Counternarratives by John Keene

John Keene's Counternarratives is one of the most impressive short story collections I've ever read from a living writer, and I was pleased to have the chance to write about it for my old blogosphere friend Dan Wickett, who does wonders celebrating short fiction via his Emerging Writers Network. Here's a taste:

The stories of John Keene provide an aesthetic to push against the power of the cultural forces that venerate quick, easy thinking; forces that reduce knowledge to soundbites and hottakes and quick! mustread! breaking! stories, enforcing a compulsory presentism that is little more than mass amnesia — and self-aggrandizing mass amnesia at that. It’s a prose aesthetic to fight against any impulse insisting life here and life now is the most, the best, the worst, the only. His 2015 collection Counternarratives — easily one of the most invigorating English-language story collections of the last 25 years — offers us a powerful contemporary toolbox of approaches to language and knowledge. I say contemporary because one of the great values of Keene’s prose is that he has studied and emulated the writing not only of writers older than himself, but writers long dead by the time he was born, recognizing what they might, in their very different ways, offer, and then building on the offerings. Such study seems to be rare in current American fiction.

Continue reading at Emerging Writers Network

"Anti-Fragile" by Nick Mamatas

As a little addendum to my post about the somewhat narrow aesthetics of Ben Marcus's New American Stories anthology, let me point you to Nick Mamatas's "Anti-Fragile", a story that does pretty much everything I was hoping to find somewhere in New American Stories and didn't.

On Twitter, I said:

Had enough of shallow stories told in short sentences & bite-sized paragraphs? Feast on "Anti-Fragile" by @NMamatas http://t.co/R28zqR5l2f

— Matthew Cheney (@melikhovo) July 27, 2015

And that about sums up my feelings.

Well, also: I may be partial, as I am an avowed and longstanding lover of long sentences, and this story is a wonderfully skilled, thrillingly long sentence. It's well worth reading and thinking about.

Notes on the Aesthetics of New American Stories

Ben Marcus's 2004 anthology The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories is a wonderfully rich collection for a book of its type. I remember first reading it with all the excitement of discovery — even the stories I didn't like seemed somehow invigorating in the way they made me dislike them. I've used the book with a couple of classes I've taught, and I've recommended it to many people.

I was overjoyed, then, when I heard that Marcus was doing a follow up, and I got it as soon as I could: New American Stories. I started reading immediately.

Expectations can kill us. The primary emotion I felt while reading New American Stories was disappointment. It's not that the stories are bad — they aren't — but that the book as a whole felt a bit narrow, a bit repetitive. I skipped around from story to story, dashing in search of surprise, but it was rare. I tried to isolate the source of my disappointment, of my lack of surprise: Was it the subject matter? No, this isn't quite Best American Rich White People. Was it the structure of the stories? Maybe a little bit, generally, as even the handful of structurally adventurous stories here feel perfectly in line with the structurally adventurous stories of 50 years ago, and somewhat tame in comparison to the structurally adventurous stories of 80-100 years ago. But that wasn't really what was bothering me.

And then I realized: It was the style, the rhythm. The paragraphs and, especially, the sentences. It wasn't that each story had the same style as the one I'd just read, but that most (not all) of the stories felt like stylistic family members.

Notes on a Sentence from "The Death of the Moth"

Forced by some reductive power to declare a single favorite essay, mine would be "The Death of the Moth" by Virginia Woolf. It is a marvel of concision, and yet it contains the universe. It is an essay both personal and cosmic, material and spiritual.

Whenever I teach writing, I use "The Death of the Moth" as an example of the interplay of form and content. (While I have seldom met a pairing I didn't want to deconstruct, the form/content binary is one I continue to find useful. Yes, the separation is problematic — what, in language, is content without form or form without content? — but I also find it a valuable way to talk about concepts that are otherwise invisible or easily muddled.) Usually, I take one sentence, scrawl it out on the board, and pick it apart. It's not always the same sentence, but recently I've been using this one:

Yet, because he was so small, and so simple a form of the energy that was rolling in at the open window and driving its way through so many narrow and intricate corridors in my own brain and in those of other human beings, there was something marvellous as well as pathetic about him.

