Fashionable Do’s and Don’t’s in the Penny Press!

September 4, 2010

Whatever the current himbo-du-jour James Franco is paying the publicists he claims not to have, it’s not enough: as the cover of the latest Esquire truthfully declares, the guy is everywhere (not that I’d expect you to know what that cover declares, considering how unbelievably, amateurishly cluttered it is). This is partly due to the usual reasons – he’s got upcoming work (movies and a book) to hawk, or to be hawked around him while he appears not to care. But it’s also partly due to the fact that Franco in the last few years been morphing from a fairly assembly-line Hollywood leading man into … well, “an individual” would clearly be going too far, but at least a good simulation of one. Increasingly, his antics – going back to (several) schools, studying baroquely useless things like literature, doing a turn on a daytime soap opera, putting up scandalous art exhibits, the aforementioned book – look like the kinds of things any 32-year-old guy would do if he suddenly found himself in possession of fame and money – if that guy were an individual, or maybe wanted to become one (whereas the New England Patriots, alas, can boast a perfect example of what such a guy does with fame and money if he’s got no interest in being an individual: he knocks up and discards his girlfriend, buys the most famous idiot runway model currently available, and carries a man-purse in St. Tropez).

This Esquire “profile” (that’s what it calls itself, though it isn’t even close to being one – think more “press release with digressions”) is by Tom Chiarella, so you know you’re going to get good peppy prose. And he doesn’t disappoint:

Sometimes Franco gets a little hypnotic with the eye contact. What starts as a steady gaze generally transmutes into the oddly pleased squint that is his war paint, a look that allows him to play both stoner and supervillain with the same incredulous vacancy. He sighs a little, apologetic. “You probably know I have a lot of projects,” he says. “But that one is way, way off. It’s just something I’m thinking about.” He whisks at something in the air then. “Off in the distance. Way off.”

These words are so bloated and vague, they almost bob in the air. Franco knows this. “Okay. I want to write a children’s book.” He guts out a laugh, snorting himself off the hook. “Someday.” This is a kind of hedge – people are constantly vetting his agenda, because it is unlike the typical high-quote actor’s, because it is puzzlingly arcane, because he isn’t notching his belt or collecting motorcycles or figuring out new enthusiasms in laboratory drugs, because that agenda appears to have nothing to do with being a rich, laconic, and ultimately free thirty-two-year-old male.

Chiarella’s article starts out with some standard interview-code-speak: we first meet Franco sitting “by a side door near a pail of mop water. There’s a paperback, palm-pinched, cover down, in his right hand …” The reason the famous James Franco is reading a paperback one-handed while standing in an alley next to a slop bucket (though Chiarella never spells it out) is because he’s smoking, something he does virtually every minute he’s awake. But I’ll take code-speak over outright PR, which is what Sam Anderson gave us in his Franco “profile” for New York magazine, in which he hilariously tells his readers that Franco “doesn’t drink, smoke, or do drugs” – somehow, Anderson’s keen perceptions failed to notice that Franco was drunk, stoned, and chain-smoking during that very “profile,” but at least Chiarella doesn’t outright lie.

Or maybe he does – certainly his piece as a whole flirts with being willfully false. The text – and the accompanying little fictional squib by the so-talented-he-really-ought-not-to-do-crap-like-this Ben Percy – is constructed in such a way as to encourage readers to take on faith not only that Franco is sincerely interested in all these “projects” of his (as opposed to being interested mainly in the attention they get him) but that the projects themselves aren’t worthless. When a gorgeous young actor/model begins shopping around so openly for a new avenue of self-expression, we can reasonably assume the results will be worthless; if Joe Gordon-Levitt decided to write a book, for instance, that’s exactly what we’d assume (although of course such predictions can be wrong; Michael Bergin, with nothing but his washboard abs to recommend him, wrote a book that was actually good) – we’d encourage him to confine his personal reinventions to acting, where at least he’s got credentials. Franco in these last few years has seemed rather desperately in need of extracurricular credentials, and it’s far, far from clear that he knows what work is.

Then again, it’s possible that success has fueled experimentation – that happens even to ordinary non-stars. Franco’s forthcoming short story collection is a genuinely good debut, and most of its work predates all this art-installation nonsense. Perhaps he should cancel his four post-doc degrees-in-progress, shutter his studio swannings, and buckle down to that most incredibly arduous of all mortal tasks: writing a second book.

It’s unlikely, if only because writing is the least glamorous of all the arts – and Franco, being a handsome young man, finds a certain appeal in glamor: hence the appearance in Esquire, which started out its life exclusively as a men’s fashion magazine and still pulls in the latest ads from all the big fashion industry names. We see quite a few such ads in this issue. There’s Armani, swathing a distracted model in fog and confusing the known order of the universe by making him put on a pair of Michael Jackson gloves:

And there’s Lincs, trying to perpetuate the delusion that young men can look heterosexual while wearing ridiculous “skinny” clothing:

But the normally level-headed Tommy Hilfiger stumbles rather badly in this issue – their latest spread contains what could only be termed a hideous fashion faux-pas:

Can the brand be salvaged? Those outfits can’t be.

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Under the Covers with Paul Marron: Wolf Moon!

September 3, 2010

We’re still covering Paul’s early adventures, including this one: Wolf Moon, part of the “Harlequin Intrigue” line from 2007, part of the “McKenna Legacy” sub-series, written by Patricia Moore but copyrighted, sotto voce, to Patricia Pinianski.

Paul looks a trifle worried on the cover, and there are two possible reasons for that: first, he’s got all those clothes on, and second, he’s the scion of the reclusive, mysterious Lindgren clan in remote Wolf Creek up in snowbound Wisconsin, where locals have been turning up dead, apparently savaged by a large dog-like creature. The Lindgrens are natural objects of suspicion (it’s just Paul and his creepy-intense father in that opulent cabin with its gazillion books and panoramic views), and as if that weren’t bad enough, into the mix comes one of the aforementioned McKennas – and this one’s a gorgeous woman!

