Newspaper (assumed to be the Times because Rowland herself was a transcriptionist for the paper). She’s the only one transcriptionist left and occupies an old room once filled with many toiling at the same function.

She lives the life you’ve read about, heard about, seen movies about, the single female in Manhattan -poor, lonely, creeping towards middle age, on the edge. Mercifully, through a pigeon on the ledge of her office and a woman more on the edge than Lena, whom Lena encounters briefly on a bus, Rowland leads Lena to salvation, away from the edge (and more accurately, the ledge) and exposes for us her new-found dignity as a member of the human race, a member who no longer needs the newspaper.

The woman, Arlene Lebow, is a blind court reporter (get the connection to Lena?) who takes her own life swimming in the moat at the lion’s den in the zoo.

Lena’s colleagues at the newspaper don’t fare well. They serve as stereotypes solely to heighten Lena’s sensitivity to what’s happening around her (the aftermath of 9/11, for one thing). There’s just something off about all these characters. They are too one-dimensional. As an example, a speech by Ralph, the paper’s head honcho, goes like this: “…we are gathered here today to issue escape hoods to our valued staff. It is true that our country is at war. And we, the voice of the people, the voice for the people, we are under attack as well. As I’m sure you know, one of our most esteemed colleagues, Katheryn Keel, received personal threats this week, along with an envelope containing white powder…”

Banal is probably being kind here.

I noted at the top that it wasn’t a great book. It’s not a bad novel either. I am a sucker for novels about NYC, any time period. But this was a rare case when my understanding of, and experience with, the city got in the way of my enjoyment of the story. The ending doesn’t work. Just doesn’t. But I have sympathy. Endings are so difficult. But I could see what the author was striving for: How the craziest things, wanting to save a pigeon (a pigeon?? this ex-New Yorker asks) and demanding an obituary in the “paper of record” for Arlene (Lena essentially holds the paper hostage to achieve this), help you find the meaning in your own life and give you the strength to disrupt it for the better. Depressing, yes. Poignant? Almost. But there’s a lilt to Rowland’s style, a naivete to her protagonist, a minimalist sensibility, and a genuine desire to lampoon modern journalism. These elements work well together.

I’m going to bet Rowland’s second will be worth reading.

 

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Short story publishing: Why are readers left out of the business model?

By On January 26, 2015 · Leave a Comment · In Literary fiction, Literature

Art always has two sides – the crass side, the commercial or business side, and the creation and artistic side. Publishing short stories, a critical component of literary fiction, has a commercial side that seems to defy all business logic, but is just as crass. The problem seems to be two fold – far too […]

Art always has two sides – the crass side, the commercial or business side, and the creation and artistic side. Publishing short stories, a critical component of literary fiction, has a commercial side that seems to defy all business logic, but is just as crass. The problem seems to be two fold – far too much supply over demand and an important subset of customer, the reader, is left out of the business model.

Writing and publishing short stories is the early gestation period for eventually birthing a novel. Very few writers plan on making a living or staking their careers on publishing only short stories. There’s no money in it because there are so few readers. But virtually all writers of literary fiction start with short stories. And the miniscule population of short story readers is largely comprised of the same people who write them.

Here’s some of the business illogic of short story publishing as I’ve experience it, and many others, too.

When I started thinking about submitting some of my short stories more than a dozen years ago, I was struck by how many literary journals demanded that your story not be submitted to any other journals while it was under consideration by their staff. No simultaneous submissions. In the same paragraph or on the same page, they advised, “send us only your best work,” and “please allow 3-6 months for a response.”

Why would a self respecting business man or woman take their “best product” off the market and allow a potential partner, or at least a distributor for said product, exclusive right for six months to ponder whether they will deign to “carry” it?

You would think a literary journal would find ways to attract customers, e.g., readers. The most obvious customer base is the hopeful writers who submit stories to them. Well, not only do they insist on holding your best work hostage until they’re ready to reject it, they almost unanimously also tell you, “Due to the volume of submissions we receive, we are unable to offer feedback on your work.”

In other words, after holding it for six months, they aren’t going to tell you why they refuse to do business with you. These are the same journals which implore you to buy a copy or subscription, support their publication, and champion their mission.

It’s like McDonald’s telling you eating at Burger King is verboten until McDonald’s decides you aren’t allowed to eat at McDonald’s.

I don’t know about you but I think a potential life-long customer (or at least for a very long time) for a literary journal is the battered writer rejected by dozens of my competitors who actually receives a letter or note about their work, some recognition that a human actually engaged with it, or at least a few paragraphs of it, not an undergraduate intern automaton sticking form rejection notes into envelopes or pasted into emails.

I mean, why don’t literary journals treat every writer who submits as a potential reader customer rather than a writer whose product didn’t meet their standards?

Rather than reject a writer, establish a relationship with a customer who might tell others about his/her positive customer experience.

Literary journals often run competitions with a fee for entry, usually $15-25, or charge a “reading fee” to consider your submission. Often, a year’s subscription is included with the fee. On first blush, you might think this is in keeping with the competitive spirit of American business. Yet I, as the customer, think: Shouldn’t they be paying me to send them my contact information so they can send me their promo collateral in perpetuity?

It’s the same intention when journals insist they want to discover “emerging writers.” In the same breath, or a few lines down, they add, that your work should be perfect from a proofreading and editing perspective. I’m sorry, but the chances of an “exciting emerging new voice in fiction” sending in a perfect manuscript is, I have to imagine, pretty darn low.

The dirty secret behind the thousands of print and on-line literary journals is that they have subscribers, they have “customers,” people who receive their product, but they don’t really have readers. They all know this, but no one really wants to talk about it. Literary journals exist to satisfy the academic need to “publish or perish.” Some of them have more lofty reputations than others, but few people actually read what’s in them.

