The Elegant Variation

HOW DO YOU SAY "IT'S NOT THE CRIME, IT'S THE COVER UP" IN GERMAN?

The NY Times continues its coverage of the Grass scandal, and pretty nails what is the core problem for us.

The reaction in Germany to this admission has been one of disbelief and indignation: not that a teenager should have been recruited into the Waffen SS as Hitler struggled to avoid defeat, but that the country’s most prominent writer should have hidden this while hectoring others for their political and social sins from the comfort of the moral high ground. “I do not understand how someone can elevate himself constantly for 60 years as the nation’s bad conscience, precisely in Nazi questions, and only then admit that he himself was deeply involved,” Joachim Fest, a prominent historian and biographer of Hitler, told the newspaper Bild. “I don’t know how he could play this double role for so long.”

We're not suggesting - as some commentors seem to think - that he should be punished for youthful mistakes or for having been a Nazi (although it's scarcely a fait accompli that he shouldn't).  We are saying that the sheer, naked, breathtaking hypocrisy here is inarguable.  This cuts to the heart of what one requires of one's moral exemplars, self-appointed or otherwise.  A certain amount of consistency seems a minimum; at the other extreme, being outrightly two-faced for a period of 60 years seems ample grounds to merit reassessment of Grass' place.  Talk of "punishment" and the like is silly, but as Bill Clinton knew, it's all about the legacy - and Grass' should be reevaluated and appropriately and permanently diminished over this.

TODAY'S NYTBR DISAPPOINTMENT

This Sunday's New York Times Book Review devotes its cover page to Marisha Pessl's Special Topics In Calamity Physics, which we're taking along for our weekend road trip.  The review isn't available online yet, so we're taking a minute to type out Liesl Schillinger's disappointing lede:

Whoever coined the phrase "everybody loves a winner" probably wasn't one.  When the news came out that a distractingly pretty actress, playwright and Barnard College graduate named Marisha Pessl, only 27, had sold her first book (which she also illustrated) - a "Nabokovian" thriller about an intellectual widower and his precocious daughter - for a substantial sum, the pick-a-little, talk-a-little publishing blog brigade when into conniptions.  "She's the latest in a long, long line to suffer from 'Hot Young Author Chick' Syndrome," one blogger grumbled; another wrote in a headline, "It's Not About Marisha Pessl's Looks and Money - Is It?" and asked if the book would have been snapped up so quickly if pessl hadn't had such a "drool-worthy author photo."  But don't hate her because she's beautiful: her talent and originality would draw wolf whistles if she were an 86-year-old hunchbacked troll.  And in Pessl's case, Nabokovian doesn't need scare quotes.  Her exhilaraing synthesis of the classic and the modern, frivolity and fate - "Pnin" meets "The O.C." - is a poetic act of will.  Never mind jealous detractors: virtuosity is its own reward.  And this skylarking book will leave readers salivating for more.

We've come to expect a certain amount of foolishness from the New York Times and we should probably be inured to this sort of thing by now.  But there's a bitterness in Schillinger's take that's hard to ignore.  (It's also hard to ignore the clumsy, breathless run-ons, but that isn't the focus of this post.)

This is the same sort of thing we've seen from John Freeman, a hostility toward and mistrust of blogs that seems to short-circuit the ability to reason soundly.  We've made no judgement yet on the book or the wisdom of the deal but it seems entirely sound and rational to challenge publishing for its slavish devotion to the young, the new and yes, the beautiful.  It's certainly wrong to assume as a default position that Pessl's book was not purchased on its merits.  But Schillinger displays a real absence of critical thinking here, allowing her obvious distaste for bloggers to obscure a larger and legitimate question. 

This is hardly an unsual position among mainstream reviewers and is likely to become more and more common.  Our own theory is that these reviewers are threatened by the growing profile of bloggers.  Certainly, as story after story suggests that "reviews don't sell books" and that word-of-mouth via blogs is more powerful, it's understandable that reviewers like Schillinger and Freeman would take a hostile and defensive view of blogs.  And as bloggers continue to enter the field as mainstream reviewers, they are sure to be shaken even further.

It's callow of Schillinger to suggest that envy and jealousy are the only possible motives for questioning whether a massive advance doled out to a 27-year-old actress is a sound business call.  Examining the motives of the deal is a fair question that she slights NYT readers by failing to engage.

