September 17, 2013
My review ran in the Miami Herald on 9/15/13. I wasn’t really crazy about it. I suspect Coetzee will get over it.
Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee’s latest novel reads a bit like a fable. It’s one of those books that withholds meaning at every turn and invites the reader to make of it what she will. Looking for clues in the author’s biography is tempting but foolhardy, but admirers of the novels Elizabeth Costello or Disgrace or the superb In the Heart of the Country will not be surprised to learn that the South African-born Coetzee has written what amounts to a doctoral dissertation on the absurdist master Samuel Beckett.
In Coetzee’s fiction, the absurdity can often be found in the large and small indignities of everyday life. The Childhood of Jesus is about a middle-aged man named Simón who is looking after a young boy called David, but that may not be his real name. They met on the boat ferrying them over to a Spanish-speaking land called Novilla, where there are recent exiles. David has lost the information he carried about his mother, and Simón has promised to help him, although neither of them knows her name or what she looks like.
David, who is estimated to be 5, is in many ways an unusual child. He pretends that he doesn’t know how to read and invents his own language that only he can understand. Simón takes a job as a stevedore at the docks and hands over David to a strange woman named Inés, who refuses to let him go to school but is also incapable of educating him herself.
Beyond that, not much happens. David becomes obsessed by the idea of death. People bicker. Eventually Simón comes to a revelation about the boy: “For the first time it occurs to him that this may be not just a clever child — there are many clever children in the world — but something else, something for which at this moment he lacks the word.”
Fictional characters do not have to be likable, of course, but they shouldn’t all be annoying either. None of these characters is sympathetic or even, despite the promise of the title, which is never fully borne out, all that interesting. David’s pretty much a brat even if we are to believe he’s something like the Son of God. And Simón is prone to excess philosophizing. “ ‘I have not let go of the idea of history, the idea of change without beginning or end. Ideas cannot be washed out of us, not even by time. Ideas are everywhere. The universe is instinct with them. Without them there would be no universe, for there would be no being.’ ” There’s a lot of this sort of thing.
Perhaps the novel is meant to be taken as an extended allegory about mankind’s inability to understand the divine, or something along those lines. Good luck with that. Over a long and tremendous career, Coetzee has proven to be an absolute master of explicating what makes us human. Unfortunately, though, things didn’t quite work out this time around. The Childhood of Jesus is an indulgent and meandering novel of Big Ideas and sadly little heart.
September 9, 2013
My review of Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon ran in the Philadelphia Inquirer on Sunday Sept. 8, 2013.
Thomas Pynchon is best known for his aversion to publicity.
It’s a bit of a shame, considering he has written at least one indelible classic in Gravity’s Rainbow, a National Book Award winner that must be mentioned in any serious discussion of the Great American Novel. Personally, I’m equally fond of his Mason & Dixon, which is in some ways even better. The fact that he has stayed out of the public eye for so many decades has, ironically, focused popular attention on his supposedly enigmatic persona instead of where it belongs: on an oeuvre without equal in contemporary American letters.
Pynchon’s potboiling and masterful new novel, Bleeding Edge, is set in New York City and takes place after the late-’90s dot-com crash. It also stands as one of the few novels with something of real substance to add to our national discourse about the attacks of 9/11. Our hero, or I suppose heroine, is one Maxine Tarnow, a recently unlicensed fraud investigator snooping around the suspicious goings-on in Silicon Alley, which, you might recall, was Lower Manhattan’s tech corridor. When it comes to getting her job done, Maxine doesn’t feel particularly bound to such trivialities as law and order:
“Since going rogue, Maxine has acquired a number of software kits, courtesy of less reputable clients, which have bestowed on her superpowers not exactly falling with Generally Accepted Accounting Practices, such as thou shalt not hack into anybody’s bank account, thou shalt leave that sort of thing for the FBI.”
