The Elegant Variation

THE GROVES OF ACADEME

David Leavitt partakes in a lengthy, candid interview about the "dire state of fiction" at Court the Jesters.

In all honesty, even though I teach in an MFA program, I have mixed feeling about the MFA industry (and it is becoming something of an industry). Here at UF, for instance, the quantity of applications that we receive increases substantially each year. This year we only accepted 6% of our applicants in fiction. More and more people seem to be writing.

Yet we're told that fiction is on the skids, is tanking, that no one buys novels or story collections any more. There's a paradox here, and a problem that reveals itself when you actually read these stories by people who don't bother to read fiction themselves. At the very least the MFA programs preserve the idea that writing is a craft and that established writers should train younger writers as established musicians train younger musicians and that writers should read great literature in order to learn from it.

If a lot of writers (like me) have ended up in academia, it's not because we're necessarily drawn characterologically to the groves of academe; it's because academia offers writers a degree of stability that's impossible to find elsewhere -- a steady salary, a pension plan, health insurance -- while leaving us time to write. Especially as you get older, these things become more important. On the other hand, writers who teach in MFA programs often find themselves caught up -- unwittingly, it seems -- in academic politics and administration, and these demanding facets of the job can take up so much time that the writers have very little time left to write.

WEDNESDAY MARGINALIA

* James Wood's How Fiction Works has reached Australia, and now those reviews are starting to come in.

* Birds of Paradise is a novel written in collaboration by readers of the Los Angeles Times.  It looks, well, you be the judge:

Carmen Madonna Louise Ventura shimmied down the old, iron drainpipe that ran from the roof of her apartment building to the alley in the back, her strong legs gripping the slightly rusted metal. It wasn't her usual kind of pole, and under normal circumstances, she might have smiled at the irony. She was, after all, a pole dancer.

* National Poetry Month is upon us, and FSG's poetry blog is going all out.

* Where, oh where, have the literary salons gone?

* Blogging the Classics - a recap of the Oxford Literary Festival panel which included TEV favorite Mark Thwaite of ReadySteadyBook.com.

* The NYRoB disses Steinbeck, and the hometown decides to fight back.

Upon reading such an efficient put-down, we suddenly knew what it must be like to be a Saroyan enthusiast in Fresno. For as long as it took us to finish the piece, we found ourselves questioning our taste not only in literature but in music (hide the Cachagua Playboys CD), food (deny attendance at Pebble Beach Food & Wine) and movies (Clint Who?).

* Nice to see libraries get some author love.  Unbridled Books' Andrea Portes is touring California libraries.

* Andrew Furman pens a lengthy essay on "The Russification of Jewish-American Fiction" for Zeek.

As the literary world was busy showering Shteyngart’s debut with accolades, other young Russian immigrant writers such as Lara Vapnyar and David Bezmozgis were putting the final touches on their first fiction manuscripts, There are Jews in My House (2003) and Natasha (2004), respectively. Through these story collections, Vapnyar and Bezmozgis evoke the jagged contours of Jewish life in the Soviet Union and the tumultuous transition westward through a more restrained, understated English prose, through nearly Carveresque artistic temperaments. Shteyngart and Vapnyar have since contributed follow-ups to their first efforts–the uproarious Absurdistan (2006) and the carefully observed Memoirs of a Muse (2006)–and books by new Russian Jewish fiction writers continue to emerge, most notably Anya Ulinich’s Petropolis (2007), set in various Russian and American locales, sprawling and picaresque in its reach, and Ellen Litman’s The Last Chicken in America (2007), set amid the Russian Jewish enclave of Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh.

* The man who started the Bookers suggests that not all winners have been especially deserving.

* Mary Dixie Carter considers Marguerite Duras's Wartime Writings in the Chronicle.

* Jeanette Winterson adds her name to the list of genre-crossing writers with her latest, The Stone Gods.

* A witty take on the Paris Review Interviews.

* Tom Teicholz blogs about Richard Price's recent ALOUD appearance, and realizes: "Price is the Anti-Roth."

* Yes, of course we noticed this recent Banville interview in the Village Voice.  We're just late in getting it to you.

* Peter Carey vents about dumb shit reviewers who are spoiling his story.

* And, finally, the live interview we gave at Duttons on Saturday is now available as a podcast.

THWAITE SPEAKS

It was a real treat for us to finally get to hear Mark Thwaite, one of the UK's best and brightest book bloggers, as he makes the case (and for some, apparently, the case still needs to be made) for reading literary blogs.  Well done, Mark.

MONDAY VIDEO ACTION

First up, there's a new episode of Titlepage online - this installment focuses on non-fiction writers.

