Tag: Books

Richard Yates — Tao Lin

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Tao Lin has made the choice to be a very visible, very public author, one whose antics might lead audiences to form opinions on the 27 year old’s work before even reading it. I mention his age because he’s young, and not only is he young, he seems to be gunning to speak for his generation–always a precarious position.

Lin’s new novel Richard Yates is about young people. Specifically, it’s about a 22-year-old slacker named Haley Joel Osment and his 16-year-old girlfriend Dakota Fanning (I’ll address those names in a moment). Haley Joel Osment lives in Manhattan where he apparently is trying to make it as a writer–something that the book rarely delves into. Haley Joel Osment (Lin always writes the entire name out, part of the book’s numbing, trance-inducing program) meets fellow weirdo Dakota Fanning, and soon begins paying furtive visits to her New Jersey home, hiding in closets and under covers to avoid Dakota Fanning’s mother–who nevertheless soon discovers their illicit romance.

This is the primary conflict in the book–the age-of-consent gap between the young lovers–but the real trauma of the book lies in the couple’s urge toward self-annihilation. In conversations with each other–in person or in email, but primarily in Gmail chat–Haley Joel Osment and Dakota Fanning frequently promise to kill themselves, usually in a casual, detached tone. If “I will probably kill myself later this week” is one of their mantras, the other is “I’m fucked” or “We’re so fucked.” These are not happy people. Here’s Haley Joel Osment writing an email to Dakota Fanning, summarizing his philosophical position: “At each moment you can either kill yourself, try harder to detach yourself from people and reality, or be thinking of and doing what you can for the people you like.”

The bulk of the book consists of such conversations, mopey or mordant or mean. Haley Joel Osment accuses Dakota Fanning of being the type of person who wants to detach from others and reality, yet he’s just as guilty. Lin allows the audience into Haley Joel Osment’s interior, where we find a deeply troubled young man, alienated by his own inability to stop over-processing everything he sees. The problem is that Haley Joel Osment is the core referent of all of Haley Joel Osment’s observations; his solipsism prevents him from actually really knowing anyone else. Mulling over Dakota Fanning’s minutest movements, he repeatedly reads in them signs about her own regard for him. Even when he attempts to be the type of person who is “thinking of and doing what [he] can for the people” he likes, he’s not. He’s selfish and cannot see his own selfishness. The kernel of self-destruction at the heart of Haley Joel Osment and Dakota Fanning’s relationship doesn’t emerge from their age difference but rather his slow, cruel manipulation of her self-image. As the book progresses, Haley Joel Osment’s “advice” cripples Dakota Fanning, leading her down a path of bulimia and self-mutilation.

Lin’s style is flat, dry, and utterly concrete. The only metaphors or similes he employs come (quite artlessly) from his characters. Furthermore, these figures of speech seem incidental; even the couple’s code word “cheese beast” feels like a metaphor with no referent (or perhaps too many referents). There are no symbols (or perhaps the book is all symbols). In many ways, Richard Yates recalls Bret Easton Ellis’s early work, although Lin’s observations and comments on twenty-first century materialism are even more oblique and ambiguous than the moralism of Less Than Zero. The most immediate rhetorical technique, of course, is the book’s title. Although the text refers to the writer Richard Yates several times, his name seems utterly arbitrary, perhaps an obscure joke meant to purposefully confuse. And those character names. For the first few pages, Lin’s choice to name his protagonists after famous child stars seems gimmicky or overdetermined, but in time these names displace their original referents, as well as any other associations. They become like placeholders; Lin might as well have named them X and Y. As if to flatten out his characters even more, Lin also transliterates all of their speech. Much of the novel takes place in conversations over Gmail chat, email, and text messages, but Lin turns these truncated forms into full, affectless sentences. He even removes most contractions. His characters often speak like androids, albeit androids prone to spouting non sequiturs.