It’s even questionable how many people read the short stories in the loftiest slots available, yes, The New Yorker (and The Atlantic, Harpers, and a few other elite publications). My admittedly anecdotal analysis of The New Yorker over the years suggests that they publish short stories from authors who have new books or collections coming out soon, or had come out recently. From the crass commercial perspective, one might say that the weekly short story slot is often reserved for these authors as much for a promotional device as a worthy short story. Not that anyone would concede this.

Except for the top publications, publishing emerging or unknown writers does nothing little for these journals or the writer, unless that writer gets famous one day and they can claim “discovery.” Publishing writers who are already well known does everything for them. Other writers can only hope to share ink and dead trees (or their digital equivalents) with those already known because that’s the only way he/she is going to get noticed. Of course a story published in the three magazines listed above is a stamped ticket to the inner orbit of literary fiction.

And if there is need for any further evidence of the non-competitive nature of this business, consider that, for most of the short story publishing outlets, the wording under their “how to submit” button is eerily similar.

Except for those lofty few elite publications, short story writers don’t get paid. They are expected to publish for free and write their stories after they’ve spent the better part of the day, week, or year earning a living by other means or living off the kindness of spouse, family, or friends.

Once again, I have to ask, where is the reader, the ultimate customer, in this business scenario?

From a business 101 perspective, the supply of short story product is like a firehose in the collective mouth of the literary journals. For every available publishing slot, hundreds if not thousands of products compete for the “shelf space.” No wonder the journals can be so callous to their writer customers. One literary quarterly, not even a year after launch, reportedly was receiving 700 submissions every quarter. It publishes around a dozen stories. Do the math. It’s a 1.7% chance. Established journals will have a far worse chance, several thousand submissions for every slot.

How many businesses do you know that can charge a customer up to $25 for a lower than 1.7% chance they will get anything in return? Not even a casino is that bad (well, maybe the slots).

Again, I ask, where is the reader in this business model?

Readers who happen to love the short story face an almost impossible task: where to find and read short stories that are either great, miss greatness but for the right reasons, or otherwise are worth your investment in time as a reader and a writer? MFA and creative writing programs proliferate. Supply keeps growing. Distribution gets easier and easier with today’s on-line publishing and communications platforms. But those in control of distributing the product are doing so to build the resumes of credentialed writers (those with English degrees or passing through MFA programs or writing workshops), not to attract serious short story readers.

Imagine going into a store that sold only short stories. Each month the inventory could potentially expand by thousands if not tens of thousands. In a logical production and supply value chain, there would be a retail function to help customers match product to their needs and tastes. Good bookstores, especially independent ones, do this for books. And novels (and to a lesser extent story collections) are supported by a large ecosystem of catalogues, reviewers, critics, bloggers, and on-line and bricks and mortar retail outlets.

There is no credible retail function for short stories, unless they are disguised as books (The Best American Short Stories annual, for example), or they are issued as a collection after an author gets famous for his/her novels or (in rare instances) or other works. But good novelists don’t necessarily write the best short stories. In fact, their short stories may reflect mostly their experimentation and development towards novel writing. From the commercial crass business perspective, however, story collections from novelists will sell because they are leveraging an existing “brand.”

The only site I know of which comes close as a retail function is a blog (www.may-on-the-short-story.blogspot.com) by Charles May, a retired professor of literature who has published several books on short story analysis and critique. May’s posts are generally informative and even entertaining at times. One from August 3, 2010, lists May’s 100 favorite short story collections of the 21st century (in honor of his 100th blog post on short stories). He also from time to time will analyse how authors get to be published, who they know, who attended their MFA program with them, that sort of thing.

The Short Review (www.thenewshortreview.wordpress.com) site also aggregates reviews of short story collections, but again, it’s a one collection, one voice approach.

May writes in a very down-to-earth non-academic style.  But he is just one voice. And he mostly comments on the authors and collections we all know about because they’ve been published through the elite channels or have published novels. Imagine if I could access half a dozen sites offering not just academic analysis but commentary from readers who happen to love short stories, whether they write them or not. Imagine if this site also covered great short stories from writers subsisting under the radar or even out of its range.

There is no on-line store exclusively focused on helping me identify the short stories I want to read and sell them to me. I can try to sift through hundreds of sites where dozens of short stories (and in the case of Amazon, thousands) are available and hope that I randomly land on one I might appreciate, or browse through stories that are “pushed” to me on request from other sites (Narrative, Every Day Fiction). Only a few distributor/publisher types (One Story is a good example) send you only one story at a time with your subscription. With a mainstream publication of culture and politics, you get the short story only as part of the larger package.

The literary short story marketplace is inefficient. Producers (writers) can’t find real customers. Distributors cater to a certain class of producer as customers, those who need the publishing credentials to succeed in their careers.

Even reading groups and book clubs rarely select short stories or collections.

It functions under a “push” retail business model. Publishers “push” stories selected for reasons that are not wholly aligned with readers interests. It needs more of a “pull” function in the retail business model. Customers, readers, need to be treated as customers. They need help, a friendly sales person, a welcoming store, more trusted sites not dedicated to publish or perish, a place to gather face to face or on-line with friends to discuss, suggest, recommend, and share.

Maybe the market for short stories is simply too small to warrant a true retail “pull” function. Maybe the customer base is small because writers, producers, and distributors don’t spend enough time and effort cultivating and retaining true readers rather than creating clubs that exist largely to satisfy their own professional interests.

Maybe, just maybe, if the retail function were made more efficient, more readers would become paying customers and a few more short story writers could get paid.