For our part, we are content to let the book be the final arbiter, and we look forward to seeing for ourselves.  And we look to reviewers who are not working so hard to overcompensate for their own insecurities to provide us with more balanced perspectives.

DEPT OF NONSENSE: THE VOICE OF A GENERATION

We're not entirely sure what to make of Lev Grossman's "Who's the Voice of this Generation?" essay in Time.  He seems to be clinging desperately to his cake whilst shoveling in forkful after forkful ...

And yet: there's still no writer under 40 who makes you want to stand up in a crowded theater and shout, That right there is the voice of this generation, that is the yearning and the rage of the contemporary, embodied in some poor sad sack of a character who's mad as hell and just can't get no satisfaction. Every once in a while a novel comes along that makes everything else feel dated, that feels as current as tomorrow's e-mail, that gives readers the story of their own secret ineffable desperation with such immediacy that it induces spontaneous mass recognition as the Voice. Every once in a while--but not lately.

You can walk from the beginning of the 20th century, stepping safely from decade to decade, and find one writer after another anointed as the Voice. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, J.D. Salinger, Jack Kerouac, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis ... but once you get to Douglas Coupland (who published Generation X in 1991), the last novelist who on a moonless night could be taken for the V.O.A.G., the trail goes cold. Not quite abruptly--for a few twinkly, magical minutes interest swirled around Wallace, and Eggers (more for his memoir than his fiction), and Chuck Palahniuk--but, ultimately, definitively.

Our first impression was to call "bullshit" and to point out that this whole Voice of a Generation thing was a fairly meaningless distinction.  After all, to look at some of Grossman's examples, The Great Gatsby (which was scarcely lauded as the voice of a generation at the time - This Side of Paradise came much closer) was published in 1925.   The Sun Also Rises was published in 1926.  So who's the VOAG for the 20s?  Scott or Hem?  Jumping to the sixties, we got Slaughterhouse Five in 1969 and Catch-22 in 1961.  Eight years is still well within a generation, so again, who gets the nod?  And what to do with 80s wunderkinds McInerney and Ellis who published their debuts a year apart - Bright Lights, Big City in 1984 and Less Than Zero in 1985?  And what about, oh, Faulkner (20s) and Mailer (60s) and on and on and on ... and so the whole VOAG thing seems like a journalistic conceit or an academic puzzle.  But Grossman himself acknowledges this:

Or maybe there never was such an animal in the first place. The voice of a generation could just be a convenient fiction, propagated by academics looking for dissertation topics, publicists looking for publicity and (surely not) book critics looking for a headline. On some level it has always been an absurdity. Look at the heroes of the iconic books of those previous eras: Jake Barnes, Holden Caulfield, Dean Moriarty--bad seeds and square pegs, all of them. The paradox of every Voice novel is that it brings a generation of readers together around the idea that they alone are the single badass misfit truth teller in a world full of phonies.

So what are we to make of all this?  Grossman seems to, finally, be offering up yet another elegy to the lost power of the novel:

The fact is, a generation of readers will probably never again come together around a single book the way they did in the 20th century, when Holden Caulfield went looking for the ducks in Central Park. Those birds have flown. It's hard not to miss that old sense of unanimity. Even if it was a fiction, it was a pleasant, comforting one.

Again, we're not sure this ever really happened at all.  Grossman's generation might have embraced Catcher but it probably didn't have the same purchase with readers in Louisana.  We think the problem isn't with the form or with the century or with the age of authors.  As long as young novelists persist (as many, though not all do) in writing self-absorbed novels, shot through with narcissism disguised as detail, endlessly self-referential tomes on the angst of overprivileged, overeducated children, well, who can blame the public for tuning out?  And the novelists who engage bigger pictures - including many Grossman names, such as Lahiri, Smith, Krauss, Ali, Mitchell and Whitehead - will continue to draw the lion's share of attention they deserve.  But, finally, it just seems silly to us, the idea that any single writer can speak for an entire generation.  And Grossman sort of seems to acknowledge that - even as he also sort of seems to wish it were otherwise.