 

Lin also makes the odd decision to include an index to the book, part of which you can see above. In a sense, reading the index is like reading a condensed version of the book. It’s a lump sum of nouns that the book treats with more or less equal weight. The long list under the entry “facial expression” perhaps reveals the most about the book’s program, about its refusal to yield insights or give away anything beyond surfaces–it reads almost like a cheat sheet for someone with Asperger syndrome. The index seems like a postmodern gesture but it’s something else–I’m not sure exactly what else–but there’s nothing sly or even self-referential about it: it’s literal, it’s surface, it’s referential. In turn, Lin resists commenting on or satirizing the sundry brand names and corporate locations that populate his index (and, of course, his novel)–a marked contrast to the postmodern tradition.

This is all perhaps a way of saying that Lin is clearly attempting something new with his fiction, a kind of writing that abandons most conceits of post-modern cleverness and self-commentary, yet also compartmentalizes the pathos that characterizes social realist novels. This latter comparison might seem odd unless one considers the concreteness of social realist works, their emphasis on the body, on food, on places. Richard Yates shares all of these emphases, yet it divorces them from ideology; or, more accurately perhaps, it documents an as-yet-unnamed ideology, a 21st century power at work on body and soul. If Lin’s goal then is to document these forces, he succeeds admirably–but I want more; more soul, more insight, more, yes, abstraction. Richard Yates gives us the who and the what, replicates the when and where with uncanny ease; it even tells us how. But many readers, like me, will want to know the why, even if it is just a guess. And I’d love to hear Lin’s guess.

Richard Yates is new this week from Melville House.

“How to Be ‘Artsy’ and Mean It” — David Foster Wallace and Mark Branaman

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The AV Club Interviews William Gibson

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The AV Club interviews cyberpunk pioneer William Gibson about his new novel, Zero History. From the interview–

AVC: You’ve talked elsewhere about the modern dilemma of separating the real from the virtual. How does something like Twitter confuse the issue?

WG: More and more, I think the thing our descendants will find most quaint and old-fashioned about us is the trouble we still take to make that distinction, between the virtual and the “real.” I think that will seem sort of Victorian to them, because I think we’re already losing the need to make the distinction, and I don’t see that as necessarily a bad thing. That doesn’t fill me with the panic it fills some people with. The back-and-forth [of Twitter] is the same back-and-forth we’re having right now in a telephone conversation, and it’s very much like the back-and-forth that Victorian English people had with their three mail deliveries a day. Except that with a medium like Twitter, it’s simultaneously public, in large part. It becomes a communal activity. I don’t see it as a new activity, inherently. I think it’s something we’ve had equivalents of for forever, but the completely post-geographical way in which we’re able to do it is new. And it must be changing it somehow. I actually don’t think we can know what emergent technologies are doing to us while they’re doing it to us. In fact, I don’t think we know yet what broadcast television did to us, although it obviously did lots. I don’t think we’re far enough away from it yet to really get a handle on it. We get these things, I think they start changing us right away, we don’t notice we’re changing. Our perception of the whole thing shifts, and then we’re in the new way of doing things, and we take it for granted.

Donald Barthelme’s Syllabus

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Wolf Hall — Hilary Mantel

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Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel’s revisionist retelling of the Tudor saga through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell, is new in trade paperback this week from Picador. When the book won the Man Booker Prize last year, chairman James Naughtie credited its success to the “bigness of the book . . . [its] boldness [and] scene setting.” In The Atlantic, Christopher Hitchens noted that the book put Mantel “in the very first rank of historical novelists.” In The New York Review of Books, Stephen Greenblatt pointed out that this “is a novel too in which nothing is wasted, and nothing completely disappears.” Here’s what Biblioklept had to say:

