Defending Alice Munro

I was pleased to read Kyle Minor's response to Christian Lorentzen's London Review of Books hatchet job on Alice Munro, not because I think Munro is above criticism, but because Lorentzen's attempt at a take-down was pretty shallow. I read Lorentzen's piece and was merely moved to get snarky on Twitter, but Minor really digs into Lorentzen's claims.

Much as I am in awe of Munro's best stories, I am also extremely wary of any discourse that builds up around a writer to make them seem impervious to criticism. This is perhaps Lorentzen's best claim — that Munro has been too much worshipped and too little evaluated. It does our understanding of her achievement no service to surround every sentence she writes with awe. Habitual praise is meaningless.

The critical writing about Munro that I most appreciate is the type that really digs into what she's doing and its effects. I found Lorentzen's approach annoying not because he doesn't like Munro's work, but because his dislike prohibits him from understanding the subtleties and complexities of the texts, making his writing a narrow expression of personal taste and ultimately a demonstration of his own obtuseness. Everybody has writers whose work they don't "get" — writers who, for whatever reason of tone or style or topic, we bounce off of. Such writers are the hardest for any critic to write about in a constructive or insightful way, because our response is too individual, too blinding. Lorentzen's expression of distaste for the stories of Alice Munro is perfect evidence of this: the review says little of use about Munro and instead paints a (rather unappealing) portrait of Lorentzen as a reader.

Really, the fact that Lorentzen read ten of Munro's collections in a row should immediately disqualify him from rational conversation about her work, because while it might be an interesting exercise to see what happens when you cram 45 years of a writer's words into your brain, it's hardly going to lead to a nuanced appreciation of their skill. Anything consumed quickly and in large quantities is likely to lead to nausea. I especially think short stories should not be read in gulps, and even if some short stories do benefit from such an approach, Munro's most certainly do not.

Kyle Minor has not been nauseated from gorging himself on the rich feast of Munro's fiction, and so his defense of her work is well done: specific, detailed, thoughtful, informed. These two paragraphs, for instance, offer a good example of the virtues of his method:

By 1998, the year of the publication of “The Love of a Good Woman,” Munro had begun to mute the way the new kinds of stories wore their form like an exoskeleton, and created a series of stories in which the freedom the previous two books had opened could now be stretched out into in more organic ways, a development that reached its crescendo in “Hateship, Friendship’s” “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” a novel compressed into 40-some pages in which, as Lorentzen tells it, “a woman with dementia forgets her husband and directs her affections toward another resident.” “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” is Munro’s crowning achievement, a story in which a writer is operating without a net, in absence of constraints, offering in greatest fullness a character for whom ordinary consciousness has been transmuted into some other thing, a story whose only rival in this regard is “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” Katherine Anne Porter’s novella of the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918.

Throughout the years she was writing “Friend of My Youth,” “Open Secrets,” “The Love of a Good Woman” and “Hateship, Friendship,” Munro was making history, culture, power and time her subjects. Lorentzen complains that “people’s residential and familial histories” come up “all the time in the stories … details she never leaves out,” without understanding that these are the details that accumulate, that the characters gnaw on until they explode like fireworks at story’s end, where, as in Chekhov’s best story, “Gusev,” we realize that the story is an avatar of all the world’s other stories, and that the song of the individual is given to grandeur in part because of the way it connects to all the music that came before and all the music that will come after. In this regard, sometimes Munro seems to have made a single dyspeptic organism of the whole universe.

Minor's worst tendency is his fondness for grandiose statements*, but he knows Munro's work well and, most importantly, has the kind of sympathy for it that allows him to write intelligent analysis. Sympathy is certainly not required for intelligent analysis, as critical insight can sometimes result from fierce antipathy, but Lorentzen's antipathy is too idiosyncratic to overcome his uncomprehending bluster and lead him toward insight.

______________________________
*"Gusev" is Chekhov's best story, "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" is Munro's story's "only rival in this regard" — as if "Gusev" is not one among quite a few examples of Chekhov at his best in different ways, and as if Minor has read every story ever written and therefore knows that only Porter was Munro's rival.

Metaphor Systems, Fictive Moments, and False Arrests

Bradford Morrow, editor of Conjunctions and writer of The Diviner's Tale and The Uninnocent, in an interview conducted by Edie Meidav at The Millions:

I may be overly optimistic or utterly blind, but my view of contemporary American fiction is that it is as rich as ever. Some of the best work is being written in what until recently was considered, at least among the conventional literati, genre fiction. Horror, gothic, mystery, fantasy, fabulism. There are so many stunningly original and serious writers working these fields. I have to think that anybody reading this interview would agree. Just one example, though there are many, would be Elizabeth Hand. She composes sentences of ravishing beauty. She is capable of creating metaphor systems that are so dynamic and provocative. She can turn a fictive moment that seems deeply rooted in the everyday into something that, in fact, touches upon the sublime, the miraculous. Just read her novella Cleopatra Brimstone and tell me that American fiction isn’t pulsing with life. Like I say, I could list dozens of authors here whose work I admire and follow with care and excitement. That said, I do think that much contemporary criticism is stuck in the past and that too many reviewers want those who are exploring ways to revolutionize genre to stick to the rules. I think of them as genre police. They make too many false arrests and lead potential readers astray, keep them caged away from renegades whose work they might well dig reading.

How to Respond to a Critic

Posting will be light-to-nonexistent here until after the new year, but I want to put this up before I forget it.

I've been bingeing on Tim Minchin over the holidays, mostly because I've been very busy with grading, writing, wrapping, cleaning, etc. and needed something amusing and profane in the background of these activities. Minchin's "Song for Phil Daoust" is a heartfelt, soul-searching, and genuinely touching example of something artists should really never, ever do, despite the temptation: respond to a negative review. (Note: despite being heartfelt, soul-searching, and genuinely touching, this is not a song you will want to play anywhere where colorful words might singe sensitive sensibilities.)