Elsewhere, TEV reader Robert Nedelkoff writes in to alert us to this two-part interview in which Nabokov discusses Lolita with Lionel Trilling.  Robert notes "The moderator is the late Pierre Berton, author of many notable works on Canadian history. It was either Nabokov's first TV appearance or close to it. According to Brian Boyd's biography, unlike every subsequent TV appearance VN did where he approved (and usually rewrote) the questions beforehand and memorized written answers, it was completely unscripted. For quite a while there's been a TV interview with VN on Youtube - his last, on "Apostrophes," conducted in French - but this is the only online footage I know of involving him speaking in English."

POETS & WRTERS MAKEOVER

You'll want to check out the revamped P&W website.

COLOR US CONFUSED

We're not trying to be obtuse or anything but, seriously, which is it?  Is there a crisis in book reviewing or is there more book information out there than we can keep up with?   Hmm.  We ruminate on the matter.

NEW BOOKFORUM ONLINE

Always a happy day at Chez TEV - the new Bookforum is online with the usual embarrassment of riches.

MANIC MONDAY

* The complete schedule of panels for the 2008 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books has been released.

* The renowned editor Aaron Asher, who worked with the likes of Milan Kundera and Philip Roth, has died.

* The little bit that we've recently learned about oddities in Australian copyright law actually alows us to make some sense (though not too much) of this article in the Age about Brit/Aussie publication struggles.

The trouble is that British publishers have almost always insisted, when they acquire domestic rights, that so-called "Commonwealth" rights — that part of the globe that used to be coloured red — be included. They have even tended to refuse to consider buying rights in books that originate in Australia.

* Huntsville, Alabama has taken on The Maltese Falcon as its next Big Read selection.  Elsewhere, Tulsa Metro Reads chooses The Great Gatsby.

* The state of Irish literary fiction is thriving, according to Alison Walsh's essay in The Independent.

The Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year Award 2008 emphatically gives the lie to this notion. The "senior" award in the Irish Book Awards, the shortlist features four outstanding novels, which demonstrate that our literary culture is thriving: Joseph O'Connor's Redemption Falls, his hugely ambitious novel charting the progress of our ancestors in America just after the Civil War; Ronan Bennett's Zugzwang, a gripping literary thriller set in St Petersburg; Anne Enright's Booker Prize-winning The Gathering, a tour-de-force of literary quality and a searing portrait of family life in all its glory; and Benjamin Black's The Silver Swan, about which Tim Rutten in the LA Times urged: "Go directly home. If you live with others, send them away. Pour yourself a quiet drink and settle into your best chair for an authentic dose of Irish angst and wit, wondrous writing and about as undiluted an evening's pleasure as reading can provide."

* One of literary journalism's evergreens: Another profile of Paris's Shakespeare & Co.

* No jacket required: A.L. Kennedy profiled at length in Scotland on Sunday.

* Though we hope Mrs. TEV would beg to differ, literary wives, it appears, routinely get the short end of the stick.

What is interesting rather than merely depressing about all of this is why the women stay. Literature is littered with miserable writers’ wives and a few of their corpses: see Vivienne Eliot, Zelda Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath, all of whom had mental health issues that their husbands may or may not have tried their hardest to alleviate.

And there’s no shortage of literary unions where the wife’s own talents were subsumed to the husband’s (alleged) greatness, until divorce came along to rectify the balance: see Martha Gellhorn, who was married to Ernest Hemingway, or Elizabeth Jane Howard, who was married to Kingsley Amis.

* The promising new online magazine Triple Canopy includes a new story by Sheila Heti: A Logical Love Story.

* We have never been fans of Bret Easton Ellis and although there's little in this profile to make us change our mind or revisit his oeuvre, it's a riveting look at what feels like a trainwreck of a career and well worth your time.

* Financial Times offers a list of five famous literary converts, starting with Evelyn Waugh.

* Michael Chabon's superb The Yiddish Policemen's Union has become the first novel to be nominated for a Hugo, Nebula and Edgar.

* And, finally, not literary but of personal interest: The secret plot to change James Bond's suit.

DEPARTURES

We're outta here, off for a real NYC drive-by, back on Wednesday afternoon.  If we had time on our way out the door, these are the stories to which we'd direct your attention:  Maud Newton's review of Lush Life for the Globe ... The German who shot Saint-Exupéry out of the sky speaks ... A bomb threat at the Paris Book Fair ... Honoring Zora Neale Hurston ... Kertesz's Detective Story reviewed ... Mitch Cullin, whose last novel we admired, has a new book out ... Orange Prize: "Sexist con trick"? ... What happens when J.M. Coetzee is your creative writing instructor? ... Sometimes, even we're embarrassed for Sir Paul ... Test your literary cred with the Oxford Literary Festival prize quiz ... Britain's hot young writers ... VS Naipaul: Thoroughly nasty piece of work ... The genius of Tom Stoppard ... The Lindgren Award has been given to Sonya Hartnett ... New Zealand's largest literary prize has gone to a mail sorter ... Chicago selects The Long Goodbye for its "One Book, One Chicago" series ... The New York Times Book Review usefully explains the differences between trade and mass market paperbacks ... The case for slowing down ... Lambda announces literary award finalists ... Criticising the critics ... A Junot Diaz Q&A ... and Edmund Wilson's socialism.