Aileen McKenna has come to study wolves in the wild, and she runs afoul of Paul as quick as you can say ‘handsome, enigmatic stranger.’ Paul is trying to be nice, lord knows, but even this early in our investigations we’ve come to see that he’s easily misunderstood – he’s always pouting and smoldering, after all, when in so many situations a smile and a firm handshake would work wonders instead.

The problem is, Paul’s just as protective of the wolf-pack that lives in the area as Aileen is, but at first he thinks she has ulterior motives, and she thinks he’s hiding something. She doesn’t have ulterior motives – she’s up there solely to study the wolves, certain that they’re innocent of any citizen-maulings. But he does indeed have something to hide – this is a romance novel, after all! – not that you’ll need to qualify for MENSA to guess what that something is. Let’s just say he’ll provide Aileen with the perfect opportunity to mix business with pleasure.

But first they have to get to know each other! This involves many hikes into the deep dark woods, and it offers Paul plenty of opportunities to display handy shop-class skills one suspects many of his fellow male models sorely lack, such as the fashioning of a walking staff:

Rhys [that's Paul!] quickly stripped the branch of any offshoots. Fascinated, Aileen watched him work.

His hands were sure, as if he’d done this hundreds of times. She could imagine those hands working on her, stripping off her clothes, smoothing her skin …

Rhys glanced up and heat seared her cheeks.

“You certainly took to the outdoors,” she said, trying to cover. “Your father was a good teacher.”

“That he was. He taught me everything I know. He didn’t just teach me to be self-sufficient. Actually, he used to be a college professor. Psychobiology,” he added, “studying the interactions between biology and behavior. Father made sure I was properly educated.”

“You didn’t go off to school?”

“Didn’t need to. Everything I needed to learn is in our library. Literature. History. Sciences. Everything. My knowledge is equivalent to an advanced degree.”

He’s so earnest in his social maladjustment that we almost don’t want to break the news to him about ‘psychobiology’ … and as you can see, the sparks are already flying between these two! Paul’s adventures might have only just begun, but he’s already well adept at super-heating nearby women like some kind of roving microwave oven.

Wolf Moon picks up pace and tension almost from the first page, and unlike the vast majority of romance novels out there, it has a long and raucous action-sequence as its climax (not that kind of action, and not that kind of climax, you filthy little things!). Paul might not really have the equivalent of an “advanced degree” from all those hours spent loitering in his father’s library, but when the chips are down and the book’s delightfully over-the-top villain makes his big appearance, our hero steps up with distinctly less cerebral talents.

But even so – all those clothes! Paul must have wondered if he’d ever get a chance to breathe free! Will things be any better next time? Tune in and find out!

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Short Story: Frances the Ghost!

September 2, 2010

“Frances the Ghost,” the six-page story that opens Demons in the Spring (Akashic Books), is what we must by now be justified in calling “classic Joe Meno.” He’s been writing in the public eye for some time now (including the rapturously good The Great Perhaps and the dangerously overpraised The Boy Detective Fails), and it’s no slight to him to say he’s got certain mannerisms, certain preoccupations. All writers do; the only strange thing about Meno’s is how old-fashioned they are – he likes recognizably human characters, he likes to try them but not usually destroy them, and he’s fond of happy endings (hard-fought or otherwise).

His ironies are gentle and reader-friendly (indeed, the greatest irony of Demons in the Spring is that a volume so lavishly illustrated should have such an appallingly ugly cover), as we can see in this first little story. The Frances of the title is a silent, problematic little girl who’s recently taken to wearing a sheet with eye-holes and pretending she’s a ghost (Charles Burns, in his story illustration, makes the perfect little artistic decision to remove the eye-holes). Janet, her mother, often feels like she’s dealing with two ghosts: Frances, and her “imaginary” husband off serving in a faraway war (“Do not get killed or I will never forgive you.”), and so Frances’ eccentricities can be draining.

Meno is superb at conveying the realities of how one person can drain another – and how those same invisible wellsprings can be refilled (the last ten consecutive winners of the Nobel Prize for literature couldn’t manage it – Meno should remember that if he ever gets depressed). Frances – wearing her ghost costume at her own mute insistence – gets in a fight at school; she then gets into a looks-scarier-than-it-is accident that momentarily freezes her mother with confusion. But there are epiphanies that Meno can’t wait to dispense:

Of course, it is true: If you cover your ears, a whisper does not feel the same as a kiss. A laugh does not make the small hairs around your neck startled the way it does when someone is shouting. When someone cries, it feels like you are waiting for the rain. When someone sings, it feels like the shape of a heart being traced along the center of your chest.

And there’s a hard-fought happy ending, in which it’s possible to hope that Frances, Janet, and everybody else will somehow be OK. That’s classic Meno, and it’s damn refreshing after reading a small mountain of contemporary short stories that manage to be both inept and arrogant.

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Penguins on Parade: The Anger of Achilles!

September 2, 2010

Some Penguin Classics are distinctly odd, but there’s nothing wrong with that. The field of books is limitless, after all, and it’s never possible to tell right at the moment of publication that a particular book has all the earmarks of a classic.

Those earmarks don’t change and haven’t changed since the first human drew his own hand on a cave wall by the flickering light of a bison-fat lamp. A classic must be true to itself, must follow its own logic without regard fro the world around it – it’s that very egocentrism that will seal it off from the shocks of time and allow it to speak to every successive generation (panderers get fame and money enough to build their Thames-side mansion and entertain in style, but they steal no marches on Helicon and are often as not forgotten before there’s even decent ivy on their tombstones).

Classics must also have power, and strangely enough, power isn’t always easy to spot – especially after a lapse of many years. That’s why my hat’s off to the editorial team at Penguin Classics for consistently finding gems big and small that do, in fact, possess power enough to justify the attention of all posterities. Some of their choices mystify me, and others seems self-evident – but the odd ones always delight.

Certainly there could be few odder choices from the whole of the 20th century than The Anger of Achilles by Robert Graves. He first published the book in 1959 calling it a ‘translation’ of Homer’s Iliad, although a quick scan of the first few lines will suffice to show it’s not quite that:

Sing, Mountain Goddess, sing through me

That anger which most ruinously

Inflamed Achilles, Peleus’ son,

And which, before the tale was done,

Had glutted Hell with champions – bold,

Stern spirits by the thousandfold;

Ravens and dogs their corpses ate.

