Thomas Mullen's Blog, page 2
September 6, 2011
Bookzilla, Library Journal stars, and other random thoughts
--Why do I find it so much harder to write on rainy days than on sunny days? I know I've blogged about this before, but since today is the first rainy weekday in roughly six months here in Atlanta, I find myself having trouble once again to motivate. Okay. I can do it. Just one more cup of coffee, then I'll do it. Really. (Proof, if I needed it, that I would not be a very productive Seattle writer, much as I love that city.)
--Had a blast at the sixth annual Decatur Book Festival, which is the third one I've given a talk at and the fourth I've attended. In addition to my own events (and big thanks for everyone who came, and especially to everyone who bought an advance copy of the hardcover, which otherwise doesn't go on sale until Sept. 29!), I got to see a talk by George Pelecanos, who writes great D.C.-based crime novels and should have a place in writer heaven for his work on The Wire alone, and one by Tom Perotta, whose The Leftovers sounds amazing. And then at the author party I got to shake hands with Mr. Perotta and tell him how much I dug Little Children, and in particular its perfect first line ("The young mothers were telling each other how tired they were"), and I also met many other wonderful writerly types, and catch up with some others I already know but don't see nearly enough. Ah, book festivals, where the scurrily introverted pointyheaded folk come out and play. Gotta love 'em.
--My son was not nearly as wowed by the giant, inflatable "Bookzilla" monster over Decatur Square as I had expected him to be, though.
--Library Journal has given The Revisionists a starred review! It calls it "an outstanding dystopic novel." It also says: "This is either a novel about a horrifying future in which dissent is crushed before it starts and history is altered to fit the present, or an equally horrific present in which corporate interests and lawmakers collude and the apparatus of enforcement is progressively outsourced. Maybe it's about both."
--Note to self: Next year, bring son to DragonCon, which happens at the same time as the Book Festival, a few miles away. If it's anything like ComicCon, with Stormtroopers and Boba Fetts galore, he'll be amazed.
--Can't tell if I really want to see the upcoming movie Contagion or if I really don't. If someone had to go make a film about a virus epidemic, I could have recommended that they option a certain first novel set in 1918...
--Didn't get nearly enough done today. Hence this meandering, aimless blog post at 4 PM. Note to sun: Come back. Drought, shmought. My trees will survive without more rain, really. I need your inspiration.
Go To Post
--Had a blast at the sixth annual Decatur Book Festival, which is the third one I've given a talk at and the fourth I've attended. In addition to my own events (and big thanks for everyone who came, and especially to everyone who bought an advance copy of the hardcover, which otherwise doesn't go on sale until Sept. 29!), I got to see a talk by George Pelecanos, who writes great D.C.-based crime novels and should have a place in writer heaven for his work on The Wire alone, and one by Tom Perotta, whose The Leftovers sounds amazing. And then at the author party I got to shake hands with Mr. Perotta and tell him how much I dug Little Children, and in particular its perfect first line ("The young mothers were telling each other how tired they were"), and I also met many other wonderful writerly types, and catch up with some others I already know but don't see nearly enough. Ah, book festivals, where the scurrily introverted pointyheaded folk come out and play. Gotta love 'em.
--My son was not nearly as wowed by the giant, inflatable "Bookzilla" monster over Decatur Square as I had expected him to be, though.
--Library Journal has given The Revisionists a starred review! It calls it "an outstanding dystopic novel." It also says: "This is either a novel about a horrifying future in which dissent is crushed before it starts and history is altered to fit the present, or an equally horrific present in which corporate interests and lawmakers collude and the apparatus of enforcement is progressively outsourced. Maybe it's about both."
--Note to self: Next year, bring son to DragonCon, which happens at the same time as the Book Festival, a few miles away. If it's anything like ComicCon, with Stormtroopers and Boba Fetts galore, he'll be amazed.
--Can't tell if I really want to see the upcoming movie Contagion or if I really don't. If someone had to go make a film about a virus epidemic, I could have recommended that they option a certain first novel set in 1918...
--Didn't get nearly enough done today. Hence this meandering, aimless blog post at 4 PM. Note to sun: Come back. Drought, shmought. My trees will survive without more rain, really. I need your inspiration.
Go To Post
August 29, 2011
Book Publication, Readings, and Festivals on the Horizon
Hey, y'all. Suddenly it's almost September, which means we're less than a month away from the publication of The Revisionists! The book officially hits the stores and cyberspace on Sept. 28. Those of you in the Atlanta area will have a chance to get a hardcover earlier, too: this weekend I'll be reading at the super-awesome Decatur Book Festival, and there will be early copies available for purchase. I'm up on Saturday at noon, so come by, say hi, and be the first to get a hardcover of the new book!
I'll be hitting a few other festivals in the coming weeks and months as well, and a couple of colleges. September 20 will have me reading at the University of South Carolina at Aiken for their Freshmen Reads, and I'll also be visiting Regis University in Denver on Oct. 4. I'll be at the Southern Independent Booksellers Association's annual trade show in Charleston on Sept. 17. And a few more festivals on the horizon: the Texas Book Festival the weekend of Oct. 22 in Austin, the Dahlonega Book Festival here in Georgia on Nov. 12, and some time next spring I'm off to Arizona for the Tuscon Book Festival and U. Arizona.
If you live near any of the above, please come by and say Hi!
Go To Post
I'll be hitting a few other festivals in the coming weeks and months as well, and a couple of colleges. September 20 will have me reading at the University of South Carolina at Aiken for their Freshmen Reads, and I'll also be visiting Regis University in Denver on Oct. 4. I'll be at the Southern Independent Booksellers Association's annual trade show in Charleston on Sept. 17. And a few more festivals on the horizon: the Texas Book Festival the weekend of Oct. 22 in Austin, the Dahlonega Book Festival here in Georgia on Nov. 12, and some time next spring I'm off to Arizona for the Tuscon Book Festival and U. Arizona.
If you live near any of the above, please come by and say Hi!
Go To Post
August 9, 2011
Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter and the Whole Southern Novel Thing
I haven't posted an old-fashioned book review here in a while, but I just finished a novel that merits an online shout-out. Tom Franklin's Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter is the early breakaway candidate for Best Book I'll Read This Year. I haven't been reading as many novels as I'd like lately -- there are many months in which I read only nonfiction, as research for whatever project I'm working on -- so it's been a while since I found myself anxiously awaiting the next free moment I'd have to crack a novel open and see what would happen next.
Franklin, like another writer I know (um, me), wrote two historical novels before breaking the mold with a contemporary third novel. For that reason alone I was curious to see how he handled it. (I haven't read his other books, but will remedy that shortly.) The characters in Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter are rich and real and flawed, the dialogue is perfect, and the plot is extremely well executed, so much so that some critics or lit-fiction writers might fret that it's too interesting to be literary fiction (they would be wrong).
I'll keep my plot recap simple: It's the story of two middle-aged men, one white and one black, who were briefly friends in high school until one of them was implicated in the disappearance of a girl they knew. The girl was never found, so the suspect was never jailed and instead has lived his life as a local outcast. Now, many years later, another girl has vanished, and the estranged friends find themselves confronting their pasts, as well as dealing with the new crime.