NOTES ON A SCANDAL

Having just finished Peter Carey's excellent new novel Theft, I would appear to be in the ideal position to weigh in on the recent contretemps surrounding the alleged depictions of his ex-wife in the novel.  However, I do say "appear" because it seems that it's not necessary to have read the book to find the essential – if understandable – wrongheadedness in this assertion:

"I think it is a misuse of literature. I don't think literature at that level should be used to settle scores. And I don't want to be portrayed as the horrendous woman of literature."

This argument that there's any proper "use" of literature is stillborn, if you believe, as I do, that art has absolutely no "use" or duty or obligation or responsibility to anyone or anything except unto itself.  Which is – ironically (or not) – one of the central themes of Theft, in which a painter engages in all sorts of reprehensible behavior in the name of art.  (One also wonders if the aggrieved ex-Mrs. Carey would consider, say, more flattering literary immortalizations as somehow more appropriate to literature's "use.")  So at the most basic level, one has to object to this stance.

But there are further grounds for objection.  Malcolm Gladwell's essay on plagiarism is being widely linked to in the wake of the Kaayva Viswanathan scandal but it's actually quite instructive in this case.  At one point, Gladwell writes about a character in a play based – perhaps a bit too closely, according to its subject – on a real life figure.  The woman in question objected to actions the character performed, for fear that these actions would be associated with her.  Gladwell's point:

It is easy to understand how shocking it must have been for Lewis to sit in the audience and see her "character" admit to that indiscretion. But the truth is that Lavery has every right to create an affair for Agnetha, because Agnetha is not Dorothy Lewis.

And "The Plaintiff" of Carey's novel is not Alison Summers.  She is a character in a novel, and even if she is modeled directly on Carey's ex-wife, she is still a fictional character in a novel.  I realize in these post-Frey days that distinction can sometimes be hard to make but there it is.  Summers married a novelist.  Even if he cut and pasted her into his book, she would surely have known that was a possibility – it goes with the territory, artists are notorious parasites.  The very title - Theft - can make this no clearer.  Either way, whether we find it tasteful and pleasant or not, he had every right to do so, however upsetting Summers might find it.

None of this precludes sympathy for Summers' distress.  But still there's more.  By going public in this fashion, Summers has ensured that the character in the book will now be read in precisely the fashion she fears.  I'm not in the NY gossip loop, and the particulars of the Carey/Summers marriage were entirely unknown to me until the day after I read the book.  And it never remotely occurred to me that Carey was mining his personal experience in any way (beyond the extent that all writers draw on their experiences) – because frankly most readers just don't care about authors' private lives.  Journalists and gossip columnists do but most readers simply want to read a good book.

It's worth noting that the character of "The Plaintiff" is on the periphery of the periphery of the book, nowhere near its central action, referred to perhaps a half dozen times.  The references are deeply scathing but they are also easy to dismiss giving the defective character of the narrator - he holds nearly everyone in similar contempt.  In fact, I assumed - given Butcher's awful behavior - that his wife's leaving him was entirely warranted.  But now Summers has ensured that few are likely to be able to enjoy that interpretation of the work.

Finally, the notion put forth in the Independent piece that because the character shares some superficial simiarities to Carey, he must be Carey, is just, well, plain stupid.  There's no more polite way of saying it:

But there are inescapable similarities between the book and Carey's own life. Its central character, Butcher Bones, is an artist born the same year and in the same town outside Melbourne, Australia. Their careers have taken them to Sydney, Tokyo and New York, but perhaps more crucially both have recently emerged from bitter divorces.

This is simply jejune reasoning.  Literature is filled with examples of characters who bear more than a passing resemblance to their creators but they are not their creators.  That's the game, taking something known, crafting it, layering it, shading it, changing it.   In his essay, Gladwell also talks about the question of transformation, about taking something from its source and turning it into something more.  That's what creating a work of art is, and that's what Carey has done with Theft.

What do you think?  Your comments are welcome and encouraged.

LET HE WHO IS WITHOUT SIN DO THE TALKING

We've been keeping quiet on the whole Frey business as we're well past exhaustion on the subject, but we're irked by Morgan Entrekin's comments in a recent New York Magazine piece.  Discussing Sean McDonald, Frey's editor, Entrekin says:

“I like Sean,” says Grove/Atlantic publisher Morgan Entrekin. “But he’s the one who’s closest with the author, and he’s the one who should be most skeptical of his claims. Isn’t that what a drug addict is an expert at, lying and dissembling?”