For thus did ZEUS, who watched their fate,

See his resolve, first taken when

Proud Agamemnon, King of men,

An insult on Achilles cast,

Achieve accomplishment at last.

It’s not the rhymed couplets that are the problem here – after all, they were good enough for Pope. No, it’s that ‘Mountain Goddess’ right there in the first line where “Muse” should be that tips the reader off to the fact that this version of the Iliad will be … well, rather heavily interpretive. Who the Hell is this “Mountain Goddess”? Who the Hell knows?

Some of you may already be familiar with the outline of Graves’ life, but for those of you who aren’t there’s only one sentence of any real import in figuring that life out: in 1929, Robert Graves decamped for Majorca, bought a rambling mountain-top ranch, and proceeded to live there for the rest of his life. He wore fraying white shorts, he wore fraying straw bonnets, he drank from dawn until moon-set, and he conducted a peppy correspondence. In other words, he went nutty as a fruitcake.

The bulk of his good poetry was written before he Majorca’d himself, as was his classic memoir Good-Bye To All That. Then he came into the possession of far too much unstructured personal time. Some of it he put to good use – the world of letters would be a poorer place without Hercules My Shipmate or Count Belisarius, and of course the landscape of historical fiction would be virtually unrecognizable without I, Claudius and Claudius the God. But if a man takes himself to Majorca and holes up on the outskirts of a respectful but uncomprehending village, he deprives himself of the one sure safeguard against mental instability: the presence of knowledgeable old friends who’ll refer to him as a jackass on a regular basis. Without that safeguard, even the most intellectually formidable men will soon become positive aphasic with mania. In fact, it happens to the smart ones first.

In between the creditable works of historical fiction, there flowed increasingly from Graves’ pen a species of prose that bore all the hallmarks of its author possessing no jelly on his toast. Graves delved far too deeply into the twisted by-ways of Greek and Near Eastern mythology, and he emerged from this safari with hundreds of theories about ancient Greek history and mythology that, well, you won’t find anywhere else. The first real expression of these carefully-diagrammed lunacies happens in the two volumes of his The Greek Myths – structurally one single book and hands-down the strangest book written in the 20th century. And it was just the warm-up for such impenetrably, lavishly wacko wonder-works as King Jesus and especially The White Goddess.

Not far from those thickets of bubbly to that “Mountain Goddess” crack, and the casual way it’s dropped in there is the surest sign that Graves knew perfectly well not all his dogs were barking; that casual tone is the lure, the little tease designed to prompt the unsuspecting listener to ask, “Mountain Goddess? Why, what can you mean by that?” – after which the Sage of Majorca is off to the races with his various ethnographic proofs the Greek cult of the Muses originated in Indo-European mountain-worship, or some such claptrap.

The key to surviving such lures is not to fall for them, and fortunately, The Anger of Achilles has plenty enough to recommend it so that you can ignore any and all pretty shiny lures in order to soak up the narrative vigor with which Graves renders the age-old story. When you do start reading it, the thing you’ll notice first is that this version is a combination of prose and verse – the rhymed couplets only make up a tiny proportion of the whole text, the rest being straightforward entirely readable prose. Graves justified it this way:

I have … followed the example of the ancient Irish and Welsh bards by, as it were, taking up my harp and singing only where prose will not suffice. This, I hope, avoids the pitfalls of either an all-prose or an all-verse translation, and restores something of the Iliad’s value as mixed entertainment.

This is yet more lunacy (poetry lapsing into prose except for the really poetic bits? Song lapsing into speech except when things are really exciting? To put it mildly, Graves never heard anything like that in Ireland or Wales), but it’s also beside the point: the main point is that it all somehow works, probably because Graves could exercise a pitch-perfect ear for dramatic timing, when he felt like it. When his Anger of Achilles breaks into verse, damned if it doesn’t lend the whole segment a sudden whoosh of drama. You’ll get caught up in this distant cousin to Homer – it’s certainly one of the 20th century’s most distinctive renderings, and it’ll do you good to read it. Just remember: whenever any character starts talking about ‘our Holy Mother,’ just start whistling for a few paragraphs, until things go back to semi-normal.

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Open Letters in a sultry September!

September 1, 2010

 

The rampant heat and choking humidity that have characterized the last 115 days without slackening remain with us, sapping all movement of pleasure, turning the contemplation of each day’s activity into a presentiment of pure woe. But today is the first of September, and that means at least one thing has changed: a new issue of Open Letters Monthly appears for your pleasure! Even here, though, there’s continuity: we’ve continued to do our best to present you with a wide variety of entertainments, from perfume to video games to literary biographies to historical fiction to straight-up history to poetry both ancient and modern. It’s our hope that you’ll find some intensely air-conditioned corner of some not-very-pretentious cafe, tuck your feet underneath you on a comfy sofa, and read to your heart’s content! What better way to beat the heat of a summer that just won’t end?

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Rome indeed and room enough in the Penny Press!

August 31, 2010

It’s been a bad week for good faith in the Penny Press. Bad enough Us Weekly ran a picture of Joe Jonas apparently preparing to kiss a girl (even the National Enquirer would’ve scrupled at that), worse still that National Geographic should so conspicuously lend its imprimatur to a glorified tomb-raider, but worst of all – at least from our bookish point of view here at Stevereads – is the full-blown orb-and-scepter coronation Sam Tanenhaus bestows on Jonathan Franzen’s new novel Freedom in The New York Times Book Review.

The iniquity isn’t that Tanenhaus liked the book – because despite appearances, he keeps his personal reactions entirely to himself in the course of a very long, glowing review. No, if he liked the book and wrote it a love-letter this long and gushing, I could live with that. I’d be disgusted, but I wouldn’t be nearly as disgusted as I am by what Tanenhaus decided to do instead.