I’m coming to the end of Hilary Mantel’s brilliant treatment of the Tudor saga,Wolf Hall. Sign of a great book: when it’s finished, I will miss her characters, particularly her hero Thomas Cromwell, presented here as a self-made harbinger of the Renaissance, a complicated protagonist who was loyal to his benefactor Cardinal Wolsey even though he despised the abuses of the Church. Mantel’s Cromwell reminds us that the adjective “Machiavellian” need not be a pejorative, applied only to evil Iago or crooked Richard III. The Cromwell of Wolf Hall presages a more egalitarian–modern–extension of power. Cromwell here is not simply pragmatic (although he is pragmatic), he also has a purpose: he sees the coming changes of Europe, the rise of the mercantile class signaling economic power over monarchial authority. Yet he’s loyal to Henry VIII, and even the scheming Boleyns. “Arrange your face” is one of the book’s constant mantras; another is “Choose your prince.” Mantel’s Cromwell is intelligent and admirable; the sorrows of the loss of his wife and daughter tinge his life but do not dominate it; he can be cruel when the situation merits it but would rather not be. I doubt that many people wanted yet another telling of the Tudor drama–but aren’t we always looking for a great book? Wolf Hall demonstrates that it’s not the subject that matters but the quality of the writing. Highly recommended.

Presenting all these reviews is simply a way of pointing out that if you know anything about contemporary lit, you probably already know that there’s a strong critical consensus that the book is excellent. Which it is. And if you like historical fiction, particularly of the English-monarchy variety, it’s likely you’ve already read it (and if not, why not? Jeez). However, I think it’s important–particularly now, with the current brouhaha over what literary fiction is and how female writers are treated by critics–to point out that what makes Mantel’s novel so excellent–and distinctly literary–is the writing: the narrative craft, the intensity of characterization, the vitality of prose. There’s nothing gimmicky about Wolf Hall even though its hero Cromwell has been traditionally reviled. Furthermore, Mantel resists fetishizing her set pieces, unlike so many writers of historical fiction, who feel the need to bombard their readers with extraneous details, as if the author’s painstaking research were a weapon rather than a tool.

My original review of Wolf Hall overlapped with a reading of James Wood’s essay on Thomas More from his collection The Broken Estate (also, incidentally, available in paperback from Picador). More is the major villain of Wolf Hall, and Wood savages him in “Sir Thomas More: A Man for One Season.” It was strange then (not too strange, though) to see Mantel and Wood intersect again a few months later, in Wood’s New Yorker review of David Mitchell’s historical novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Here’s Wood–

Meanwhile, the historical novel, typically the province of genre gardeners and conservative populists, has become an unlikely laboratory for serious writers, some of them distinctly untraditional in emphasis and concern. (I am thinking not just of Mitchell but of Thomas Pynchon, Susan Sontag, Steven Millhauser, A. S. Byatt, Peter Carey.) What such novelists are looking for in those oldfangled laboratories is sometimes mysterious to me; and how these daring writers differ from a very gifted but frankly traditional and more commercial historical novelist like Hilary Mantel is an anxiously unanswered question.

Wood is typically dismissive of the historical novel even as he admits its attraction–one he doesn’t understand (or pretends not to understand)–to “serious writers,” a collective from which he deems to exclude Mantel. Wood’s rubric seems to be that Mantel is too “commercial” and “traditional” to warrant her inclusion in his club (even as he damns her with faint praise), but I think that his Mitchell review reveals a deep antipathy to anything that seems, y’know, approachable for most readers. That Pynchon leads Wood’s list is telling. Pynchon’s historical fictions range from fantastic and funny (V., Gravity’s Rainbow) to belabored and difficult (Mason & Dixon) to dense and inscrutable (Against the Day). But Pynchon is Pynchon and it’s not fair to exclude Mantel from the “serious writers” club for not being Pynchon (I sometimes think that poor James Wood has just been a book critic too long and hates reading). This is a roundabout way of arguing that, yes, Wolf Hall is serious writing, that it is literary writing, that it transcends its subject matter and comments on the human condition, on soul, on psyche, on spirit. That it happens to entertain at the same time is, of course, why we care. Highly recommended.

Biblioklept’s 777th Post Spectacular

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Welcome to Biblioklept’s 777th Post Spectacular*

*Not guaranteed to be spectacular.