Mother (contra Brody)

Two of Joon-ho Bong's films previous to Mother, 2003's Memories of Murder and 2006's The Host, impressed me greatly, and Memories of Murder is certainly among my favorite films of this century (that sounds so much more impressive than "this decade"!).  Mother didn't get me in the gut the way Memories did, but it's certainly an excellent film: compelling, thought-provoking, and visually rich.

Reality Narrative Death Point

My latest Strange Horizons column has just been posted, and it's a sort of meditation on four books: Reality Hunger by David Shields, Narrative Power edited by L. Timmel Duchamp, Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor, and Vanishing Point by Ander Monson.

All four books are well worth reading, thinking about, arguing with. I especially hope that in the wake of Paul Di Filippo's review of Who Fears Death in the B&N; Review that the column will offer an alternative way of evaluating the novel. For the way Di Filippo read the book, I think his assessment is valid, but he read it in the most narrow and silly way possible, the way someone who's only ever read science fiction would read. And I know he hasn't only read science fiction, so I'm perplexed at the assumptions he applies. I agree with his desire for fewer savior of the world/universe/everything characters, and in fact once wrote another SH column about it, but I think there's abundant evidence in the text that Okorafor is a smart writer who is as aware of this paradigm as anybody else, and is both using and critiquing it in complex, multi-layered ways, just as she is simultaneously using and critiquing other tropes, tendencies, templates -- not all of them from SF -- throughout the novel.

Lonesome Rangers of Excessive Candour: Scores of Post-Toasties New World Hip-Hop (An Imaginary Free Jazz Session of Cult Studs, with a Touch of Story, Too!)

Hitting this parenthetical, I knew I was in the wonderful Land of Clute:

--Ajvaz has made it clear he does not want the reader to be reminded of Magic Realism in his work, that his texts do not valorize any hero bearer of sigils out of the swamp nor any origin tale at the heart of the delta of tales untold--

Since the death of John Leonard, I've come to cherish Clute more than ever. I've always had an admiration for Clute -- for though my ability to embrace his ideas has often been tempered by my (quasi-irrational?) antipathy to taxonomy vs. his career of it, I love his rhythms and diction, and more than that, I love his willingness to follow the words into a realm more of sound than sense, something Shakespeare did now and then, and all the best poets, and John Leonard, too, who was nearly unique in offering that quality as a book reviewer.

Nearly unique. I think of Leonard and Clute as the Jazz Johns of Bookchat. I wish they'd had the chance to play a session together. Imagine what it might sound like--

The sky's falling and so's the yen. Suddenly the jaws of Story shut cleanly on him. And he realizes he's been holding his breath even on those occasions -- under a tent at Caramoor, once in a cathedral -- to which he's been invited as a designated partisan, after which he's guaranteed a standing ovation because, of course, he's followed by the Laureate, who reads from her novel-in-progress, which begins: "They shoot the white girl first."

Shouting, farting, swearing, grinding his intimates into stricken silence but also lifting them high, shitting himself so hard he blasts a hole in his own peritoneum, arguing, staggering from the ring of truths so great the world shouts God in his ear, he is a stunning creation, a histrion utterly real to the eye, a porridge of sensation who turns on a dime into icon.  Old son, you're nicked.  From sea to shining sea: long-distance loneliness ... Deer slayers, cow punchers, whaling captains and raft river rats ... Greedheads, gun nuts, and religious crazies ... Carpetbaggers, claims jumpers, con men, dead redskins, despised coolies, fugitive slaves, and No Irish Need Apply ... Land grabs, lynching bees, and Love Canals ... Lone Rangers, private eyes, serial killers, and cyberpunks. Not exactly the ideal social space for a radical Johnny Appleseed to plant his dream beans.

All in all, though, it is a structure into which a thousand tales could nestle, each nudzhing its niche, each transacting furiously. So superior are these sentences to the churlishness that passes for criticism elsewhere in our culture -- the exorcism, the vampire bite, the vanity production, the body-snatching and the sperm-sucking -- so generous and wise, that they seem to belong to an entirely different realm of discourse, where the liberal arts meet something like transubstantiation. It is the outside of the inside of the data of the dance. It is a shape for the knowing we're going to need.

Innocence

Lucile Hadzihalilovic's 2004 film Innocence is haunting, beautiful, mysterious, unsettling, and maybe bait for pedophiles. Based on some of the reviews I've read, what you think of the movie may depend on how much you blame Hadzihalilovic for her husband.

First, the movie. It's based on Frank Wedekind's 1901 novella Mine-Haha: or On the Bodily Education of Young Girls. Wedekind gave us the controversial works Spring Awakening (recently seen on Broadway) and the Lulu plays, which were filmed as Pandora's Box in 1929 by G.W. Pabst and made Louise Brooks a star.

Knowing this, it should be no surprise that Innocence is a surreal story of a weird boarding school for pre-pubescent girls, and that certain sexual undercurrents are present.

Manohla Dargis on Women in Hollywood

Manohla Dargis may be my favorite mainstream film reviewer -- it's not just that she's got great perception of cinema as an artform of its own (too many reviewers treat movies like they're illustrated novels), but she's also an extraordinarily talented writer, one of the few film reviewers I'm happy to read simply for her sense of language and prose structure within the newspaper review form. Plenty of writers' expressive abilities have been deadened by the demands of writing multiple 800-1000-word reviews week after week, but Dargis still turns in more energetic and thoughtful reviews than not, and it's an impressive feat.

In a recent issue of the Times, Dargis wrote an essay about women in Hollywood. The commercial American film industry remains an astoundingly sexist enterprise, and the sexism is systemic, as Dargis shows. Even if you think you know how bad the situation is, the statistics are breathtaking:

Only a handful of female directors picked up their paychecks from one of the six major Hollywood studios and their remaining divisions this year: 20th Century Fox had “Jennifer’s Body” (Karyn Kusama) and “Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel” (Betty Thomas), while Fox Searchlight had “Amelia” (Mira Nair), “Post Grad” (Vicky Jenson) and “Whip It” (Drew Barrymore). Anne Fletcher directed “The Proposal” for Disney, while the studio’s once-lustrous division, Miramax Films, continued on its death march without any help from female directors. Ms. Ephron’s “Julie & Julia” was released by Sony Pictures while the art-house division Sony Pictures Classics released “An Education” (Ms. Scherfig), “Coco Before Chanel” (Anne Fontaine) and “Sugar” (Anna Boden, directing with Ryan Fleck). Universal Pictures has Nancy Meyers’s “It’s Complicated”; its specialty unit Focus Features has no female directors.