The first thing to do is break the sentence apart. Here's one way:

Happy Birthday to Virginia Woolf

When one was young, said Peter, one was too much excited to know people. Now that one was old, fifty-two to be precise (Sally was fifty-five, in body, she said, but her heart was like a girl’s of twenty); now that one was mature then, said Peter, one could watch, one could understand, and one did not lose the power of feeling, he said. No, that is true, said Sally. She felt more deeply, more passionately, every year. It increased, he said, alas, perhaps, but one should be glad of it — it went on increasing in his experience.

--Virginia Woolf,
Mrs. Dalloway

Today is Virginia Woolf's 129th birthday. Woolf is one of my touchstone writers, a writer I've been reading for the majority of my life (really, I first tried to read Mrs. Dalloway in middle school -- I didn't get too far, but I found the first pages of the book utterly entrancing, and by the time I read it fully for the first time eight or nine years later, I had those pages nearly memorized). I've read all of Woolf's novels at least once, and Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando many times. They are magic poetry.

I've known a couple of Woolf scholars over the years, and one of the things that made me a lifelong Woolf devotee was working at the 7th International Virginia Woolf Society Conference when it was held in my hometown of Plymouth, NH. I had only read Mrs. Dalloway and Orlando at that point, but I found the conference invigorating. I even coerced Hermione Lee into signing my copy of her brilliant biography while I signed her in. The next fall, I took an undergraduate course devoted to Woolf's work; I was the only male in the class, and some of the other students thought my passion for Woolf's writings was a little weird. "You don't understand!" I remember telling one of them when we happened to find ourselves sitting together on a bus. "There's nobody like her! Those sentences!" It was hardly one of my more eloquent moments, and probably led to me being considered weirder than I already was, but nonetheless the passion was real. (I had a similar, though I hope slightly more informative, moment this past term when I spent 10 minutes taking a class of writing students through one of the sentences in "The Death of the Moth." I wrote the sentence on the board, broke it into some components, talked with great enthusiasm about it and the genius of it ... and after class went to my department head and said, "Do you ever get really into something you're doing in class, then look at the students and think, 'Wow, I really am a freak.'" And she replied, "Yes, it's the foundation of my pedagogy.")

I knew Anne Fernald as a blogger before I knew she was a Woolf scholar, though she had been at the Plymouth conference. We used to hang out together at the LitBlog Co-op, and when I first moved to New Jersey, she gave me a tour of Jersey City and environs. Anne is editing an edition of Mrs. Dalloway for Cambridge University Press, work that has consumed her for a few years, and though I don't envy her the tedium of some of that work, I do envy her getting to study all sorts of editions of the novel, to see it in all its permutations, to trace its meanings and influences. If I can find a line where they're selling her edition when it is released, I will force my way to the front.

Anyway, what I wanted to say here was that a talk Anne gave at The New York Public Library about her work on Mrs. Dalloway is now available as a podcast. It's fascinating stuff (well, to those of us who love Mrs. Dalloway) and a fine way to spend an hour during Woolf's birthday.

The Length of the Gimmick

J. Robert Lennon points to an essay by Ed Park in the NY Times from a couple days ago, "One Sentence Says It All", which I missed until now, but which obviously appealed to me, an avowed lover of long sentences, because it concerns books that are written as a single sentence.

Park's focus is primarily on what "really" makes something a one-sentence novel, a kind of purity test, while Lennon mostly just seems grumpy, declaring the whole idea to be "the kind of fake formal experimentation that a writer is more likely to use as cover for his incompetence than for any kind of genuine insight into character, situation, or language".

I think Lennon's opinion is noxious, and I'm skeptical of any use of the word "gimmick" for a writing technique, because it seems to me a particularly prejudicial and generally inaccurate term -- in a broad sense, any literary (as opposed to purely pragmatic) way of writing is gimmicky, because any writing that is not so conventional as to be invisible draws attention to itself. Anything in the plot of a narrative that draws attention to itself is, then, a gimmick, any word that is not banal is a gimmick, etc.

It may be that Park's focus on what a one-sentence novel actually is inspires some of this annoyance from Lennon, because it moves the focus away from the purpose and effect of what are, in fact, different techniques employed by the various writers; but Lennon's grumpiness comes, I suspect, from deep-seated assumptions about what writers should do -- the sort of assumptions that are useful for writers themselves, because they can be fuel for writing, but are dangerous when elevated to the level of absolute statements for everybody else. I'm all for writers saying, "I'm going to write this way because I don't want to write that way," but I'm ferociously suspicious of writers who say, "My way of writing is the best and your way of writing is wrong." (It reminds me of when somebody once saw a t-shirt that proclaimed, "My God is an awesome God," and pointed out the subtext: "Your God sucks.")