Hmm.  We're pretty sure that all writers are experts at lying and dissembling, which is pretty much the job description.  We assume Entrekin can personally vouch for the total veracity of all of the following titles, which come up in a "memoir" search of the Grove/Atlantic website:

Auto da Fay By Fay Weldon
The Autobiography of a Tibetan Monk By Palden Gyatso with Tsering Shakya Translated from the Tibetan by Tsering Shakya Foreword by His Holiness the Dalai Lama
The Cap By Roman Frister Translated from the Hebrew by Hillel Halkin
The Circle of Hanh By Bruce Weigl
Close to the Bone Edited by Laurie Stone Contributions by Jane Creighton, Jerry Stahl, Catherine Texier, Lois Gould, Laurie Stone, Phillip Lopate, Peter Trachtenberg and Terminator
Dark Wind By Gordon Chaplin
Daughter of the River By Hong Ying Translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt
The Devil That Danced on the Water By Aminatta Forna
The Dressing Station By Jonathan Kaplan
A Drink with Shane MacGowan By Shane MacGowan and Victoria Mary Clarke
Fortunate Son By Lewis Puller
Frankie's Place By Jim Sterba
The Fruitful Darkness By Joan Halifax
A House Unlocked By Penelope Lively
How I Became Hettie Jones By Hettie Jones
In My Family Tree By Sheila Siddle with Doug Cress Introduction by Jane Goodall
In the Deep Heart's Core By Michael Johnston Foreword by Robert Coles
A Joyful Noise By Deborah Weisgall
The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner Edited by Tim Flannery
A Little Pregnant By Linda Carbone and Ed Decker
My Traitor's Heart By Rian Malan
My War Gone By, I Miss It So By Anthony Loyd
Off to the Side By Jim Harrison
On a Wave By Thad Ziolkowski
Patient By Ben Watt
A Place to Stand By Jimmy Santiago
BacaSalam Pax By Salam Pax
The Sexual Life of Catherine M. By Catherine Millet Translated from the French by Adriana Hunter
Small Craft Advisory By Louis Rubin, Jr.
Stet By Diana Athill
Things You Get for Free By Michael McGirr
Uphill Walkers By Madeleine Blais
The Zanzibar Chest By Aidan Hartley

If he can, he's a better man than most.  If he can't, which we suspect is the case, he should, well, you know, get off his horse.  Are all his editors tasked to approach these titles in the manner he prescribes for others?  Has he verified that each of Catherine Millet's anal penetrations actually took place?  Unlikely.

A writer lied.  That's the whole story.  An editor acted in good faith.  The writer is suffering, deservedly, but it should stop there.  Time to let the blood lust cool down a bit.

NEW KID IN TOWN

Check out the latest entry to the blogosphere, MextaxuCafe which plans to "[highlight] the best content from the community of bloggers who write about books."  Brought to the from the fine minds behind Chekhov's Mistress.  Poke around, it's a worthy bookmark.

SHORT AND SWEET

Everyone's reporting on the arrival of Hunger's Brides, the latest 1300+ page behemoth demanding your precious reading hours.  Both Scott and Ed make the case for these backbreakers but we're decidedly more suspicious.  Ever since Infinite Jest waddled onto the literary scene, bloat puts us immediately on guard, and we cast a wary eye on writers who seem either to feel that (a) heft equals Significance (See: Vollmann, William T)  or (b) that their every blessed thought is too important to deny.  More often than not, we find ourselves wading through authorial self-importance that would have been immeasurably strengthened by some judicious hacking.

This is not to say we're of gnatlike attention span.  We enjoy a Big Serious Read as much as the next guy.  But if you're going to try to pin us down for 1300 pages, you damn well better have a really good reason for demanding our time.  If you do, we'll love and you tout you at the top of our lungs.  If you don't, you're kindling.  Lots of kindling, as it turns out ...

As far as Hunger's Brides itself goes, we did look over an early copy and judged it not for us.  But the book is gaining steam with the independent scene and, like other books that we didn't quite embrace - Jonathan Strange and Dr. Norrell leaps first to mind - it's likely to find an appreciative audience out there.

