Alan Cheuse's Blog, page 7

Malamud's 100th

Last night at the church across the street from the Folger Shakespeare Library in DC, a blissful celebration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of story writer and novelist Bernard Malamud.
NPR's cultural correspondent Susan Stamberg presided, holding notes in a beautiful notebook by Matisse...introducing the evening's three writers, all previous winners of the PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction...
Edward P. Jones, Lorrie Moore, and Tobias Wolffe. Each read from a favorite Malamud story and then from his or her own work, offering comments along the way.
The audience of two hundred plus--mesmerized by the language of Malamud and of these three gifted writers.
Young novelist Boris Fishman likes to tell people that each day before he begins his own writing he reads some Malamud. After listening to the readings last night few would disagree.

Top Ten Works of Jewish American Fiction

Last year Moment magazine asked me to make my list and this is what I came up with.

TOP TEN: FICTION BOOKS

1 Call It Sleep—Henry Roth—New York's Jews Without Money filtered through the modernist techniques of
James Joyce and company, and, believe it or not, a fabulous and memorable blend. One of the underrated achievements
of early-20th-century American fiction.

2 The Magic Barrel (1958)—Bernard Malamud—More than a dozen stories about the reality and pathos of Jewish life
in New York City, by a master of the American sentence.

3 The Last of the Just (1959)—Andre Schwarz-Bart—
A vigorous and appealing epic that follows good and admirable
men from epoch to epoch.

4 Herzog (1964)—Saul Bellow—His masterpiece, where intellect
and soul intersect in the story of an heroic, and tormented,
Jewish-American composer of a multitude of missives.

5 Fathers: A Novel in the Form of a Memoir (1967)—
Herbert Gold—Jewish greenhorns head west—at least as far as Cleveland—where the writer in the family observes
his father in bold glimpses.

6 The Book Of Lights (1981)—Chaim Potok—A Jewish military chaplain in Korea, and Potok's revelatory presentation of his problems and triumphs.

7
The Collected Stories of I.B. Singer (1982)—Isaac Bashevis Singer—Magical realism, Eastern European style,
descended from Gogol and the kabbalah and steeped in the flavors of old Warsaw and modern New York. Sometimes
low-doings, sometimes straining toward the mysterious and
even holy, always lovingly told.

8 The Shawl (1989)—Cynthia Ozick—Her miniature masterwork about life and death in the camps—a glimpse of
the horror and humanity at history's nadir.

9
The Collected Stories of Grace Paley (1994)—Grace
Paley—A treasure trove of American gems, in the seemingly casual (gum-snapping) and singular voice of one of the late
greats of modern American fiction, telling beautifully made stories about Jewish life in postwar (World War II and Vietnam
War) New York.

10 The Human Stain (2000)—Philip Roth—The question
of Jewish identity intersects dramatically with the question
of black identity, which intersects dramatically with the
greater question of American identity.

Good New Reading

Speaking with Rick Kleffel on KUSP Santa Cruz about some good new reading...
Ron Rash stories, Maureen Corrigan on F.Scott Fitzgerald, a new political novel set in Shanghai

http://bookotron.com/agony/news/2014/...

A Map of Betrayal

Ha Jin's new novel, about a Chinese
mole in the CIA...

http://www.npr.org/2014/12/02/3680411...

Strange Library

Just out--A long story or novella, who's counting pages when the pages aren't numbered?
A new work from Japanese master Haruki Murakami, beautifully designed by the legendary Chip Kidd...and first and foremost, a wonderful prose invention, good to read....

http://www.npr.org/2014/12/02/3638362...

Kent Haruf, R.I.P.

Midwestern novelist Kent Haruf died on the weekend. His novels give us something quite lovely to remember him by, especially "Plain-Song", his first book. Here's a review I wrote for the Chicago Tribune when he published the sequel to that lovely book.

From Edgar Lee Masters to Sherwood Anderson, Midwestern writers have portrayed small-town America and its inhabitants with a certain affectionate ferocity. Novelist Kent Haruf has revived that tradition, except he has turned down the ferocity a great deal.