Boiled down that way it can sound like any number of crime novels, and in a way it echoes Mystic River (whose author, Dennis Lehane, offers a blurb on the back cover). But the book soars far higher than either crime novel or literary fiction standards thanks to fine writing and a perfectly calibrated balance between plot, character development, and setting.
Part of what impressed me is that its plot is deceptively simple, yet the layers of each character are slowly peeled back to reveal more wrinkles and folds and intricacies than the reader would have expected. I found myself thinking of Go Tell it on the Mountain, another Southern-flavored work that had the same effect on me. (Yes, that's high praise indeed.) The fact that this is all accomplished in less than 300 pages is something that makes me exceedingly envious.
Franklin steeps us in the history of a small Mississippi town and the major characters, artfully dangling just enough strings for the reader to pull on, making us anxious to turn the pages. He should teach a class on this. (Actually, he probably does: he teaches writing at Ole Miss.)
In addition to being a fantastic read, the book made me think all the more about what I term "The Southern novel thing." When I first moved from DC down here to Atlanta, I was immediately confronted with a dilemma I hadn't anticipated: whether I've suddenly become a "Southern writer" because of my zip code, or would I only be called that if my next book was set in a small Georgian town and featured hound dogs on porches and the occasional run-in with a poisonous snake. And, would I even want to be called a Southern writer, since that's a term often deployed disparagingly by the sorts of Northeasterners who would never, say, refer to Richard Russo as a "Maine writer" or Philip Roth as a "Jersey writer."
Tom Bell, one of the founders of the awesome Decatur Book Festival, told me that when he launched the festival and asked NY publishers to send writers to it, the publishers at first only figured he was interested in that same kind of stereotypical, bourbon and hound dogs and hot summer nights kind of small town hokey fiction. (Which in some ways seems as much a temporal stereotype as a regional one -- do they think that people south of the Mason-Dixon line still live in the 1960s? Have they actually been to Atlanta?)
Enough ranting. What I'm trying to get at is that Franklin has written a book that would indeed fit comfortably in a professor's course on Southern Fiction. It has the kudzu-choked setting, it has the great themes of race and class and redemption and crime and punishment. It even has a poisonous snake, and a very mean dog. And young boys toting firearms. But Franklin isn't blindly following stereotypes, he's capturing the vibrant modern world as he sees it: DirectTV dishes on doublewides, office workers nodding their heads to gospel music on their iPod earbuds, and small-town sheriffs wearing T-shirts that extol the virtues of using firearms.
It all works, perfectly, and makes me that much more excited to dig my own hands into the fertile territory I now call home. (OK, true, Atlanta is a far cry from Southern Mississippi. But you get my point.) That alone makes me hugely grateful to have read this book. Whether I file it alongside Ron Rash in my library's unofficial Southern authors section, or alongside Lehane and Richard Price in my unofficial literary crime section, or on my wife's bedside table in the Future Book Club Picks section (her club actually did pick it next), it's a book I'm sure I'll turn to again.
Go To Post
Franklin, like another writer I know (um, me), wrote two historical novels before breaking the mold with a contemporary third novel. For that reason alone I was curious to see how he handled it. (I haven't read his other books, but will remedy that shortly.) The characters in Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter are rich and real and flawed, the dialogue is perfect, and the plot is extremely well executed, so much so that some critics or lit-fiction writers might fret that it's too interesting to be literary fiction (they would be wrong).
I'll keep my plot recap simple: It's the story of two middle-aged men, one white and one black, who were briefly friends in high school until one of them was implicated in the disappearance of a girl they knew. The girl was never found, so the suspect was never jailed and instead has lived his life as a local outcast. Now, many years later, another girl has vanished, and the estranged friends find themselves confronting their pasts, as well as dealing with the new crime.
Boiled down that way it can sound like any number of crime novels, and in a way it echoes Mystic River (whose author, Dennis Lehane, offers a blurb on the back cover). But the book soars far higher than either crime novel or literary fiction standards thanks to fine writing and a perfectly calibrated balance between plot, character development, and setting.
Part of what impressed me is that its plot is deceptively simple, yet the layers of each character are slowly peeled back to reveal more wrinkles and folds and intricacies than the reader would have expected. I found myself thinking of Go Tell it on the Mountain, another Southern-flavored work that had the same effect on me. (Yes, that's high praise indeed.) The fact that this is all accomplished in less than 300 pages is something that makes me exceedingly envious.
Franklin steeps us in the history of a small Mississippi town and the major characters, artfully dangling just enough strings for the reader to pull on, making us anxious to turn the pages. He should teach a class on this. (Actually, he probably does: he teaches writing at Ole Miss.)
In addition to being a fantastic read, the book made me think all the more about what I term "The Southern novel thing." When I first moved from DC down here to Atlanta, I was immediately confronted with a dilemma I hadn't anticipated: whether I've suddenly become a "Southern writer" because of my zip code, or would I only be called that if my next book was set in a small Georgian town and featured hound dogs on porches and the occasional run-in with a poisonous snake. And, would I even want to be called a Southern writer, since that's a term often deployed disparagingly by the sorts of Northeasterners who would never, say, refer to Richard Russo as a "Maine writer" or Philip Roth as a "Jersey writer."
Tom Bell, one of the founders of the awesome Decatur Book Festival, told me that when he launched the festival and asked NY publishers to send writers to it, the publishers at first only figured he was interested in that same kind of stereotypical, bourbon and hound dogs and hot summer nights kind of small town hokey fiction. (Which in some ways seems as much a temporal stereotype as a regional one -- do they think that people south of the Mason-Dixon line still live in the 1960s? Have they actually been to Atlanta?)
Enough ranting. What I'm trying to get at is that Franklin has written a book that would indeed fit comfortably in a professor's course on Southern Fiction. It has the kudzu-choked setting, it has the great themes of race and class and redemption and crime and punishment. It even has a poisonous snake, and a very mean dog. And young boys toting firearms. But Franklin isn't blindly following stereotypes, he's capturing the vibrant modern world as he sees it: DirectTV dishes on doublewides, office workers nodding their heads to gospel music on their iPod earbuds, and small-town sheriffs wearing T-shirts that extol the virtues of using firearms.
It all works, perfectly, and makes me that much more excited to dig my own hands into the fertile territory I now call home. (OK, true, Atlanta is a far cry from Southern Mississippi. But you get my point.) That alone makes me hugely grateful to have read this book. Whether I file it alongside Ron Rash in my library's unofficial Southern authors section, or alongside Lehane and Richard Price in my unofficial literary crime section, or on my wife's bedside table in the Future Book Club Picks section (her club actually did pick it next), it's a book I'm sure I'll turn to again.
Go To Post
August 3, 2011
How To Escape Desert Islands
Here's a kind of random interview of yours truly that my UK publisher just posted to its Web site. Items discussed include Atlanta traffic, Indiana Jones (man, I just keep bringing him up), and being marooned on an island with one book.
Positive blog reviews of The Revisionists have been popping up, which is great. Although also slightly weird: bloggers, remember that the book doesn't come out for another month and a half! Kindly hold back the effusive, gushing praise until the book is actually, you know, available to be purchased by curious readers. Thanks!