IN WHICH HEROES STUMBLE

MONDAY UPDATE: The comments thread on this one continues to draw interesting and thoughtful perspectives, so we're leaving it here in pole position for one more day ... especially since we rode a 50-mile ride Sunday and are still working on our LATBR Thumbnail.

(A more personal, first person post as we greet the weekend ... See you Monday with the LATBR and more.)

The current issue of the London Review of Books includes James Wood’s review of Nicole Krauss’ novel The History of Love.  Regular readers of this page are well aware of my immoderate enthusiasm for Wood’s criticism.  The appearance of this review, however, presented a mild quandary.  I am presently dead smack in the middle of The History of Love and am enjoying it.  But it’s clear from title of Wood’s review – “Tides of Treacle” – that his take was likely to be unkind.  So what to do?  Could I count on my independence of mind to hold strong against Wood’s opinions?  Or would I sheepishly fall into line with his reading?  Or could I just leave the review aside until finishing the book?

I’m not known for my patience or discipline and prospect of a new Wood review proved irresistible to me – a prospect I admit was strangely heightened by the likelihood of disagreement.  So, I read his review and – just to prove to you all that I’m not so slavish that I can’t take issue with my literary heroes – I’m here to say that I think Wood gets it more or less wrong.  Yes, you read that right.

This isn’t to say that I disagree with everything Wood says.  Yes, Krauss can be cloying at turns and she sometimes takes the whole enterprise a bit too far, not knowing when to leave well enough alone – there is no “less is more” in The History of Love; it’s a “more is more” kind of read.  But this isn’t Wood’s core objection.  The online review is only available to LRB subscribers but I reprint what I consider to be the crux of his problem with the book  in three excerpts below:

*

Krauss fervently believes that Gursky is Jewish. But he is not Jewish. He is a literary idea of Jewish. He is the pampered notion, the precious dream, of his overdetermined literary parentage, all the Singer and Babel that Krauss has been reading. Gursky looks out of the window: ‘Maybe I was contemplating the sky. Put even a fool in front of the window and you’ll get a Spinoza.’ No one talks like this in real life, unless they are impersonating an idea of how people talk in Singer’s tales. Interestingly, the novel often registers its uncertainty in such passages, wobbling between claiming its over-explicit Jewishness and wanting to disown, or at least to ironise, that Jewishness. The book tries to be knowing about the Jewishness it is most earnestly in thrall to.

*

This is minstrelsy, pure and simple; it is an insult to Jewishness (the test of the insult is to imagine it written by a gentile; or imagine an equivalent piece of nonsense about an octogenarian African American – tap-dancing, say, or hysterically singing along to Marvin Gaye – written by a white writer). It is difficult to know where to begin. First, like almost everything Gursky does or wants to do or tells us he has done, it seems deeply untrue: the old man danced until dawn, did he? Until his feet were raw and bloody? And dawn found him lying prostrate on the floor? Yeah, yeah. Then there is the characteristic arc of the passage, as it guns for its target of sentiment – that incredible ‘L’chaim’ that closes the paragraph. And then there is the desperate groundlessness of the writing, as on the one hand it bathes in its overwrought ethnicity and on the other seems to want to cleanse itself by turning that self-indulgence into awkward self-parody, into something out of Fiddler on the Roof.

*

Repeatedly, the reader comes to the end of passages in this book and intones to himself (in Alma-ish block capitals): I DON’T BELIEVE YOU. In life, alas, one’s uncle never does wistfully hang over one’s bed at three in the morning with a single charming question. But in a made-for-TV film this is exactly what happens. I don’t believe Krauss when she tells me that Alma’s mother was at Oxford, where her tutor ‘slept under a pile of papers’, since it’s rather hard to sleep under a pile of papers; the image is something out of Harry Potter – or, if one is being charitable, Dickens. And I don’t believe Krauss when she tells me about Alma’s trip to Israel for her Bat Mitzvah, where her grandparents, Bubbe and Zeyde, look after her. At the Dead Sea, Bubbe appraises Alma: ‘You don’t have a bosom? Vat happened?’ At the Wailing Wall, grandmother and granddaughter place their prayers in the cracks of the bricks. Alma’s prayer, she tells us, is addressed to her late father. Once her grandmother has walked away, Alma sneaks a glance at her prayer: ‘Baruch Hashem, I and my husband should live to see tomorrow and that my Alma should grow up to be blessed with health and happiness and what would be so terrible some nice breasts.’ Bubbe is no more real than anyone else in this book, merely a coarse version of fat Auntie Bobka in Babel’s Odessa stories. (Also, wouldn’t her prayer be in Hebrew or Yiddish, languages incomprehensible to Alma? Why, then, this stagey, absurdly ‘Jewish’ English?)