Of special interest is the Onion's news that the nationwide Novelists' strike has affected ... no one:

While the strike has been joined by an estimated 250,000 novelists—225,000 of whom have reportedly stopped in the middle of their first novel—it has done no damage to any measurable sector of the economy, including bookstore chains, newspapers, magazines, all major media, overseas markets, independent film studios, major film studios, actors, editors, animators, carpenters, those in finance or banking, the day-to-day lives of average Americans, or anything else anyone can think of as of press time.

Finally, be sure to follow all the fun at The Tournament of Books, especially come Wednesday when our decision is sure to piss off all sorts of people.

We'll update from the road as we can.

TUESDAY MARGINALIA - DELUXE EDITION

We continue to argue with ourselves about the merits of link roundups, but there's so much interesting literary news out there that we continue to feel a weird obligation to bring the best of it to you.  So excuse the overload, but these items of interest have accrued:

* The Guardian suggests that the shortlist for the Arthur C. Clarke is continuing to bring down the barriers between genre and literary.

* Esquire is turning readers' letters into short fiction.

* The novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett (beloved by the Queen in Alan Bennett's charming The Uncommon Reader) hold up nicely, according to A.N. Wilson.

Nothing else was ever like them. They depict an entirely First World War world; they are written largely in quite oblique dialogue. Yet they are ever new. No novels more deserved the name novel than hers. And they are truly subversive.

* There are still too many small-minded Americans running the country's classrooms.

* Francine Prose is set to return to a second term as PEN president.

* The Benjamin Black stories are starting to run - here's Bob Hoover's profile.

Banville, 62, himself is a longtime newspaper staffer, starting with a Dublin newspaper in 1968 as an editor of reporters' stories, called a copy editor, and retiring as the Irish Times' literary editor in 1999.

"Working on the copy desk was wonderful training for a writer of fiction," he believes. "First, you learned the language, even to the importance of a comma. Second, you were involved in shaping the stories, making sure they read properly."

* Colim Toibin profiled in the Chronicle Herald.

* And speaking of Irish novelists, the Irish Book Awards are coming.

* Allen Barra on the complete novels of Flann O'Brien.

But all you need to know is that the man championed as one of the funniest writers who ever lived has just had all of his novels, previously available only individually from the Dalkey Archive Press, collected in one handy volume by Everyman's Library.

* If you're Oxford-bound, the Times has literary tour details for you.

* Former Booker prize judges name their favorites in the Guardian.  Robert McCrum has his own ideas.

* Is the pamphlet dead?

* In the wake of yesterday's ludicrous, indefensible decision in the Tournament of Books (with which 73% of Rooster readers plus one Rooster judge take considerable issue), we offer another review of Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas.

* Daniel Defoe, Spy.

* Ali Smith suggests there's more to Carson McCullers than is commonly thought.

There is a great deal of sweetness in the prevalent vision of McCullers as the poet of haunting oddbods, the laureate of American loneliness, the gifted bard of adolescent girls. But any reader of McCullers with a half-open eye knows her routing of sentimentality as one of the central actions of her fiction. The Member of the Wedding, published in 1946, has, in more recent years, picked up critical kudos as a mid-20th-century gay classic. It has influenced works as culturally inquiring and politically vibrant as Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye (1970) and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (1963), the first line of which profoundly echoes McCullers's novel. The Bell Jar's opening pages go out of their way to suggest a close kinship between them. As Morrison and Plath knew, The Member of the Wedding is a cutting piece of fiction, and its antecedents are equally sharp. But still the sentimental image persists.

* We quite liked Jeanette Winterson for a while there, though she's lost us a bit with her recent efforts.  (The Passion remains our favorite, though we're also among the minority who rather enjoyed Gut Symmetries.)  In the Times, she laments the state of English literature education.

* We are all Homer's children, according to the Washington Post.  MOTEV will be surprised, indeed.  (FOTEV, too.)

* Louis de Bernières has a new novel out, and the Times celebrates with an oddly racy photo (and a review).  Presumably, it's a new way to get people to show interest in literature.

* A Brooklyn writer before, you know, "Brooklyn writers" - Joseph Heller.

* And, finally (appropriately), the Utne Reader links to the American Book Review's 100 Best Last Lines from Novels.  Our beloved Gatsby clocks in at number three.