When she goes snooping into the affairs of a new billionaire and his computer-security company, she sets off a series of events that gives Pynchon every opportunity to write a love letter to his home city. He holds the tragedy and comedy in perfect balance. In one of the more chilling scenes, Horst Loeffler, Maxine’s former and perhaps future husband – she calls him her “sort of ex” and her “quasi ex-husband” – and their kids are enjoying a pleasant lunch at the Windows on the World restaurant in the World Trade Center:
“There happens to be a more-than-moderate wind blowing that day, making the tower sway back and forth in five-, what feel like ten-foot excursions. On days of storm, according to Horst’s cotenant Jake Pimento, it’s like being in the crow’s nest of a very tall ship, allowing you to look down at helicopters and private planes and neighboring high-rises. ‘Seems kind of flimsy up here,’ to Ziggy.
‘Nah,’ sez Jake, ‘built like a battleship.'”
Their obliviousness to the national battles that are about to begin feels both liberating and heartbreaking. It’s an era of addiction to oil “gradually converging with the other national bad habit, inability to deal with refuse.” And, indeed, Maxine ends up at one point at a landfill: “toxicity central, the dark focus of Big Apple waste disposal, everything the city has rejected so it can keep on pretending to be itself.”
Although Bleeding Edge puts to use many tools of the gumshoe noir genre, the tone – which I take as a kind of bemused nostalgia for newly outmoded technologies – owes as much to The Big Lebowski as to The Big Sleep. Pynchon remains the funniest novelist in America. Maxine’s work takes her undercover – or uncovered – in a strip club. A venture-capital firm goes by the name Voorhees, Krueger after the villains of two mostly terrible slasher movies. The riff on shopping at IKEA alone is worth the price of the book.
At the same time, however, the description of 9/11’s aftermath will halt your breath:
“The plume of smoke and finely divided structural and human debris has been blowing southwest, toward Bayonne and Staten Island, but you can smell it all the way uptown. A bitter chemical smell of death and burning that no one in memory has ever in this city smelled before and which lingers for weeks. Though everybody south of 14th Street has been directly touched one way or another, for much of the city, the experience has come to them mediated, mostly by television.”
The combination of intellectual bravura and crude slapstick is vintage Thomas Pynchon, as is his characters’ mostly justified paranoia about the secret systems governing their day-to-day lives. He is not afraid to tell it like he sees it:
“This was nowhere near a Soviet nuclear strike on downtown Manhattan, yet those who repeat ‘Ground Zero’ over and over do so without shame or concern for etymology. The purpose is to get people cranked up in a certain way. Cranked up, scared, and helpless.”
Line by line, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, Bleeding Edge reveals the workings of an uncommonly humane thinker and uniquely American voice working at the peak of his talents.
August 19, 2013
My interview with Jeff Jackson ran on Tin House’s web site on 8/19/13. New debut novel Mira Corpora is absolutely terrific.
“It’s difficult to say what I might be up to,” the narrator of Jeff Jackson’s debut novel Mira Corpora tells us. His name is also Jeff Jackson. “These days I’m on a need-to-know basis with myself.” Identity and the impossibility of knowing one’s self provide many of the thematic resonances here. Mira Corpora is a beautiful and intense book, a grim and grimy fever dream in the shape of the fictional autobiography; it’s arranged in four sections beginning when the narrator is six years old and carrying us through a series of events that make Dolores Haze’s teenage years feel like an episode of “Leave it to Beaver.”
A brief and perhaps fictional author’s note, informs us that “This novel is based on journals I kept growing up” and “ Sometimes it’s been difficult to tell my memories from my fantasies, but that was true even then.” The plot can’t be summarized any more than one’s life could, but for the sake of context I’ll mention that there is a mesmerizing episode involving a society of runaway children led by a teenage oracle, a cassette tape that might or might not call to mind certain elements of Infinite Jest, and a take-no-prisoners writing style that made me read the entire book in one sitting.