Almost five years ago, Haruf published "Plain-Song," a rather humbly conducted, and quite ingratiating, depiction of several groups of appealing, small-town Colorado characters: school-teacher Tom Guthrie and his two sons; Victoria Roubideaux, a mixed-blood high school girl in trouble with a nasty boyfriend and a pregnancy; brothers Harold and Raymond McPheron, solitary, bachelor, cattle ranchers. And now we have a sequel, "Eventide," to jog our good memories of them, though this time around the teacher and his boys play minor roles, as does the high school girl now turned college student and single mother.

"Eventide" moves along slowly, with scenes of the feeble and debilitating parenting of Luther and Betty Wallace, a local welfare couple, and their soon-to-be-much-abused children, and on to an unfortunate ranching accident, when Harold McPheron, despite a lifetime of experience with animals, succumbs to a knocking-about by a mean and powerful bull that also sends his brother to the hospital. Raymond's story dove-tails there with that of an old man sick with pneumonia and his devoted grandson DJ, and with Guthrie, who appears again, helping out with the ranch work while Raymond is on the mend. The Wallace family story brings to the foreground Betty's child-abusing Uncle Hoyt, and Rose Tyler, the helpful and attractive social worker who eventually leads Raymond into a new life.

If this account of the story seems somewhat laconic, that may be because the book moves along in the same way, inspiring just enough passion in you as a reader to keep following the intertwined stories of most of these ordinary lives. But not much more.

Some of this lassitude has to do with the language. Harold's death by bull-trampling scarcely causes a ripple in Haruf's quiet prose. But neither -- somewhat surprisingly in a book that is, after all, a paean to the simple facts of living on the high plains -- does the landscape. Consider a sunset that casts "the flat country around them . . . in gold, with long shadows fallen out from behind the ordered fence posts above the bar ditch." That brief passage is as much as we hear about the country setting until a Saturday night in winter, when we get to see the sky above the town, as viewed by Raymond, after he's healed from his accident and taken a quiet liking to a nurse he met while hospitalized:

"[T]he sky overhead [was] clear of any cloud, the stars as clean and bright as if they were no more distant than the next barbed-wire fence post standing up above the barrow ditch running beside the narrow blacktop highway, everything all around him distinct and unhidden. He loved how it all looked, except he would never have said it in that way. He might have said that this was just how it was supposed to look, out on the high plains at the end of winter, on a clear fresh night."



That's the paradox of working so carefully with characters who don't have the means to speak about the very emotions that stir the writer to work with them. There's just something so subdued, almost to the point of repression or muteness, that pertains to these people that sometimes you want to take the innocent incompetents among them and shake them just as hard as you want to shake the vile, child-beating Uncle Hoyt.

Hoyt, the only really nasty character in the town as we know it, is, ironically, the character who really pulls you along with great force. The other, gentle folks are . . . just that. All too gentle to make for much interest.

Not that I'm against gentleness. If I sound ambivalent, it's because I am. "Plainsong," the first book about life in Holt, Colo., and its environs took me by pleasant surprise, and I hoped "Eventide" would go as well. It does, but not so well that I want to rave about it, which is what I hoped I could do. Maybe somebody ought to take me by the shoulders and give me a shaking?

Critics in the Time of the Internet

Last Saturday afternoon at the Miami Book Fair I participated in a three-round
(three ring) discussion on the role of book critics and reviewers in the age of the internet (sounds like Garcia Marquez's
wonderful title Love in the Time of Cholera?)....
The description ran as such: What has happened to book reviews and book journalism with the collapse of local newspapers? An illustrious panel of the Internet’s most prominent book critics, bloggers, and web portal editors discuss the current state of book culture.
Some terrific young critics took part in the discussion, such as Jessa Crispin of Bookslut and journalist Sarah Weinman, the book industry represented by the able Katie Freeman, Leigh Haber, and yours truly among a large cast of characters who read and write for a living--talking, among other things, about whether or not you can make a living at this trade now that so many newspapers have gone dark. And whether or not you can make a mark or make a difference.
Clearly the panel itself, with so many vital intelligent people assembled to discuss the question, suggested that criticism of all levels was alive and well, though probably not paying as well as it used to (which was never a lot).
Where once the field seemed to be dominated by male writers now it shows a lot more diversity, and, to my eyes, speaks of the vitality of the critical trade which is strong, intelligent, and still necessary in a period of tumultuous but interesting transition.
Particularly in an age when everyone, from your pet cat to towering geniuses of academia, and everyone in between, can publish anything and everything about books and life and how they connect, we need critics more than ever. Although most of us seem to stand as gate-keepers when the gates are wide open we're speaking out as writers always have, even in places where no one appears to be listening.
Are you listening?