Paramount Pictures and Warner Brothers Pictures, meanwhile, did not release a single film directed by a woman. Not one.

The Jezebel website has now published an interesting interview with Dargis about the essay and about the relationship between women and Hollywood. Her replies to the questions are sharp, succinct, and peppered with the wonderful vernacular vocabulary the Times never lets her use...

The only thing Hollywood is interested in money, and after that prestige. That's why they'll be interested in something like [Kathryn Bigelow's] The Hurt Locker. She's done so well critically that she can't be ignored.

Let's acknowledge that the Oscars are bullshit and we hate them. But they are important commercially... I've learned to never underestimate the academy's bad taste. Crash as best picture? What the fuck.

It's a Plot!

I don't have time or desire to expose all the errors and bad assumptions in Lev Grossman's essay "Good Novels Don't Have to be Hard", but thankfully I don't have to: Andrew Seal has already shown how wrong Grossman is about so much.

Grossman's essay reminds me of a lot of things I've read in science fiction fanzines and blogs over the years where people want to justify their taste and pleasures against armies of straw people marching through an alternate literary history. But I don't really feel any malice toward SF fans and amateur critics who are passionate about what they spend most of their time reading; that they don't have a nuanced understanding of Modernism is really not a big deal.

That a man who has a degree from Harvard in literature and did work toward a Ph.D. in comparative literature at Yale, has written for Lingua Franca, the Village Voice, Entertainment Weekly, Time Out New York, Salon and the New York Times, and has been Time's book critic since 2002 -- that a man of those qualifications can write something this clueless, though, is impressive. After all, plenty of fanzine and blog writers produce better-informed and more thoughtful stuff.

A few quick points before I go...

• "Modernism" can be, and often is, used as a term to describe an era rather than a set of techniques primarily associated with an era -- an era and set of techniques fiercely debated just about from the moment they first appeared -- but pretending that "Modernism" is a settled term is likely to lead you toward the same sorts of problems you encounter by assuming that, for instance, "science fiction" is a settled term.
• Books are not popular or unpopular simply because of their accessibility. Consider Faulkner. The Sound and the Fury does, indeed, sell quite well these days. Before teachers realized how much fun it can be in classrooms, it didn't do nearly as well. The bestselling novel in 1929, the year Sound and the Fury was published, was All Quiet on the Western Front (an episodic novel that is not especially suspenseful, at least not in the way we generally talk of popular fiction being suspenseful). In 1931, Faulkner's "pot-boiler" Sanctuary sold well and helped raise the sales of his backlist, but still not in the way his Nobel Prize and academic canonization did. And then a few years ago Oprah helped.
• Which is just to say that confusing what makes a book popular with how a book is written is likely to lead to distorting simplifications and confusions.
  
• Also, confusing the popularity of a book within an academic context with its popularity within a general context is likely to lead to distorting simplifications and confusions.
  
• Also, confusing a book's reputation with its popularity is likely to lead to distoriting simplifications and confusions.
  
• There is no link between the ideas that A.) a group of writers Lev Grossman defines as Modernists wrote books that are hard to read, and Z.) "millions of readers" "need something they're not getting elsewhere". Look at the lists of 1920s and 1930s bestsellers. Most of the names have been forgotten, but of the ones people today might possibly recognize -- Zane Grey, Sinclair Lewis, Edna Ferber, Rafael Sabatini, John Galsworthy, Booth Tarkington, Edith Wharton, Thornton Wilder, J. B. Priestley, Pearl S. Buck, Willa Cather, James Hilton, Isak Dinesen, Franz Werfel, Margaret Mitchell, George Santayana, Rebecca West, Aldous Huxley, Kenneth Roberts, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, John Steinbeck -- hardly any of them are bestsellers with books that are "difficult" because of the reasons Lev Grossman identifies. (One notable exception is Virginia Woolf's The Years in 1937, though it's a more "accessible" novel than many of her others.)
• Here's an interesting analysis of bestseller lists that is relevant to this discussion.
• Lev Grossman sez: "The revolution is under way. The novel is getting entertaining again." This is a meaningless statement outside of a personal context. Its meaning is closer to, "I've recently enjoyed more of the novels that 1.) I have encountered, 2.) have been published within the last few years, and 3.) I identify as 'literary fiction'."
• Lev Grossman sez: "This is the future of fiction." Do not trust anyone who utters such a sentence. They are likely a charlatan, a mesmerist, or a dolt.
• Lev Grossman sez: "Old hierarchies of taste are collapsing. Genres are hybridizing." This is called The History of the Novel. Those two statements could have been made at any time during the last 300 years at least.
• Lev Grossman sez: "The balance of power is swinging from the writer back to the reader, and compromises with the public taste are being struck all over the place." When did writers have power, exactly? Writers do not have power (well, at least before they establish a proven track record of bestsellers). Publishers, editors, marketing executives, reviewers, teachers, booksellers, and readers have power. And what are these "compromises with public taste" of which you speak? Are people writing on walls with their feces or something?
  
• Lev Grossman sez: "Lyricism is on the wane, and suspense and humor and pacing are shedding their stigmas and taking their place as the core literary technologies of the 21st century." I'll agree that within this article, lyricism is on the wane.
  
• Lev Grossman often sez "the novel". This is even less useful than talking in general about "the internet". It can be done. But it's seldom enlightening.
• Lev Grossman sez: "In fact the true postmodern novel is here, hiding in plain sight. We just haven't noticed it because we're looking in the wrong aisle. We were trained—by the Modernists, who else—to expect a literary revolution to be a revolution of the avant-garde: typographically altered, grammatically shattered, rhetorically obscure." Whoa, man, you are, like, soooo 1960s!
• "Lev Grossman is the book critic at Time magazine and the author of 'The Magicians,' a novel." Lev Grossman seems to have mistaken the indefinite article a after The Magicians for the definite article the.

