Lev Grossman: Good Sport

A couple weeks ago, Lev Grossman wrote an essay for The Wall Street Journal and I was in a bad mood that day (having choked on all the butt-ends of my days and ways) and so I decided to take issue with Mr. Grossman's representation of literary modernism. I know my pet peeve against people using the term "modernism" in certain ways borders on the irrational and is at best a bit of lit geekery, but so it goes. I certainly didn't expect a lot of notice. But there was a lot of notice, and various people started piling up either to pummel Mr. Grossman's essay or to celebrate it. There was, at least from the perspective of a lit geek like me, some fascinating discussion in amidst the ever-vociferous noise of internet brouhahahahahas.

I know Mr. Grossman considered some of what I said to be too ad hominem, and though I may not feel that it was too ad hominem, he's absolutely right that, out of disappointment that someone of his educational background, broad reading experience, and obvious intelligence would write such sentences as he wrote, I expressed my argument not only with his ideas, but with him. I really just thought he was having a temporary delusion and my words were (though it was perhaps not obvious) fueled by an optimistic belief that he could recover. Having suffered plenty of delusions in my own time -- delusions of grandeur, of omnipotence, of eloquence, of relevance, of thrift -- I am sometimes too ready to help other people recover from theirs....

Meanwhile, Mr. Grossman seems to have survived my attack on his windmill, and done so in good humor -- Jeff VanderMeer asked him a series of immensely serious questions, and got immensely serious responses. It's a perfect coda to the conversation.

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.

Books Received

The majority of the books I receive from publishers and writers are, unfortunately, not ones that spark my interest. They find homes at local libraries, with more appreciative readers, etc. (unless really desperate for cash, I don't sell books I get for free).

The ones that do, for some reason or another, arouse my curiosity are still more plentiful than I have time for. Consider, for instance, two current piles of books I intend to do more than just glance at the cover and publicity materials for...



And that's just stuff that's arrived in the last few weeks...

Some of these are books I will definitely read -- indeed, one of them, Lev Grossman's The Magicians, I read this past weekend. (Not sure if I'm going to write much about it anywhere, because I had exactly the response M.A. Orthofer had at The Complete Review, and I don't think I have anything to add beyond what he said. But we'll see.) I'm writing a piece for Rain Taxi on Wallace Shawn, so will be plunging into his two, as well as brushing up on all the rest of his books, this week. Beyond that, well...

I'm intrigued by each of the Night Shade books, but am most excited by Paolo Bacigalupi's first novel, The Windup Girl, since I've had a few things to say about his short fiction in the past. I intend to read the others, but if I only get to one of them, it will be The Windup Girl.

The little book on top of one of those piles is an advance copy of The Original Frankenstein from Vintage, and it's an interesting attempt to reconstruct the earliest manuscripts of Frankenstein. Editor Charles E. Robinson seeks to show the exact nature of Percy Shelley's influence on the novel, and makes what appears, at least at first glance, to be a strong case for Percy as a collaborator with his wife on the book. The collaboration is complex, though, and for anyone who has previously been fascinated by the changes between the published editions of Frankenstein, this volume will be essential. As a reading text of the novel, though, it's awkward, given how much the scholarly apparatus has to intrude upon the actual text, so it's not a book anyone will want to read as their first encounter with Mary Shelley's "hideous progeny".

I'm intrigued by Penguin's re-issue of Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton's novel Who Would Have Thought It? not only because I had never heard of it or because it is billed as the first Mexican-American novel, but because it tells the story of a Mexican girl raised by Apaches who ends up in New England amidst hypocritical abolitionists.I don't usually find a plot to be the most intriguing things about a novel, but that's a plot that intrigues me!

Finally, among the books you may not have heard of, sits my friend Caroline Nesbitt's horse novel, Ride on the Curl'd Clouds, which I am curious to read not because I know anything about horses (I don't), but because I've known Caroline and her writing for years. One of these days I'll get around to interviewing her about the book and about her decision to publish it via Lulu.com, a decision she and I talked about a lot -- Caroline had previously published a nonfiction book in the traditional way, but we thought she might be able to have more success publishing her novel herself and marketing it within the equestrian community, a world she knows well.

The other books are there because at one point or another they seemed interesting to me and so I hope to get to time to read at least some of them. We shall see...