The Elegant Variation

COMPARE AND CONTRAST: MR. & MRS. AMIS

The Times discusses the sexual trauma incorporated into Martin Amis's new autobiographical novel ...

He was 56 when he started the latest draft, the same age as his main character Keith, who suffers “sexual trauma” at the hands of two 20-year-old blondes and is mocked by his offspring for looking like a tramp.

... as his wife, Isabel Fonseca, shares what she knows about men with Guardian readers.

My husband shares certain essential qualities with my father, which, in its fatefulness, is quite depressing - as if I had no hand in the choosing. Both are artists - that is, utterly preoccupied with their own stuff. This can be trying at times, but it's also useful, if it echoes your own needs and appetites - for solitude, for work. Parity's the thing. Every artist is most alive when alone - and they don't really take holidays, no knocking off at six. I get that. But I don't recommend it for my daughters.

POST-VALKYRIE THOUGHTS

During the holidays we took in Valkyrie, motivated more by residual affection for the Singer/McQuarrie pairing than anything else.  The movie was thunderously ordinary but it did bring to mind the related Coetzee/West contretemps of a few years back. 

For those who missed it the first time, Coetzee used Paul West's novel, The Very Rich Hours of Count Von Stauffenberg, (he of the failed July 20 plot to assassinate Hitler upon which the film is based) as a leaping off point for Elizabeth Costello's meditation as to whether the depiction of certain kinds of evil lies beyond the boundaries of art.  Here's David Lodge addressing the issue in his NYRB review of Elizabeth Costello:

As most readers of this journal (but not necessarily most of Coetzee's readers) will know, Paul West is a real author, who published The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg in 1980. His CV is not unlike Coetzee's, though less brilliant: born in England but an American citizen, he has held a number of prestigious posts as a professor of literature, and writes literary novels which have won several awards. For a writer to introduce another, living writer as a character into his fiction, especially in such a prejudicial light, is a very unusual, perhaps unprecedented, thing to do. One might speculate that Coetzee read The Very Rich Hours...with much the same reaction as Elizabeth's, wanted to write about that experience, and felt that inventing a fictitious novel would not serve his purpose—indeed, would involve him in the same kind of "obscene" imagining of which Elizabeth accuses West, though it must be said that there are some very nasty imagined tortures in Waiting for the Barbarians.

Lodge addresses this episode at considerable length and is worth reading.  A few months later, Paul West took to the pages of Harpers to weigh in on the controversy.  This essay is, sadly, available to Harpers subscribers only but is worth springing for.  (And if you drop us a line asking nicely, we might even share our copy.)  But here's a bit of what he had to say back to Ms. Costello:

To the gravamen, then, with which Costello belabors West-Stauff at the Amsterdam conference. To write so vividly (Paul West giving Stauff the German a helping hand with his English) is to poison both author and reader. Or so she claims. Some things simply must not be said. Now, which dictator hasn't said that? From memory, I recall Rottger, my book's hangman, as reeking of mothballs and celery (try it, you might like it), taunting the condemned with foul sexual and effluvial sneers. Is this worse than the actual Von Moltke's aristocratically telling them to strengthen their minds, as it takes twenty minutes to die on the rope? Given the chaste concinnity of that, or the feral gloat of Rottger, who cares? Moltke's warning includes the seed of its own remedy, and, anyway, some of the real-life condemned proved heroic to the end. This is what my novel is about. I doubt if there is a gentle way of saying how the hangman or hangmen treated screaming women, but they did it, and I am not sure the discreet version is any less shocking than the hideous one. Those clutching at straws for decorum may take heart from the German soldiery's refusal to watch the film of the hangings with Hitler. Only Hermann Fegelein and junior SS kept him company, and when the film was tried out on cadet audiences in Berlin, the effect on morale was so awful that almost all copies were destroyed.

Confronted with the stuff of history (say the brutal facts reported by such a magazine as Human Events, in which you browse at your peril), the novelist had better sample truth, if he can get at it, or quit. But to remove such events from history is to view a rosy world that, nonetheless, may just not exist.

Not, perhaps, what Tom Cruise was hoping to have running through our heads during his movie but, arguably, more satisfying than anything he had in mind.  It's a question we continue to mull over, wondering about the limits of art.  We're curious to know your thoughts, if you are so moved to leave them in the comments box below.

COMPARE & CONTRAST: RATATOUILLE and JAMES WOOD

"In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends."

