Jessica's review

The great lady married to my eldest son up in Tiburon (she styles herself a 'recovering lawyer') is a Proulx addict and with your permission i would like to send your review here on to her. She has been getting the entire B.R.Myers kerfuffle from me and this would be a double delight. E.A.P. + B.R.M. = Jessica

For what it's worth, Annie Proulx was the only author I'd read in Myers' screed where I didn't completely agree with him.

I loved, just loved, The Shipping News, and as opposed to Myers' perception that Annie is all about precious manipulation of language, it was the story and the heartfelt rebirth of the main character that captivated me in Shipping News. The only other Proulx I've read is Accordion Dreams, and while I enjoyed it, I found the different episodes too single-minded in their portrayal of dark and depressing slices of life (and in that sense, not the least bit realistic).
It's almost as though she was trying to counterbalance her notes of optimism and hope in Shipping News.

On the other hand, I tended to agree with a lot of Myers' other attacks. I read one DeLillo book, White Noise, and experienced nothing to make me pick another one up. I haven't read any of McCarthy's novels, but I have read excerpts, and have been completely put off by the tortured language.

I'm sure Myers enjoys being the traditionalist curmudgeon. It doesn't mean he hasn't got a point. And when he says that literary critics would do well to get off their high horses and praise writers like Stephen King, I couldn't agree more.

Ginnie, it is a shared tradition in my family to make as many friends in Tiburon as we possibly can!

Mark: Yeah, I haven't read Moody or McCarthy, and I don't remember who else he tore up, but I think I probably hadn't read them either. I actually loved DeLillo's Underworld, but trying to read White Noise made me throw up in my mouth a bit for many of the reasons Myers identifies, and I tossed that book away and didn't pick up any more contemporary fiction for about five years afterwards, so Myers and I do share some common ground there.

I did appreciate some of his points, for example, that flinging words around just to sound writerly is irresponsible, and he does accurately identify a real and damaging view that capital-L-Literature should be inaccessible, and that readers are left feeling dumb or out-of-the-loop when they don't "get" these books that fancy critics assure us are so amazing and over our simple heads.

However, I disagree with Myers's suggestion that all good literature needs to be crystal clear and easily accessible. Maybe this was my misreading, but I took him to suggest that good novels are all written in a very direct, simple, almost journalistic style, and to me that's awfully silly. Some books are hard to read, and sometimes that is part of what makes them good. Are all hard books good? No, of course not. But some good books are hard.

A lot of his less controversial positions just seem like the same old stuff to me. I don't think the Stephen King point is in any way a new one. Didn't we all deal with this a few years ago when he got the Book Award or whatever it was, and the usual constipated Ivory Tower suspects threw temper tantrums? I think most reasonable people agree that King is our era's Dickens, or something of that nature, and he certainly has earned this reader's respect. However, I feel like Myers is describing an ideal bookstore in which every book is a Stephen King, and there is no E. Annie Proulx -- or Woolf or Joyce, for that matter. Again, maybe I misread his article -- I haven't read the book -- but that was the impression I got.

I did feel like Mr. Myers holds very different ideas than I do about the purposes and nature of language. His criteria for judging Ms. Proulx's writing just seemed fundamentally wrong to me. Does he talk about poetry at all in his book? I'm very curious. I should probably read the Manifesto, since I have a lot of questions, but I think I need some kind of assurance first that his complaints have serious relevance and merit and are worthy of my time, even if I don't agree with them. After his article, I wasn't sure I hadn't just read some guy whining about some books he happened not to have liked. And I can just do that here on Bookface, and then give my feedback, which -- of course! -- I vastly prefer.....

Oy. I wish I could cross-reference my posts -- well, I guess I can, but I wish I could do it without looking more than a little bit crazy (probably too late for that here, but we'll try to keep up appearances).

Ginnie, after reading your last comment on the Tree of Smoke thread, I've realized a big problem I have stems from not understanding or being a part of the context for this debate. I'm not as big of a reader as a lot of you big guns on here (not being self-effacing, just admiring and honest), and I'm definitely not up at all on the criticism and reviews. So probably the main reason why I'm baffled by Myers's freakout is that I'm not informed enough about what it is that's freaked him out.

Does that make sense? Reading your last comment made that a lot clearer to me. It's like walking into a room and seeing someone screaming, having missed all the scandalous events and arguments that occurred before you came in. Of course the guy who's yelling seems crazy, if you don't know the other people in the room just stole his pants and ran over his dog! That's Myers, I guess, and the other people are the reviewers who told him he was dumb because he didn't appreciate all these writers I've never even heard of.