777 seems like a beautiful enough number to celebrate, and because we’re terribly lazy, let’s celebrate by sharing reviews of seven of our favorite novels that have been published since this blog started back in the hoary yesteryear of 2006. In (more or less) chronological order–

The Children’s Hospital–Chris Adrian — A post-apocalyptic love boat with metaphysical overtones, Adrian’s end of the world novel remains underrated and under-read.

The Road — Cormac McCarthy — That ending gets me every time. The first ending, I mean, the real one, the one between the father and son, not the tacked on wish-fulfillment fantasy after it. Avoid the movie.

A Mercy — Toni Morrison –Slender and profound, A Mercy should be required reading for all students of American history. Or maybe just all Americans.

Tree of Smoke — Denis Johnson — Nobody knew we needed another novel about the Vietnam War and then Johnson went and showed us that we did. But it’s fair to say his book is about more than that; it’s an espionage thriller about the human soul.

2666 — Roberto Bolaño — How did he do it? Maybe it was because he was dying, his life-force transferred to the page. Words as viscera. God, the blood of the thing. 2666 is both the labyrinth and the minotaur.

Asterios Polyp — David Mazzucchelli — We laughed, we cried, and oh god that ending, right? Wait, you haven’t read Asterios Polyp yet? Is that because it’s a graphic novel, a, gasp, comic book? Go get it. Read it. Come back. We’ll wait.

C — Tom McCarthy — Too much has been made over whether McCarthy’s newest novel (out in the States next week) is modernist or Modernist or post-modernist or avant-garde or whatever–these are dreadfully boring arguments when stacked against the book itself, which is complex, rich, enriching, maddening.

You Do Understand — Andrej Blatnik

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There’s a central irony that emanates throughout Slovenian author Andrej Blatnik’s new collection, You Do Understand–namely, this is a book about misunderstanding. Take the first piece, “Few Words,” for example. Here it is in full–

“Do you believe in a tomorrow together?”

“First I’d like to believe that tonight really happened.”

Or, even more to the point (if that’s possible), here’s “Misunderstanding” (again, in full)–

“You’re even more beautiful when you come,” he said.

How would you know, she thought.

These two stories are probably the shortest of the fifty or so pieces in the collection, but even the longest selections barely pass four pages, creating a terse, clipped rhythm that lends You Do Understand a poetic immediacy. This rhythmic consistency, along with the book’s central theme, give it the feel of a novel-in-vignettes as opposed to a collection of unrelated stories.

You Do Understand begins with a series of miserable young single people shambling from failed romantic encounter to dismal hookup to ugly awkward sex. Take the (non)couple in “Do It Quickly, She Said” who both just want to get the sex over with so that one of them can leave, or the pair in “Melting Point” who trip over their own expectations. The narrator of “Say That” defers his drunken confusion and guilt by speaking his story in the second person. “Say that you’re kissing a strange girl,” he begins. As the microstory unfolds, it turns out that “your” dilemma is twofold–it’s not just that “you” are approaching cheating on “your” wife (if “you” haven’t already crossed a line), but also that this “strange girl” just might be a guy.

Blatnik never names his characters, but by drawing them in spare, concrete details, he makes them real nonetheless. The effect is uncanny–these are aliens you probably know in your own life, only, y’know, not. Stories like “Words Matter,” where a man fails to order a hooker for his hotel room, or “I Write These Words,” where another hotel-dweller finds his writing interrupted by paramedics fetching a dead body, express a core loneliness intrinsic to modern, transient existence.

There are other travelers in You Do Understand–although none of them seem to have a clear destination in mind. In “Other Paths,” a stranger arrives in a village in what might be a Third World country, perhaps with a romanticized notion of getting away from civilization. His illusion dissipates when he realizes that the villagers cannot even spare a bowl of rice for him to eat. In “Stains,” an expedition picks up a man in the middle of the desert, robbed and dehydrated. As he drinks their precious water, they nervously wonder if he’ll ask for the help that they don’t want to give him. It’s a cruel world, and at times You Do Understand is a cruel book, although it’s also quite funny–but never at the expense of the humanity of its cast, whom Blatnik measures with a distant compassion and a deep cynicism, as if human beings were programmed to fail, but also programmed to try again. Tamara Soban’s nimble English translation highlights Blatnik’s telegraphic style in these brisk but heavy stories, which call for rereading. Recommended.