Go To Post
Positive blog reviews of The Revisionists have been popping up, which is great. Although also slightly weird: bloggers, remember that the book doesn't come out for another month and a half! Kindly hold back the effusive, gushing praise until the book is actually, you know, available to be purchased by curious readers. Thanks!
Go To Post
August 1, 2011
On Risk
A while ago, a friend of mine made a comment about one of his formerly favorite bands, and it's stuck in my head for a while now. Honestly, it's been so long that I can't even remember which band he was talking about, but the bottom line is that he had previously worshipped the ground they played on, but then he got their new album and he really, really hated it. Sucked just wasn't a strong enough word. He thought of a lot of other ones. He went yet further, stating that the new album was so incredibly bad (so unforgivably bad) "that it makes me reassess their earlier work." In other words, he was realizing that maybe those earlier albums, which he had once gone on and on to me about, and which had been the very soundtrack of his life for a few years, were actually bad, simply because their new one was bad.
Huh?
This was maybe a year after my first novel had been published, an experience which forever changes the way one feels about book reviews, movie reviews, the online reviews of kitchen products, blogger posts about that one restaurant with the one waitress who was a total bitch that night because she forgot to put my salad dressing on the side, etc. So maybe I was feeling a tad over-vulnerable, and over-defensive about artists being knocked, and over-protective of my friend's formerly favorite band. (Whom I'd never really dug much, actually.)
But I started thinking: Even if the new album is the worst album my friend had ever heard, and even if he felt a sense of profound, even personal disappointment (as if he was let down not by some musicians he'd never met but by one of his own friends, or as if he'd been cheated on by his girlfriend), why does that have to alter his feelings about their earlier albums, which he'd always loved? Those albums haven't changed. They're still awesome (or at least, as awesome as he'd always thought of them as being). Why does he feel the sudden need to "reassess" them?
Because here's the thing: I think we want to think of our favorite bands, and writers, and directors, and atheletes, as perfect. Or at least damn close. I still remember when I was in high school and I was in a big, big U2 phase, I liked them so much that I'd blow $12 on a UK import of one of their singles, just so I could get the one or two rare B-sides that came with it. These were tracks that they hadn't put on their album, or released in the US, but still I had to have them. And I listened to them, and ... they weren't very good. (Some of the rare U2 songs in that era, actually, were great. But others were B-sides for a reason.) And I found my opinion of the cherished U2 lowering a bit. OK, they were still great, but it's not like every time they plugged in their instruments they created perfection. Some of their songs were just ok. The lads were smart enough to keep those songs off their albums and use them as B-side fodder, yes, but still. Those songs were proof to me that the band wasn't perfect. Which, you know, sucked to discover.
So it's all the worse when your favorite writer/artist/director/quarterback tosses out a bad follow-up album/novel/movie/playoff game. (I will not speak of the Patriots' last few postseason performances here.) It proves to us that they are human. They make mistakes. But does it mean that their earlier successes weren't actually successes at all? Just because they aren't successful all the time?
The reason, I would submit, that a work of art succeeds is because the artist takes risks. My friend dug that band's first two albums because he'd never heard anything like it; they melded various sounds together in a new way, they took their listeners to a bold new place. I feel the same way when I crack open a great novel by a writer I've never read before, or an amazing film. We want our artists to take risks, to tread on new ground, to avoid playing it safe. We hate it when someone plays it safe and writes the same damn book over and over, or records the same album three times. Where's the sense of adventure, we ask? It all feels too ho-hum. We want another bold leap forward.
But risks, by their very definition, are incredibly likely to fail. Sometimes when the artist takes another risk, it works yet again (wow! even better than their first!) but sometimes, yikes, it's a risk that just doesn't pay off. It doesn't mean their earlier work was worse than we realized. It just means that the odds got them this time, and that our romanticized version of the artist as perfect is being replaced by this unfortunate glimpse into the sausage-making process of art, which ain't always pretty.
Am I thinking of this now because I'm about to publish a book that takes a lot of risks? That is in many ways quite different from my first two? That combines various elements that aren't normally placed in the same narrative? Perhaps. Of course, I happen to love the darn thing, and I think it's a lot closer to perfect than sausage. (Though I do like sausage.) No doubt someone else might feel differently, and they'll be so enraged by the new risks that they'll think maybe my first two books weren't as good as they thought. (Well, maybe they weren't.) But it's my job to test out that tightrope, so I'll continue to do so, one imperfect step at a time, hoping as usual that someone's holding the net.
Go To Post
Huh?
This was maybe a year after my first novel had been published, an experience which forever changes the way one feels about book reviews, movie reviews, the online reviews of kitchen products, blogger posts about that one restaurant with the one waitress who was a total bitch that night because she forgot to put my salad dressing on the side, etc. So maybe I was feeling a tad over-vulnerable, and over-defensive about artists being knocked, and over-protective of my friend's formerly favorite band. (Whom I'd never really dug much, actually.)
But I started thinking: Even if the new album is the worst album my friend had ever heard, and even if he felt a sense of profound, even personal disappointment (as if he was let down not by some musicians he'd never met but by one of his own friends, or as if he'd been cheated on by his girlfriend), why does that have to alter his feelings about their earlier albums, which he'd always loved? Those albums haven't changed. They're still awesome (or at least, as awesome as he'd always thought of them as being). Why does he feel the sudden need to "reassess" them?
Because here's the thing: I think we want to think of our favorite bands, and writers, and directors, and atheletes, as perfect. Or at least damn close. I still remember when I was in high school and I was in a big, big U2 phase, I liked them so much that I'd blow $12 on a UK import of one of their singles, just so I could get the one or two rare B-sides that came with it. These were tracks that they hadn't put on their album, or released in the US, but still I had to have them. And I listened to them, and ... they weren't very good. (Some of the rare U2 songs in that era, actually, were great. But others were B-sides for a reason.) And I found my opinion of the cherished U2 lowering a bit. OK, they were still great, but it's not like every time they plugged in their instruments they created perfection. Some of their songs were just ok. The lads were smart enough to keep those songs off their albums and use them as B-side fodder, yes, but still. Those songs were proof to me that the band wasn't perfect. Which, you know, sucked to discover.
So it's all the worse when your favorite writer/artist/director/quarterback tosses out a bad follow-up album/novel/movie/playoff game. (I will not speak of the Patriots' last few postseason performances here.) It proves to us that they are human. They make mistakes. But does it mean that their earlier successes weren't actually successes at all? Just because they aren't successful all the time?
The reason, I would submit, that a work of art succeeds is because the artist takes risks. My friend dug that band's first two albums because he'd never heard anything like it; they melded various sounds together in a new way, they took their listeners to a bold new place. I feel the same way when I crack open a great novel by a writer I've never read before, or an amazing film. We want our artists to take risks, to tread on new ground, to avoid playing it safe. We hate it when someone plays it safe and writes the same damn book over and over, or records the same album three times. Where's the sense of adventure, we ask? It all feels too ho-hum. We want another bold leap forward.
But risks, by their very definition, are incredibly likely to fail. Sometimes when the artist takes another risk, it works yet again (wow! even better than their first!) but sometimes, yikes, it's a risk that just doesn't pay off. It doesn't mean their earlier work was worse than we realized. It just means that the odds got them this time, and that our romanticized version of the artist as perfect is being replaced by this unfortunate glimpse into the sausage-making process of art, which ain't always pretty.