Lost Books

When I think of lost books, the first thing that comes to mind are those wonderful novels that have faded from the public memory so that when people turn to them (if they ever do) they seem like great treasures buried for a long while in the sand. A novel such as the Cuban Alejo Carpentier's The Lost Steps (lost! even in the title) comes immediately to my mind because in the mid-1970s I wrote a doctoral dissertation on Carpentier's work,which even then was out of print in English. But if you are mulling over this subject the great book that lights up one's thoughts is Moby-Dick, the great novel that killed Melville's reputation in his own time--he was known as a writer of South Sea adventure novels and then came out with the work of a life-time, in all of its lore about whaling and its meditations on life and destiny a weight too heavy for the ordinary reading public of his time to spend much time with. And then on top of that he published Pierre, his enigmatic novel about an incestuous love, and that served as the nail in the coffin in which Melville's reputation already lay.
(As most of you know, readers found is work again after the long-postumous publication of his previously unpublished novella Billy Budd, the manuscript of which his grandchildren found in the attic of "Arrowhead", his house in the Berkshires.
And then there at the books (usually only in manuscript form) that are truly lost. Such as the suitcase containing Hemingway's early short fiction that his first wife left on a Spanish train, or the manuscript of a novel that the great twentieth century writer Malcolm Lowry lost in a fire in the squatter's shack where he and his second wife were living in Vancouver, British Columbia, a novel called In Ballast to the White Sea. And the working manuscript of Invisible Man that Ralph Ellison lost in a fire at his country house in the Berkshires. Oh, Berkshires, land of lost fiction! Ellison went on to revise the book. Lowry, or so we read in an introduction to a Canadian edition of "Ballast", never tried to restore this one. And it would have remained lost to us until his first wife, Jan Gabrial, revealed that she had given a draft of that book to her mother for safe-keeping. Which is why we have that early Lowry work today.
Other stories flicker in literary lore. Ann Beattie, for one, tried to lose her early stories, tossing them into the trash of her New England apartment where she lived with her first husband. A close friend rescued these early pages and (apparently unknown to Beattie) began sending them to magazines. Which eventually led to an acceptance by the New Yorker. The rest is literary history.
All this came to mind as I picked up the new edition of the once-lost, now-found Lowry novel "Ballast to the White Sea" and began reading the introduction, on this sunny Thanksgiving afternoon in Washington, DC. For all of these lost books now found all good readers will give thanks.

On Rereading

When nonagenarian novelist and story writer William Maxwell went into the hospital some years ago in New York City, one of his loyal correspondents reportedly wrote to ask how he was faring. Maxwell reportedly wrote back to say that he was passing the time by making a list of books he was going to read for the last time.
Rereading, for most of us, from those in middle age on down to the recent college graduate, doesn't take on that sort of urgency. Traditionally it's more of a seasonal preoccupation than an end-of-life concern, though I suppose for most serious readers, that time will come. But for right now, in the weeks before the holidays come around, when we can carve some time outside of time, and turn entire days, if not weeks, into rocks around which normal hours rush past like a mountain stream, it seems like a promising way to live. At least that's my thought on mornings when I wake to stare at my pile of books.