Sigh. Maybe I should think a little more next time to see if I have any idea what I'm talking about, before I start howling at the virtual moon about something I don't understand....

Jessica

You were perfectly clear to me. Full Disclosure: one of my major interests for many years has been brain/mind psychobiology, tying all sorts of research into better understanding of how that icky grey stuff makes me ginnie, you Jessica, and Mark Mark. Levitan on music, Ramachandra on mental maps (Thomas Guides for the brain) and recently Pinsker on the several different storage areas for language in the brain, one the higher neocortex for logic and executive functions, one a more ancient part for survival mechanisms (the old fight or flight stuff) where it has been discovered we also store swear words - hence the neurological disorders that may manifest as uncontrollable cursing. All these people and thousands more are bringing their pieces to fit into ever more complex ideas about brain function. Sorry to ride off on my hobby horse but what I am getting at is that Myers strikes me as unaware of all this, positing a one style fits all way to enjoy and understand literature and reading. You are obviously comfortable with the varieties of literature, the playfulness of language, the puzzle solving, the rhythms of words while poor B.R. isn't - or pretends so which is his business. So back to my first sentence, my brain has no trouble at all cross referencing what you said over at "Tree of Smoke" with Proulx's stories or about social work or Sally Bowles. I think what allowed us dumb primates to survive once we climbed down from the trees was our brain's smart ability to form and understand patterns. Add mammalian curiosity and sociability and we were good to go. Add language and we became Goodreaders in an instant.

I still don't care for magical realism and will never finish One Hundred Years of Solitude - but I can live with that.

By the way, apart from his (deliberately) provocative title Professor Bayard has some sensible things to say in "How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read." In fact he doesn't say anything new; he merely says old stuff clearly and serves it with a French flourish.

Yeah! Yes! Exactly!

Ginnie, this is not totally related, but I wonder if you've come across The Echo Maker? Not a perfect book, but it's got an Oliver-Sacksian character, concerns traumatic brain injury and subsequent disorder, and might be interesting to a neuroscience buff.... My own review isn't very helpful, but I'd stand by Mark's, which is.

I like Richard Powers. Wonder what Myers thinks of him? I bet I can guess....!

Funny you should ask, she whined.

I had The Echo Maker sitting right on the top of my pile but the library clock expired and I didn't finish it- guess you have jump started me again. But I have a serious allergy to anything termed "a novel of ideas" by the NYRB.

Ah well, another day, another twenty books.

Oh, it's not "a novel of ideas." I guess it tries at some points, maybe with some not-terribly-fresh questions about the brain's functioning and identity and that kind of thing? In my opinion it's an uneven novel of incredible description. I was blown away -- blown away! -- by early passages from the point of view of the character with TBI. Maybe I'm missing something, but I suspect reviewers are intimidated by Richard Powers because he knows everything, in an information sense; however, the two books of his I've read have been very straightforward narratives. My complaint is that his characters don't always feel real enough, and I sometimes wonder how much time Powers has spent around other human beings, relating to them in a fully engaged and reciprocal way.

Anyway, though, this didn't strike me as "a novel of ideas," maybe because I'm not really sure what that means. It's a story about a man with Capgras syndrome, his caregiving sister, and some cranes flying around. There's a lot of data in there about brains, but nothing unappealingly cerebral, that I could see....!

This has been a great thread to catch up on after a weekend away. Going from back to front, my problem with Powers wasn't his erudition or his insights into brain science (thanks to Ramachandran and others, Capgras was already familiar to me); rather, it was the human relationships part of his novel that I thought he flubbed on -- and more specifically, one subplot that I don't want to get into until Ginnie has had a chance to read it. But once she has, I'd love to share some direct posts among us about my theory to see what you think.

One problem I think Myers has is that when you set out to throw a bucket of cold water on the literati, if you keep going back and filling the same old bucket up with the same old water, all you will give people is a chill.

I absolutely love E. Annie Proulx. She does that thing with words that makes me go all dissociated from the world around me and live inside the world she creates. I am almost always disturbed by her stories but I can't stop reading them. In fact, her writing is so good that when I saw "Brokeback Mountain" (which I saw *before* I read her short fic on which it was based), I didn't think it was a great story... until I read her actual story. There is ONE line in her piece that makes the story GREAT which was impossible to convey in pictures. IMHO that is what makes a great writer. It's not just what they say, but the exact way in which they say it which makes the art.

I love E. Annie Proulx so much, in fact, that for years I didn't notice the "E." at the beginning of her name... and by the time I noticed, I didn't care.