This huge encomium (titled “Peace and War,” as if there weren’t already enough travesties going out to Westchester County this week) isn’t the result of Tanenhaus really liking Freedom – it’s the result of Tanenhaus’ entirely political decision that The New York Times Book Review (of which he’s the editor) should really like Jonathan Franzen. This isn’t high-minded literary debate; it’s the cat-fighting that precedes a small-town high school class president election. Oprah Winfrey started things by stepping waaaay outside her comfort zone to nominate Franzen’s last unreadably awful doorstop, The Corrections, for her happy, embracing Book Club. Franzen played the ‘inchoate integrity’ card for all it was worth, and the American public gobbled it up (The Corrections surely contends with Robert Hughes’ The Fatal Shore and Robert Caro’s The Power Broker as the most-bought unread book of the last fifty years). Just last week, Time magazine nominated Franzen as the best novelist since Jesus Christ. Tanenhaus spotted a wave and hopped on his board.

The man’s an excellent writer (those of you who haven’t read his biography of Whittaker Chambers are urged in all sincerity to drop everything and do so), and that makes it all the more sadly easy to tell when he’s not even present for his own review. Pretty much as soon as his first sentence, “Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, ‘Freedom,’ like his previous one, ‘The Corrections,’ is a masterpiece of American fiction,” it’s obvious this is going to be one of those times. All the hallmarks of boilerplate are here, and good boilerplate it is, too – but it bears almost no relation to what Tanenhaus says (or how he says it) when he’s genuinely saying what he thought about a book. Instead, it’s virtually bent double under the anxiety of the Reviewer’s Remorse.

The Reviewer’s Remorse goes something like this: I like to think of myself as an independent thinker, and I like to think I run my blog/literary review/library desk/major publishing industry taste-maker with the same amount of independent thinking. But I don’t want to be one of those critics who hated Book X when it first came out and now looks like a jackass because it’s gone on to become an enshrined piece of the canon. I’ll do anything, literally anything, to avoid that.

Even a casual glance at history should amply demonstrate the absolute futility of the Reviewer’s Remorse. Names that were venerated a hundred, fifty, or even twenty-five years ago are today nearly-forgotten footnotes. Yes, quickie laugh-getters of the “Rotten Reviews” variety routinely collect all the initial negative notices of now-respected novels like Pride & Prejudice (dissed by a Bronte sister, no less!) or Joyce’s Ulysses (famously panned by Virginia Woolf). And yes, such reviews spark a certain frisson – but it’s a fraudulent one: it stems from the vague idea that in literature there’s a presiding true genius that will out.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The howling irony of Reviewer’s Remorse is that it directly inverts the power-structure: critics don’t just stand around taking guesses (some lucky, some not) at what the true greats of the literary canon are going to be in twenty-five, fifty, and a hundred years – they determine it. They always have, and they should.

But only the honest critics, and this review of Freedom is deeply, blandly dishonest. An honest critic couldn’t write “Assaultive sex reverberates through ‘Freedom,’ and why not? Sex is the most insistent of the ‘personal liberties,’ and for Franzen the most equalizing. One is at a loss to think of another male American writer so at ease with – that is, so genuinely curious about – the economy of female desire: the pull and tug of attraction and revulsion, the self-canceling wants.”

Do you know what Tanenhaus means by insistent personal liberties? Why he creates the odious euphemism “assaultive sex” when he’s talking about rape? What he means when he calls sex the “most equalizing” personal liberty, when that very notion flies in the face of 17,000 years of human experience? Why he equates comfort with curiosity? Why he uses the synonyms ‘pull’ and ‘tug’ in parallel with the antonyms ‘attraction’ and ‘revulsion’? What on Earth a ’self-canceling want’ is? No? Neither do I. And neither does he. The point of this kind of prose isn’t to say anything – it’s to sound like you’re saying something. It’s the smart kid in the back of the class using lazy-clever short cuts to get his homework done. And the assignment here is to make sure The New York Times Book Review experiences no Reviewer Remorse when it comes to Jonathan Franzen.

Fundamentally, this is the way a reviewer writes when he doesn’t believe what he’s writing. And in this case it’s appropriate enough, because in Freedom Franzen has written a nearly 600-page novel in which he doesn’t believe a single godforsaken word. Every particle of the book’s grotesquely self-indulgent length is pure artifice, pure hypocrisy, pure lie. Franzen started out with the idea of mocking certain things – most especially the specific kind of mindlessly opinionated and entitled suburbanites with whom he spends his every waking minute and whose ranks he himself long ago joined, if indeed he was ever outside them to begin with – but he found he actually liked them instead, viewed them as genuine civilizing forces (just for clarification: you and I, no matter who we are? We’re the ones who need civilizing). But rather than abandon the envisioned evisceration, he thought to turn it elaborately, I’m-smarter-than-you-can-even-see faux-satirical, pretending to hate the thing he loves in order to torture it a little. Call it assaultive fiction. And even that quasi-plan fell apart completely, probably after endless nights spent drinking and endless mid-mornings spent speed-writing to make page counts. What’s left – what gets published to unprecedented fanfare this week and collects a National Book Award (at least) in a few months – is nothing at all, a rote exercise in verbiage.

It might be fitting that a book whose own author doesn’t care about it at all would generate essays from reviewers who don’t care about their own verdicts at all, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. When Sam Tanenhaus isn’t resorting to Reviewer Remorse hedge-betting blather, he’s a first-rate writer, and I prize first-rate writers: I’ve always wished I were one, and I consider them incredibly thin on the ground. So naturally, after trudging through Tanenhaus lines like “Franzen’s world-historical preoccupations also shape, though less delicately, his big account of the home front – the seething national peace that counterpoises the foreign war,” I went in search of some sort of corrective, somebody actually talking about Freedom.

In addition to Tanenhaus, the field of American literary reviews also sports two other first-rate critics of the current fictive zeitgeist, both also named Sam: there’s Sam Anderson, who writes for New York magazine, and there’s Sam Sacks, who’s the editor of Open Letters Monthly and yet reviewed the new Franzen for The Wall Street Journal (one can only assume they pay better, although it’s hard to believe they could match the droit de siegneur). These two never let me down; Anderson is funnier than Sacks (this isn’t difficult – the spinning ceiling-fan above my head is also funnier than Sacks), but Sacks has an oddly magisterial probity that no critic currently writing can quite match. Between them, they almost always manage to say everything that needs saying about any present-day male novelist (needless to say, they’re both flailingly helpless when reviewing women – but then, I don’t notice Jill Lepore or Nancy Franklin stepping forward to review Franzen either).