You Do Understand is available September 7th, 2010 from Dalkey Archive Press.

“I’m Not Too Concerned What Happens to My Books After I’m Dead” — The AV Club Interviews Jonathan Franzen

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The AV Club interviews Jonathan Franzen. Topics include his new book Freedom, posterity, Glenn Beck, Ian McEwan, and why Franzen still has an AOL account. Here’s Franzen, from the interview, discussing contemporary references in his books–

I’m not too concerned what happens to my books after I’m dead. And I am very concerned by what’s going on with the culture of reading and writing now. So I would not wrap myself in a toga and speak of timelessness regarding my work. It’s my experience that reading Dostoevsky, say, or reading Balzac—the books are full of these contemporary references, and there are feuds going on, and names are dropped, and you know that they’re significant. If you have a good edition, it’ll have six pages of notes at the back explaining what the reference is, because some good scholar has actually looked all of the stuff up. But I don’t really feel like it detracts from my reading of that, and in a perverse way, it actually makes it feel… [Pauses.]

I want to say something can’t become timeless unless it had first inhabited its own time. Undoubtedly, we only get 70 percent of Shakespeare, because the other 30 percent is references that are just completely lost. There are all of these in-jokes, these insider references and contemporary references. We’re so removed from that culture, we don’t even know they’re there. But he was having so much fun writing those plays, and part of the fun was putting all this other stuff in—all of the wordplay, taking a jab at this actor and that theater. He was having so much fun that it just became inseparable from the general fun of those plays, and reading them, and going to performances of them. And he maybe needs those little references to make it fun for him. Not to compare myself to Shakespeare. [Laughs.] But any writer nowadays, I think… I don’t think the book is about those references. It’s not a collection of in-jokes. It’s not some snarky contemporary satire. It’s no dis-fest. It’s about other things, and those things are there for the enjoyment of people who might get them.

The Obligatory Jonathan Franzen Post

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So, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom is out today. The follow-up to 2001’s The Corrections was already in a second printing before its release today, pretty much pointing to the book being “the literary event” of 2010 (whatever that means). I haven’t read Freedom yet so I don’t have an opinion about it–but it’s hard to not have an opinion about the opinions about Freedom, at least if you follow literary-type news. The reviews have been overwhelmingly positive, even when they can find something to nitpick or quibble with. Obama picked up a copy last week on vacation. In an act of hyperbole so ridiculous as to turn comical, The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones called it “the novel of the century.” (Nevermind that the century isn’t even a decade old). But it’s probably the fact that Franzen appeared on the cover of Time magazine–the first writer in a decade to do so (the last was Stephen King)–that’s caused some professional jealousy and a backlash against Franzen. Again, this is all before the book has been released.

Yes, Franzenfreude. Authors Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner felt the need to speak out against coverage of Freedom, crying foul that their books were not receiving the same critical attention as the “white male literary darling.” You can read an interview with the pair here, where their position seems to be that their work, frequently on the bestseller lists, is dismissed as genre fare. I don’t know Weiner’s stuff but Picoult’s novels strike me as the sort of maudlin crap that get turned into Lifetime movies (which they do). Picoult and Weiner don’t just play the gender card though. No, they also whip out a populist argument, the idea that literary critics ought to give more weight to “what people actually read.” In a series of recent columns on the attention Freedom has garnered, Lorin Stein pointed out that “It has become immensely hard to get a “literary” writer the attention he or she deserves.” (The comments section of Stein’s posts showcase a remarkable debate about just what “literary fiction” is).