 

Mona Simpson – The Case of an Author I Love But Am Never Sure Why

By On November 23, 2014 · Leave a Comment · In Book review, fiction, Literary fiction, Literature

I just finished Mona Simpson’s Casebook. Her most recent novel. I really enjoyed it. I think I have read and enjoyed every novel she has written except one. She reminds me of Anne Tyler, except that Anne Tyler does a great job of writing the same type of story every time. Mona Simpson does not. […]

I just finished Mona Simpson’s Casebook. Her most recent novel. I really enjoyed it. I think I have read and enjoyed every novel she has written except one. She reminds me of Anne Tyler, except that Anne Tyler does a great job of writing the same type of story every time. Mona Simpson does not. Mona Simpson’s novels are deeper, even though I think she is a master of the story in which nothing much happens. In Casebook, a boy nominally proceeding through adolescence during the course of the story engages in his parents divorce and subsequent relationships through espionage. He and his best friend spy on the parents. They record and listen in on private conversations. Some of them are very intimate. They hire a private investigator. These people have pretty weird relationships. But the boys have a purpose: Self preservation. They want to know what is going to happen to them.

Other than in-home espionage, the story is typical white American family privilege and angst. Suffering, outside of the divorce and newly forming relationships, manifests in a slightly receding economic orbit for the mom post-divorce, but frankly not much else. Far from tragic in the scheme of things. Especially if your schema is living in war torn countries overseas, in countries with oppressive governments or cultures, or in economically deprived and racially divided regions of this country. The new man in the mother’s life lies in a despicable way. But let’s face it. A verbal bomb isn’t much like a real bomb. Everything that happens in this story happened yesterday to a few million young American men and their families, and will again tomorrow.

But Simpson’s stories read with ease. Casebook reminds me of a very popular book from my youth, Harriet the Spy (Louise Fitzhugh), which in less direct terms, deals with many of the same issues and from a similar perspective. Perhaps that is the clue as to its appeal for me. I loved Harriet the Spy. I was sucker for books about New York  City (The Catcher in the Rye, The Godfather) way before I ever got there (in 1974). In many ways, this is a version for the next century, as Fitzhugh’s classic came out in 1964, but mostly for adults. And that is the one troubling issue with Casebook. This narrator is able to feel and interpret and express way beyond his age, at least what I would conceive of for that age. Then again, maybe that’s how much the world has changed, I can’t fathom a boy at this age being so worldly, or so blase about things like sex and his parents.

I seem to remember thinking the same thing of Holden Caulfield and Harriet. Perhaps the narrator is telling the story about his earlier years at a much later point in time and therefore he is entitled to add some worldliness. In other words, he is narrating a story, not journaling. Does a teenage boy, not portrayed as academically superior, know what disyllabic means? This one does. Maybe it’s not so logical, but I like the narrator anyway.

Another strange thing for an experienced contemporary female novelist: The female characters are relatively two dimensional, but then again, we see through the eyes of this adolescent narrator, so that may be authenticity rather than character defect.

Anyway, there’s something warm about Simpson’s writing. Cozy. Commanding. The story never gets out of hand. It’s tightly controlled. It’s not too long or too short. No long-winded passages demonstrating literary pyrotechnics. Somehow, in the course of 300+ pages, I felt I had born witness to the maturing of Miles Adler, the narrator. His arc is clear, in the midst of his parents’ divorce, modern grappling with sexual identity, a close-knit group of his parents friends (whose kids are his friends). The kid turns out just fine. Thousands of course do every week, but I still found it reassuring. It’s more about how Miles seeks to exert some control over family events out of his control. His methods may seem shady for an adult, but come off as precocious for a kid.

And there is something comforting about Simpson herself as an author. For me. I read Anywhere But Here in the early 1980s. It was one of the first books I found when I began searching for (1) books by new contemporary authors that were not part of a syllabus, (2) books which no longer were reflecting my age and circumstances (Catcher in the Rye; This Side of Paradise; KinFlicks; Bright Lights, Big City; and others), and (3) books by and about women and their struggles. So it was instructive to read how Simpson would capture a male protagonist, a young ‘un at that.

 

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Arab American Writers: The struggle to revise the revolution being televised

By On September 21, 2014 · Leave a Comment · In Book review, fiction, Literary fiction, Literature

Want to be lifted out of your comfortable armchair, earbuds blown out, favorite title from The New York Times best seller list dropped suddenly into your lap? Want literature that still astonishes and amazes? Wanna rise above incessant post-modern commentary on life in these United States of American corporations, calcified institutions, claymation government, and balkanized […]

Want to be lifted out of your comfortable armchair, earbuds blown out, favorite title from The New York Times best seller list dropped suddenly into your lap? Want literature that still astonishes and amazes? Wanna rise above incessant post-modern commentary on life in these United States of American corporations, calcified institutions, claymation government, and balkanized sexual/gender/cultural identities? Get acquainted with some of these authors listed at the links below. Pay attention. The revolution(s) over there is being televised but these American writers bring depth and breadth and passion and sense and frames and authenticity to the revolutions that are really going on, the struggle to fairly represent what our American channels will not.

I just returned from the Radius of Arab American Writers Mizna 5th National Gathering in Minneapolis, MN. I could devote a great deal of space here about my experience, but I would soon be out of character and so bordering on the obsequious that I might have to run and check my look in the mirror and make sure I am still me. Let’s just leave it as, I feel like a saturated solution of salt about to bear crystals.

Normally, I leave readings of short stories, novel excerpts, and poetry diluted and frustrated.

I think I can distill this experience and articulate why I felt like I got more out of two days with these writers and lovers of literature than I probably did at a two-week writers conference I attended a few years ago.

First, most of the writers who read their work at this gathering were talented enough, confident enough, astute enough to add a dimension to their reading that complemented the words, without resorting to multi-media. And they did it in a way that was not only unique, but was deeply personal and as they felt for what they were reading. Two poets read in duet form from poetry they wrote together by email. They had not met until this conference! One woman laced her words as if she were about to self-combust, fiery, angry then imploring then searching, but every move she made, every dynamic and intonation was in keeping with the meaning behind her words. We witnessed a theatre work in progress practice-staged for the first time by two actors, one of whom had only started acting two weeks ago. Another writer used a simple backdrop of an image on a big screen of two windows with curtains being gently moved by the wind to contrast her home in America with her ancestral home in Lebanon. An actor-writer dramatized what it was like to be in Baghdad with her family (in the consulate area) while it was under siege.

