The Elegant Variation

Five authors to watch in 2013

The Telegraph looks at five young authors to watch in 2013.  TEV favorite Sheila Heti is on the list, but I'm especially intrigued by Owen Martell's novel Intermission:

A slim, rigourously nuanced book, Intermission tells the story of how [Bill] Evans’s family try to support him in 1961 when he is devastated by the accidental death of Scott LaFaro, bass player in his celebrated trio. His protective elder brother Harry knows he is a drug addict and fears the worst.

Jazz novels are always so hard to pull off (Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter succeeds; Morrison's Jazz does not), but I've always been so intrigued by the Evans/LaFaro relationship.  LaFaro was a prodigy, killed obscenely young, whose influence is still felt among jazz bassists.  It sounds like a fascinating read.

RIFFING ON DFW

I can't imagine at this late stage of the game that anyone needs me to direct them to Maud Newton's New York Times Magazine Riff on David Foster Wallace's influence on writing on the net, which has been lighting up Twitter, Facebook and the blogs.  But in case you've been as hunkered down as I've been, I send it along, with a hearty endorsement of Newton's take.  (I took another ill-fated crack at Infinite Jest a few months ago but foundered yet again. I fear I will fall into the Geoff Dyer camp on this one.)

Geoff Dyer, an essayist as idiosyncratic and perceptive as Wallace but far more economical, confessed recently in Prospect magazine that he “break[s] out in a mental rash” when forced to read Wallace. “It’s not that I dislike the extravagance, the excess, the beanie-baroque, the phat loquacity,” Dyer wrote. “They just bug the crap out of me. ” Wallace’s nonfiction abounds with qualifiers like “sort of” and “pretty much” and sincerity-infusers like “really.” An icon of porn publishing described in the essay “Big Red Son,” for example, is “hard not to sort of almost actually like.” Within a brief excerpt from that piece in The New York Times Book Review, Wallace speaks of “the whole cynical postmodern deal” and “the whole mainstream celebrity culture,” and concludes that “the whole thing sucks.” Nor is this an unrepresentative sample; “whole” appears 20 times in the essay, so frequently that it begins to seem not just sloppy and imprecise but argumentatively, even aggressively, disingenuous. At their worst these verbal tics make it impossible to evaluate his analysis; I’m constantly wishing he would either choose a more straightforward way to limit his contentions or fully commit to one of them.

Still, I will continue to try and grapple with DFW.  His shadow is too long to ignore.  I am not done yet.  

POSSIBILITIES

My UK publisher Jamie Byng - who I imagine must be pretty tired of the enfant terrible label - talks to British GQ.

The possibilities have never been greater, but that doesn't make it easier. E-books do involve lower costs, but only in manufacturing and distribution. Publishing is also about finding new talent, rigorous editing, championing the books you believe in, and all that doesn't just disappear with digital books.

FROM FIRST TO LAST

David Kipen, whose lending library Libros Schmibros comes to the westside with a pop-up at the Hammer Museum later this month, writes about the closing night of Village Books in the Palisades, in which your humble host makes a cameo:

To keep my mind off the temptation to weep uncontrollably, I asked myself which book would make the most fitting final purchase. The buzzards had long since started circling, so the remaining books were already huddling toward the middle shelves, hemmed in by vacant plywood on all sides. When I hit Mark Sarvas up for a suggestion, that sly blogger at the Elegant Variation — with unnerving speed, as if he'd already somehow had the question leaked to him — pointed discreetly toward a copy of Philip Roth's The Dying Animal. Then he resumed fulminating darkly about the evening's events: "Where were all these people six months ago?"

I'm still fulminating darkly, too angry to put down my own thoughts about the closing.  Everything I have to say will likely get me kicked out of my neighborhood.  So you have Kipen's frankly superior musings in my place.  Check them out.  And for those wondering, my final purchases at Village Books were At Swim-Two-Birds, Pictures from an Institution, The Lonely Passion of Judth Hearne and Kate Christensen's latest, The Astral.

WEEKEND READ - ALAN BENNETT ON LIBRARIES

In truth, I'd read Alan Bennett on pretty much anything, but when the subject is libraries, who can resist?

There were other perils to reading, but it was only when I hit middle age that I became aware of them. Me, I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf was a television play written in 1978 and though it doesn’t contain my usual scene of someone baffled at a bookcase the sense of being outfaced by books is a good description of what the play is about. ‘Hopkins,’ I wrote of the middle-aged lecturer who is the hero, ‘Hopkins was never without a book. It wasn’t that he was particularly fond of reading; he just liked to have somewhere to look. A book makes you safe. Shows you’re not out to pick anybody up. Try it on. With a book you’re harmless. Though Hopkins was harmless without a book.’ Books as badges, books as shields; one doesn’t think of libraries as perilous places where you can come to harm. Still, they do carry their own risks.