Stein is absolutely right of course. (Weiner and Picoult will have to console themselves by sobbing into their piles of money). Franzen’s Freedom has become an opportunity for those who love literary fiction–which might be an endangered species–to call attention to the fact that novels are important, that they can somehow diagnose and analyze the spirit of an age. In his article for The Guardian, William Skidelsky strips the rhetoric away and gets to the point–

Underneath the words “Great American Novelist”, Time‘s strapline ran: “He’s not the richest or most famous. His characters don’t solve mysteries, have magical powers or live in the future. But in his new novel, Jonathan Franzen shows us all the way we live now.” It isn’t hard to unpick the subtext here: “Remember, folks, there’s such a thing as serious literature; it has little to do with Dan Brown or Harry Potter, and these days most of us tend to ignore it, but it’s actually kind of important.”

At The Faster Times, Lincoln Michel is even brassier–

There has always been a segment of the population that does not like it when intelligent artistic work gets praise. These people cry foul when an Academy Award goes to a well-crafted film with limited distribution instead of the latest Hollywood blockbuster, they moan when magazines cover innovative indie musicians instead of the most recent Nickelback CD, and you better believe they can’t stand it when that elitist literary fiction gets awards and coverage that should be reserved for books that people are “actually reading.”

Much of the critical reception of Freedom, then, is more about how the public–the reading public–is to connect with and interact with novels in an age of new media, in an age where some like to pretend the literary novel has lost its relevance, in an age where bozos go around declaring manifestos against novels. While Freedom need not be the novel to “save” the novel, it also shouldn’t be an occasion for backbiting, jealousy, and backlash. Maybe everyone should just calm down and read the damn thing.

[UPDATE: Read our obligatory review of Freedom].

Tao Lin’s Eeeee Eee Eeee: The Movie Trailer

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Tao Lin’s novel Eeeee Eee Eeee, adapted by librarian Kacper Jarecki and friends. More info here and here. The trailer is sort of like a sweded version of a nonexistent studio version of Eeeee Eee Eeee.

Baby, We Were Meant for Each Other — NPR’s Scott Simon’s New Memoir in Praise of Adoption

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If you listen to NPR, you’re likely familiar with Scott Simon, host of Weekend Edition. In his new memoir Baby We Were Meant for Each Other, Simon shares his own experiences adopting two girls from China, his daughters Elise and Lina. In addition to sharing his own story, Simon highlights moving tales from a dozen other families, including sportswriter Frank Deford and Freakonomics author Steve Levitt. Simon mixes pathos and humor and his detailed, unflinching narrative is deeply emotional without ever coming across as maudlin or mawkish. While an argument for adoption seems to be relatively common sense, Simon reveals that the process is declining in America, largely because of advances in fertility science. He also makes an impassioned case against China’s one-child policy as a human rights crime against women. In a recent profile at Bookpage, Simon said “The Chinese permit an astonishingly small percentage of orphaned and abandoned children to be adopted. To me, that is absolutely flabbergasting. The government policy on adoption is addressing political, economic and social goals that have almost nothing to do with the best interests of children. Now that we have two little girls from China who are part of our family, we need to speak out about it.” At first glance Simon’s memoir will likely resonate mostly with those who’ve experienced adoption first-hand, but a closer look reveals a narrative that taps into an experience that we all share–what it means to part of a family. Baby, We Were Meant for Each Other is new in hardback from Random House.

Gainesville Church Plans Book Burning

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I called the Dove World Outreach Center this afternoon to find out some details about their upcoming book burning.

The woman who answered the phone seemed tense but polite, wanting to know what organization I was with. I told her that I just wanted to find out a few simple facts about the book burning. First, I wanted to confirm that the church still plans to burn copies of the Qur’an on September 11th, 2010. In a New York Times article from August 25th, the church’s pastor Terry Jones avowed that the book burning would still take place, despite the Gainesville Fire Department denying them a permit. The woman I spoke to confirmed that the book burning will still take place.