It is no small feat to strictly balance the performance element so that it does not overwhelm or underwhelm the reading. Most writers reading their literature don’t even think about this. Most of them sound like they’ve never even practiced reading the work in front of others. A few drown out their words with multi-media pyrotechnics.

To listen to a dozen or more writers so artfully achieve this balance just blew me away.

The second distilled observation is that the venue itself embodied literature. Minneapolis has a literary community, space dedicated to literature and reading and performance, programs to get children reading and writing early and often, and numerous allied arts organizations. It is a city which supports the BOOK. Many cities have vibrant arts programs. Minneapolis-St. Paul has programs focused on the BOOK. It has the Loft Literary Center, a whole building called Open Book, even a Book Lover’s Ball. By the way, I’m told three of the ten largest and most admired independent publishers reside in Minneapolis. Winters may be unbearable, but the twin cities know how to curl up and warm up with good books.

There is a third observation. It is the elephant in the room, the 900-lb gorilla, the tank in the corner, the warplanes overhead, the barrel bombs descending. The Middle East is burning. All of these writers have family, homes, history, stories, fables, myths, voyages, and land torn apart, or otherwise permanently scarred, by regional, sectarian, and religious strife and geopolitics. You’d be hard pressed to name a country in the region that isn’t engulfed in civil war, civil unrest or protest, invasion, or brutal occupation, and those that aren’t probably will be soon, the way things seem headed. The country these writers call home, America, is in the middle of all of these Middle Eastern conflicts one way or another.

There is no shortage of suffering. Suffering breeds passionate writing. Hope for the Middle East right now is barely keeping one nostril above water. The performances from these writers represent submerged energy desperate to be picked up by the sonar of justice, mediation, and peace. And as if that isn’t enough, they grapple with the freedom to fully express themselves as non-stereotypical men, women, LGBT, and other identities in this country, identities far more repressed, shunned even, “over there.” Clashes of culture, clashes of politics.

Want to be lifted out of your comfortable armchair, earbuds blown out, favorite title from The New York Times best seller list dropped suddenly into your lap? Want literature that can astonish and amaze again? Wanna rise above incessant post-modern commentary on life in these United States of American corporations, calcified institutions, claymation government, and balkanized sexual/gender/cultural identities? Get acquainted with some of these authors listed at the links above. Pay attention. The revolution(s) over there is being televised but these American writers bring passion and sense and frames and authenticity to the ones that are really going on here and there, and to the struggle to fairly represent what our American channels will not.

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Ghost Quartet: Take a Walk On the Seamier Side of Getting Ahead In the Arts

By On August 27, 2014 · Leave a Comment · In Book review, fiction, Literary fiction, Literature

What makes a novel with a plot you could easily envision for a soap opera episode rise to the level of literary fiction? That’s a question I often ask after reading what in the movie world might be called “indie,” or viewable on Sundance, but not the other 50 movie channels I get on cable.

[…]

What makes a novel with a plot you could easily envision for a soap opera episode rise to the level of literary fiction? That’s a question I often ask after reading what in the movie world might be called “indie,” or viewable on Sundance, but not the other 50 movie channels I get on cable.

The plot of Richard Burgin’s Ghost Quartet is easily captured in one sentence, albeit a sentence with a semi-colon. An ambitious, heterosexual young composer curries favor with a maestro conductor who overtly promises a shove up several rungs on the career ladder in exchange for a sexual relationship; said young composer loses the female love of his life in the process, and the Maestro’s ultra-sensitive former lover is devastated.

Remove the gay theme and the setting in the classical music world and the plot works just as well for an episode of Dallas, The Sopranos, or House of Cards. While Ghost Quartet was published in 1999, it is based in New York (Manhattan and upstate, Tanglewood), so it is difficult to give credit for tackling gay themes earlier than others.

Having played a classical instrument, attended music camps, and played in orchestras and string chamber groups, I was taken in by the music world Burgin depicts. I am also a sucker for books set in Manhattan, especially around the neighborhood of my alma mater, Columbia University.

Burgin’s novel has at least two qualities that answer the question posed at the top. First, the story has momentum. Rarely have I read a novel this length (300+ pages) in such a short amount of time. There is something compelling about the economy and precision of his prose, especially difficult when an author is dealing with neurotic prodigies, talented musicians, and, for lack of a better word, characters who overthink everything. You need many extra words to convey complex, contradictory emotions and behaviors, but none of Burgin’s text is surplus. Burgin’s mastery here surely must be derived from having a professional background in classical music (he is a composer and the son of a famous classical musician) and in writing and literature.

In literary fiction, one looks for themes or connections to issues that present themselves between the lines on the pages, especially if the plot or characters offer little more than the standard moral dilemmas and contrasts we are accustomed to regardless what fiction we read. In Ghost Quartet, I gained a greater understanding of a somewhat vile reality faced by classical musicians and other artists: Beyond a certain point, everyone is talented, the talent pool is an ocean, the few prodigies and stars have been sifted out by the talent recognition and separation system, and those remaining have few choices in their quest to make more than a mere living.

In today’s world, you either learn to wield the tools of self-promotion, or you depend on the kindness of those with coattails you may catch and ride, along with the reputation of the credentials you earn (e.g. a degree from the Juilliard compared to a degree from Southeastern Indiana State College). Coattails, of course, usually have threads attached. I think this is what Burgin captures splendidly, not just the moral dilemma or the economic survival imperative, but the need for something else for which a price must be paid. Rare is the performer or corporate executive or wealthy citizen who did not have to compromise on something for which his soul will punish him for the rest of this life.