D'OH

One of Andrew Sullivan's guest bloggers makes the mistake of taking Shalom Auslander at face value.

DALE PECK IS THE WORST CRITIC OF HIS GENERATION

OK, that’s an obvious headline.  Almost cheap, I admit.  But it got your attention, right?

Which, at the risk of getting a bit too meta, perfectly distills Dale Peck’s raison d’etre.

His recent squib at Mischief and Mayhem is a perfect summation of why he is utterly dispensable as a critic, as forgettable as he is flamboyant.  He represents the worst of the Wieseltier School – the bitterness and the careless, self-defeating rage, without the learned humanity. 

On the one hand, it’s probably unfair to hold his brief screed to formal critical standards, since Peck himself admits in the comments that the piece is “lazy”.  And given the way he breathlessly updates his post to note a link from the New York Times, it seems he was less interested in substantive commentary and more excited about bomb throwing.  (His back and forth about blurb requests just feels petty.  Anyone who has spent five minutes in publishing is a bit more savvy about blurbs than that.)

Still, it’s worth asking the question, keeping in line with my earlier post about comments here – why does Peck feel an argument can’t be engaged with, without blanket character assassination?  One may fairly disagree with Mendelsohn’s take – some of my readers here have.   But a bit like this …

Daniel Mendelsohn—a Princeton-educated classicist who should never be allowed to write about anything more recent than, say, Suetonius. Frankly, I’m not sure he should be allowed to write about the classics either, but I don’t know enough Latin and Greek to say if he’s as wrong about them as he is about modern stuff.  Because man is this guy wrong. Always. Every time. Completely off the mark.

… torpedoes any credibility the person making it might have.  Anyone who spends five minutes in the NYRB will see that this is the sort of scorched earth idiocy that suggests that Peck’s true métier has all along been blogger, not critic. 

Beyond the name calling, Peck’s post is shabby, subpar and, as he admits, lazy.  He makes an assertion:

I think that, ultimately, is my problem with Mr. M.: he has no inkling of the problematic but fascinating phenomenon of the postmodern savvy audience—educated to the point of jadedness, suspicious but also sentimental, craving the thing it’s been taught to distrust 

It’s an assertion that is both empty and exhausted.  First, the term postmodern has been beaten so bloody, waved so relentlessly for decades, that I’m not sure anyone can agree on what it means any more.  But Peck lazily relies on presumptions and associations, and then presumes that we will agree with him and see their truth and value.  There’s so much assuming going on here, one’s head spins.

If Peck were interested in discussion, he might take a moment and explain this allegedly fascinating phenomenon. But that’s clearly not his game, and I suspect he knows if he were called to make a more substantive argument, he’d fall on his face. Once the insults are over, he runs out of gas.

(It’s also a favorite rhetorical brickbat of the aggrieved, that one who disagrees with us  is always characterized as “missing the point.”  As though “the point” was so obvious to begin with that any discussion is unnecessary.  The term is always a tipoff to impending intellectual dishonesty.)

Obviously, I linked to the Mendelsohn piece earlier because it resonated with me, and confirmed my experience of watching the program.  And the essay is considerably more nuanced than Peck’s sneering (or the Times's scandal-baiting) suggests.  Still, it can and should be engaged with, and one hopes that more responsible, intelligent and insightful interlocutors will make themselves heard.  

MARTY'S CRASH PAD

The brotherhood of cranks:  Wolcott on Martin Amis's request for "asylum" ... 

But when Amis goes on in the email to inquire about the condition of my wine cellar and whether there might be space for him to store a few bottles of his "favorite plonk," I have to wonder if this email, like the previous one of his that found its way into my in-box, may have been misdirected. I wouldn't know a wine cellar from a bomb shelter, and I never touch the stuff, wine snobbery making me break out in hives. Perhaps Marty meant to reach out to Jay McInerney and got me instead, a mix-up which will someday give us all a good laugh at the nursing home.

Wolcottt goes on to reveal that Amis has opened his yap again - only for once, the usual hyperbole notwithstanding, I'm hard-pressed to disagree with the substance.

ZADIE SMITH ON LOPATE

Zadie Smith goes on the Leonard Lopate Show to talk about her new book reviewing gig with Harper's.

YOU SHOULDA BEEN THERE

Zadie Smith and Nathan Englander in conversation at the Matawi Fundraiser, via Guernica Magazine.

Nathan Englander begins his conversation with Zadie Smith by recalling the two novelists’ first encounter, at the Capri Festival “ten thousand years ago,” and the visible reverence Smith showed for David Foster Wallace, who, along with Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides, was also in attendance. In the conversation that follows, the two discuss the heralded Infinite Jest author (as well as Saul Bellow, George Eliot, and James Baldwin) and topics ranging from seeing yourself as other to morality in writing.