Am I thinking of this now because I'm about to publish a book that takes a lot of risks? That is in many ways quite different from my first two? That combines various elements that aren't normally placed in the same narrative? Perhaps. Of course, I happen to love the darn thing, and I think it's a lot closer to perfect than sausage. (Though I do like sausage.) No doubt someone else might feel differently, and they'll be so enraged by the new risks that they'll think maybe my first two books weren't as good as they thought. (Well, maybe they weren't.) But it's my job to test out that tightrope, so I'll continue to do so, one imperfect step at a time, hoping as usual that someone's holding the net.
Go To Post
July 20, 2011
Off to Comic Con!
I've been to book festivals and arts festivals, a pumpkin festival, a convention for physical therapists, a conference for managed care companies at which Bill Clinton was the keynote speaker (and I overslept and missed his talk -- it was in Vegas), and even a North Carolina hog festival. Never been to a comic book convention, though, but soon I'll get to cross that off my list.
Yep, I'm headed to Comic Con in San Diego! Excited, overwhelmed, confused, wary, armed with my camera and some kryptonite. I'll be part of a panel on dystopian/post-apocalyptic fiction, along with authors of books about flesh-eating viruses and robot revolutions. Should be a riot. While there I hope to see a presentation about Star Wars Legos (my son is addicted to the things), hear from genre-bending authors like Lev Grossman (just finished his book The Magicians) and Paul Malmont (see my interview with the pulp aficionado here), catch a talk by visionary director Guillermo del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth is I think one of the greatest works of art to appear in the last decade, in any medium or genre), see grown men and women dressed up like Storm Troopers and X-Men, maybe buy some toys for my kids, and just overall learn more about the crazy and shockingly profitable intersection of comics, film, graphic novels, and books. I should have much to report in a few days...
Go To Post
Yep, I'm headed to Comic Con in San Diego! Excited, overwhelmed, confused, wary, armed with my camera and some kryptonite. I'll be part of a panel on dystopian/post-apocalyptic fiction, along with authors of books about flesh-eating viruses and robot revolutions. Should be a riot. While there I hope to see a presentation about Star Wars Legos (my son is addicted to the things), hear from genre-bending authors like Lev Grossman (just finished his book The Magicians) and Paul Malmont (see my interview with the pulp aficionado here), catch a talk by visionary director Guillermo del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth is I think one of the greatest works of art to appear in the last decade, in any medium or genre), see grown men and women dressed up like Storm Troopers and X-Men, maybe buy some toys for my kids, and just overall learn more about the crazy and shockingly profitable intersection of comics, film, graphic novels, and books. I should have much to report in a few days...
Go To Post
July 15, 2011
What "Iron Chef" Taught Me About Writing
A few years ago I found myself flipping through a book about Iron Chef -- the early Japanese version of the show, which I used to watch with my wife and some friends about ten years ago (not the newer, less goofy American one with Alton Brown). The book had an interview with one of the chefs, Morimoto, the Japanese wizard behind the restaurant Nobu. He made an interesting comment about cooking that applies equally well to writing, and I think about it until this day.
For those of you not in the know: Iron Chef is a kitschy cooking face-off in which the contestant (a top-notch cook at some big-time restaurant) challenges one of the show's four "iron chefs" to see "whose cuisine reigns supreme." The show's host, a very scary Japanese man with an Elvis hairdo and a Sergeant Pepper wardrobe, chooses a special "mystery ingredient" for the day (could be rice, or sea urchin roe, or conger eel -- did I mention the show was Japanese?), and then the contestant and the iron chef race to prepare six or seven different meals containing that ingredient. Three celebrity judges (the American version of the show, interestingly, often featured one of my favorite writers, Jay McInerney, as a judge) then rate the dishes based on three scores: presentation, taste, and originality.
In the interview I read, Morimoto noted that although he loved being on the show, he found it incredibly stressful. We're judged based on both originality and taste, he said, but it's so hard to make something that's both amazingly original and yummy. People have been eating for millions of years, and the reason we've come to eat certain things together (like pork chops and apple sauce, or steak and potatoes) is that they taste good together. The reason we don't throw hugely disparate ingredients together (chocolate and fish sauce! steak tartare and burnt caramel!) is that it would taste really, really bad. On the show, Morimoto was always trying to be original and push the envelope by conceiving weird and unheard-of combinations, but finding such alchemies that also happened to be delicious was tough. Get too creative and it could be gross; aim too relentlessly at the taste buds and it might seem unoriginal. How do you find that balance?
I think about this a lot. Many of my favorite books, films, albums, and TV shows succeed so well because they combine odd elements in a unque way. Yiddish Policeman's Union told a tale that was equal parts hardboiled noir, Jewish identity narrative, and speculative history; The Wire combined novelistic scope with crime stories with soap operatic storylines with big-picture political scope; Odelay found the common ground between folk, hip-hop, rock, and pop. And I love books that do new things with narrative and style and voice, that tell a story in a way you've never seen before.
As a writer, I want to capture this level of fun and play, the zaniness of combining ingredients that aren't supposed to go together. But there's a certain boiling point beyond which the originality metabolizes but the taste begins to suffer. Because if you push the experimenting too far, you wind up with a nasty entree that makes you want to vomit. We've all read books or seen films that took their little experiments too far, that strayed so outside the established norm of story that you couldn't follow the plot (or, the opposite, there was no plot), or whose experimentation felt forced or simply wrong in an indefinable, gut-level way. Which is the risk you take when you, say, add a dash of pepper to your ice cream, or add a time traveler to a book about the politics of post-9/11 America (as my forthcoming book The Revisionists does).
So, when I'm devising my stories and working out the kinks, I try to push boundaries and do new things, I try to have fun and show my readers something they've never seen before, but I always try to remember to step back and ask myself, "Does it still taste good?"
Go To Post
For those of you not in the know: Iron Chef is a kitschy cooking face-off in which the contestant (a top-notch cook at some big-time restaurant) challenges one of the show's four "iron chefs" to see "whose cuisine reigns supreme." The show's host, a very scary Japanese man with an Elvis hairdo and a Sergeant Pepper wardrobe, chooses a special "mystery ingredient" for the day (could be rice, or sea urchin roe, or conger eel -- did I mention the show was Japanese?), and then the contestant and the iron chef race to prepare six or seven different meals containing that ingredient. Three celebrity judges (the American version of the show, interestingly, often featured one of my favorite writers, Jay McInerney, as a judge) then rate the dishes based on three scores: presentation, taste, and originality.
In the interview I read, Morimoto noted that although he loved being on the show, he found it incredibly stressful. We're judged based on both originality and taste, he said, but it's so hard to make something that's both amazingly original and yummy. People have been eating for millions of years, and the reason we've come to eat certain things together (like pork chops and apple sauce, or steak and potatoes) is that they taste good together. The reason we don't throw hugely disparate ingredients together (chocolate and fish sauce! steak tartare and burnt caramel!) is that it would taste really, really bad. On the show, Morimoto was always trying to be original and push the envelope by conceiving weird and unheard-of combinations, but finding such alchemies that also happened to be delicious was tough. Get too creative and it could be gross; aim too relentlessly at the taste buds and it might seem unoriginal. How do you find that balance?