I don't have anything against Lev Grossman. I'm not his Mortal Enemy. I didn't call him "the Uwe Boll of the book reviewing world". I read The Magicians and thought it was a fun idea not very well executed overall, but entertaining sometimes. If this were just one insipid article I wouldn't really care. But it works from assumptions and misperceptions that keep getting trotted out, and my tolerance for it all is low at this point.

George Steiner at The New Yorker

The front flap of George Steiner at The New Yorker, published as a lovely paperback by New Directions earlier this year, claims that the book "collects fifty-three of his fascinating and wide-ranging essays from the more than one hundred and thirty he has contributed to the magazine." This is an error. The essays are certainly fascinating and wide-ranging, but there are only twenty-eight of them. Perhaps Robert Boyers, the editor, has selected another twenty-five for a later volume. We can certainly hope so.

Subscribers to The New Yorker have access to all of Steiner's essays, though the New Yorker's database is not the equal of, for instance, the database available of Harper's subscribers, and so browsing Steiner's contributions is cumbersome without the guide handily provided as an appendix to George Steiner at the New Yorker.

I've been reading and grading final papers and exams for the past week, and in amidst that I saved the last vestiges of my mind by reading Steiner, a writer I've binged on in the past, but hadn't read in a few years. The New Directions collection proved to be a delightful way to revisit his work.

It surprises me that I like Steiner's writings as much as I do -- he is an avowed devotee of, primarily, the classics of European literature; he has shown mostly contempt for the methods that have come to be called literary theory and cultural studies; he's particularly interested in Greek and Roman languages and mythologies. I, meanwhile, spend about half my reading time with popular fiction; I'm rather fond, depending on my mood, of such writers as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault and am in general sympathy with some of the tendencies within what gets labelled as New Historicism and Queer Theory; I have very little interest in Greek and Roman history or literature and even less interest in mythology. Additionally, I am fluent only with English, while Steiner's second book, The Death of Tragedy, begins by noting that "All translations from French, German, and Italian are by the author" and one of Steiner's best-known works is After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. He is not I.

There is enough poly in the math of Steiner, though, that some of his passions are ones I share -- for much of Modernism in its various forms and modes, for Shakespeare and the Russians and Kafka and Beckett and Celan and Borges, for the ethics of language and literature in an age of atrocity. Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, Steiner is a marvelous writer. His sentences and paragraphs are rich not only with ideas and information, but music.

George Steiner at the New Yorker provides a good general overview of Steiner's primary obsessions and themes over the years, making it a fine companion to, especially, such previous works as Errata: An Examined Life and My Unwritten Books (also from New Directions, and adorned with one of my favorite covers of recent years). There are essays on Beckett, Borges, Brecht, Bertrand Russell, Noam Chomsky, Simone Weil, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Walter Benjamin, and Albert Speer. There are surprises, too: one of the most impressive and elegant essays is the first, "The Cleric of Treason", about Anthony Blunt, espionage, homosexuality, and scholarship. There are insightful pieces on 1984 and 1984, on Graham Greene, on Thomas Bernhard, on the OED, and on chess. Perhaps most surprising of all, there is a basically positive review of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

One of the critics Steiner most reminds me of is Guy Davenport -- their erudition is similar, and there is much overlap in their interests. George Steiner at the New Yorker contains an essay on Davenport where Steiner, after praising numerous sentences, writes, "There would be no harm in simply using the remainder of this review to make a mosaic and montage of quotes." The same is true for a review of this collection. Consider all that is packed and unpacked in this opening paragraph to a review of a biography of Anton Webern:

There is a great book to be written. It would show that the twentieth century as we have lived it in the West is, in essential ways, an Austro-Hungarian product and export. We conduct our inward lives in or in conflict with a landscape mapped by Freud and his disciples and dissenters. Our philosophy and the central place we assign to language in the study of human thought derive from Wittgenstein and the Vienna school of logical positivism. The novel after Joyce is, in the main, divided between the two poles of introspective narration and lyric experiment defined by Musil and by Broch. Our music follows two great currents: that of Bruckner, Mahler, and Bartók on the one hand; that of Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern on the other. Though the role of Paris was, of course, vital, it is now increasingly clear that certain sources of aesthetic modernism, from Art Deco to Action painting, can be found in the Viennese Jugendstil and in Austrian Expressionism. The functionalist, antiseptic ideals so prominent in today's architecture were predicted in the work of Adolf Loos. Political-social satire in London and New York, the sick joke, the conviction that the language of those who govern us is a poisonous smoke screen echo the genius of Karl Kraus. Ernst Mach had a profound influence on the development of Einstein's thinking. The logic and sociology of the natural sciences cannot be formulated without reference to Karl Popper. And where shall we place the manifold effects of Schumpeter, Hayek, von Neumann? One could prolong the roll call.

A reader who has encountered that paragraph and been intrigued will find ideas from it scattered and blooming throughout Steiner's oeuvre in fascinating ways -- the essay on Kraus and Thomas Bernhard in this book, the material about his Viennese parents and Judaism in Errata, the essay "A Kind of Survivor" in Language and Silence. Other connections pop up throughout many of the other pieces in the collection -- "The Tongues of Man" (from 1969, about Noam Chomsky's linguistics) points toward After Babel and a 1974 essay in On Difficulty, "Whorf, Chomsky, and the Student of Literature". Et cetera, et cetera.