I’ve never met Jackson, but in 2010 he included my short story “Meatland” in a terrific anthology he edited,Topograph: New Writing from the Carolinas – And the Landscape Beyond (Novello Festival Press). He answered a few questions from his home in Charlotte via email in late July and early August.
Andrew Ervin: I hate this question, sorry, but it’s one that I’ve been thinking a lot about since I started reading Vollmann years ago. It came up again recently while reading Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? and Kyle Minor’s forthcoming story collection Praying Drunk. Can you please explain the relationship between the “Jeff Jackson” described in this novel and the construction you think of yourself as.
Jeff Jackson: The most fundamental distinction – but one that isn’t made often enough – is that one Jeff is flesh-and-blood and the other is made up entirely of words. Really, we’re not even the same species! Also, this is a novel and not a memoir. The character Jeff shares some of my biography while other aspects were partly or wholly invented, or borrowed from friends and acquaintances. I’m wary about going into too many specifics because it’s ultimately beside the point. Hopefully the novel is convincing on its own terms, even when you encounter something extreme like, say, burning a strangled corpse on a pyre in the woods. Overall, I was less concerned about the character sharing my literal experiences than making sure there was an emotional honesty underlying everything. Originally, I didn’t even want to call the protagonist Jeff. But as the novel evolved, I came to know the character so well that he earned the right to my name.
AE: What was the most difficult part of writing Mira Corpora? Was your background in drama useful? Was it an impediment?
JJ: The hardest part was finding the right structure. I went through countless drafts and even created an entirely separate version of the novel – there was a steep learning curve. Basically, I was too ambitious about how many things the novel could accomplish at once. I ended up cutting over 100 pages of polished material and radically rearranged the rest. For instance, the last chapter of the novel was originally the book’s opening.
My drama background was helpful because I was used to a long gestation process. We often create plays over several years of intensive rehearsal and I’ve picked up tricks for working through seeming dead-ends. I trusted that eventually I’d find the right form for this story. However, my theater experience also led me to expect the material would intuitively shape itself more than it did. Somehow I managed to forget how the physical presence of the actors plays an important role in making fragmented material and tonal shifts cohere for an audience. Of course you don’t have that in fiction, so I had to find other ways to make that happen and be more intentional about streamlining everything.
AE: Speaking of theater, what makes Wallace Shawn so fucking great? How has his work affected your own?
JJ: Oh man, it’ll be a total pleasure to answer that! I could writes pages about the Godlike Genius of Wallace Shawn! It always amazes me that one of America’s greatest writers is still best known for his role in The Princess Bride. Most people picture Shawn as this avuncular homunculus and approach his plays like they’re popping a cork from a champagne bottle when really they’re pulling a pin from a grenade. I love how his work tackles extreme material in sophisticated ways. It’s simultaneously wildly imaginative, morally challenging, and bare-knuckled in terms of its impact. And politically, his plays shred the well-heeled liberal ideas that so many people (like me) often take for granted and expose the well-meaning hypocrisy behind them.
I admire how each play takes fresh risks and his latest, Grasses of a Thousand Colors, is his most startling yet. It’s a truly visionary work that mixes dystopian nightmare, anthropomorphic fairy tale, and sexual fantasia – and that description hardly does justice to both its strangeness and haunting familiarity. I’ve always been fascinated by the innovative way Shawn structures his material – unusual gambits like the blistering barrage of obscenity that opens Marie and Bruce and the endless party scenes that comprise most of that play. But the biggest inspiration has been how he trusts his audiences to register the nuances of his highly-charged material and to navigate the ambiguity of his complicated texts. His best work grants audiences the maximum freedom of interpretation – something I’ve strived to do with Mira Corpora.
AE: Are you suggesting that there’s political commentary at work in Mira Corpora?