I think about this a lot. Many of my favorite books, films, albums, and TV shows succeed so well because they combine odd elements in a unque way. Yiddish Policeman's Union told a tale that was equal parts hardboiled noir, Jewish identity narrative, and speculative history; The Wire combined novelistic scope with crime stories with soap operatic storylines with big-picture political scope; Odelay found the common ground between folk, hip-hop, rock, and pop. And I love books that do new things with narrative and style and voice, that tell a story in a way you've never seen before.
As a writer, I want to capture this level of fun and play, the zaniness of combining ingredients that aren't supposed to go together. But there's a certain boiling point beyond which the originality metabolizes but the taste begins to suffer. Because if you push the experimenting too far, you wind up with a nasty entree that makes you want to vomit. We've all read books or seen films that took their little experiments too far, that strayed so outside the established norm of story that you couldn't follow the plot (or, the opposite, there was no plot), or whose experimentation felt forced or simply wrong in an indefinable, gut-level way. Which is the risk you take when you, say, add a dash of pepper to your ice cream, or add a time traveler to a book about the politics of post-9/11 America (as my forthcoming book The Revisionists does).
So, when I'm devising my stories and working out the kinks, I try to push boundaries and do new things, I try to have fun and show my readers something they've never seen before, but I always try to remember to step back and ask myself, "Does it still taste good?"
Go To Post
July 11, 2011
The Novel vs. The Short Story vs. The Novel-As-Story-Collection
I just finished reading the reigning champion of literary fiction, Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Good Squad, which cleaned up with the recent Pulitizer Prize and National Book Critic Circle Award and pretty much every newspaper's Best Of the Year list. Egan had been on my own to-read list for years, embarrassingly, but I'm glad I finally got around to reading her: she's clearly brilliant, with a restless sort of narrative eye that wants to take in everything in this crazy world of ours. As a commentator of contemporary life, she reminded me a lot of Franzen, one of my favorite writers.
(I should also note that about ten years ago I wrote a never-to-be-published novel about a rock band, and among my rejections from editors were comments along the lines of "books about rock music don't sell." So it's good to see another literary novelist doing something artistic and new and fun with this concept, and seeing it work, and, yes, seeing it sell.)
The more complicated issue is how Goon Squad brings up the question of what exactly makes something a novel. It says "a novel" right there on the cover, that weird two-word designation that publishers decided to put on all novels a few years ago. (Why do they do this??? It's not like movie credits say "INCEPTION: A FILM.") Yet this particular "novel" is really 13 somewhat related short stories. We start out with the story of a music mogul and his young assistant, then we get a decades-earlier story from the perspective of a young girl whose group of punk friends included that future-mogul, then a story about an older man who seduced that young girl's best friend, etc. It's not so much a Russian nesting doll effect as a social networking, outwardly spiraling effect (which nicely ties in with her discussions of social networking in a few of the stories). Sometimes this works beautifully, creating weird links and casting unexpected shadows on earlier tales. But sometimes it feels forced, like Egan had a random story that she really liked but that had nothing to do with this book, so she decided to say that one of the background characters in the otherwise unrelated Story X is actually the boss of the main character's brother from Story Y, justifying Story X's inclusion.
So, the question: what makes a novel a novel, and not a collection of short stories? And does it matter?
Goon Squad seems part of a trend, as a number of recent books take this somewhat-related-stories-as-novel structure. One of my favorite books from last year, Tom Rachman's The Imperfectionists, also appears to be a novel but feels more like a collection of stories, each written about a different employee of a newspaper in Rome. David Mitchell's wonderful Black Swan Green is an autobiographical coming-of-age "novel" (supposedly) about a boy, but each chapter occurs in a different month of the boy's life and is a perfect stand-alone story as opposed to an open-ended, plot-line-dangling chapter.
Maybe this form of novel-writing is a result of the increasing MFA-ization of literature. More and more writers are coming out of grad programs, where they're taught more about short-story writing than novel writing (due to the fact that you can't exactly write a novel in time for next week's workshop). If they can find cool ways of turning their stories into bold new forms of novels, as I feel Rachman did, then more power to them. The novel is a breathing, living thing, and it's exciting to see it do new tricks. When proven short story master Junot Diaz tried his hand at writing a novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, it didn't have the typical flow of a novel; chapters came from different characters and in different timelines, giving it a slightly disjointed effect, but still it worked as a novel, as there were enough linking threads and a commonality of voice to tie it all together. The result was a novel unlike any I'd read before, in a good way. It was a novel written in a, er, novel way.
But the mere fact that Goon Squad ran the critical and awards table (as Oscar Wao did) makes me worry sometimes that the novel as traditionally written is being unfairly knocked by the literati. It's been interesting to note the high percentage of short story collections reviewed by the The New York Times Book Review of late, as if mere novels aren't as worthy of critical attention. And a few years ago, when Granta issued its Twenty Best Young Novelist list, I couldn't help noticing that many of the "novelists" they'd chosen were people who actually hadn't written any novels. Many had a short story collection or two to their credit, but no novel. The clear assumption is that if someone can write a great story collection, then surely they can write a great novel. Stories are displays of artistry, requiring pointillistic brilliance, but novels are closer to hackwork, a brute exercise in endurance.
As someone who writes novels, I find this not a little insulting. I realize that story writers are ostracized by their lack of sales, so I don't want to rain on the one parade they get to enjoy. And short fiction is exciting: it allows for experimentation, for trying new things, for the wonders of impatiently jumping between tenses or characters or styles from page to page. Its limited space is particularly conducive to insightful pieces surgically picking at a character's, or a single scene's, emotional state. When story writers try novels, sometimes we get the best of both worlds: inventive tales that work on a micro level and from the 10,000-foot perspective. But sometimes we wind up with long-form stretches of internality whose lack of movement bores, whose navel-gazing feels narcissistic and self-important. As does the sometimes incoherent leaping from style to style, as if the author feels that a novel is only good if it has seven different writing styles and perspectives, or as if s/he feels that they'll only be considered an Important Writer if they can check so many boxes off of their Creativity Checklist ("and then in chapter five I'll write from the perspective of the family dog! and then in the next chapter from the perspective of a dead relative of their neighbor who they talked to in chapter 1! and then the next chapter will be written as an Excel spreadsheet!").
(And in fairness I should admit that my aforementioned, unpublished rock novel did exactly this: told a story from about 12 perspectives, in different styles and tones and tenses. No Excel or canines, but there was a chapter written as a Rolling Stone review, and one as a Web chat, etc. Forgive me: I was 25 and was way, way too into David Foster Wallace at the time.)
