The Elegant Variation: MOTEV RETURNS: FORSTER, HAZZARD AND A CERTAIN LITERARY CONTROVERSY

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February 03, 2006

MOTEV RETURNS: FORSTER, HAZZARD AND A CERTAIN LITERARY CONTROVERSY

The only thing we like more than giving away books is posting our little chats with MOTEV. But we do try to dole them out since she's far more popular than our own caterwaulings are. Still, we know you've been clamoring for a dose, and we managed to catch up to the busy retiree between book groups, the opera, Broadway and museum outings, and she kindly consented to give us a minutes of her time to chat books.

TEV: So what are you reading?

MOTEV: I'm finally reading Howard's End.

TEV: And?

MOTEV: I'm enjoying it so much I can't believe I never read it. I'm just loving it. And then I thought of Shirley Hazzard's Transit of Venus, and I thought, OK she had good taste about where to borrow from.

TEV: Borrowing is part of the game

MOTEV: That's right. Have you read it?

TEV: Not yet. I've had it for a while - someone I respect recommended it highly but I haven't gotten to it yet.

MOTEV: What's taking so long?

TEV: Have you read The English Patient yet? Which I gave you, what, seven years ago?

MOTEV: (silence. then:) No comment.

TEV: Thought so. OK, what's the book group reading?

MOTEV: We're meeting in March. We're going to read On Beauty.

TEV: Have you started it yet?

MOTEV (patiently stating the obvious to her not-too-bright son): No. I'm going to finish Howard's End first.

TEV: That's very organized of you.

MOTEV: I may not stick to it but that's the plan

TEV: OK then. So, any thoughts about the literary controversy of the day?

MOTEV: Frey?

TEV: Yeah.

MOTEV (the world's deepest long suffering sigh): I don't see what's the big ado – no one should assume that a memoir is true. One shouldn't read memoirs and assume they're true – they should read them as fiction and assume they're not true. I'm actually on his side. He misrepresented himself to the media but what he did in his book, that should be a writer's right

TEV: You should tell Oprah …

MOTEV: And this mania for "truth"? What is completely True or Not True? There should be a limit on talking about it, and anyway what about the right of the writer to do with truth whatever they want to? As long as they say that it's my version of the truth. Think about the definition of "memoir" ... Read Casanova's memoirs!

TEV: (typing quickly to keep up with her indignation) Uh huh …

MOTEV: (pause) Are your MOTEVing me?

TEV: You know, "to MOTEV" isn't actually a verb. (pause; busted) I may be …

MOTEV: Oh please! But this is my opinion. I thought it was fine that Oprah defended him first and then I caught the moment when she said "you mislead me" – that's stupid! He's not on trial. He's a writer. I think the whole controversy is helping his sales. They couldn't pay for better advertisement. That's all. And next time you MOTEV me without saying so first, I'm disinheriting you.

TEV: But you guys don't have anything!

MOTEV: It's a symbolic gesture. Now go finish writing your book. It's not a memoir, is it?

Posted at 12:25 AM in MOTEV | Permalink

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MOTEV has good taste--well, I think it comes with the Mom territory. I'm teaching Transit of Venus this term, putting it in as the last book in my Modern British Fiction class, in part because while it's set in England it's so decidedly NOT an English novel, it's marked by a narration that seems to come from nowhere in particular, transnational. But the book I connect it to isn't Howard's End but rather Women in Love, with which the term starts--surely that young astronomer is much more a Lawrence figure?

Posted by: michael gorra | February 03, 2006 at 05:40 AM

Yes, but doesn't the 'what is TRUTH' argument apply to writing that would be persuasive and powerful whether it were strictly factual or not? In the case of 'writing' (I use the term loosely here) that gets 100 percent of its force from being the supposed report of a supposedly lived experience...whether or not the events really happened is a crucial distinction. Interestingly, this argument could be applied with some justice to contemporary debates about Religion...

Posted by: Steven Augustine | February 03, 2006 at 08:02 AM

Michael, my uni days are long over but that's a class I wish I was taking.

Posted by: Justine | February 03, 2006 at 09:37 AM

MOTEV and I are in total agreement about memoirs and "truth" with a little t. I also don't see what the big deal is here, at all. In my opinion, memoirs are experiential -- and experience is a fuzzy thing indeed.

Posted by: SKL | February 03, 2006 at 11:15 AM

Not buying it. I read something labeled "memoir" expecting it to be true, knowing some of it isn't quite, and resigned to a lie here and there. The hazy parts and honest little fibs are functions of memory and ego. I can live with that. However, deliberately falsifying portions, for whatever sincere and heartfelt reasons, means it's no longer memoir but polemic, essay, fiction, what have you. That's not what I wanted when I picked up a book labeled "Memoir."

And because of the "so what?" response by far too many publishers and writers over this whole dust-up, I won't ever buy another book so labeled. I don't trust the definition anymore.

Posted by: Exeye | February 03, 2006 at 06:39 PM

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MY NOVEL

HARRY, REVISED - Get all the details here.

TOUR DATES

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal by Rob Riemen

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Dictation: A Quartet by Cynthia Ozick

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*Now in Paperback*

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Here Is Where We Meet by John Berger

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THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
The Rider by Tim Krabbe

Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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February 03, 2006