Most of the reviews collected here are at least generally positive about their subjects, but Boyers has included two sharply critical pieces, and they're valuable not just because they are, in my opinion, basically correct in their criticisms, but also because they help give some context to Steiner's praises and passions -- to understand why a critic likes one thing, it can be helpful to understand why she or he dislikes something else. Thus, we have Steiner calling John Barth's novel Letters prolix, narcissistic, and "a more or less indigestible classroom soufflé"; and finding little of merit in E.M. Cioran's aphorisms, which he describes as banal, derivative, and predictable:

There is throughout Cioran's jeremiads an ominous facility. It requires no sustained analytic thought, no closeness or clarity of argument to pontificate on the "rottenness," on the "gangrene," of man, and on the terminal cancer of history. The pages on which I have drawn not only are easy to write, they flatter the writer with the tenebrous incense of the oracular. One need only turn to the work of Tocqueville, of Henry Adams, or of Schopenhauer to see the drastic difference. These are masters of a clairvoyant sadness no less comprehensive than Cioran's. Their reading of history is no rosier. But the cases they put are scrupulously argued, not declaimed; they are informed, at each node and articulation of proposal, with a just sense of the complex, contradictory nature of historical evidence. The doubts expressed by those thinkers, the qualifications brought to their own persuasions honor the reader. They call not for numbed assent or complaisant echo but for reexamination and criticism.

Despite his erudition, I don't find Steiner to be a particularly difficult writer to read, especially when he is writing for a general audience, as here. These essays don't feel as incisive as some of Steiner's other works, ones where he has more space to expand his ideas, but that's not entirely a bad thing -- I much prefer this book to such books as Grammars of Creation, where Steiner himself lights up some tenebrous incense of oracularity. His years of teaching, about which he has often written (especially in Lessons of the Masters), have made him a kind of exemplary popularizer of Western culture. It is not in his theories that he is at his strongest, but in his enthusiasms -- his ability to convey his passions. In theorizing about tragedy, for instance, I much prefer Terry Eagleton's Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic, but I still read The Death of Tragedy with interest and even fondness, because the connections Steiner makes are productive and sometimes unique ones -- his comparison of Woyzeck and King Lear is, alone, more than justification for the book still being in print, not because it's necessarily "right" but because it allows us to think about both texts and authors in ways we -- by which I mean I -- would not have otherwise, and thus to pay closer attention to implications and emphases previously invisible and silent. (Similarly, I reject some of the basic premises of Steiner's Tolstoy or Dostoevsky while also realizing that it taught me more than any other book how to appreciate both writers.)

I have no quarrel with Robert Boyers's choices for what to include in George Steiner at the New Yorker, but some of the omissions are unfortunate -- we really would benefit from that lost fifty-three-essay collection. After reading the book, I spent a few days looking at Steiner's other pieces for the New Yorker, and found, just by following some of my own interests, excellent essays on Alexander Herzen (8 Feb. 1969), Samuel Johnson (28 April 1975), Glenn Gould (23 Nov. 1992), and Louis Althusser (21 Feb. 1994). "Closing Time", about fin de siècle Vienna (11 Feb. 1980), would have paired well with the piece on Webern. And three of the pieces I read seemed like real losses. A review of the first volume of Brian Boyd's biography of Nabokov is a particularly thoughtful appraisal both of Nabokov and the biography ("learned hagiography"), but more than that: Steiner wrestles with what are, he says, for him, as someone who doesn't read Russian fluently, unresolveable questions about Nabokov's greatness and the humanity (or lack of it) within his work. Steiner's review of Michael Hamburger's translations of Paul Celan's poems (28 Aug. 1989) would also have been a valuable piece to include, because Celan is particularly essential to many of Steiner's ideas, especially in Language and Silence (but he had not yet read Celan by the time of that book's writing). It's not an extraordinary essay on Celan, nor a particularly outstanding example of Steiner's work, but it's a useful piece in the puzzle of his thought. Finally, the essay that ends the book, on Robert Hutchins and the University of Chicago, is interesting and insightful, but it is not as affecting as similar material in Errata, and it might have been better to end with Steiner's last essay for The New Yorker, a review of Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading titled "Ex Libris" (17 March 1997), although the final paragraph might have been a disturbing one to finish the collection with:

Books do continue to be produced and published in large numbers. Handwritten illuminated manuscripts continued to be produced well after Gutenberg. Periods of transition are difficult to make out. They are also intensely stimulating. One can intuit deep-lying seismic shocks affecting our cultural perceptions of time, of individual death. These will put in question the claims of literature, of written thought, to individual glory, to survival "for all ages." Milton held a good book to be the "lifeblood of a master spirit." Doubtless this precious liquor will continue to flow, but, perhaps, in altogether different channels and test tubes. The boys and girls at their computer keyboards, finding, stumbling onto insights in logic, in fractals, may neither read nor write in any "book sense." Are they illiterate?

As a boy at a computer keyboard, I will simply say here that George Steiner at the New Yorker -- even with twenty-eight essays instead of fifty-three! -- makes me grateful for the bits of my own literacy that have made the book such a pleasure over the past week, and grateful for the greater, and generous, literacy of George Steiner, who continues to make the idea of a literate life itself seem like something to be aspired to more than something ever truly to be attained. We must keep learning, writing, reading.

The Ubiquitous Bolaño

I find it mildly embarrassing to be so enamored of Bolaño these days. I picked up By Night in Chile and Distant Star back when they were the only Bolaño books available in English -- back in the dusty old days of, what, 2005? -- and they both perplexed me and impressed me; then when Last Evenings on Earth came out, I picked it up and was blown away -- something really felt like it exploded in my head, and I went back and reread parts of By Night in Chile and Distant Star and they felt so much richer than they had before. I had, in some ways, been teaching myself how to read Bolaño.

There was great praise of Bolaño from the moment the first translations appeared, but the praise and admiration for Bolaño back then felt restrained and quiet compared to what would happen when The Savage Detectives came out -- suddenly it seemed like Bolaño had been made the saint of all literature. I was excited, yes, but also a bit fearful, and I resisted Savage Detectives for a while, partly, I think, because praise of Bolaño seemed ubiquitous, and I just couldn't believe -- didn't want to believe -- that here was a writer who could be so universally popular. Sure, I loved him, but how could everybody else? It was disturbing. I particularly didn't think it possible that a writer like Bolaño could be so truly adored, because he is a writer whose work seldom has much of a linear plotline (if it has a plotline at all), likeable characters, or lyrical prose, the things that so much of the world seems to want fiction to have.

