The Elegant Variation

BEA CODA

Mostly odds and ends to report ... Sunday at BEA is usually an anticlimax as people begin to check out and head for the airport ... I was a bit too tired and hungover to make the Sunday's author breakfast (at 8 a.m. - who schedules these things??) so I didn't get to see Richard Ford and Monica Ali but I did make some final booth visits and got to say goodbyes to friends until next year's show.

Saturday was another night of busy partying, with the big show of the night being the annual PGW blowout at the Black Cat.  Too loud for much talk but a great, lively scene - fun to watch people let their hair down a bit.  The Unbridled Books party was much more along the lines of what one thinks of when one thinks of Book Parties, and it was a great opportunity to chat with their authors, including Frederick Reuss, about whose fascinating novel Mohr I've already written.  It was also nice to see so many bloggers in evidence, there and elsewhere.  It's hard to believe that at BEA two years ago, I still had to explain what a blog was.  (Last year, too, though less often.)  The question wasn't asked once this year.

But my favorite part of the weekend came Saturday evening.  At my first BEA I made what I know will be a lifelong friend in a gentleman named Marc Parent.  Marc works with the French house Buchet-Chastel in Paris, where he acquires foreign language literature for the French market.  It's become an annual tradition that when I visit Paris, he cooks for me, and when he comes to the US, I buy him a nice, American steak.  As it happened, the steakhouse I chose for this year was the same one where Macadam/Cage was holding its staff dinner party.  Marc knows Macadam/Cage publishers David Poindexter and Scott Allen very well, having bought two of their titles from the French market.

We were sitting directly outside of the private room of their party, and we were invited in to join the ending.  Marc and I ended up sitting with an author named Sonny Brewer, a courtly, charming independent bookstore owner from Fairhope, AL.  I didn't put together that this was the same Sonny Brewer who was the subject of a recent profile in the New York Times Styles section.  The conversation ranged all over the place and naturally touched on Sonny's forthcoming novel, A Sound Like Thunder, which nabbed an all-too-rare blurb from Harper Lee.  I promised to stop by the Random House booth the next day and grab a copy.  Which I did.

Since my bags were already packed, Sonny's book made it as carry-on for the flight home, and I read the book through in its entirety en route.  It's a lovely coming-of-age story, one that will surely resonate with any lad who's had an uneasy relationship with his old man.  And the best part of BEA - and why I'll go back next year - is that but for this fortuitous meeting, I would surely never have picked up this book - it simply wouldn't have hit my radar.  But it has, and I'll talk more about it as its August publication date approaches.

Finally, there's loads of great coverage elsewhere, most notably at Galleycat where Ron and Sarah have been working overtime.  Newsday's Aileen Jacobson also gets into the act.  Inside Higher Ed looks at the university press quest for crossover appeal.  And, of course, there's also good stuff at Ed's, Max's, Carolyn's, Kassia's, Wendi's, Matt's and many others ...

MEANWHILE, OVER HERE IN THE REST OF THE WORLD ...

And amid all the BEA madness, the literary world did not, in fact, grind to a halt. And so we note:

* Speaking of Harper Lee, Thomas Mallon - one of the Seriously Smart Dudes out there, unfailingly thoughtful - reviews the new biography.

* Maud has posted her long-awaited Rupert Thomson interview.  Do not overlook this amid all the BEA ballyhoo ...

* Gideon Lewis-Kraus attends a water tasting contest.  Really.

* Dan Wickett hosts a great E-panel of literary translators.

* The congress of PEN International is convening in Berlin, with 450 writers from around the world in attendance.

* An embarrassment of literary riches over at the Chronicle of Higher Education ... in addition to the afore-noted BEA coverage, Michael Kimmel looks at Lad Lit (dubbed here "guy lit") and is Not Impressed:

The characters in these books are as unmemorable and faceless as the men in the gray flannel suits they hold in such contempt. None will hold up like Holden Caulfield because what makes him so endearing, and The Catcher in the Rye so enduring, is that he actually believes his own hype. Holden believes that he and he alone is morally superior to all the phonies he sees around him. The purveyors of guy lit implicate themselves. They know how inauthentic they are. Salinger is at heart a romantic; Kunkel et al. are cynics. Holden feels too much; Dwight and the others feel too little, if anything at all.