Reading Goon Squad, I found myself thinking of another story-collection-as-novel, Melissa Bank's The Wonder Spot. I loved her Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing, and I did mostly like her second as well, but I thought it highlighted some of the problems in this form. The Wonder Spot was a series of short stories about a young protagonist; one story was her as a young girl, then another was her as a working professional, etc. This revealed some surprising narrative choices. Early in one story we learn that the character's beloved father died recently, but we never actually saw what happened or learned any of the details -- the death apparently happened in the blank space between stories. But the father was a big part of her life, we were told earlier, so why did we skip over his death like that? We got an entire story about her dating one random ex-boyfriend, but nothing about this major life event. I had the uncomfortable sense that Bank wasn't sure how to write such a wrenching scene, so instead she skipped ahead to some other, more story-izable aspect of her character's life. The stories in the book were all well done, but it felt to me like she'd cheated.
This is the problem I sometimes have with the story-as-novel. While it plays to the strengths of short stories (close-up introspection, a careful scrutinization of our daily lives and habits, the ability to try on different voices and styles), it ignores some of the aspects of novel-writing that too many writers assume are easy and therefore unimportant: the careful sustaining of a larger narrative, the interplay of interlocking storylines, the steady accretion of suspense, and a consistency of style and tone not just for each individual character but for the novel as a whole. My friend the novelist and critic (and football fan) Charles McNair calls this "the blocking and tackling of writing." Sure, maybe it looks cooler and is more fun to throw up 50-yard bombs on every play, but in order to win you need to do the heavy hitting, too. Just because that seems less glorious doesn't make it less important, and it certainly doesn't make it easier, though many critics mistakenly assume it is.
It reminds me of a great piece by David Denby in The New Yorker a few years ago, about the new trend of films that played their narrative out of order or jumped between multiple, initially unrelated storylines. It started with Pulp Fiction and continued with Memento and seemed to be hitting some crazy peak in 2007 (when he wrote the article) with Babel and Syriana. He praises this form of overly complex, disruptive narrative while also pulling back and saying, hey guys, let's not forget that straightforward, chronological storytelling is a powerful, wonderful way to create art, and it's lasted for generations for a good reason: because it works. Jumbling your narrative and rearranging the timeline of a film doesn't inherently make it more artistic, it just makes it more complicated. Which is sort of how I feel when I read some of these stories-as-novels.
I'm coming off harder on Egan's book than I mean to -- I very much enjoyed it, and I think she worked some awesome tricks, and, again, I am deeply impressed by the way she came up with something new to say about the rock industry, about the dreamers who suffer for their art. (And, yes, I admit it: I thought her PowerPoint chapter was awesome.) Her book just got me to thinking about some of the novel/story tensions that already had been bothering me lately. Maybe the problem is that we novel writers aren't doing enough to further the art form and push the boundaries, and we need the story writers (who are skilled by necessity at experimentation) to point the way. Or maybe the tastemasters armed with their MFAs and their New York Times book reviews are too quick to assume that straightforward narrative is dry and old-hat, and too quick to assume that it's easy. Or, more likely, I'm thinking about this too much and just need to put my head down and finish my next novel. Unless I get some crazy short story ideas first...
Go To Post
(I should also note that about ten years ago I wrote a never-to-be-published novel about a rock band, and among my rejections from editors were comments along the lines of "books about rock music don't sell." So it's good to see another literary novelist doing something artistic and new and fun with this concept, and seeing it work, and, yes, seeing it sell.)
The more complicated issue is how Goon Squad brings up the question of what exactly makes something a novel. It says "a novel" right there on the cover, that weird two-word designation that publishers decided to put on all novels a few years ago. (Why do they do this??? It's not like movie credits say "INCEPTION: A FILM.") Yet this particular "novel" is really 13 somewhat related short stories. We start out with the story of a music mogul and his young assistant, then we get a decades-earlier story from the perspective of a young girl whose group of punk friends included that future-mogul, then a story about an older man who seduced that young girl's best friend, etc. It's not so much a Russian nesting doll effect as a social networking, outwardly spiraling effect (which nicely ties in with her discussions of social networking in a few of the stories). Sometimes this works beautifully, creating weird links and casting unexpected shadows on earlier tales. But sometimes it feels forced, like Egan had a random story that she really liked but that had nothing to do with this book, so she decided to say that one of the background characters in the otherwise unrelated Story X is actually the boss of the main character's brother from Story Y, justifying Story X's inclusion.
So, the question: what makes a novel a novel, and not a collection of short stories? And does it matter?
Goon Squad seems part of a trend, as a number of recent books take this somewhat-related-stories-as-novel structure. One of my favorite books from last year, Tom Rachman's The Imperfectionists, also appears to be a novel but feels more like a collection of stories, each written about a different employee of a newspaper in Rome. David Mitchell's wonderful Black Swan Green is an autobiographical coming-of-age "novel" (supposedly) about a boy, but each chapter occurs in a different month of the boy's life and is a perfect stand-alone story as opposed to an open-ended, plot-line-dangling chapter.
Maybe this form of novel-writing is a result of the increasing MFA-ization of literature. More and more writers are coming out of grad programs, where they're taught more about short-story writing than novel writing (due to the fact that you can't exactly write a novel in time for next week's workshop). If they can find cool ways of turning their stories into bold new forms of novels, as I feel Rachman did, then more power to them. The novel is a breathing, living thing, and it's exciting to see it do new tricks. When proven short story master Junot Diaz tried his hand at writing a novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, it didn't have the typical flow of a novel; chapters came from different characters and in different timelines, giving it a slightly disjointed effect, but still it worked as a novel, as there were enough linking threads and a commonality of voice to tie it all together. The result was a novel unlike any I'd read before, in a good way. It was a novel written in a, er, novel way.
But the mere fact that Goon Squad ran the critical and awards table (as Oscar Wao did) makes me worry sometimes that the novel as traditionally written is being unfairly knocked by the literati. It's been interesting to note the high percentage of short story collections reviewed by the The New York Times Book Review of late, as if mere novels aren't as worthy of critical attention. And a few years ago, when Granta issued its Twenty Best Young Novelist list, I couldn't help noticing that many of the "novelists" they'd chosen were people who actually hadn't written any novels. Many had a short story collection or two to their credit, but no novel. The clear assumption is that if someone can write a great story collection, then surely they can write a great novel. Stories are displays of artistry, requiring pointillistic brilliance, but novels are closer to hackwork, a brute exercise in endurance.
As someone who writes novels, I find this not a little insulting. I realize that story writers are ostracized by their lack of sales, so I don't want to rain on the one parade they get to enjoy. And short fiction is exciting: it allows for experimentation, for trying new things, for the wonders of impatiently jumping between tenses or characters or styles from page to page. Its limited space is particularly conducive to insightful pieces surgically picking at a character's, or a single scene's, emotional state. When story writers try novels, sometimes we get the best of both worlds: inventive tales that work on a micro level and from the 10,000-foot perspective. But sometimes we wind up with long-form stretches of internality whose lack of movement bores, whose navel-gazing feels narcissistic and self-important. As does the sometimes incoherent leaping from style to style, as if the author feels that a novel is only good if it has seven different writing styles and perspectives, or as if s/he feels that they'll only be considered an Important Writer if they can check so many boxes off of their Creativity Checklist ("and then in chapter five I'll write from the perspective of the family dog! and then in the next chapter from the perspective of a dead relative of their neighbor who they talked to in chapter 1! and then the next chapter will be written as an Excel spreadsheet!").