Except this time, alas. Like Tanenhaus, like most of the best critics, Anderson and Sacks are also afflicted with Reviewer Remorse – Franzen must bring it out in reviewers, what with his ostentatiously domestic purview and the odd, Howard Hughesian stretch of time between The Corrections and this new book (a stretch of time Trollope and Dickens would have disdained; a stretch of time not warranted by anything at all actually in the novel; a stretch of time that is almost always, in my experience with writers, caused by alcohol). Like Tanenhaus, neither of these other Sams wants to believe that Freedom could simply be bad, even though, like Tanenhaus, they experienced not one moment of personal pleasure while reading it (hugely significant that both Anderson and Sacks call the book addictive, with all the word connotes of involuntary and even degrading participation). In this context Anderson’s rather reaching invocation of David Foster Wallace can be seen as the desperate hail-mary side-step of somebody who knows he’s backing the wrong horse and is too invested (or under orders) to admit it. And that’s nothing compared to what Sacks does in the Journal – for a writer as reverential of his sources as Sacks is to drag Milton into a review of Jonathan effing Franzen (Sacks also quotes William Blake, gawd help us all, just to make sure nobody gets out alive) … well, no matter what else it is, it’s certainly a cry for help.

And this is just the beginning, of course. If The New York Times Book Review is comparing Franzen to Tolstoy this week, next week The Sacramento Bee will be comparing him to the author of the Book of Genesis. It’s depressing, not only because the book itself is such a completely cynical waste of time but also because of what the coronation says about the American literary landscape. Franzen costs Farrar, Straus & Giroux the rough equivalent of twenty-five talented authors who’ve never feuded with Oprah, and this makes two novels in a row in which he’s done absolutely nothing to compensate for that loss. Is the republic of letters really so hard up for good writers that it needs to go down on its knees to this lazy charlatan? On what meat doth this Franzen feed, that he hath grown so great?

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Geographica: The Curse of King Tut!

August 30, 2010

 When he was asked what he thought of P.T. Barnum’s “Grand Scientific and Musical Theater,” Henry Adams once said “I have no objection to him – provided he remembers he’s not Agassiz, and provided his audience remembers it.”

He was referring to that internationally esteemed Harvard luminary Louis Agassiz, perhaps the pre-eminent zoologist and natural historian of the day, and his point was simple: the only danger involved in popular entertainments like Barnum’s (with its “life-like” tableaux of cannibals, and its “Fiji mermaid” and the like) was the possibility that large segments of the public would mistake them for the scientific facts and conclusions of which Agassiz was a master. Adams would have been appalled by the young people who earnestly debate the motivations of characters on so-called ‘reality’ TV as if those characters were living anything remotely approaching authentic lives. And Adams would have been appalled by the latest National Geographic.

The issue has its usual blend of stunning visuals and far-ranging reporting, but the centerpiece article is about the “family secrets” revealed by a recent DNA study of the mummified remains of King Tutankhamun and several other Amarna-period individuals. The article purports to be written by Zahi Hawass, the so-called secretary general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, and that should serve as the first sign of trouble, since Hawass hasn’t written a memo unghosted in about thirty years, let alone a full-length National Geographic article. So this won’t be one of those display-articles the magazine sometimes shows us, where every line is meticulously red-penciled for accuracy and clarity. This will, we can legitimately fear, read more like a press release.

And it does, dolorously so. Hawass (we’ll refer to him as the piece’s author until the guilty party chooses to step forward) has previous experience in press releases: five years ago, he amassed funding sufficient to perform a modern CT scan on Tutankhamun’s remains, with results he has since characterized in only one way, which he recaps again here:

… by carrying out CT scans of King Tutankhamun’s mummy, we were able to show that he did not die from a blow to the head, as many people believed. Our analysis revealed that a hole in the back of his skull had been made during the mummification process.

 

Never mind that his team’s analysis “revealed” nothing of the sort, never mind that their determination, ginned up for public consumption, could be exactly wrong on the flip of a coin. The hole shows none of the necrosis associated with natural causes, but it wouldn’t show those signs if mummification was performed soon after what could have been an injury – or, in certain fictional imaginings, murder; so the analysis of Hawass’ paid scientists is only right if it isn’t wrong, which is hardly worthy of a press release. But this also should have served as a warning sign.

The problem with CT scans and scientific teams to analyze their results and then guess about them on Egyptian TV is that such things cost money. Press attention generates tourism, and that in turn generates money (forget about the periodic flooding of the Nile: hordes of credulous tourists have always been Egypt’s most reliable natural resource). Since this looks like a self-feeding process, you might wonder what the problem with it could possibly be.

But it’s only a self-feeding source if the appetite stays constant. And in Zahi Hawass, Egypt has found an appetite for attention so deep as to be bottomless. The hoopla associated with that CT scan eventually faded, and all that remained was the boring old field work being done by boring credentialed Egyptologists who’ve never been profiled in The New Yorker and who wouldn’t dream of referring to themselves as a ‘modern-day pharaoh.’ It’s doubtful Hawass even knows such wretched creatures exist; he certainly has no interest in their miniscule, responsible findings. If the world’s attention has wandered away from Egyptian antiquities, that attention must be drawn back, and there’s one sure way to do that: more technology!

Hence, this article. Hawass has the brazen effrontery to start it off with the line, “I believe we should honor these ancient dead and let them rest in peace.” I don’t know about the rest of you, but a horrific scene like this:

 

sure as Hell doesn’t look like resting in peace to me. I think Hawass himself might feel different about the whole process if it were his grandmother’s corpse plopped down on that tarpaulin – but alas, there’s no money to be made from gawking at her remains under strobe lights.