Consumers of professional music and art want to believe that cream rises to the top, talent and hard work is rewarded, and the “rock stars” we regard so highly deserve our adoration (and our discretionary spending). Burgin takes the reader on a fast ride through the thick murky waters of the not-so-obvious reasons why one gifted individual is playing in a world-renowned string quartet, and another equally gifted musician is teaching music in public high school No. 143.

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My struggle – to understand why I enjoyed Knausgaard’s My Struggle

By On July 21, 2014 · Leave a Comment · In Book review, fiction, Literary fiction, Literature

 It’s like Knausgaard takes a baseball bat to Knausgaard’s pinata of a head and there his life is, his thoughts, strewn all over the lawn for us to collect and consider.

I’m rarely at a loss for words about why I like a book. I just read Karl Ove Knausgaard’s 400+ pages My Struggle, faster than […]

 It’s like Knausgaard takes a baseball bat to Knausgaard’s pinata of a head and there his life is, his thoughts, strewn all over the lawn for us to collect and consider.

I’m rarely at a loss for words about why I like a book. I just read Karl Ove Knausgaard’s 400+ pages My Struggle, faster than I’ve read a book that long in a long, long time (maybe since Lonesome Dove). My Struggle and Knausgaard have received a ridiculous amount of publicity recently. Sometimes I have to admit, yeah, I was just sucked in by the hype, but then I usually quit reading if it’s no good. I put down The Goldfinch after about twenty pages.  I made it through The Signature of All Things, but wasn’t pleased with my investment of time.

Picking up My Struggle wasn’t easy. When I first read about it, I thought, this has to be duller than dirt. Then the cacophony grew. I read Knausgaard being compared to Proust. I vowed doubly to stay away. James Wood, exalted New Yorker book critic, weighed in effusively. I tripled my vow to remain divorced from reading it. Then a few people I know personally had great things to say. A week ago, I walked into a bookstore to support a fellow local author’s event, saw it in paperback (I thought it was only hardcover), looked up at one of the sales ladies (who knows me from a book group that meets there), and I asked, rhetorically and with a distorted grimace, “Is this any good?” She blurts out, “Oh my God, I Loved it!”

Which was interesting because earlier that day I was arguing with a few other women, who had read that a few other women had written, “this is glorified mommy blogging – if Knausgaard had been a woman…” and, well, you probably know where that conversation went. It went to the restaurant where we had dinner at afterwards because those two ladies were with me.

I bought it. A few pages in later that evening, I was hooked. But why? Why?

First, realize that My Struggle is an anomaly from the get-go. I purchased and read Book 1 in paperback. Book 3 just came out in hardback. It is a six-volume work, something close to 2700 pages, I read somewhere. Two times a trilogy. Harry Pottisfjord’s autobiography under contract. Facing that commitment, maybe you could argue that the publisher has no choice but to alp horn this guy from every mountaintop, force every other author in its stable to blurb it glowingly, and sew up all slotting fees on the store shelves for the next several years. If that’s the case, they can’t even agree on what it is. One reviewer calls it a “giant autobiographical novel cycle,” another calls it just a novel. Everyone talking and reading about it calls it a memoir. Is that the appeal? It defies conventional categorization? I doubt it. Is it that the softcover has a close-up photo of Knausgaard, looking all intense, like he’s Bjorn Borg and he just murdered you in tennis?

One-tenth of Norway has read My Struggle, reportedly (and in the publishing business, the verb “to read” apparently is a synonym for the verb “to buy”). That’s half a million, based on the 2012 Norwegian census. But, you know, Scandinavians are very homogeneous, so they all read the same thing, like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series.

The title grabs you. My struggle. Really? That’s about the least descriptive title I can recall for contemporary fiction. In fact, it’s mis-titled. There’s no “struggle” going on here, at least not in Book 1. He’s an author examining his life, albeit putting some of the more sordid details on display, but as far as I can tell, his is an ordinary life. His struggle is little different from mine, yours, his, hers, theirs, or ours. I examine my life, staring at me like fisheyes in a bowl, whenever I’ve had more than two drinks and I’m alone.

Oh, wait, eureka moment! He’s written a bullet-proof epic autobiographical memoir novel cycle, and the critics can’t dig any dirt up on him. He beat them to it! Politicians have to be thoroughly vetted before the campaign begins. This is an author who self-vets.

You might think, Knausgaard having grown up in Norway and living in Sweden, that life in Scandinavia is a more fascinating struggle than other regions. Perhaps what struck me more than anything is how the culture, the politics, the pop culture, the people, the daily routine, etc, in My Struggle are identical to what I am familiar with in America. Except they eat more fish. Is western civilization so homogenized, I wondered, that the events, the rock star idols of youth, the books, the movies, the aspirations, the successes and failures, charting this guy’s “struggle” feel no less like my own, and everyone else’s I ever knew? An earlier eureka moment had me thinking, well, Scandinavians , especially men, are known for their reticence, for internalizing their, well, personal struggles, more so certainly, than, say, Mediterranean men (my heritage). Knausgaard is honest about his personal feelings…but so what? Lots of authors are. That’s the point of writing about yourself, at least in the literary context. I read Laura Bush’s autobiography. She was pretty honest.

He handles difficult topics, taboo topics? Not really. The narrator is honest about masturbation. But he has nothing on Phillip Roth’s Portnoy. The narrator is honest about his older brother. So was Kevin in The Wonder Years.

So, what is it? First, I am a sucker for reading about painful relationships between a father and a son. Russell Banks’ Affliction immediately comes to mind. Knausgaard lets us in on the tension between a confused young boy and a distant father, with no need to embellish it. So distant, in fact, that it could be called today abuse by neglect. Second, what Knausgaard does so well is refrain from emotional outbursts, or any conclusions, no tidy bows around the wrapping paper. The struggle, I am guessing, is that he has no answers, provides none to the reader. Daily life is made up of confusing, contradictory emotions, and there is no sorting them out. They are what they are. Knausgaard is generous with them, but he does not exaggerate them, does not put his emotions on some pedestal as if they are more interesting, more exalted, more worthy, than mine or yours.