When talking about writing, people don't usually use gimmick to mean just a technique that draws attention to itself (the way a performer would say, "You gotta have a gimmick"); instead, it's usually meant to point to something considered by the word-wielder to be inauthentic or artificial. It's sibling to the wheezy old canard about non-mimetic fiction: it's a game, it's a trick, it's not real fiction. Real fiction provides, as Lennon says, "genuine insight into character, situation, or language". Note the word "genuine", highlighting the idea that gimmicks are the path to fake insight. Real insight, apparently, comes from pretending that fiction is true, from relying on verisimilitude, from suspending disbelief. This is residual Victorianism, the continuing belief that the 19th Century British dominant novel form is the single goal toward which writers should aspire. I like plenty of novels written that way, but I don't think they should be given a special place of honor above novels using other approaches.

If we assume (and it really is an assumption) that we should read fiction for "insight into character, situation, or language", then I fail to see how a single-sentence novel doesn't at least have the chance of providing insight into language, nor do I see how the one-sentence technique itself must inevitably lead to false insight into character or situation. Perhaps what Lennon means is that such a technique distracts from where the reader's attention, in his scheme, should be: on thinking about character and situation, and not thinking about one writing technique in particular. But this idea is contradicted when he asserts that "the writer generally finds new ways to separate ideas and establish rhythm, and the reader quickly gets accustomed to them." If that's so, then the technique is not distracting, and therefore there shouldn't be anything getting in the way of the proper, legitimate contemplation of character and situation.

The problem, the gimmickry, seems to come from what Lennon assumes is the writer's over-exertion, or misplaced exertion. "[N]obody's really being challenged here--it's all proof-of-concept," he says, adding yet another generalized assumption. "If you're going to break it up with conjunctions or semicolons or what have you, you might as well restore the periods, indentations, and chapter breaks, and devote more of your energy to evoking the wrinkles in grandma's forehead or the smell of jasmine wafting over the piazza." Thus, sensory description is, to Lennon, a legitimate activity for a writer to expend energy on, but punctuation and sentence style are not. (I expect he would reply that what he was trying to communicate was the idea that a writer should, of course, pay attention to punctuation, but they shouldn't do so at the expense of evoking sensory details. That equation proposes a see-saw act between style and sensory detail that seems absurd to me: sensory detail is a result of stylistic choices about punctuation, rhythm, diction, etc. Writing is language first.)

I also think it's flat-out inaccurate to say that the breaks created by "conjunctions or semicolons or what have you" are the same as those created by periods. I certainly don't read periods the same way I do conjunctions and semi-colons. A hugely long sentence is a totally different reading experience for me than a bunch of shorter sentences, and I have an almost physical reaction to some types of punctuation -- works composed primarily of short sentences are just about unreadable to me; lots of short sentences make me feel like ants are crawling all over my skin.

What interests me here is not so much that Lennon is wrong (no, not THAT!), but rather the offense that he seems to take from Park's essay. My own rather strong response to his response may also seem a bit odd, because Lennon's post was clearly an off-the-cuff statement of preference, so why did I feel impelled to put everything aside and analyze it? It's not like there are lots of one-sentence-novel writers who are now going to become destitute because J. Robert Lennon said he thinks they're just hiding their incompetence -- which means, of course, that they aren't real writers, and don't deserve to be taken seriously, especially not by such a prestigious mainstream outlet as the Times, castle of the competent.

No individual statement like Lennon's is particularly meaningful or effective, and such statements might even be useful in inspiring contrary-minded writers to prove the asserter wrong. My own concern comes not because of Lennon or any other proselytizer, but because the assumptions that Lennon's post appears to embody are ones I see a lot, ones that promote what seems to me a narrow and unadventurous idea of what is or isn't an appropriate, legitimate, authentic way to write. Continued expression of such ideas creates a consensus and solidifies a prejudice about what should or shouldn't be valued.

Next thing you know, people will be trying to contact the nearest politician to propose a Defense of Multi-Sentence Novels Act...