Because I review books, many of them are new, the novels and story collections of the next few months. But when I make up reading lists for courses I’ll be teaching I put aside some time for rereading, that act by which we judge work we once took pleasure from to see how it has held up, and, I suppose, judge our own taste and sensibility, to see how we have changed in the face of an old experience. And how much the books have changed in turn.
How much the books have changed? I don't mean to suggest that Moby-Dick will have a different last chapter or that The Great Gatsby will have narrator Nick Carraway adding new metaphors to his dialogue. Books change because our experiences change. Read a Shakespeare sonnet before you've had a major league love affair and it will be different from the way it seems after. So, too, with Mrs. Dalloway before and after marriage and Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina before and after adultery and betrayal. This is one of the great abiding principles of modern literature, that the text may remain the same but the meaning changes.
Sometimes this can be delightful, sometimes disappointing, but always, in its own way, rather revelatory, both for the books and ourselves. And that's why it is so worthwhile to reread and reread.
For example, a few summers ago I dove into Thomas Wolfe's novel Look Homeward, Angel for the third time. I read it once as an undergraduate and regarded it as something like a giant thermometer that told me the temperature of my 19-year-old blood. I reread it in 1979 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of its publication and found that it held up rather nicely as a record of a young man's desires and aspirations for knowing the world in its fullness. But this last time around it seemed flat to me and full of satiric posturing and dull approximations of human character. The only parts that remained exciting were Wolfe's long, descriptive lists of food and clothing and tools and other human artifacts that are Homeric, or at least Whitman-like, both in impulse and execution.
John Steinbeck's East of Eden which I reread this year was a wonderful surprise to return to. I would strongly recommend it for anyone who hasn't yet added that final book to the top of his or her summer rereading pile. It's an idiosyncratic epic, set in the Salinas Valley during the making of modern California, and it shows us a vast amount about the essence of American life and both the negative and the endearing qualities of the American character. Along with Steinbeck's quasi-comic little masterpiece Cannery Row it's my favorite from the California novelist's large output of fiction. (Sorry to say that when I last reread his supposed masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath I wasn't as moved as I was by the other books.)

But that was all last year, when I was sitting in the cool shade of a room with walls of books in a rented house near the Pacific Ocean just west of Steinbeck country, up to my eyeballs in rereading.
The first volume I picked up was a 1955 American edition of Jean-Paul Sartre's essays, called Literary Essays. I hadn't read these pieces since I was an undergraduate. On rereading, I discovered that Sartre may have faded from contemporary thought as a philosopher and a novelist, but his literary criticism remains useful, particularly his essay on Camus' novel The Stranger and his two essays on the work of William Faulkner. It turned out that the distinctive American nature of time (as discussed in Sartre's 1939 essay on The Sound and the Fury) was a good question to ponder on afternoons such as summer brings.
It's refreshing to find that Sartre's essays hold up as well as they do (and in fact give welcome insights into the way other books work). But after rereading the essays, I had to face up to my major summer rereading project, hoisting up before my eyes the recently deceased William Gaddis' monumental work of contemporary modernism, the novel The Recognitions. Originally published in 1955, the appearance of this nearly thousand-page novel about life in what Gaddis has one character call "The Age of Publicity," which is to say, our own times, turned out to be what we like to call a major literary event.