He deals with his dad. He pretty much hates him. But the narrative is about dealing with him, day in and day out, under normal circumstances and tragic ones and what he feels moment to moment. He has friends. He has girlfriends. He has a wife. He has children. He is a writer. He gets along with his brother. He loves his mother. He cries all the time. He’s the John Boehner of contemporary literature. The struggle he is imparting to us is the grind of daily life. He’s not suffering, near as I can tell, not starving, not poor, not crippled, not mentally incapacitated. His struggle is to elevate the ordinariness of existence. Sprinkled in are commentaries on politics, global affairs, art, and the other extremities of existence, but never outside the random or prompted thoughts you would expect of someone immersed in daily living.

Knausgaard has no discernible “message,” no axe to grind (although I did read his family is furious or something, so maybe this changes in subsequent volumes).

He is allowing us into a place somewhere beyond introspective psychoanalysis but short of his spiritual self, his soul, which would make it a spiritual journey, of which there are plenty on today’s bookshelves. He is examining his ordinary life and the only thing extraordinary is that he is chronicling it.

Damned if it isn’t a fascinating place.

I don’t know how much credit goes to the translator or to Knausgaard, but these pages just blow by. Even the dense, non-dialogue stuff that we often hop-scotch through (but never admit to), even these passages move swiftly. Not once did I get the feeling that Knausgaard’s ego is on display, even though, arguably, one of the most egotistical things you can set out to do – you think? – is write a six volume autobiography (but, hey, if a publisher takes it on, more power to ya). Nowhere did I find senseless displays of literary pyrotechnics. The window onto his ordinary life has been wiped clear with Windex. No distortions, no apologies, no histrionics.

Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye came to mind frequently as I read My Struggle, partly because the book opens with his childhood, but mostly because there is an honesty, an authenticity to the first person narration, that hooked me from the first line: “For the heart, life is simple: It beats for as long as it can.” (And what about that rule never to use colons in fiction?). There is nothing to analyze here, nothing to interpret, nothing that requires a literary oracle to divine what the author means. It’s like Knausgaard took a baseball bat to Knausgaard’s pinata of a head and there his life is, his thoughts, strewn all over the lawn for us to collect and consider.

Maybe this passage does as good a job as any to clue you in about what you are in for:

“While previously I saw time as a stretch of terrain that had to be covered, with the future as a distant prospect, hopefully, a bright one, and never boring at any rate, now it is interwoven with our life here and in a totally different way. Were I to portray this with a visual image it would have to be that of a boat in a lock; life is slowly and ineluctably raised by time seeping in from all sides. Apart from the details, everything is always the same. And with each passing day the desire grows for the moment when life will reach the top, for the moment when the sluice gates open and life finally moves on.”

And here’s a passage that puts Book 1 in context:

“My father is dead, and I am thinking about the money that will bring me.

So what?

I think what I think.

I can’t help thinking what I think, can I?”

Obviously, he can’t help writing it either. And I can’t help but read it.

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The Master’s Voices – A Short Story

By On June 19, 2014 · Leave a Comment · In fiction, Literary fiction, Literature

One of my favorite short stories, The Master’s Voices, was accepted for publication by The Dos Passos Review. This is especially satisfying because this story has been kicking around for a long time. Most everyone in my various writers groups are also fond of it. I had it workshopped when I attended the […]

One of my favorite short stories, The Master’s Voices, was accepted for publication by The Dos Passos Review. This is especially satisfying because this story has been kicking around for a long time. Most everyone in my various writers groups are also fond of it. I had it workshopped when I attended the Sewanee Writers Conference. One of my instructors there gave me sage advice: “Get out of the way of your story!” Most fiction writers hear this admonishment at some point, in different guises. But it took me several years to figure out what he was talking about. One of the most difficult things in fiction is not listening to critique (well, it might be for some people, I cherish it), but converting the feedback into revisions without destroying your original meaning and intention of the story, especially in subtle ways. Anyway, the only hint I’ll give about the story is a major theme is the Negro Baseball Leagues and some of the players who have very colorful names. Most people are aware of the Baseball Hall of fame in Cooperstown, NY, but fewer know that there is a Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, MO. I am definitely planning on visiting my next trip across the state (I live in St. Louis).

Your feedback is most welcome!

 

 

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Concentration Camp Life: The Hunger Angel

By On June 9, 2014 · Leave a Comment · In Book review, fiction, Literary fiction, Literature

I think more and more these days about novels and their translations, how much of the quality of what we read in English is thanks to the translator, and how non-English speaking readers must be responding to American novels translated into their languages. I recently finished The Hunger Angel, Herta Muller, who won the Nobel […]

I think more and more these days about novels and their translations, how much of the quality of what we read in English is thanks to the translator, and how non-English speaking readers must be responding to American novels translated into their languages. I recently finished The Hunger Angel, Herta Muller, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009. It’s a fascinating book, more for stylistic qualities than theme — life in a Russian-run concentration (or worker) camp in the mid- to late 1940s.

As the title suggests, hunger not only is the central fountain of suffering but also the savior of the main character/narrator, helping him to “feel the rawest connection to life.” The bulk of the action takes place in the camp, depressing enough, but the alienation the narrator undergoes when he returns home is worse. The form of the novel is of the narrator writing in a journal of sorts. For the most part, the unjust, brutal, and downright strange life in the work camp is alternately described directly and bluntly (“1 shovel load = 1 gram bread”) and then with a powerful prose/poetry style:

“Hunger is an object. The angel has climbed into my brain. The angel doesn’t think. He thinks straight. He’s never absent. He knows my boundaries and he knows his direction. He knows where I come from and he knows what he does to me. He knew all of this before he met me, and he knows my future.”