I started to distrust even my own response to the books -- did I really like them, or did I just want to avoid upsetting the overflowing bandwagon? I suffered angst and self-distrust. I didn't leave the house for days. I abjured my very basic knowledge of Spanish and tried to remember some German. (Ach, German! I said to myself, remembering that earlier sensation in translation, W.G. Sebald, a writer I have much admired but not yet learned to love.)

And then came 2666 in two gorgeous editions from FSG (I bought the 3-volume slipcased paperback, since the hardcover seemed a bit unweildy) and the praise just continued, like kudzu or a deadly bender. Of course, at some point it will stop. Won't it? People will pick up the books and be bewildered by them and decide it's all just hype and they will turn, backlashing, against we who praise -- we who must, they think, be full of horse effluent: "How," they will say, "can you really and truly think that is any great shakes?"

The phenomenon of Bolaño's success in translation (a separate sort of success, I think, from success in one's own language -- and his translators, each excellent, deserve much praise as well, particularly in as translation-averse a country as the U.S.) is itself beginning to become a topic. The new issue of The Chronicle Review contains an interesting, though not particularly probing, essay by Ilan Stavans about the sudden rise of Bolaño's popularity and, in particular, about 2666, a book he has some reservations about (the article is only online to subscribers or people who have access via various institutions, alas):

Alas, Bolaño's work is rapidly becoming a factory for scholarly platitudes. More than a year ago, I had a student who wrote his senior thesis on the author. My student started early in his junior year with a handful of resources at his disposal. By the time he had finished, the plethora of tenure-granting studies was dumbfounding: Bolaño and illness, Bolaño and the whodunit, Bolaño and the beatniks, Bolaño and eschatology, etc. Since then, interviews, photographs, e-mail messages — everything by or about him — are perceived as discoveries (even though most of the material was never lost to a Spanish-language audience).

The rapture must have been the same when Borges, long a commodity among a small cadre of followers in Argentina, shared with Samuel Beckett the International Publishers' Prize in 1961. Suddenly he became an overnight sensation in translation around the world. Such instant celebrity occurs when writers are able to prove that the local is universal: They exist in their corners of the world but are able to recreate the world entire. For Borges, that happened because after World War II readers were eager to look at Latin America, and the so-called third world in general, as a cradle of a worldview that was both different and refreshing.

Stavans goes on to ask an important question: What does Bolaño offer that was so quickly attractive to such a broad swath of the U.S. literati? (I'll leave it to others to ruminate on his popularity elsewhere.) Stavans suggests that it is because the fiction offered to us by "mainstream publishers" has grown "complacent", that the genres offered are "suffocating", that we want somebody to shake it up, a prophet, and that Bolaño is the one who has been annointed.

There's something to this, but I don't buy it completely (I might have been more persuaded if Stavans had had more space to expand upon his ideas). There is, indeed, an energy in Bolaño that is not available in most mainstream U.S. writers, a blithe disregard for the strictures of fictional form as they have ossified over the years into the current cant about "what a novel is", a willingness on Bolaño's part to make his own forms as he sees fit, and to have fun with those forms, a playfulness seen in only a few U.S. writers whose work is published by mainstream publishers, though it's much less absent from the books published by many small presses. Most of the U.S. writers who have a sense of playfulness in their fiction get chastised for thinking fiction is a "game", but I haven't yet seen Bolaño get criticized for this.

Perhaps we expect people from south of us to be a little ... odd like that. They speak a funny language, they write weird books, so it's all just fine. It's kind of cute, actually.

No, there's something more to it -- I think Bolaño escapes being criticized for gaming the system because he also writes about Big Stuff: dictatorships and mass murder and evil and stuff. He does it in a weird way, yes, because he doesn't have magical things happen to his dictators the way the other people who write in his funny language do, but that's part of his appeal -- we've got shelves of the other sorts of books about dictators and mass murder and stuff. The roundabout way he does it, it's kind of fun. Even though books should not be fun if they're Serious, well ... we like this kind of funlike Serious. Don't we? Yes?

Oh, I don't know. I don't understand the mass mind, so why am I trying to explain?

At least I've found one person who isn't buying into the hype: Nick Antosca. Having just finished reading 2666, he says that though he often found it enthralling, he also found it just as often tedious (and, by the way, he thinks Jonathan Lethem's NY Times review is insane):

The fourth book, "The Part About the Crimes," is the one everyone talks about. It is a list of murder scenes. It is a desert of boredom containing sites of interest. Once in a while, things happen--certain characters reappear (a suspect, a few detectives). Young women are being killed in a Mexican city. We don't see the crimes, we just get a detached third person voice describing the bodies. Always, "the hyoid bone was fractured." Occasionally there are scenes of horrific prison torture and murder. (These scenes are much more disturbing than the murders, which we never "see.") I found this section the most problematic--it is generally tedious, for one thing, but worse, I think it's exploitative. I haven't heard anyone else say this about 2666, but I really felt like Bolaño was using the murders for literary capital--using the dead women as props, as flavor, and illuminating nothing. (Remember, these are based on real murders--hundreds of women dumped in the desert outside Juárez.) Describing horrific crime scenes in a politely repetitive tone for 300 pages isn't interesting, productive, compelling... it's wasteful and it's boring, and after a while I became angry at Bolaño for building his novel around this litany in what seems a very arbitrary way. Certainly a powerful novel involving the Juárez murders (which do feel apocalyptic and unreal) could have been written. This isn't it.

I found Nick's post (and the comments from Bolaño haters after it) liberating -- I'm not as embarrassed to love Bolaño as much as I do anymore, because finally I know of at least a few people out there who don't share my feeling. This is comforting.