- Ratatouille

"Positive individuality; the cultivation of "something new" (anything, as long as it is something?); a connection to the Great Tradition; and ... youth!  One of the editors ... could be found on the last page of the magazine writing "It is time to say what you mean."  Indeed, but what do you mean?  The Editors had unwittingly proved the gravamen of their own critique: that it is easier to criticize than to propose."

- James Wood

COMPARE AND CONTRAST: HERGE v. TOM McCARTHY

- Herge, The Castafiore Emerald

"So anyway, I was lying on the floor observing this phenomenon - speculating, you might say - while the piano music looped and repeated in the background when I saw the pianist walk up the stairs towards me.
     This, of course, was physically impossible: I was listening to him practising his Rachmaninov two floors above me at this very moment.  But impossible or not, there he was, walking up the stairs towards me.  As soon as he caught sight of me he jolted to a standstill, then started to turn - but it was too late: he knew the game was up.  He became static again.  His eyes scampered half-heartedly around the floor's maze as though looking for a way out of the quandary he found himself in while at the same time knowing that they wouldn't find one; the bald crown of his head went even whiter than it usually was.  He mumbled:
     'Hello.'
     'What are you ... ' I started, but, I couldn't finish the sentence.  A wave of dizziness was sweeping over me.  The piano music was spilling from his flat into the sunlit stairwell.
     'I had an audition,' he murmured.
     'Then who ... ' I asked.
     'Recording,' he said, his still moping at the floor."

- Tom McCarthy, Remainder

"As Freud knows all too well, whatever is suppressed repeats.  Haddock suppresses the hand-biting episode from his account to Miarka's family of his encounter with the gypsy child and so the episode repeats, again and again; the parrot bites him twice and a bee stings him for good measure.  The Castafiore Emerald is obsessive.  The whole book runs on its loops: falling down the stairs, phoning Bolt the builder, scales, scales, scales.  It runs with the regularity of a machine - so much so that parts of it can be replaced by a cassette and the characters can take a break, wander offstage.  There is a huge self-consciousness about it: 'MERCY! MY JEWELS!' 'There she goes ... She's lost her geegaws again.' 'MURDER!' "You hear?' 'Yes, yes ... don't worry: she'll find them in a minute or two,' "MY EMERALD!' 'THUMP' 'Someone's missed that step again.'  Those who can discern the rhythms can step into them and operate in their blind spots: Wagner, the photographer, the magpie ... "

- Tom McCarthy, Tintin and the Secret of Literature

UPDATE: Bonus link - McCarthy interviewed at Bookninja.

COMPARE AND CONTRAST: An Occasional Series

Carlin Romano on Exit Ghost for the Philadelphia Inquirer:

You'd call it a pattern if it were not, across the broad scope of Roth's oeuvre, far more - a pathetic mosaic. In Exit Ghost, as in The Dying Animal, the falsest notes Roth hits are in orchestrating the young woman's psychology and dialogue, preposterously portraying her mounting interest in the older man. If you read the new book, note how many times we're told in He and She that Jamie laughed at a Zuckerman comment. Ask yourself if someone in her situation would.

How, hypothetically, would one review Exit Ghost if it were a first novel by an unknown? Conversational and readable, cliched in its larger plot, lacking fresh imagery or arresting wordplay, and unconvincing in the judgments it tries to shove down the reader's throat: that Kliman is a "domineering" jerk, that Jamie doesn't know what she wants in a man, that Amy remained satisfied with just four years of Lonoff because she'd had the privilege of being "in love with a great man."

As the umpteenth recycling of Roth's obsessions, Exit Ghost will doubtless draw Roth admirers to explore and celebrate it, connecting all the new dots to previous Zuckerman lore as if they were painting a portrait of literature itself. Less enamored readers may conclude that to the extent Roth possesses an imagination, it's an insufferable one.

Bharat Tandon on Exit Ghost for Times Literary Supplement.

Stylistically, Exit Ghost is something of a surprise: a reader acclimatized to the progressive sidelining of Zuckerman’s own life during the American Pastoral trilogy might take some time to get used to his newly rediscovered centrality – almost as if Joseph Conrad had followed Chance with a picaresque first-person narrative entitled The Adventures of Marlow. Nor is it a flawless work: for example, Zuckerman’s encomium on George Plimpton feels like an insufficiently fictionalized valedictory address; and for all Roth’s deliberate highlighting of “the theatrical emotions that the horrors of politics inspire”, Jamie and Billy’s growing despair as the 2004 presidential election results emerge (“The turn to the right in this country is a movement to replace political institutions with morality”) is rather a stolid and undramatized performance compared to the rage of Merry Levov in American Pastoral or Herman Roth in The Plot Against America (2004). But this is not where the novel’s interest truly lies; in fact, one passage near the beginning hints at this:

I started toward the subway to take a train downtown to Ground Zero. Begin there, where the biggest thing of all occurred . . . . I never made it to the subway . . . . Instead, after crossing the park, I found myself in the familiar rooms of the Metropolitan Museum.