An oddity of the novel is that the work camp is a coke processing plant (coke is made from coal and is used in steel production) and the reader is treated to some interesting details of industrial processing through chapters with titles like “Cement, On Coal, On Yellow Sand, On Slag, Cinder Blocks, and On Chemical Substances.” Of course, I am intrigued because I am a chemical engineer, but the beauty of the language is striking, as in this example:

“Anthracene is another chemical substance. It lurks on every path and eats through your rubber galoshes. Anthracene is oily sand, or oil that has crystallized into sand. When you step on it, it instantly reverts to oil, inky blue, silver green like trampled mushrooms.”

The passage alternately reads like entries in a textbook, then poetic descriptions of an evil monster.

Mostly, I note The Hunger Angel, not only as worth your reading time, but as another example of how the “big” non-American novels and novelists choose vastly different central themes, an observation I dwelled on in an earlier post: http://jasonmakansi.com/the-global-american-footprint-in-fiction/

This continues to fascinate me. It’s only an observation based on my own recent reading selections, but there seems to be such a divergence in what American novelists write about and the rest of the world’s authors. There’s plenty of suffering going on in America, but our literary world is more lathered up about the ironic intersection of pop culture, high art, moneyed society, low-brow professionals, media sensationalism, social media, and corrections to the historical record for maligned segments of the population. Perhaps that is the luxury of a largely academically trained literary community writing in the lone superpower country. Even one that just came through the “Great Recession.”

Beyond that, I would love to be privy to the mind meld of author and translator for these non-English authored novels I’ve been reading. It must be difficult enough between writer and editor.

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The Global American Footprint in Fiction

By On April 23, 2014 · Leave a Comment · In fiction, Literary fiction, Literature

While American novelists expand their post-modernist styles, stretch and bend pop culture irony, embed high art and music into their language, and deal with the culture wars, the rest of the world’s novelists, including Americans from the various war theatres, are writing about ducking for cover from the heavy American footprint everywhere.

The Sound of […]

While American novelists expand their post-modernist styles, stretch and bend pop culture irony, embed high art and music into their language, and deal with the culture wars, the rest of the world’s novelists, including Americans from the various war theatres, are writing about ducking for cover from the heavy American footprint everywhere.

The Sound of Things Falling, Juan Gabriel Vasquez, is everything a novel should be. It’s primal theme is what life was like in Colombia while America conducted its War on Drugs. It is narrated by an innocent professor/lawyer who meets a guy recently released from prison, a guy who flew a small plane to run pot and cocaine in the 1960s and 1970s. His American wife, who has not seen him in decades, is coming to see him but the commercial plane she is on crashes and everyone dies. Walking home, the professor and his friend are gunned down in the streets of Bogota in the 1990s. The professor survives to tell this story. The back story is all about how his dead friend’s American wife was a young idealist with the Peace Corps and got in over her head with this pilot guy. The professor encounters their daughter much later. Both share hearing the black box tape of when the commercial flight went down. It’s a depressing story, but it is riveting. I don’t know whether it is the translation or the original writing (likely both) but I tried so hard to slow down my reading of this book ( I do that when the writing is superb) and could not.

This novel is solidly structured and woven together with wonderful recurring devices (e.g., airplanes). Can you imagine listening to the last words on a black box tape of the pilot of a plane crashing with your loved one in tow? Yet this horror brings two random people together. The last thirty pages read like that plane falling from the sky, like Vasquez is tightening the g-force between you and his sentences. The narrator, Antonio Yammara, represents all the innocent bystanders and Colombian civilians of the War on Drugs, a collaboration between the Colombian and American governments. Idealism represented by the Peace Corps volunteers is battered, shattered, and buried, but two human beings deeply affected by the events, one shot up who almost dies and the other who loses her mother way before that plane crashes, find each other, at least for a time.

This is the passage that stands out for me: “And you, Senorita Fritts, do you know when you’re going to die? I can tell you. If you give me some time, a pencil, and paper and a margin of error, I can tell you when it’s most likely that you’ll die, and how. Our societies are obsessed with the past. But you Gringos aren’t interested in the past at all, you look forward, you’re only interested in the future. You’ve understood it better than us, better than the Europeans. The future is what we have to focus on. Well, that’s what I do, Senorita Fritts: I earn my living by keeping my eye on the future, I support my family by telling people what’s going to happen. Today, these people are insurers of course, but one fine day there will be other persons interested in this talent, it’s impossible there won’t be. In the United States they understand this better than anyone. That’s why your people are going forward, Senorita Fritts, and that’s why we’re so far behind.”

Lots of people in the US earn their living telling people what’s going to happen – consultants, bankers, regulators, insurers, medical professionals, clergy, data scientists, economists, academics, and probably others I can’t name off the top.

I have read many novels in recent months and years which are translations or in English about other parts of the world, usually places with a heavy American footprint. These include: The Wandering Falcon (Jamil Ahmad) about Afghanistan, The Apartment (Greg Baxter) about an Iraqi War veteran searching for some peace and quiet away from the American footprint, 2666 (Roberto Bolano) about Juarez and the Mexican – American Border drug wars, Back to Back (Julia Franck) about Post- WWII East Germany, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Mohsin Hamid) about Afghanistan, Shantytown (Cesar Aria) set in Argentina, Tyrant Memory (Horacio Castellanos Moya) about El Salvador, A Map of Home (Randa Jarrar) set in Egypt, Kuwait, Palestine, and Texas, and A Hologram for the King (Dave Eggers) about Saudi Arabia.

A seminal theme in all of these novels is the implicit or explicit American footprint, whether CIA, Peace Corps, DEA, Pentagon, American consumer, or tech-American corporations; Cold War, War on Drugs, War on Terror, or Global Economic Warfare. It’s easy to say all of these novels are about places America has fucked up in one way or another at one time or another, but it’s more accurate to say they are about how the rest of the world lives in the shadow of a lone superpower.

Mostly, think of a dinosaur bounding your way while you duck for cover. You’ll get the picture.