(And in fairness I should admit that my aforementioned, unpublished rock novel did exactly this: told a story from about 12 perspectives, in different styles and tones and tenses. No Excel or canines, but there was a chapter written as a Rolling Stone review, and one as a Web chat, etc. Forgive me: I was 25 and was way, way too into David Foster Wallace at the time.)
Reading Goon Squad, I found myself thinking of another story-collection-as-novel, Melissa Bank's The Wonder Spot. I loved her Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing, and I did mostly like her second as well, but I thought it highlighted some of the problems in this form. The Wonder Spot was a series of short stories about a young protagonist; one story was her as a young girl, then another was her as a working professional, etc. This revealed some surprising narrative choices. Early in one story we learn that the character's beloved father died recently, but we never actually saw what happened or learned any of the details -- the death apparently happened in the blank space between stories. But the father was a big part of her life, we were told earlier, so why did we skip over his death like that? We got an entire story about her dating one random ex-boyfriend, but nothing about this major life event. I had the uncomfortable sense that Bank wasn't sure how to write such a wrenching scene, so instead she skipped ahead to some other, more story-izable aspect of her character's life. The stories in the book were all well done, but it felt to me like she'd cheated.
This is the problem I sometimes have with the story-as-novel. While it plays to the strengths of short stories (close-up introspection, a careful scrutinization of our daily lives and habits, the ability to try on different voices and styles), it ignores some of the aspects of novel-writing that too many writers assume are easy and therefore unimportant: the careful sustaining of a larger narrative, the interplay of interlocking storylines, the steady accretion of suspense, and a consistency of style and tone not just for each individual character but for the novel as a whole. My friend the novelist and critic (and football fan) Charles McNair calls this "the blocking and tackling of writing." Sure, maybe it looks cooler and is more fun to throw up 50-yard bombs on every play, but in order to win you need to do the heavy hitting, too. Just because that seems less glorious doesn't make it less important, and it certainly doesn't make it easier, though many critics mistakenly assume it is.
It reminds me of a great piece by David Denby in The New Yorker a few years ago, about the new trend of films that played their narrative out of order or jumped between multiple, initially unrelated storylines. It started with Pulp Fiction and continued with Memento and seemed to be hitting some crazy peak in 2007 (when he wrote the article) with Babel and Syriana. He praises this form of overly complex, disruptive narrative while also pulling back and saying, hey guys, let's not forget that straightforward, chronological storytelling is a powerful, wonderful way to create art, and it's lasted for generations for a good reason: because it works. Jumbling your narrative and rearranging the timeline of a film doesn't inherently make it more artistic, it just makes it more complicated. Which is sort of how I feel when I read some of these stories-as-novels.
I'm coming off harder on Egan's book than I mean to -- I very much enjoyed it, and I think she worked some awesome tricks, and, again, I am deeply impressed by the way she came up with something new to say about the rock industry, about the dreamers who suffer for their art. (And, yes, I admit it: I thought her PowerPoint chapter was awesome.) Her book just got me to thinking about some of the novel/story tensions that already had been bothering me lately. Maybe the problem is that we novel writers aren't doing enough to further the art form and push the boundaries, and we need the story writers (who are skilled by necessity at experimentation) to point the way. Or maybe the tastemasters armed with their MFAs and their New York Times book reviews are too quick to assume that straightforward narrative is dry and old-hat, and too quick to assume that it's easy. Or, more likely, I'm thinking about this too much and just need to put my head down and finish my next novel. Unless I get some crazy short story ideas first...
Go To Post
June 24, 2011
Crossing Genre Borders And Getting Past Literary Customs Officers
I'm nearly a month late on this one, as school break and kid illnesses and a beach trip have thrown off the schedule, but I've been meaning to write about this great story in the Wall Street Journal about the trend of "literary" authors writing "high-concept" novels.
The story's author notes that this summer and fall a number of literary authors will be publishing novels that deal with the supernatural or other elements that are normally consigned to the genre shelves. Colson Whitehead will publish a zombie novel, Tom Perotta will publish a book about the aftermath of the Rapture, Lev Grossman is publishing his sequel to The Magicians, and British author Glen Duncan is starting a series about a werewolf. She writes:
"The explosion of fantasy titles from mainstream authors is eroding decades-old divisions in the publishing industry. ... A new era of experimentation is sweeping literary circles."
Mark me as firmly in favor of this. I've always been a reader of literary fiction and the classics, and I used to have that requisite snobbery, thinking of myself as someone who didn't read thrillers and didn't read sci-fi and didn't read spy novels. But a few years back I realized that most of my favorite recent novels were books that combined a certain literary aesthetic with the plot structure of noir or mysteries, or with the more imaginative elements of sci-fi or fantasy. I'm talking books by Michael Chabon, David Mitchell, Jonathan Lethem, Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy. People who realize that the ability to write well and insightfully is key, but who also understand that without a good story, it's so much frilly air. Books whose plots are as powerful as their prose, by writers who realize that narrative is every bit as important as (and every bit as difficult to do right, if not harder than) character and the careful deployment of a really cool metaphor.
So I guess I'm now part of a trend. My last book had noir elements and magical realism, and my new one, The Revisionists, is a sort of literary spy novel with a time traveler set in contemporary D.C. I didn't realize I was part of the zeitgeist -- I just thought they were cool stories -- but hey, it's nice to be not alone on this adventure.
(And it's also worth noting that this isn't exactly a brand-new trend. It seems every few years there's another story about this. Lev Grossman himself wrote this story two years ago, again for the WSJ.)
Despite these occasional stories, the bias against genre-breaking novels is still strong among certain circles of academics and book critics. Just a week ago, in Michiko Kakutani's New York Times review of Monica Ali's new novel about Princess Diana, she writes that, for a Booker-nominated, highly praised writer like Ali, a princess novel "seems like an awfully high-concept, low-brow endeavor." The implication being that it's unbecoming for serious authors to write "high-concept" books; such writers should instead focus on quiet, internal, borderline inert fiction. I haven't read Ali's new book and don't honestly plan to, but I resent the way Kakutani thumbs her nose at anything high-concept, as if taking risks and daring to chart new horizons is somehow unartistic and unworthy. (Whitehead's new book I'm particularly psyched about -- I loved his first, The Intuitionist, a noirish racial allegory, but his subsequent books, to me, have felt very well written but lacking in narrative strength. I think zombies might be exactly what he's needed to get that mojo back.)
Look, I'm not saying I dislike a good work of realist contemporary fiction: my bookshelves are bursting with them. But I am saying that such fiction is not, and never has been, inherently better or more artistic or more moving or more encapsulating of human nature than a less realistic novel featuring a cyborg, or a bank robber, or even (yes, it's possible!) a vampire. Ultimately, it's not the subject matter that matters, it's the execution. A great writer should be able to make you care just as much about a hardboiled detective as you'd care about a lonely overeducated housewife in suburban New York.
Like any trend, this is likely a pendulum swinging thing, and I'm sure it will again seem uncool to write anything that crosses genre lines -- well, it already is to Kakutani, but a time will no doubt come when most other people too get sick of it. The question is, will that be in five years, or fifty, or 100? Maybe the realistic stranglehold on literary fiction, which started cutting off the more imaginative plot arteries early in the previous century, will stay loose for another generation or two. I'm sure we won't all be writing about the fantastic and the bizarre and the noir, but perhaps enough of us will so that such stories will be considered respectable rather than slumming. Maybe the slums are where the action is--and the emotions, and the poignant moments, and the sobering insights, and the artistry.