One might read that change of direction as Roth’s resistance to the easier historical associations attendant on a post-2001 New York fiction: Exit Ghost’s focus is more on the smaller physical and emotional scarrings that are part of the publicly brutalized landscape. And if much of the novel plays old against new, with the present recapitulating the past, Zuckerman’s story highlights that terrible form of self-reference around which so much of Roth’s recent work has circled: the fact that ageing lampoons us all, makes us grotesque bodily parodies of ourselves. Where the Zuckerman of the early novels could be prodigal with his semen, now he just leaks urine, and the dignity of Roth’s writing, recalling the hard-headedness of his memoir Patrimony (1991), lies in his not sparing Zuckerman the indignity. The sound of time in late Roth is not that of a winged chariot but of a hospital trolley with badly greased wheels; and there are few American writers who write with such power of the loss of powers, with such command of the chaos that haunts and mocks every attempt at shape. Roth has one final indignity in store for Zuckerman: Amy’s brain cancer is killing her, and a reader eventually finds out that Zuckerman’s memory (the part into which so much of his being retreated during the American Pastoral trilogy) has begun to fail him, a revelation which lends a retrospective poignancy to some of the novel’s earlier moments (“I’d copied the phone number onto a piece of scrap paper on which I’d written the name ‘Amy Bellette’”).

COMPARE AND CONTRAST: An Occasional Series

From Pierre Bayard's How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read (or The French Way):

The notion of skimming or flipping through books can be understood in at least two different senses.  In the first case, the skimming is linear.  The reader begins the text at the beginning, then starts skipping lines or pages as, successfully or not, he makes his way toward the end.  In the second case, the skimming is circuitous: rather than read in an orderly fashion, the reader takes a stroll through the work, sometimes beginning at the end.  The second implies no more will on the part of the reader than does the first.  It simply constitutes one of our habitual ways of relating to books.

But the fertility of this mode of discovery markedly unsettles the difference between reading and non-reading, or even the idea of reading at all.  In which category do we place the behavior of those who have spent a certain amount of time on a book - hours, even - without reading it completely?  Should they be inclined to discuss it, is it fair to say of them that they are talking about a book they haven't read?  The same question may be raised with regard to those who, like Musil's librarian, remain in the margins of the book.  Who, we may wonder, is the better reader - the person who reads a work in depth without being able to situate it, or the person who enters no book in depth, but circulates through them all?

From John Sutherland's How to Read a Novel (or The English Way):

Judges of fiction prizes are routinely asked if the 'read them all', and are as routinely misreported on the topic.  It is hard to reply, accurately, because 'read' is such a blunt term. Is studying Emma for A-level the same reading act as skimming the latest Jeffrey Archer in the airport departure lounge with the aim of finishing the thing before boarding in forty minutes?  'I've read the newspaper,' we say, meaning, 'I've glanced at the headlines, scanned the letters page, decided not to bother with the editorials, looked up the soccer results and taken in my favorite columnist'.  You can gut novels the same way - but it is hardly 'reading'.

Upping the reading speed helps.  Silent reading is, although no one is quite sure, a relatively late arrival historically.  The Venerable Bede was regarded as prodigious in the seventh century in that he could read without moving his lips and was therefore faster than he could speak.  What Bede has worked out, evidently, was the amazing buffering capacity of the brain: that it can take in verbiage fast and play it back to the mind's ear at the right, slowed-down speed.  Larger 'eyebites' and various other 'speed reading' gimmicks were promulgated in the speed reading mania of the 1960s - when information overload first became a worry.  Unfortunately, there are absolute physical limits to the rate at which one can read.  Few will reach them, but no human eye will exceed them, any more than any athlete - however well trained and drugged - will run 100 meters in three seconds.

Nowadays, it seems to me, something like the 'surf and zap' approach is required.  As with satelite TV and its hundreds of channels, one has to skim through, stop where it seems interesting, zap the commercials and other impertinent material, concentrate from time to time where the offering seems genuinely interesting.