The project this time around is to use modern DNA analysis to look for genetic markers held in common by Tutankhamun and several of the other mummies, in hopes of establishing concrete relationships between some or all of them (historians haven’t been able to say with certainty who Tutankhamun’s father was, for instance, with opinion split between Amenhotep III and the heretic-pharaoh Akhenaten). Hawass portrays himself as a reluctant convert:

In the past I had been against genetic studies of royal mummies. The chance of obtaining workable samples while avoiding contamination from modern DNA seemed to small to justify disturbing these sacred remains. But in 2008 several geneticists convinced me that the field had advanced far enough to give us a good chance of getting useful results.

 

A child (one with a good moral grounding, anyway) will have spotted the trouble with this: respect is an absolute. Remains don’t become less ’sacred’ in proportion to how ‘useful’ the results are that can be extracted from them. Calling something ’sacred’ while in the process of defiling it is generally considered a false piety. The ancient Egyptians themselves had stronger terms for it, and stronger penalties than getting on the cover of National Geographic.

Granted it’s distasteful, some readers might say, but if it really does advance our knowledge of the past, isn’t it worth it?

The answer to that question is ‘no’ (always awkward when rhetorical questions turn out to have actual answers, but it can’t be helped), but even if it weren’t, the point is moot: there was never any chance of legitimately advancing our knowledge of the past here – there has never been such a chance associated with anything Hawass has ever done in the entire course of his professional life. It’s true that he tells us his team found some of the ‘family secrets’ they’d been instructed to find:

Once the mummies’ DNA was isolated, it was a fairly simple matter to compare the Y chromosomes of Amenhotep III and Tutankhamun and see that they were indeed related … But to clarify their precise relationship required a more sophisticated kind of genetic fingerprinting. Along the chromosomes in our genomes there are specific known regions where the pattern of DNA letters – the A’s, T’s, G’s, and C’s that make up our genetic code – varies greatly between one person and another. These variations amount to different numbers of repeated sequences of the same few letters. Where one person might have the same sequence of letters repeated ten times, for instance, another unrelated person might have the same sequence stuttered 15 times, a third person 20, and so on. A match between ten of these highly variable regions is enough for the FBI to conclude that the DNA left at a crime scene and that of a suspect might be one and the same.

 

But any reader who thinks obtaining viable DNA samples of 3000-year-old mummified bodies is akin to collecting fresh DNA samples from a crime scene is just asking to be duped. They are exactly the kind of audience Hawass wants, and he’ll always be ready to sell them a certain bridge in Brooklyn. Considering that a strong genetic match can be obtained between any human being and the hamburger they had for supper last night, the level of discrimination necessary to start sending Father’s Day cards around the suburbs of Luxor is simply not possible with non-Star Trek technology. Even Hawass isn’t prepared to gloss over all the difficulties, and some of those difficulties should give pause even to the truest of believers:

If the extraction and isolation succeeded, [Tutankhamun's] DNA would be captured in a clear liquid solution, ready to be analyzed. To our dismay, however, the initial solutions turned out to be a murky black. Six months of hard work were required to figure out how to remove the contaminant – some still unidentified product of the mummification process – and obtain a sample ready for amplifying and sequencing.

 

Six months of ‘hard work’ were no doubt required to transform a ‘murky black’ solution into something clear enough to support modern analysis, but surely that studiedly offhand mention of ‘amplifying and sequencing’ will raise an air-strip full of red flags? Once upon a time, we all banded together to make “Jurassic Park” the #1 movie in the country – have we so soon forgotten its lessons (not only about spotty science but about showmen marketing flea circuses)?

In the end, this National Geographic article might raise all sorts of speculation to new heights – was Tutankhamun really the son of Akhenaten and the grandson of Amenhotep III? Did he have a club foot? Was he entombed with his wife’s miscarried fetuses? – but it takes one speculation and banishes all doubt: there is at least one grave-robber still active in the Valley of the Kings, cracking open ’sacred’ bones in search of media gold. Shame on him for so often betraying his ’sacred’ trusts in order to hog a little spotlight, and shame on National Geographic for continuing to fund his serial sacrileges.

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Writers, Readers, & Reptutations!

August 28, 2010

 Our book today is Philip Waller’s massive, utterly delightful Writers, Readers, & Reputations from 2006, and it finishes off our little quintet of books about books this time around (I’ve read every such book that’s ever been written – what can I say? Reading about reading fascinates me – and I’ll get to all of them here sooner or later, but five is enough for now).

And boy, HOW it finishes things off! Waller’s book is a stunning, almost overwhelming masterpiece. He’s staked out the period of a “long” Edwardian era in England and completely, freakishly absorbed every last scintilla of information on his subject, which is nothing less than the whole world of letters during those years, from 1870 to 1918. He covers everything from writers’ lives to reading tours to lending libraries to book groups to manufacture and distribution, and he does it all in such an winningly readable voice that you never feel crushed by the weight of his expertise. The pages fly by (all 1150 of them), and what emerges is a picture of the reading life of the Edwardian age in such pointillist detail that you can’t help but wish we had similar volumes for every other era. That would be great, but I don’t know where we’d find the scholars to amass the data, much less the writers to make it this engaging.

Two things mark this great book’s strongest points: first, Waller has no particular pet theory to advance (he’s mainly just interested in giving us as full an account as he can, in the liveliest language), and second, he’s perfectly willing to let the writers of the time speak their piece at length – the book is full of great quotes, and they’re given in full rather than in snippets. Here’s the always-gloomy George Gissing on the perils of the literary life, for instance:

With a lifetime of dread experience behind me, I say that he who encourages any young man or woman to look for his living to ‘literature’, commits no less than a crime … Hateful as is the struggle for life in every form, this rough-and-tumble of the literary arena seems to me sordid and degrading beyond all others. Oh, your prices per thousand words! Oh, your paragraphings and your interviewings! And oh, the black despair that awaits those down-trodden in the fray.