And that may be guy lit's biggest problem: Its readers are unlikely to resemble the guys the books are ostensibly about. As long as the antiheroes stay stuck, and the transformative trajectory is either insincere, as in Kunkel's Indecision, or nonexistent, as in Smith's Love Monkey, these writers will miss their largest potential audience. For it is women who buy the most books, and what women seem to want is for men to be capable of changing (and to know that a woman's love can change them).

On the other hand, the Chronicle also looks at how chick lit is faring out there in the academy and finds a generational divide.  Elsewhere, amid the NYTBR list controversy, Harvard University Press Executive Editor Lindsay Waters notes a considerably less scrutinized list disappointment. 

* Over at Inside Higher Ed, (the other higher ed publication) Scott McLemee makes the case for shifting all the unneeded attention from DaVinci to "my man Athanasius Kircher, the brilliant and altogether improbable Jesuit polymath."  (So sorry about Friday night, Scott!)

* Although the mighty Robert Birnbaum was not at BEA, he's kept busy with interviews with David Mitchell and Julia Alvarez.

* Jay McInerney seems to have found his niche - foodblogging for House & Garden.

* Fine reviews of Everyman and the Elizabeth Bishop collection at the London Review of Books are almost enough to make us forgive their recent disgusting essay on the Israel lobby.  Almost.

L.A. EVENT - KARA LINDSTROM

UPDATE: This announcement was accidentally posted early.  Reading is Tuesday night.

One of our favorite parts of BEA is visting with the gang at Other Press, one of our favorite houses, publishers of fine literary fare.  Their author Kara Lindstrom (who divides her time between Paris and L.A. - damn her!) will be reading from her novel Sparkle Life this evening at Book Soup at 7 p.m.

BEA STASH

Every year we absolutely swear we're going to be picky as hell and pick up no more than a handful of galleys and have the rest mailed, and every year we end up in a mad dash to buy a new suitcase for the trip home.  Herewith the 2006 edition.

BACK IN L.A.

It's late and we're beat.  It will be quiet around here until later when the day, when we'll wrap up BEA loose ends.  Regularly scheduled literary programming resumes Tuesday.

LBC AT BEA

In the Coffee House Press booth ...

BEA IMPRESSIONS

I was sitting in the Knopf booth chatting with one of their publicists and LATBR editor David Ulin (who had just offered a tongue-in-cheek - we hope - warning about the dangers of talking to bloggers) when Michael Cader wandered by and gave me a friendly chiding over my dearth of posts here.  When I made excuses that posts were coming later, he suggested that the raw impressions might be more entertaining than polished consideration - because, really, who has the time to consider anything at BEA? 

He's right, so I'm following his lead and offering some unedited impressions about my DC BEA experience.  It breaks down into three areas for me - meetings, panels and parties.

Meetings: Unlike previous BEAs, where I would wander serenditipitously up and down the aisles bumping into friendly publicists, I made appointments this year.  Lots of appointments.  The upside was structure.  The downside was more time in meetings than in panels.  (Although given what I saw of the panels, this wasn't such a downside.)  So I've spent much of the last two days meeting with publicists of more houses than I could name, and I share some general impressions:

The publicists that I had the good fortune to meet with were, to a person, smart, enthusiastic, dedicated to the work they were handling.  They are young, overworked, underpaid but they really are motivated by the love of the book (a refreshing change from the hired marketing consultant who might be selling widgets or Starbucks as easily as books).  They know the material they're handling, have thought about why they like it and are, in a noisy, noisy marketplace, often a book's last, best advocate.  As I waded through dozens of catalogues and made my requests, I was struck by just how much promising material is out there, looking for its audience.  As dire as the calls seem to get each year, every single house I visited - again, without exception - had something on their list that would interest any serious reader.