I first traveled through this meticulously composed and satiric story about a gifted artist named Wyatt Gwyon, his talent for faking paintings by old European masters, and the time--our time--in which he lives, while traveling cross-country in a secondhand VW bug in 1963. I put in my six or seven hours a day behind the wheel, and my new wife put in the other half. While she drove, I sat back in the passenger seat and read Gaddis' novel. Eight hours a day, six days journey, and I finished the book. You can do the math along with me. That's about 20 or so pages an hour. Not exactly a page-turner. But when I was finished, I believed that I had read a masterpiece.
But part of my definition of a masterpiece is a book that you read over and over, and over the years, while I pursued my work as a writer, teacher and essayist, I never went back to The Recogntions. After Gaddis’s death I began to wonder about the novel and whether or not it would hold up against the test of time. I talked about it with a friend of mine, an octogenarian former Marine, a retired industrial psychologist who does nothing but read, read, read. When he admitted that he hadn't picked up the Gaddis novel since the year it was published, I dared him in as gentlemanly a way as I could muster to reread it over the summer.
And he dared me.
And, yes, the Gaddis novel had changed.
The first time around, I heartily embraced this huge book with its multitude of characters and its settings that range from Spain to Italy to New York to Central America, and its many great themes (illusion versus reality, the real and the counterfeit, the artist versus the philistine, the Old World versus the New, family versus society, to name a few). It was, to me in my early 20s, fresh out of school (with only one reading of Ulysses under my belt), the grandest contemporary novel I had read, the direct descendant of James Joyce's masterpiece, and the product of a writer with the best ear for dialogue in America.
I see it a bit differently now.
The lavish, sometimes lapidary descriptions of landscapes, both exterior and psychological, seem to slow the narrative down on almost every page. The great connecting themes of fathers and sons, and the real and the counterfeit, are strung out so tenuously because of the book's great length that this time for me the novel nearly came apart in my hands, with great scenes here and there (a funeral in provincial Spain, a night on the town in bohemian New York City, a voyage off the coast of Panama), but only one great character to hold everything together--and this fellow, the painter named Wyatt, was not present for more than half of the book.

What stood out for me this time around is Gaddis' famous ear. Line for line, the dialogue is the sharpest of most any modern American novel. And unlike most great books--and this is Gaddis' kinship with James Joyce, I think--the novel is consistently funny, filled with jokes and vast amounts of ironic dialogue, its parodies of modern advertising and public relations vivid and quite amusing. I was left with the thought that rather than looking back to Joyce as much as I thought it did, Gaddis' novel really points forward to Thomas Pynchon's Gravity’s Rainbow and the cold-hearted critiques of modern civilization in the novels of Richard Powers.
Gaddis' novel is not a great book, but a flawed attempt at a great book, and unlike the superior works of 20th Century Western prose modernism, Ulysses and The Sound and the Fury and To the Lighthouse, inside this massive structure there is no one home, no large beating heart that gives us the feeling of what it's like to be alive in these times as well as the ideas of the day, that great fusion of emotion and intellect that Joyce and Faulkner and Woolf offer us in such density and depth.
Right now as winter approaches I'm left as it happens with just a few short books—a stack of novellas that includes work by Melville and Katherine Anne Porter and William Maxwell and Saul Bellow and Joyce Carol Oates--before the snow falls, stays, and melts. Before too long I’ll see how much they—and I-- have changed.

Reading While Traveling

I can't write while I'm traveling, except perhaps some notes for future development.
Give me more than a weekend in a hotel or motel and I can set up shop and get to work, yes. But I'm thinking about those days when you go to an airport or drive to some place some hours away. I consider that time out from my work. And more time for reading.
Reading on airplanes I see as part of my job description and I always choose carefully what I'll bring along on a flight. A good thriller always works if there is a new one available, something by John Le Carre would be my optimum choice, or a new novel by Alan Furst. I always carry an extra thriller for outbound and return flights in case calamity strikes and we get stranded in an airport or the book I have at hand is something that takes less time to finish than I had first imagined.
Thrillers, yes, mainly. Unless I have a hard reviewing deadline for a mainstream book I'll take thrillers as my first choice for airplane reading.
Why is that the case? First of all the best of this literary kind takes you so firmly by the hand and pulls you into a plot--oh, how I mourn Michael Crichton every flight I take! His novels were the best of their kind!--that you scarcely notice how smooth or bumpy a flight might be, and you don't pay much attention to the talkers, if you're unlucky enough to be seated near some folks like that. As my dear late friend John Gardner used to say, you fall into a good book as though experiencing a waking dream, and that's usually the case for me when I'm reading, traveling, flying.
At home or in another location where I'll be staying for a while I take up my regular reading of mainstream fiction, always looking for a masterpiece with the same intensity as while traveling, mainly, as I said, while flying, that I hope for the most completely engrossing plot-driven book I can find.
That's my by now old and strict habit. Though if somehow Michael Crichton returned to life and began writing again, I suppose I would anything new he wrote while sitting still in one place, at home.