Meanwhile, Wyatt Mason (who doesn't love Savage Detectives as much as I do, bless him!) is more enamored of 2666 than Nick, and uses a paragraph from it to explain why he admires this particular bit of writing and not the first sentence to A Canticle for Leibowitz:

To those who have written me to say that can’t imagine why I dislike so violently the first sentence of A Canticle for Leibowitz, I offer these sentences as exemple of what I do like, very much. They leave something to the imagination, while, at the same time, present quite an imagination at work.

And now, for Bolaño lovers and hater alike, a new translation of a short story, "Meeting with Enrique Lihn", translated by Chris Andrews. Here are the first sentences:

In 1999, after returning from Venezuela, I dreamed that I was being taken to Enrique Lihn’s apartment, in a country that could well have been Chile, in a city that could well have been Santiago, bearing in mind that Chile and Santiago once resembled Hell, a resemblance that, in some subterranean layer of the real city and the imaginary city, will forever remain. Of course, I knew that Lihn was dead, but when the people I was with offered to take me to meet him I accepted without hesitation. Maybe I thought that they were playing a joke, or that a miracle might be possible. But probably I just wasn’t thinking, or had misunderstood the invitation. In any case, we came to a seven-story building with a façade painted a faded yellow and a bar on the ground floor, a bar of considerable dimensions, with a long counter and several booths, and my friends (although it seems odd to describe them that way; let’s just say the enthusiasts who had offered to take me to meet the poet) led me to a booth, and there was Lihn.

John Leonard (1939-2008)

What I look for and care about in these various bunkers is the slice of the strange, the surprise of the Other, the witness not yet heard from, the archaeologies forgotten or ignored or despised. What I think about almost anything, from Henry Kissinger to Deng Xiaoping, from the doctrine of transubstantiation to the theory of surplus value to a tax on capital gains, from Murphy Brown to Thelma and Louise to Jelly's Last Jam, is a mess of juxtapositions, miscegenations, transplants and hybrids, atavisms and avatars, landlords and tenants, ghosts and gods; grace-notes and cognitive dissonance -- Chaos Theory, with lots of fractals.

--introduction to The Last Innocent White Man in America


Isn't it kind of stuck-up, wanting to live forever?

--"Tropic of Cancer"

All through my teen years, if I happened to sleep past 9 am, one of my parents would yell, "John Leonard's on!" and I would be awake and rushing downstairs to see the brief segment of "CBS Sunday Morning" where my oracle would hold court. I still have the old videotape on which I recorded all of the John Leonard segments that I could capture when the machine was cooperating. The weeks when he was on vacation or otherwise mysteriously absent were weeks of disappointment, because nobody else could chew on a sentence the way John Leonard did, and nobody else had such marvelous sentences to chew on.

And yes, now we speak of him in the past tense.

It's barely hyperbole to say that John Leonard taught me everything I know. I discovered him at one of the most impressionable times in my life, and he opened up a world of contemporary literature for me. I remember buying The Last Innocent White Man in America at (the late, lamented) Wordsworth Books in Cambridge, MA after it was mentioned on "Sunday Morning" -- I remember because it had never occurred to me that John Leonard might have written something somewhere, or that he did things other than offer televised wisdom once a week. The first half of the book is mostly about American politics (Reagan and Bush 1, Mike Dukakis and Jesse Jackson, Pat Buchanan and David Duke), and I found it strange and fascinating and more than a little disturbing, because I had only begun to escape from the knees of conservative jerks, only begun to realize there are other things to worry about than if the Russians will confiscate all our guns. I hardly even knew how to read paragraphs like this:

To get our minds off the war, we thought about the Big Bang and we went to a farce. We also went to protest rallies, but they don't count. After each protest rally, the crazy generals on the networks explain that our qualms, which shouldn't have launched in the first place becaue the New World Order has argument superiority, were shot down anyway, by anti-qualm Patriot absolutes. In my living room, I'm beginning to think I need a gas mask.

I learned to read his rhythms, though, and they soon infiltrated my own -- the writer I have had to work hardest to exorcise from my own words is John Leonard, and there are moments in conversation still when I will insert a Leonardism ("atavisms and avatars", "Chaos Theory -- with lots of fractals", "a zap to the synaptic cleft", "In the library, that secretariat of dissidents, they don't lie to me" -- and those are just from one particularly influential page!). Because I first got to know him via the TV, Leonard's voice is always there in my head with his words. It is a perfect voice, with a perfect sense of timing, one I'd even take over Dylan Thomas, who stole the voice of God. John Leonard didn't need to steal God's voice, he'd made his own, scarred by cigarettes and alcohols, halfway between a songbird and Tom Waits.

I've never stopped reading John Leonard, and I thought he was the perfect replacement for Guy Davenport as the regular reviewer at Harper's each month -- it was always the first page I turned to when the new issue arrived.

He seemed to have read everything, and that seeming burst into his style, one rich with bursting sentences -- just consider the title of my favorite of his collections: When the Kissing Had to Stop: Cult Studs, Khmer Newts, Langley Spooks, Techno-Geeks, Video Drones, Author Gods, Serial Killers, Vampire Media, Alien Sperm-Suckers, Satanic Therapists, and Those of Us Who Hold a Left-Wing Grudge in the Post Toasties New World Hip-Hop. I think my passion for minimalism comes from having overdosed on Leonard when I was young -- nobody else afterward ever seemed to fill up a page with quite the same panache.

Robert Christgau got at all this well at the end of a review of When the Kissing Had to Stop, and noted some of Leonard's blindspots and weaknesses along the way:

Novel lovers of every birthdate share his disdain for the Poisoned Twinkies. But when his essay on the cyberpunks, whom he's sci-fi enough to enjoy, ends by suggesting they read Toni Morrison, fight Viacom, and help the homeless, the burnt-rubber smell of '60s self-righteousness spinning its wheels leaves one to conclude that his sniping at sitcoms in general and Seinfeld in particular has nothing to do with art. And hey, he's not to be trusted on popular music either. But without him I would never have gotten the dirt on James Jesus Angleton, discovered Mating, or had the chance to opine that Monnew is twice the formal achievement Beloved is. Really, who has the time? Somehow John Leonard does. Then he comes downstairs and tells us about it.