I wanted to know where the Qur’ans that were to be burned were coming from. I asked if they belonged to the church. The woman was genuinely confused at this. “No, we’re a church. We don’t have any Qur’ans.” I clarified my question. “They’ve been donated to the church,” she replied, and wouldn’t elaborate. The conversation was getting a bit tense.

I asked her if people should bring their own Qur’ans to the book burning to burn. This again seemed confusing. “No, the event is closed to the public,” she explained. The police advised the church, for “security reasons” to restrict the book burning to only church members. I asked if this means that I couldn’t attend the burning if I was not a church member. She explained that I would be able to see the burning from the side of the road from behind a fence, but that nonmembers could not attend.

I then asked how the books would be burned. Again, a pause; perhaps confusion. I felt like I was about to get hung-up on. “Just wood, I think, is my understanding,” she said. “No gas?” I asked. “I’m not sure,” she replied. “So, you’ll burn them like, bonfire-style? A pyre? No pit?” A longer pause. “I’m not really sure,” she finally said. “And people can witness that from the road, but not up close?” I asked. “Yes.”

So I’ll admit it: I’m a lousy reporter. I didn’t get that much info. I set out to find out some very basic, concrete information about the logistics of a book burning in 2010. Where do you get the materials? How do you burn them? I suppose my efforts and my aim to be objective obscured, at least for a moment, the fact that there are few things as ignorant and idiotic as a book burning. Any group of yokels could undertake such an operation. It really doesn’t need much practical forethought. You just need some wood (and possibly gasoline). And a Facebook page. And a willingness to engage in a special kind of evil. No wonder my questions were met with terse confusion.

I didn’t aim to compete with the NYT article, which does a pretty good job of painting the scene in Gainesville, FL, interviewing Jones, along with local Muslims, people who live near the church, and local Christian leaders. There seems to be unanimous disgust with the book burning. I lived in  Gainesville for four years while I attended the University of Florida. I still live very close to it. Jones and his organization do not represent the values of the people who live in Gainesville or the people of Florida; nor do they represent American values.

The nineteenth-century German poet Heinrich Heine famously said that, “Where they burn books, they will ultimately also burn people” — and then they did, in twentieth-century Germany. I toyed with the idea of titling this post something like “Ignorant Yokels Plan Book Burning” but that seemed too dismissive, too snarky (even if perhaps true). (Also, Michael Moore has already used the poetic and appropriate title “Fahrenheit 9/11”). I’m not arguing for Jones and his ilk to be mocked (although thinking people will do so). And I wouldn’t demand that outside forces stop the church from performing this evil ritual on their own private property. Rather, I believe we must point to Dove World Outreach Center’s book burning as an example of the worst of human thinking and action, and agree that it exists outside the bounds of our culture and our society. We must recognize that book burning is inherently anti-human.

“I’m Suspicious of the Term ‘Avant-Garde'” — More Intelligent Life Interviews Tom McCarthy

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More Intelligent Life interviews Tom McCarthy about his new novel C. From the interview–

MIL: It seems many avant-garde works rely on a single conceit. “Tristam Shandy” used lies, “Motherless Brooklyn” used a tourettic narrator. Must avant-garde literature have a single mechanism to be intelligible to its readers?

TM: What’s the conceit of “Finnegans Wake” then? I’m not sure “Tristram Shandy” has a single conceit. I suppose there’s an inversion of the ‘Life and Adventures of’ tradition into ‘The Life and Opinions of—plus an obvious refusal of certain narrative conventions, for example in Tristram’s inability to get himself born for the first third of his own book. But Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” is equally full of such refusals: it subverts just about every dramatic convention that it purports to buy into. I’m suspicious of the term ‘avant-garde’. I think it should be restricted to its strict historical designation: Futurists, Dadaists, Surrealists etc. “Tristram Shandy” and “Motherless Brooklyn” aren’t avant-garde novels; they’re novels. And very good ones too!

Lolita Cover Archive

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Checkout this great cover gallery archiving over 150 covers of Vladimir Nabokov’s masterpiece Lolita. A few favorites–

This 1957 Swedish cover is a pretty subtle/creepy upskirt.