 

It’s amazing how many different facets of the literary life Waller tracks down and shows to us in full detail. There are long, engrossing chapters on every aspect you could think of, including an amusing set-piece on authors as fashion-plates:

Jerome K. Jerome attracted [publicity] by wearing and old tweed cap, Keir Hardie-style, to offset an immaculate frock coat. This was scarcely big-league stuff. Nor was Bret Harte’s trick of commanding a daily buttonhole from a Piccadilly florist, sent in a little box to him wherever he occasioned to stay. For a really booming statement, it was necessary to behold Mark Twain in his gleaming white suits. Equally magnificent, Wilde invented himself as an exquisite- or harlequin, Theordore Watts-Dunton preferred to call him … A ‘great fat oily beast’, thought Edith Somerville, who met him in 1888. This was only marginally more flattering than ‘the great white slug’ proposed in the same year by Lady Colin Campbell …

 

And Waller also makes some real contributions to a more fair study of the literary landscape, giving us long digressions on best-selling authors of the time who’ve now (in almost every case very deservedly) fallen into permanent obscurity. The foremost of these hindmost is surely novelist Hall Caine, whose insipid water-balloon books outsold everybody twice over and made their author a very, very rich man. Whenever I feel tempted to despair at the popularity of author like Stephen King or James Patterson, I remind myself of writers like Caine – and Waller could have settled for merely reinforcing the reductions of readers like me. But instead, he digs deeper and presents a better, more fleshed out portrait of the man and his counterparts. It wasn’t until I first read this book that I learned Caine used a chunk of his fame and money to aid Jewish refugees of Tsarist oppression, for instance. Doesn’t change the fact that the man’s novels are junk, but it certainly makes him more interesting.

And what about book-reviewing, you must know I’d ask? Yep – the subject is fully covered (and in a gratifyingly early chapter) in all its heights and pitfalls, from log-rolling to the ever-popular topic of how authors (and later their publicists) can stack the odds in their favor when it comes to wooing reviewers:

Authors were not without means to influence the reception of their work, although Trollope’s Lady Carbury, by sleeping with a reviewer, in The Way We Live Now, must be considered extreme. The complimentary copy system was increasingly favoured. The Society hostess Lady Dorothy Nevill, who had known Bulwer Lytton in his best-selling prime, noted in 1906: ‘I always feel sorry that he never gave me his novels; in those days authors were not nearly so generous as they are to-day, when books are showered in all directions – more given than read.’

 

Writers, Readers, & Reputations is what’s known in my immediate circle as a ‘Steve book’ – meaning it’s so long and densely researched that I’m likely the only person in a hundred mile radius who’d every consider reading it, much less read it, bookmark it, and annotate it for sheer pleasure. My circle tends to groan when they see me toting around a ‘Steve book,’ because they know I’m not only going to read such tomes but also recommend them, and they consider that an impossibility (years ago, in response to such a recommendation about a very interesting book on Britain’s King George I, an exasperated companion blurted out, “That’s an entire year’s reading for me! One year, reading nothing but that big, ugly, boring book!”)(I thought it best not to point out that the original German version was much better than the translation).

But impossibility or no, I do indeed recommend Writers, Readers & Reputations! Yes, it’s formidably big – but it’s also scrupulously, reliably enjoyable, one of the best books on books I’ve ever read. It’s worth a year, if it comes to that.

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Letters to Alice!

August 27, 2010

Our book today is 1984 novel Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen, and the blurbs it garnered at the time (including an unsigned but adulatory little column the book review section of a newspaper in Gottingen, of all places) are s true today as they were back then: whatever else it might be, this is a first-rate book about books and reading.

That ‘whatever else it might be’ alludes to the fact that this is an epistolary novel comprised of exchanges between young college-age Alice and her middle-aged novelist Aunt Fay, so there’s quite a bit of bleed-through from Weldon’s own life, and as usual with this resolutely third-rate author, the reader is constantly forced to wonder how much of that bleed-through is intentional and how much of what they paid good money to buy and read is just more or less spontaneous riffing. Despite the shelf of novels to her credit, Weldon has never to my knowledge chosen to work at her craft. The result has been a body of fiction suffering from what we might call the Munro Syndrome: lots of stuff happens, ‘the end’ is stamped a few times onto the bolt of cloth as it spews out of the machine, and absolutely nothing memorable whatsoever is produced.

Letters to Alice is an exception and a delightful book – but even here, the lively writing takes frequent detours into being insipid or torturous, before returning to its better nature.

The plot, such as it is, can be easily guessed: Alice has gone off to school to study Jane Austen (among many predictable other names), and Aunt Fay has many, many opinions to share – about Austen, for instance:

It is idle to complain that Jane Austen lacked a crusading zeal. With hindsight, it is easy to look at the world she lived in, and say she should have. What she didn’t seems to me more valuable. She struggled to perceive and describe the flow of believes that typified her time, and more, to suggest for the first time that the personal, the emotional, is in fact the moral – nowadays, of course, for good or bad, we argue that it is political.

 

But also about lots of other things, from the whole of the Western canon to the quiet little curse of the writer’s life:

Writing is an odd activity – other people have occupations, jobs; the writer’s life is work, and the work is the life, and there can be no holidays from it. If the pen is not working, the mind is thinking, and even as you sit and watch [TV] the unconscious ponders on. Even in sleep you are not safe: dreams pertain to life, and life to dreams, and both to work. There can be no time off, no real diversions, because wherever you go, you take yourself; and no pure experience, either, unsullied by contemplation, or by the writer’s habit of standing back and observing what is going on – which writers will vehemently deny they do, because it sounds passionless and calculated, but is not.

 

But even so, problems crowd around the edges. Divorce that last passage from the spirited truths it’s conveying and you’ll see the biggest of those problems: Weldon simply cannot write good English prose, not for more than an isolated line at a time. This lack is of course no bar to fantastic literary success – but it’s awfully inconvenient if an author is shooting for more. Weldon’s ambitions to be taken seriously as a novelist have always been evident, and the number one obstacle to those ambitions is that she’s never had much talent as a writer. It’s funny how that works.

There’s talent aplenty in Letters to Alice, however – here the joys and odd disappointments of reading, the thrill of book-hunting, and the pleasures of simply chatting with a fellow reader are all on triumphant display. I myself dearly love a good bookish snail-mail correspondence (some of you will have shared one with me and may attest that I’m fairly good at it), full of titles and authors and the give-and-take that happens when two lifelong readers butt heads. There’s quite a bit of that here, mainly embodied on both sides by Aunt Fay, who does all the talking and most of the summarizing of other people’s letters. She also gets in some choice wisecracks (one of Weldon’s most reliable gifts):

Your mother reads books on tennis, I know: I doubt she’s read a novel since an overdose of Georgette Heyer made her marry your father. Books can be dangerous.