*

"No one talks like this in real life” … “ deeply untrue” … “I DON’T BELIEVE YOU” … Certainly, Wood’s devotion to realism comes as no surprise to anyone who's read his reviews.  (Carrie and I both noted similarities between this review and his review of Zadie Smith’s The Autograph Man.)  But here he seems to extend his initial objections to what he calls “hysterical realism” to another (perhaps) inevitable level – and although I’m very sympathetic to his HR arguments (which strike me as being essentially about noise), this newest point (belief and plausibility) is where we finally diverge.

For Wood, realism is clearly the novel’s sine qua non – note his devotion to Chekhov’s stories.  This is a passion that I certainly share – I’ve written as much here before.  But I’m content to give novels a wider latitude.  I don’t necessarily mind if characters do not always behave as one might in real life – provided that they still observe some sort of internal logic within the world of a particular novel.  (And in this regard, perhaps comparing The History of Love to Jeanette Winterson’s early books – The Passion and Sexing the Cherry in particular – would have been more instructive than drawing a line back to her husband, something even Wood is unable to resist.  Speaking of married writers, what sort of arguments do you suppose unfolded over the dinner table in the Messud/Woode abode, given that she wrote a positive review of the same book for the LA Weekly.)  The obvious term that comes to mind is "willing suspension of disbelief" (something Wood seems reluctant to embrace, perhaps understandably given his literary preoccupations), and I am willing to place myself in skilled hands – and I find that at the halfway mark, I'm quite comfortable in Krauss'.  Further, following Wood’s formulation, one begins to think of numerous novels – great novels – in which people do not act or talk as “in real life” … What would become of One Hundred Years of Solitude … The Master and Margarita … Surely, a case can even be argued against Wood’s beloved Don Quixote?

There’s more.  Wood raises the legitimate question of sentimentality and, again, Krauss is scarcely without fault here.  But for every mawkish note she strikes, there is a balancing supply of graceful prose.   (Perhaps the best test is whether you find a line like "Her kiss was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering" moving or sentimental.)  As someone who has decried the chilly emotional terrain of much contemporary fiction – and as someone writing a book that surely has the potential to lapse into sentiment – Wood’s essay does leave me wondering about precisely how (and whether) sentiment should figure in The Novel.  On the one hand, I’ve been a vocal admirer of Andrew Sean Greer’s The Confessions of Max Tivoli – which many have taken (probably not without reason) to be quite a sentimental book.  On the other hand, how likely is one to say they’ve been moved by, say, David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion?  One imagines this comes down to matters of personal preference - as a reader, I do seek to be moved, even as I remain alive to the traps of sentiment that are cheap and easy and, worst of all, manipulative.

I’m curious what other readers think.  Where does emotion cross the line and become sentimentality?   What’s the place of all of this in today’s contemporary fiction landscape?  When I interviewed Andrew Greer, I told him that writing an old-fashioned heartfelt book might be the most radical thing a young novelist can do today.  Wood’s review raises its usual interesting points, and though I disagree this time, I’m curious to know what you think – How “real” does it have to be?  How much heart is too much?

The comments field awaits you.

JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER - A DEFENSE

I step briefly into the first person now, a move reserved for more personal posts.

It's been a week since the Jonathan Safran Foer profile appeared in the New York Times Magazine.  I've watched the ensuing spew of bitterness, both in the blogosphere and in the MSM, with increasing disgust, and although Foer certainly doesn't need me to defend him, it seemed well past time to offer the other side of things.

Personally, I liked his first book.  A lot.  I thought it unraveled a bit by the end but it was clear to me that he had talent to burn and he was someone to watch.

I've tried to understand the backlash that's followed his success but every way I parse the reaction it comes down to the two things.