1962, Brazil.

A 1964 LP with Pop Art undertones–seems a little too frank.

This 1970 Italian cover seems to be the earliest “girl in socks” theme that pops up again and again in the archive.

This 1972 Norwegian cover picks up the voyeur theme again, but it seems awfully goofy.

The poster for the Stanley Kubrick film adaptation inspired a rash of bad covers, but I think that this 1977 German cover works really well.

A Lebanese edition from 1988. Pretty and simple.

Balthus and Lolita seem like a natural fit, if a bit too obvious. I counted two other covers sporting Balthus paintings in addition to this 1995 English edition.

This Polish cover from 1997 is nine kinds of creepy.

“Never Give an Inch” — Gerald Howard on Social Class and the American Novel

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Tin House #45, out in September, focuses on “Class in America.” You can read Gerald Howard’s essay from that issue, “Never Give an Inch,” in full now. The essay discusses shifting ideas of the social class of the American novelist, with an emphasis on “working class” writers. Howard discusses Raymond Carver and Russell Banks at some length, as well as Richard Price and Dorothy Allison (he also mentions Gilbert Sorrentino, whose work seems to be enjoying a late reappraisal). From the essay–

I don’t suppose anyone has ever done an in-depth study of that interesting form of literary ephemera, the author dust jacket biography. But if they did, I’m sure they would notice a distinct sociological shift over the past decades. Back in the forties and fifties, the bios, for novelists at least, leaned very heavily on the tough and colorful professions and pursuits that the author had had experience in before taking to the typewriter. Popular jobs, as I recall, were circus roustabout, oil field roughneck, engine wiper, short-order cook, fire lookout, railroad brakeman, cowpuncher, gold prospector, crop duster, and long-haul trucker. Military experiences in America’s recent wars, preferably combat-related, were also often mentioned. The message being conveyed was that the guy (and they were, of course, guys) who had written the book in your hand had really been around the block and seen the rougher side of life, so you could look forward to vivid reading that delivered the authentic experiential goods.

It’s been a long time since an author has been identified as a one-time circus roustabout. These days such occupations have become so exotic to the average desk-bound American that they serve as fodder for cable television reality shows—viz., The Deadliest Catch, Dirty Jobs, and Ice Road Truckers. Contemporary dust jacket biographies tend to document the author’s long march through the elite institutions, garnering undergraduate and postgraduate and MFA degrees, with various prizes and publications in prestigious literary magazines all duly noted. Vocational experiences generally get mentioned only when pertinent to the subject of the novel at hand—e.g., assistant DA or clerk for a Federal judge if the book deals with crime or the intricacies of the law. Work—especially the sort of work that gets your hands dirty and that brands you as a member of the working class—no longer seems germane to our novelists’ apprenticeships and, not coincidentally, is no longer easy to find in the fiction they produce. Whether one finds this scarcity something to worry about or simply a fact to be noted probably says a lot about one’s class origins and prejudices.

The Rumpus Interviews David Mitchell

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The Rumpus interviews David Mitchell. Topics include his brilliant new novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, diction, syntax, and other writerly concerns. And stammering. I’m currently finishing up Mitchell’s novel Black Swan Green, which is hilarious and sad and beautiful. I will review it here shortly.

Guantánamo Bay Hearts Harry Potter

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The Guardian reports that the detainees/living Kafka characters at Guantánamo Bay can’t get enough Dan Brown, John Grisham, Agatha Christie, and J.K. Rowling.

Best paragraph:

Civil rights lawyer H Candace Gorman sent the library an Arabic edition of a Harry Potter book herself because it did not have all of the published titles and her client, the Libyan national Abdul al-Ghizzawi, was keen to keep up with the boy wizard’s adventures. “The guards were telling him things that had happened in the book, but he didn’t know if it was true or not,” she told Time. Ghizzawi saw similarities between his own situation and that of the prisoners of Azkaban, and between George W Bush and Voldemort, she said.