Of course, I didn't always agree with what he told us, but I wouldn't trust a critic I always agreed with (that's not a critic, it's a stalker). It didn't matter, really. I agreed enough to have discovered books and movies and political opinions I came to cherish (indeed, like Christgau, I discovered Mating via Leonard, and still think it's among the best novels I've ever read). Through his wide-ranging enthusiasms, I learned about Manhattan and Nicaragua and Africa long before my feet ever inched near those parts of the world. I discovered writers whose names I couldn't pronounce and books that hardly seemed written in English, but I always kept at these things because John Leonard had found something good in them.

Somewhere around ten years ago, I got a glorious Christmas present: a signed copy of Leonard's Private Lives in the Imperial City, a collection of short essays on daily life that he wrote for the New York Times. It's a book I cherish, and not just because he wrote his own name in it. It's full of wit and wonder, and it contains one essay, "A Victim of Surprises" that seems to me about as perfect as Virginia Woolf's "The Death of the Moth", but funnier:

Surprise! It was a birthday party, and we therefore behaved like trombones, and the victim was pleased, and the tears fell like dimes, and I looked at the ceiling, which is where I always look when the spy business takes me to the vital and dangerous Upper West Side of the imperial city. Such high ceilings they have on the Upper West Side, as if to accommodate eagles or bats. And yet the people who live under these high ceilings do not, on the whole, seem bigger than the people who live elsewhere in New York, perhaps because they eat so much Chinese food. Considering the housing shortage, maybe we should partition along the perpendicular, or turn all these old buildings on their ears. Turning them on their ears, of course, would block traffic, and that would be a good thing, too. Traffic frightens the eagles.

And then there are all the short reviews collected in his 1973 collection This Pen for Hire, in which he started with a quote from Nietzsche: "Insects sting not in malice, but because they want to live. It is the same with critics: they desire our blood, not our pain" and continued on to muse about the perils of the 800-word review:

Thus the book reviewer develops an 800-word mind, which comes in handy at literary cocktail parties and symposia on The Sclerosis of Modernism. One quarter of those words are adjectives. Anybody, stinging a book about the ears and ankles, can suck out enough ink to fill up three quarters of a column, but the professional book reviewer lives and dies by his repertoire of adjectives. ...

Not wanting to appear a jerk, the reviewer starts using adjectives like "solipsistic", "dodecahedral", and "prelapsarian". Unfortunately, out of the some 20,000 new books published each year in the United States -- of which a daily paper can review perhaps 450 -- only about three will be in any way solipsistic, dodecahedral, or prelapsarian. For that matter, only about two will be superb, compelling, explosive, or exquisite.

And then, twenty pages later, he gives us one of my favorite first-sentences to any review -- this one a review of Doris Lessing's The Four-Gated City--

On finishing this book, you want to go out and get drunk.

(Perhaps it was too much Lessing that led Leonard to AA.)

Once, I sent him a fan letter. I've hardly ever sent any fan letters in my life, not because I'm not a fan of many people and many things, but because when I gush I sound like a Valley Girl, and my dignity can only bear it occasionally. But at some point or another I felt the need to let John Leonard know that I was the lost child of his sentences. He never wrote back or signed the adoption papers, but I didn't necessarily want him to -- a fan letter is not an invitation to correspondance, but a proclamation of joy, and once I finished proclaiming, I'd done what I needed to do. I imagined him going to soirees and hanging out with the literati, with Don DeLillo on speed dial and Salman Rushdie hiding in his basement. I imagined he might be amused for a moment to learn that a kid in the middle of nowhere heard his voice crying out in the wilderness and found comfort and inspiration in it, and I imagined he would toss the letter away and chuckle for a moment and then go back to sharing a smoke with the latest Nobel winner (if he even read the letter himself; I imagined he had hordes of assistants). Though now, in my cynical old age, I know John Leonard's life was probably a bit more prosaic than I imagined when I was young, I still like the fantasy, and I hold onto it along with the atavisms and avatars, the Chaos Theory and fractals, the library and its dissidents. One of the dissidents has left, but, as a bit of consolation, we get to keep his books.

More to Life

Matt Zoller Seitz is one of the few film critics whose reviews I will read regardless of what he is reviewing, because even when my taste is different from his (his love of Brian DePalma perplexes me, for instance), his reviews usually make me think about or notice things I wouldn't otherwise.

He's giving up print journalism, though. In a long conversation with Keith Uhlich (who will be taking over command of Seitz's collaborative blog The House Next Door) this passage particularly struck me:

There’s more to life than movies, and I don’t think that, ten years ago, I don’t think I would have said that. But I’m saying it now: there is more to life than movies. And I remember a conversation with Sean Burns—I think it might have been in the comments section of the blog—he casually mentioned that Gene Siskel, God rest his soul, was… there was somebody who looked down on Siskel for saying that he skipped some film festival to go to a basketball game. And Burns was completely approving of [Siskel], and I am too. I am too: Go to the goddamn basketball game! And when I look back on those hundreds and hundreds of hours that I spent watching movies—many of which were not that memorable, and many of which did not tell a whole lot that I didn’t know—when I realized that they were hours that are gone now and I’m not getting them back… It makes me mad. It makes me mad, honestly, that I’m not gonna get those hours back. You know those are hours I could have been spending with my family. With my loved ones.

Seitz won't be disappearing, though. He's got various film projects to work on.

I’m just at the point where I feel like I need to try to concentrate my energies, which are not as profuse as they used to be, on things that I think have a reasonable shot at making me happy. Print does not satisfy me in the way that it once did. In fact, it feels too much like work. And I want to do things that feel like play. And maybe turn ‘em into work, you know? The ideal is to have your job be something that doesn’t feel like a job, and that was the case for me for years with print criticism. It’s not the case anymore.

Seventeen years of writing criticism sounds to me right now like an eternity, so much as I will miss looking for Seitz's reviews, I completely understand his decision, and look forward to seeing the results of his future work.