Go To Post
The story's author notes that this summer and fall a number of literary authors will be publishing novels that deal with the supernatural or other elements that are normally consigned to the genre shelves. Colson Whitehead will publish a zombie novel, Tom Perotta will publish a book about the aftermath of the Rapture, Lev Grossman is publishing his sequel to The Magicians, and British author Glen Duncan is starting a series about a werewolf. She writes:
"The explosion of fantasy titles from mainstream authors is eroding decades-old divisions in the publishing industry. ... A new era of experimentation is sweeping literary circles."
Mark me as firmly in favor of this. I've always been a reader of literary fiction and the classics, and I used to have that requisite snobbery, thinking of myself as someone who didn't read thrillers and didn't read sci-fi and didn't read spy novels. But a few years back I realized that most of my favorite recent novels were books that combined a certain literary aesthetic with the plot structure of noir or mysteries, or with the more imaginative elements of sci-fi or fantasy. I'm talking books by Michael Chabon, David Mitchell, Jonathan Lethem, Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy. People who realize that the ability to write well and insightfully is key, but who also understand that without a good story, it's so much frilly air. Books whose plots are as powerful as their prose, by writers who realize that narrative is every bit as important as (and every bit as difficult to do right, if not harder than) character and the careful deployment of a really cool metaphor.
So I guess I'm now part of a trend. My last book had noir elements and magical realism, and my new one, The Revisionists, is a sort of literary spy novel with a time traveler set in contemporary D.C. I didn't realize I was part of the zeitgeist -- I just thought they were cool stories -- but hey, it's nice to be not alone on this adventure.
(And it's also worth noting that this isn't exactly a brand-new trend. It seems every few years there's another story about this. Lev Grossman himself wrote this story two years ago, again for the WSJ.)
Despite these occasional stories, the bias against genre-breaking novels is still strong among certain circles of academics and book critics. Just a week ago, in Michiko Kakutani's New York Times review of Monica Ali's new novel about Princess Diana, she writes that, for a Booker-nominated, highly praised writer like Ali, a princess novel "seems like an awfully high-concept, low-brow endeavor." The implication being that it's unbecoming for serious authors to write "high-concept" books; such writers should instead focus on quiet, internal, borderline inert fiction. I haven't read Ali's new book and don't honestly plan to, but I resent the way Kakutani thumbs her nose at anything high-concept, as if taking risks and daring to chart new horizons is somehow unartistic and unworthy. (Whitehead's new book I'm particularly psyched about -- I loved his first, The Intuitionist, a noirish racial allegory, but his subsequent books, to me, have felt very well written but lacking in narrative strength. I think zombies might be exactly what he's needed to get that mojo back.)
Look, I'm not saying I dislike a good work of realist contemporary fiction: my bookshelves are bursting with them. But I am saying that such fiction is not, and never has been, inherently better or more artistic or more moving or more encapsulating of human nature than a less realistic novel featuring a cyborg, or a bank robber, or even (yes, it's possible!) a vampire. Ultimately, it's not the subject matter that matters, it's the execution. A great writer should be able to make you care just as much about a hardboiled detective as you'd care about a lonely overeducated housewife in suburban New York.
Like any trend, this is likely a pendulum swinging thing, and I'm sure it will again seem uncool to write anything that crosses genre lines -- well, it already is to Kakutani, but a time will no doubt come when most other people too get sick of it. The question is, will that be in five years, or fifty, or 100? Maybe the realistic stranglehold on literary fiction, which started cutting off the more imaginative plot arteries early in the previous century, will stay loose for another generation or two. I'm sure we won't all be writing about the fantastic and the bizarre and the noir, but perhaps enough of us will so that such stories will be considered respectable rather than slumming. Maybe the slums are where the action is--and the emotions, and the poignant moments, and the sobering insights, and the artistry.
Go To Post
June 9, 2011
Is This Post "Readable?"
I've seen a number of hilarious yet sad lists of book reviewer cliches (like "a writer to watch" or "beautiful, spare prose") kicking around the Net lately. Google "book review cliches" and you'll see a bunch -- there's even a Bingo board of cliches, so you and friends with way too much time on their hands can play over Sunday brunch while reading the Books section of the paper (assuming you still get the paper, and assuming your paper still has a Books section, which are both pretty dangerous assumptions to make these days).
The book reviewer word that breaks my heart is "readable." I can't believe someone would use this word to describe a book, one they actually enjoyed and think that you will too. It's intended as a compliment, but in fact it indicts the rest of contemporary literature. Because the simple fact that they're saying "hey, this book is great because it's readable" is to imply that other books aren't readable.
Let's ponder that one for a moment. Other books aren't readable? Literally? Or even figuratively? I'm not sure which is more depressing: 1) the fact that this might actually be true, that too many writers are opting for overly dense or academic or show-offy writing styles, afraid that accessibility is the mark of a hack, or 2) the fact that readers think it's true, that they aren't trying hard enough to embrace new styles and will instead conclude that anything a little weird or different is in fact "unreadable."
No one (least of all a critic) would ever describe a film as "watchable," or a paining as "viewable," or a restaurant's cuisine as "edible." In all of these art forms, those adjectives are assumed as the most basic requirement for audience participation. Of course the movie is watchable -- why else would the critic even write about it? Why else would the film have even been made? Yet in contemporary literature, our standards have fallen so low, and our expectations of even the existence of an audience are so sketchy and vague, that a book simply being able to be read is a distinction worthy of pointing out in a review.
If I ever tell you, "Hey, check out my new book, it's really readable!" please, please talk me down from whatever ledge I'm lingering on, and remind me that it's all going to be okay.
Go To Post
The book reviewer word that breaks my heart is "readable." I can't believe someone would use this word to describe a book, one they actually enjoyed and think that you will too. It's intended as a compliment, but in fact it indicts the rest of contemporary literature. Because the simple fact that they're saying "hey, this book is great because it's readable" is to imply that other books aren't readable.
Let's ponder that one for a moment. Other books aren't readable? Literally? Or even figuratively? I'm not sure which is more depressing: 1) the fact that this might actually be true, that too many writers are opting for overly dense or academic or show-offy writing styles, afraid that accessibility is the mark of a hack, or 2) the fact that readers think it's true, that they aren't trying hard enough to embrace new styles and will instead conclude that anything a little weird or different is in fact "unreadable."
No one (least of all a critic) would ever describe a film as "watchable," or a paining as "viewable," or a restaurant's cuisine as "edible." In all of these art forms, those adjectives are assumed as the most basic requirement for audience participation. Of course the movie is watchable -- why else would the critic even write about it? Why else would the film have even been made? Yet in contemporary literature, our standards have fallen so low, and our expectations of even the existence of an audience are so sketchy and vague, that a book simply being able to be read is a distinction worthy of pointing out in a review.
If I ever tell you, "Hey, check out my new book, it's really readable!" please, please talk me down from whatever ledge I'm lingering on, and remind me that it's all going to be okay.
Go To Post
