Mark Sarvas's Blog, page 11

JAMES SALTER, THE ART OF FICTION No. 133

A comment by TEV reader (and FSG Online Marketing Manager) Ryan Chapman sent me over to the Paris Review archives, where I came across this interview with my current obsession James Salter.  The icing on the cake: the interview is conducted by Edward Hirsch, the wonderful poet whom I got know and become a fan of when we appeared on Titlepage together.  Like all the other Paris Review interviews, this one is freely available to you:

INTERVIEWER

If you could choose to be remembered by two books of your own, which two would you choose?

SALTER

I would think A Sport and a Pastime and Light Years.

INTERVIEWER

When did you first start writing A Sport and a Pastime?

SALTER

The first notes for it, probably in 1961; I began seriously writing it in 1964 or 1965.

INTERVIEWER

Where were you?

SALTER

At that time, I had a studio in the Village. We were living in the suburbs, and I went into the city to work.

INTERVIEWER

Was it dislocating to be living in New York and writing about France?

SALTER

Not particularly. It takes a few moments perhaps to disassociate yourself from quotidian life, but afterwards you are completely with the book. In any case, my method is to go in with a lot of ammunition. I had a lot of notes.

INTERVIEWER

It's almost as if in writing that book a cluster of notions or terms came together at once, about sensuality and eroticism, food and alcohol, the landscape and culture of France?

SALTER

I suppose so. Despite what I said earlier, the cities of Europe were my real manhood. I first saw them in 1950. Apart from New York, a bit of Washington and Honolulu, I had lived in no other cities, and Europe's were a revelation to me. I liked living in them. I like Europe because the days don't punish you there.

And this, from Hirsch's intro, is priceless, my new mantra:

Coming down the stairs past the photograph of Isaac Babel I grew once more wildly excited about Salter's work-in-progress. He demurs: "Hope but not enthusiasm is the proper state for the writer."

TINTIN'S INSPIRATION

The Danish actor who is believed to have served as the inspiration for TIntin has died.

According to many accounts in the European news media over the years, Tintin exists, at least in part, because a young Danish clerk in search of adventure happened to answer a newspaper ad one day.

THE ENVELOPE PLEASE ...

My entry in The Millions' Year in Reading project is up already.  Check that shit out, yo.

"WINNING" THE BAD SEX AWARD

My mate Rowan Somerville writes about the dubious honor of winning the 2010 Bad Sex Award in the Guardian.

But let's be frank … this ridiculous award had put my novel in newspapers and websites across the world and although, when the deputy editor of the mag emailed me to ask if I'd enjoyed the party, I replied "as much as a televised visit to a proctologist", I don't think the publicity is going to do me, or the book, any harm either. So although it surprises me to say it, I am very grateful to them.

THE MILLIONS: A YEAR IN READING

The always-worthy "A Year in Reading" series has kicked off at The Millions, commencing with no less a luminary than John Banville.  (I've got my own entry in the series that will pop up sooner or later, and there are many, many contributors far more cultivated than I, so pay close attention this month.)

UNSUSPECTED COMMONALITIES

I've had my issues with Leon Wieseltier - haven't we all? - but this, I thought, from today's review of the Bellow letters, was excellent:

Metaphor is the juxtaposition of disparate elements of the world in which an unsuspected commonality, an illuminating partial likeness, has been discovered, and the more unlikely the juxtaposition, the greater the consequent sensation of the unifying of the world; and so the range of a writer's metaphor is a measure of the range of his cognition. 

I'll share that one with my students tomorrow night.

I've been quiet the last few days - work on the novel has resumed with real purpose, churning out my own metaphors.  I'm bearing down hard on finishing up Part One (there are two parts), and so I will close up shop here a bit early as I travel east for the holidays. But I'll be back around December 1, talking about my latest obsession - Tony Judt's almost unbearably lovely The Memory Chalet.  Until then, cook the stuffing outside the turkey, friends.  

 

HEBREW HARRY AND NOVEL III

It's been a while since I posted a new Harry cover here, though they do keep coming.  But the latest arrival, the Hebrew edition of Harry, Revised, is too good not to share with you, so here it is:

MOTEV will kvell.  Such naches.

Also wanted to alert you that registration is now open for my UCLA Novel Writing III class, and it is filling up quickly, like its predecessors.  The required text will be Graham Greene's The End of the Affair, and after that I'm taking a semester's hiatus, so if you are interested, do sign up.

ENFIN

Houellebecq wins his Goncourt.

"Michel Houellebecq, at last!" declared Le Monde after the chairman of the Goncourt committee stood before a crush of journalists outside the Restaurant Drouant in Paris to confirm Houellebecq's triumph for his latest novel.

The publication of a new Houellebecq title is a box-office event in France, and La Carte et Le Territoire , his quietest, least provocative novel, has been glowingly reviewed since it appeared in September.

Previously at TEV:  Textually Transmissible. 

ONE MINUTE WITH JOHN BANVILLE

One minute with John Banville, courtesy of the Independent.

Which fictional character most resembles you?

Phoebe Griffin in my Benjamin Black novels, particularly the latest, 'Elegy for April', in which she becomes really interesting. My agent Ed Victor says I am in love with her, but I think I am her.

 

I AM FUNNY

James Wood takes the recent Booker Prize winner, The Finkler Question, to considerable task in the New Yorker this week.  (Subscription required.)

The novel's prose may be calm enough, but the novel's form will seem exaggerated, because it is monochromatically devoted to funniness, as a fever is devoted to heat. Howard Jacobon's "The Finkler Question" is an English Comic Novel, in this sense. It is always shouting, "I am funny." Jacobson has a weakness for breaking into one-line paragraphs, so as to nudge the punch line on us. The effect is bullying, and, worse, bathetic: we have probably already predicted the joke by the time we reach its italicization. There is a delicious quality of overstatement in P. G. Wodehouse that Jacobson may be searching for, but Wodehouse's exaggerations are sublime in part because they constitute a magical and separate universe that has its own laws and "codes." Julian Treslove, the novel's sad-sack hero, a forty-nine-year-old nebbish Gentile, suffers from a "sense of loss," which is that all he has really wanted, all along, is to be a Jew. There is a secondhand quality to Jacobson's portraiture: the outlines are garish rather than vivid. And Treslove's admiring stupidity constantly pushes the representation of Jews and Jewishness toward caricature. This vision, in which Jews are God-like, and non-Jews must inevitably become either God-lovers or God-haters, has the functional utility of interpreting anti-Semitism as a twisted form of love, while by the same token suggesting that philo-Semitism is a twisted form of hate. The novel is ultimately politically fatalistic in similar ways. Needless to say, this is a decisively male and modern version of Jewishness, much influenced by the historic pugilism of Philip Roth's weaker novels. It also appears to be Jacobson's preferred version of both Jewishness and Jewish comic fiction. Forced down the funnel of a reductive brand of English comic writing, this vision issues in caricature.

Now you all know I revere Wood; and I have not yet read The Finkler Question, though I plan to.  (It's here on my desk as I type this.)  And Wood frames the problems in the context of a certain kind of English comic novel.  But his objections reminded me very much of his response to Nicole Krauss's The History of Love, a response I disagreed with here, and it does leave me wondering if he has a blind spot regarding certain types of (admittedly broad) Jewish humor.  His review approvingly cites Bellow and Svevo, but Finkler and History are books that sing in a different key.  As I said, I haven't read Finkler, so mostly I'm just thinking out aloud as the weekend settles upon us ...