 

Books can indeed be dangerous, and they – and their authors – can disappoint. But this one doesn’t – you’ll love it.

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Comfort Found in Good Old Books!

August 25, 2010

 

Our book today is George Hamilton Fitch’s 1911 volume Comfort Found in Good Old Books, a collection of the author’s most popular book columns from the old San Francisco Chronicle. It’s a collection the author never thought he’d make in quite the way he made it, but books are often like that. Fitch was a minor institution at the Chronicle and well-respected as a thorough-going example of what used to be called a “book man.” His columns regularly drew appreciative letters from readers, and publishers regularly sent him boxes of new releases and catalogs of forthcoming titles, in the hopes he’d choose to review them. And he often did (under his own name and pseudonyms, a curiously persistent practice in certain circles of literary journalism), but always striking the typical Edwardian note of worry that the modern world of streetcars and dry-cleaning was crowding out the eternal verities.

Even in that less skeptical age, his readers could be forgiven for wondering how much of this, after decades of repetition, was just empty cant. Possibly Fitch himself wondered. Then in 1910 his young son Harold suddenly died, and as Fitch wrote (in an eerie, heartbreaking echo of Theodore Roosevelt), his “death has taken the light out of my life.” No father and son could have been closer – best friends, near-constant companions, like minds, companions in adventure – and no loss more devastating.

True to form (a blogger at heart, long before their like was conceived), Fitch wrote about this tragedy soon after it happened, and he wrote about something else, too: it turned out that once the white-hot chaos of immediate loss had uncramped him, he actually did turn to those eternal verities for consolation. He turned to books, and not just any books but some of the greatest classics of the canon, the very works he’d always told people would be their most reliable comforters in times of trouble. He turned to them with his heart broken into a thousand pieces – and they did indeed comfort him. His note of surprise is audible – and understandable; it always surprises you, the first time it happens.

He’d thought his loss irreparable:

Now that this perennial spirit of youth is gone out of my life, the beauty of it stands revealed more clearly. Gone forever are the dear, the fond-remembered holidays, when the long summer days were far too short for the pleasure that we crowded into them. Gone are the winter walks in the teeth of the blustering ocean breezes, when we “took the wind into our pulses” and strode like Berserkers along the gray sand dunes, tasting the rarest spirit of life in the open air. Gone, clean gone, those happy days, leaving only the precious memory that wets my eyes that are not used to tears.

 

But only weeks later, he was able to report to his readers that the gospel was true in all its particulars: not only will reading the best books make you a better person, it will gift you with friends who are always there, always supportive, always themselves.

Naturally, readers wrote in by the hundreds. They offered their own stories, their condolences, and most of all, they asked Fitch to talk about which books had saved him. There sprang from those letters (and, one imagines, a deep sense of gratitude) a series of brief glimpses of some of those redemptive classics – glimpses Fitch then collected into a book that sold in huge numbers on both coasts for the better part of two years.

It wasn’t just the origin story that was irresistible to readers. Through long practice and a wonderful open mind, Fitch had always been a book-reviewer well worth reading. He combined a strong set of guiding beliefs (he was a devout Christian) with a wide knowledge of his subjects, and he was also careful to present that history in a way his readers would find both enlightening and entertaining. In fifteen short chapters, he turns to a small handful of enduring classics – the Bible, Shakespeare, the Arabian Nights, St. Augustine, Don Quixote, Boswell’s life of Johnson, the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Milton, etc. – and first tells his readers something about them, then offers his thoughts, as here about Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress:

The miracle of this book is that it should have been written by a man who had little education and small knowledge of the great world, yet that it should be a literary masterpiece in the simple perfection of its form, and that it should be so filled with wisdom that the wisest man may gain something from its pages. Literary genius has never been shown in greater measure than in this immortal allegory by the poor tinker of Bedforshire.

 

Or here, on Dante:

In all literature nothing can be found to surpass the influence of this poem of Dante’s, struck off at white heat at the end of a life filled with the bitterness of worldly defeats and losses, but glorified by these visions of a spiritual conquest, greater than any of the victories of this world.

 

Readers back then (as now) very much valued this tone of adoring certainty, and even in his grief Fitch could no more lose that tone than he could float in mid-air. Readers also valued Fitch’s ever-present practical suggestions as to formats and editions, and he can’t resist making those suggestions even in the middle of his mourning:

Many editions of The Imitation of Christ have been issued, but for one who wish to make it a pocket companion, non is better than the little editions in The Macmillan Company’s Pocket Classics, edited by Brother Leo, professor of English literature in St. Mary’s College, Oakland. This accomplished critic has written an excellent introduction to the book, in which he sketches the life of the old monk, the sources of his work and the curious controversy over its authorship which raged for many years. Buy this inexpensive edition and study it, and then, if you come to love old Thomas, get an edition that is worthy of his sterling merit.

Fitch always believed that cultivating the habit of reading was one of the cheapest and most incredibly worthwhile things a person could do for themselves. He was right, of course. But his other oft-proclaimed belief – that books could literally save you when pain threatened to blot you out – is something he only really learned through awful need. Maybe that’s the only way to learn it; it’s certainly the way I did. And time and time again since then, it’s proven true. When I lost the best friend I’d ever have or am ever likely to have, a week later I first began to feel returned to the world by reading the endless prattle of a dear old companion, a diary entry about how he went to St. Paul’s churchyard to inquire about how his book-binding was coming along, how his Chaucer was progressing but wasn’t really neat enough for his liking, how he gave a few pointers to help out, how he had to remember to go to the clasp-makers and have clasps and embosses ordered to match the set …

It was the first time I’d smiled in a week.

The best, least foreseeable detail as far as Fitch is concerned is that his own advice has grown to enclose him: I turn to his book often, when I need my rudder righted a little.

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