So what were the "scores" people want to know - galleys or books I got that I'm most excited about.  Well, I picked up copies of the new WIlliam Boyd, Jonathan Franzen and Richard Ford books.  I was thrilled to nab a copy of Grove/Atlantic's bilingual edition of Waiting for Godot.  And William Logan's collection of criticism, courtesy of Princeton University Press, might have been the score of the weekend.  (Actually, the biggest score I'm not quite at liberty to mention yet, but watch this space soon.)

Some less well known titles that are high on my radar now, given the enthusiasm I found surrounding them include Yvette Christianse's Unconfessed (Other Press) and Frederick Reuss' Mohr (Unbridled Books), which I've begun reading and looks promising, indeed.  Also catching my attention is Delia Falconer's The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers (Soft Skull).

Panels:  As I said, with all the meetings, I've had less time for panels than usual.  The blogging panel is always a must for me but, sadly, was a bust.  There was virtually no moderation - the five panelists each made longish statements (David Brustein's opening statement was maddeningly longwinded and elicited at least one cocked eyebrow of dismay from Ana Marie Cox), and a handful of questions were fielded.  I was surprised at how, frankly, inarticulate the proprietor of Daily Kos was but perhaps that's just generational - your average twenty-something would surely have related to him.  And although he might understand blogging, he seemed out of place at a publishing convention, where his insights on publishing seemed to be limited to "Dog books and Abraham Lincoln are popular."  Still, Michael Cader gave the best definition of a blog we've yet heard - "A website that showcases an individual voice" which is more elegant than our "A website that records the enthusiasms of its host."  Still, Michael's description doesn't account for popular group blogs, like LBC, but it's a handy starting point.

The problem remains, as Michael himself pointed out, people still don't know what to do with these blog panels.  They all seem to lack a clear sense of purpose (and in this case, an absence of effective moderation), and it might be that simply taking on Blogging casts to wide a net to be informative in an hour.  BEA education types, if you're reading this, drop a line to this address, and you'll get some proposals about how to liven things up next year.  Like actually showing a blog on the large screen sitting there dormant ...

At the other blog-related panel, Sarah Weinman struggled valiantly with the nebulous "Syndicating Litblog Reviews," which I still don't entirely get, and I'm a blogger.  But she made the most of it and her lecture was a handy blogging 101 for those in attendance, with several audience bloggers leaping in with pointer of their own.

Oh, another BEA panel pet peeve - use namecards, people.  If you arrive late, as I did to the Future of the Novel panel, you have no idea who the players are.  Fortunately, David Kipen was on hand to be my scorecard, as I watched Lev Grossman, John Freeman, Laura Miller, Oscar Villalon and Jennifer Reese talk about novelists under 40.  This discussion was the liveliest of the three I attended, even if the Writers Under 40 designation feels like an arbitrary mark.  And the panel did seem to take that mandate literally, discussing writers and youth, thus taking a pretty straight-line approach to the question of "The Future of the Novel."  Now, I arrived a bit late but in the time I was there, no one discussed the role of the Internet in the future of the novel.  It was entirely focused on young writers as the future of the novel.

That said, numerous interesting and worthy points made.  The MFA question seemed to split the panel with Freeman and Villalon clearly against and Miller more or less for.  Reese was silent on the issue.  Villalon suggested - as others, including myself have - that there's a sameness in MFA fiction, and he cited the New Yorker as Exhibit A.  Miller disagreed with him, arguing that MFA programs are an opportunity for writers to learn to polish their skills, especially less gifted ones.  The panel tackled the question of genre as a trend of the future, with Miller suggesting that the merging of the literary and genre is a new development but Freeman pointed out (rightly, I think) that that's scarcely a new development.  Milller also asserted that literary fiction tends to be passive and reflective because those writers are passive, reflective people.  Nothing like falling back on a gross generalization, eh people?  Prep was noted as a novel that blurs distinctions, one that can't easily be pigeonholed as either commercial or literary.  Finally, Grossman asked whether it's possible to still have a writer considered "The Voice of Generation."  Miller suggested some thought Dave Eggers might fill that role (which prompted a few groans of distress), and she felt these days the Voice of a Generation tag will get attached to memoirs before novels.  Villalon opined that the Voice of a Generation is like pornography - we'll know it when we see it.  And, he added "God willing it won't be a white writer ... but a writer comfortable with White American ... and Immigrant America." Milller went on the suggest that people essentially only like to read about themselves, or about the deeply exotic.  Good Lord, does she enjoy this stuff at all?  Still, it was a panel that left one wishing they'de been given a bit more time, and Grossman showed himself an able moderator, keeping the proceedings lively.