It's entirely possible that he's being punished for the misfortune of having been profiled by the World's Worst Journalist, Deborah Solomon.  But I'm putting my money on the jealousy factor.  His critics brush this one off but it's not so easily swept aside.  Have his two books been overpaid for?  Probably.  But why should he be punished for having either (a) a good agent, (b) a spendthrift publisher or (c) a combination of both?

These critics say it has nothing to do with his earnings but it's rather that they find his persona obnoxious, too eager to please, self-absorbed.  (In keeping with the best of fatwa traditions, many of these critics admit to having read little more than excerpts of his work.)  More obnoxious than the likes of Chuck Palahniuk?  Neal Pollack?  The great grandaddy of obnoxious, Tom Wolfe?  Or perhaps the most self-absorbed writer working today, Steve Almond?  I'm sure you could think of four of your own for this list.  But do any of these writers receive a fraction of the same enmity?  No.  Most distasteful is that even among his fiercest critics, there's no shortage of earnest self-absorption.

So why the visceral loathing?  Too successful, too soon.  How dare he?

But all told, I think the jealousy part is the smaller side of the equation.  The worst thing I can say about Foer is he sometimes comes off a bit earnestly, and I think he is being punished excessively for that.  He hasn't succumbed to the glib post-modernism or cheap, kitschy irony that seems to be the most favored weapon in the MFA arsenal these days (and here I should note that I've never met a single MFA who has anything nice to say about him, buttressing the jealousy argument).  I'm reminded of David Foster Wallace's recent comment at the Hammer reading, where he expressed a terror of "doing things straight" and it's this lamentable coolness that's made such an inhospitable literary landscape for so many of us who prefer our fiction a bit deeper than Eggers Arid or a bit livelier than The Tea Towel School (another MFA chestnut). 

Along comes Foer and he's got the (over)eagerness of youth (we all had it once, even those same MFAs before they were trained that it isn't cool to feel or, at least, to admit to feeling), and if his biggest crime is enthusiasm and an overly sincere nature, well, once again I ask - How dare he?  (Personally, I wish I still had the energy to fire off a hundred plus emails to anyone, and can remember a not-to-distant time when I did.)

Seriously, folks, you make yourself look bitter, petty and small with your ceaseless Foer-bashing.  I find myself wishing that the lettered classes could aim the discourse a bit higher, our better angels and all that.  Perhaps that's Foer-esquely naive of me to wish for, but there it is.  One can only hope that he doesn't allow the cynicism and bitterness out there to beat the life and light out of him before he really has the chance to get going.

Because I'm still watching him.  And I happen to be rooting for him.

TEV REPORT: DAVID FOSTER WALLACE READING

So, I'm back from the David Foster Wallace reading at the Armand Hammer Museum and have been fairly besieged by those wanting to know my opinion of it.

I found Wallace to have a winning personality – he's a charming reader, a gracious interviewee and a funny guy. He also strikes me as a total chameleon – no two of his publicity photos seem to resemble the other, and the guy on stage last night – who looked like a husky, genial if unassuming customer service rep at Circuit City – looked nothing like the photo advertising the event. (Unfortunately, the photo Nazis at the Hammer wouldn't let me photograph once he was onstage. The best I have is a brief video of him putting away a rambling questioner.)

And I still don't care for his fiction much.

I do admit to having felt a bit out of place at the reading, which was clearly peopled with acolytes and groupies. As we lined up in the courtyard, Wallace could be heard testing the sound system (wryly imitating Dubya, speaking of "hard work") and I watched the Wallaceites look up eagerly, grasping every vatic utterance.

He does seem to attract an army of misfits, geek chic without the chic. I was struck by two observations: first, that I was, by a considerable margin, among the oldest of the attendees; second, that the audience all looked the same. It did feel at moments rather like having crashed a meeting of a scary cult. (The wool-capped young man sitting beside was particularly anxiety inspiring, as he thumbed through a notebook containing page after page of microscopic notes written in pencil – which did spark the terrifying thought that the scribblings of a Wallace wannabee might actually make me long for the genuine article.)

The rock star/rock concert feel of the whole thing was underscored by the usual late start (when are folks going to get it together and start on time?), and once Mona Simpson got her introductions out of the way, Wallace took the stage. He read from two works – one was a section of a brand new piece; the second was part of a story from Oblivion entitled Incarnations of Burned Children (which he warned in advance had a tendency to upset people).