But I’ve also read some big American novels recently too – Middle C (William Gass), Bleeding Edge (Thomas Pynchon), May We Be Forgiven (A.M.Homes), The Signature of All Things (Elizabeth Gilbert), and Orfeo (Richard Powers), among others. What our “big novel” authors are concerned about and what the rest of the world’s major novelists are concerned about might suggest that the globalization we’ve all heard about and participated in for the past twenty five years (marked in many minds by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989) has really been America, often with good intentions but disastrous unintended consequences, making life difficult for ordinary people everywhere. Meanwhile, back in the mother country, our literary world is lathered up about the ironic intersection of pop culture, high art, moneyed society, low-brow professionals, media sensationalism, and corrections to the historical record for maligned segments of the population.

Yet I just heard on the news an hour ago that forty people were shot in Chicago over the weekend. Several weeks ago, it was reported that U.S. veterans are committing suicide at a rate of more than 20 a day. So we have our survival issues. But they aren’t the literary topics du jour.

I suppose if we’re always focused on tomorrow, it’s hard to pay much attention to who was killed over the weekend, or today, or last week.

Anyway, The Sound of Things Falling. It’s worth your time. More truth is revealed in fiction, and this novel reveals truths about how others are coping with our long global shadow overseas. I think we need more that reveal the truths about the chill that shadow has left here at home too.

 

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Ambition is not enough! The author Richard Powers and Orfeo

By On April 8, 2014 · Leave a Comment · In Book review, fiction, Literary fiction, Literature

Ambition in a novel is necessary but not sufficient.

…..

Orfeo is about a older man, once a musician (in college) in love with another musician, who has a penchant for home experiments bent on discovering new connections between music and the scientific world, who then “arouses the suspicions of Homeland Security,” runs away, visits […]

Ambition in a novel is necessary but not sufficient.

…..

Orfeo is about a older man, once a musician (in college) in love with another musician, who has a penchant for home experiments bent on discovering new connections between music and the scientific world, who then “arouses the suspicions of Homeland Security,” runs away, visits loved ones, reminisces about his college love, and disgorges thoughts that will remind you of people who got 800s on their SATs but never learned how to tell a joke with their friends.

This is the third Richard Powers’ novel I’ve read. I doubt there’s a novelist out there who I admire more for the ambition of his fiction. I want to love him. I also want to un-torture his story-telling. In an asymptotic way, I see clearly where he wants to go. But in the end he seems to sacrifice story for lofty concept.

I am especially disheartened that I could not finish Orfeo because he weaves music into his prose. I love this! I try to do this with my writing. And damn him, he selects works that are high on my list of all-time faves, like Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. Mind you, he doesn’t just refer to these works, or have characters listen to them or talk about them. They are stitched into the text as if you are following the score in parallel with reading the story.

Powers’ doesn’t stop with music. He integrates scientific, engineering, environmental, medical, literature, and just about every other academic discipline into this prose too. If I pulled a passage out to illustrate, I’d have to type ten pages.

Instead, here’s Powers’ on pot:

“Pot was a private aha. All the glories were sealed in the locked room of the smoker’s brain, and turned to a joke when he sobered. Els [main character] was after something more solid, a priori, shared–durable wonder raining down on whole roomfuls of listeners.”

I spent many late nights stoned in my dorm room in college, having edge-of-the-universe conversations with friends. The difference must be that Powers’ went back to his dorm room and recorded all of his. I just crashed.

About a third of the way through the book, Powers’ takes a detour and dwells on this favorite work of mine, Quartet for the End of Time. This is what probably kept me plugging away through the second third, after which I quit. I mean, how many times are writers told, “show, don’t tell?” Between pages 106-121, Powers’ gives us a history lesson on the circumstances surrounding Messiaen’s composing this work in a gulag in France. Okay, he seemingly gets away with it because Els is delivering a lecture to his students. But still. It’s a great story, a heartbreaking story, but in this context, pretty dry stuff, and I suspect it only “moves the story along” if you know and love Messiaen’s work, or you can run down the hall and have a eureka moment with a music humanities professor.

Powers’ is in that league with Pynchon, William Gass, William Gaddis, David Foster Wallace, John Barth, and I suppose, Faulkner, Joyce, and others, who are praised for their ambition and scope and audacious intentions, usually by people who make a living off of teaching such novels to students, reminding us how complex but important they are, and making the rest of us feel like Charlie Brown when he is asked by Lucy and Linus what he sees in the clouds. “I thought I saw a horsey and a duckie,” he says, after Linus woos and waxes philosophically.

I wrote the word asymptotically earlier, because one, I love this word, but two, it perfectly describes Powers’ in relation to some of the others in this league. An asymptote is the limit of a curve that is plateauing. Over the course of the x- or y-axis on a graph, the curve approaches the asymptote but never reaches it as the variable goes to infinity. It’s like seeing the goal posts or home plate but never getting there. I guess the fact that I use a word like asymptote tells you I feel a kindred spirit to Powers. Maybe that’s part of my issue. Envy. But I digress. The difference with Powers, say, and the others in his league, is that I see where he is going. I know where the goal posts are when I read his stuff. I don’t lose my bearings because I have context in the three-dimensional plane (unlike Faulkner, early Pynchon, Gass, etc, where I generally have no ideas what’s really going on.). BUT, I am too frustrated, exhausted, and annoyed. I want to punish him by not finishing. I know I shouldn’t but I do. I wish the guy would focus on little

Don’t get me wrong, I love complex stories, ambition, and a literary challenge. But if a horsey and duckie aren’t in there somewhere, I have to wonder whether the intention is to leave a lasting impression in the halls of academia (and The New Yorker) or an enriching (even if challenging) experience with your audience.

As a postscript, several people have told me that The Goldbug Variations is his best novel. I will probably give that one a go if I live long enough. Because I really do want to love this guy.

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