Parties:  Everyone wants to know about the parties.  Once again, I was surprised and pleased how well attended the LBC party was.  The Big Hunt turned out to be the perfect spot and, as with last year, it was definitely the most relaxed of the evening's parties.  Folks did complain that the bloggers were not easy to find and should have been wearing name tags, so perhaps those will come into use next year.  By the time I left, at least 75 people had shown up, and I understand they kept coming after I left ... I made a brief appearance at the party thrown by A Public Space, which was held in a great space with great music playing but I admit I felt a bit old among the late 20-somethings, so I didn't stay long.  I'm also not used to the whole smoking-in-bars thing anymore, so I was eager to flee the smoke.  I then proceeded to get so thoroughly lost on the streets of Washington that I entirely missed the Hougton Mifflin dinner for Alison Bechdel, which I'd been looking forward to.  But I did make my way over the Phillips Collection for the NYRB shindig where I spent quite a lot of time chatting with my former nemesis Steve Wasserman, who regaled me with wonderful literary stories.  (Highlight of the evening:  Telling Steve and Ben Schwarz, Atlantic literary editor, about my "scores", especially the Godot and the Logan.  Wasserman nodded approvingly and Schwarz laughed, looking between the two of us and saying to Steve "You know what I'm thinking ... "  So do I - more alike than either of us realized.  Then onto the Macadam/Cage launch party for their forthcoming title Mary where I got have a long and interesting talk with Dave Weich, the mastermind behind Powells.com, before finally ending up at the Hyatt drinking whiskey with a bunch of YA authors.  More of the same on tap for tonight, dishy stories to follow and general wrap up tomorrow.

BEA IMAGES

If you've never been to BEA, there's nothing quite like the sight of the main hall, exhibition booths stretching as far as the eye can see.  It's overwhelming, intimidating, occasionally depressing but also can be exciting.  Here's a look from yesterday morning, before the crowds got really thick ...

GILBERT SORRENTINO DEAD

LIke many other BEA attendees, we were deeply saddened to learn Friday that Gilbert Sorrentino has died at the age of 77.  The Center for Book Culture notes his passing.

He was the most important novelist of his generation, inventing and reinventing styles and forms with each new book. A comic genius who was also able to write what is perhaps the bleakest novel in American fiction, The Sky Changes (1966)—a novel about divorce in America, and his first—Sorrentino set himself challenges with each new book, generally indifferent to how critics would react.

The range of his work and his absolute dedication to inventing and exploring character are unequalled by any of his contemporaries. Although oftentimes facilely grouped with such writers as Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, John Barth, and John Hawkes, Sorrentino was, unlike these writers, never embraced by academics and was usually overlooked by the critics. His singular aesthetic and his lifelong tendency to criticize the very authors who could have helped his career placed him outside both the mainstream and the fashionably avant-garde.

Most recently, he's received the 2005 Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award.  You can read a 1994 interview here ... or listen to him in conversation with Michael Silverblatt here.  Then, of course, there are the books.

We haven't looked yet but expect Dan and Derik to note his passing.

L.A. EVENT - ELIE WIESEL

BEA dispatches to begin shortly but first we note that Elie Wiesel will be taking questions from teenagers Sunday morning at Sinai Temple at 10:00 a.m.  If we were in town, we'd lie about our age and be there, so grab the teen in your life and go meet the legendary author.  10400 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90024