JJ: You may be sorry you asked! I’ll just need to get my tinfoil hat properly situated to answer this one. People like to say “the personal is political” and I’m starting to think that prose style is political, too. So much commercial and even literary fiction works hard to fill in details for the reader and stage manage their experience of the story. So-called good prose is engineered to ensure you glide effortlessly over its surface without significant disruption. It’s part of a trend of passive consumption throughout the culture. Our critical skills are eroding and we need them more than ever in this era of information overload, nonstop marketing, and political doublespeak.
I believe readers should have to actively forge their own interpretations. Maybe this used to be the norm, but over the past decade I’ve seen how writing that takes away readers’ signposts is often marginalized as “experimental.” Literature is falling prey to the phenomenon Mark Fisher calls “Capitalist Realism.” He argues the atmosphere of the marketplace has become so pervasive that artists unconsciously curtail their imaginations to conform to what they expect will sell. Our language should strive to resist these forces. William S. Burroughs was more aware of this than most political writers – he employed his cut-ups because he saw language itself as a control mechanism that needed to be disrupted.
This might sound like I’m in favor of fiction that’s stern and self-serious, but it’s the opposite. I worked hard to make Mira Corporaenjoyable, imaginative, and unpredictable – it’s just that navigating the dislocations and ambiguities are a key part of its pleasures.
AE: Turning to another medium, who would be the perfect filmmaker to direct a cinematic adaptation?
JJ: I’m a huge cinephile – I’ve been known to blow off work and family to catch screenings of rare Rivette and Suzuki films – so this should be a tough question. But in my fantasies, there’s only one filmmaker for Mira Corpora: Harmony Korine. I’ve been a fan of his work since I saw Gummo during its opening week. He’s peerless at creating moments that are funny, disgusting, terrifying, tender, and incredibly beautiful all at once – without wrapping them in some moral or simplifying their confusion. There’s a lyricism to his work that isn’t like anybody else. Prose style is somewhat analogous to cinematography in my mind and I thought a lot about Harmony’s visual aesthetic while I was writing Mira Corpora. He’s artful without being precious, without calling attention to his techniques. I’m pretty sure Spring Breakers has vaulted him well beyond my book, but I can always dream.
AE: In a blurb, Don DeLillo said of Mira Corpora, “I hope the book finds the serious readers who are out there waiting for this kind of fiction to hit them in the face.” In practical terms, are there any substantial—or transubstantial—distinctions between a divine benediction and a glowing blurb from Don DeLillo?
JJ: Not as far as I’m concerned! When a handwritten note from him appeared in my mailbox, I had to walk around the block a few times until it started to feel real. I was lucky to discover DeLillo’s fiction when I was young – starting with The Names which blew my mind – and I’ve read everything he’s written. I get more out of one of his lesser books than a so-called masterpiece by someone like John Updike. For the penetrating scope of his vision and chiseled power of his prose, he’s a sort of gold standard. Being older and toiling away with little encouragement, I always took inspiration from the fact that DeLillo got published later in life and was skeptical anything would come of his work. His praise is also special because he’s basically stopping giving blurbs. I really appreciate that he’s been kind enough to let me use his words to promote the novel. The fact that I’ve received praise from both him and Dennis Cooper – another favorite writer – well, damn, it’s one of those things I wish I could relay to my younger self during those periods when I stopped writing for months at a stretch and seriously considered tossing my computer off a bridge.
August 16, 2013
My review of Darby Larson’s Irritant (Blue Square Press) was published on The Rumpus on 8/15/13. Here’s an excerpt:
Larson has effectively opened up the field of possibility for how characterization can work. What makes a novel like Irritant so exciting—not that there are many novels like Irritant—is it widens the range of narrative possibility to include both information and exformation. The effect is absurd and maddening and intoxicating. The book doesn’t make sense in any traditional ways, and that’s entirely the point here. Or one of them.
August 5, 2013
I had the enormous pleasure of writing about my obsession with Star Wars toys for Salon. It’s my dream job to write an officially licensed Star Wars book or even, failing that, a history of the Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire, inspired by Edward Gibbon.
Here’s an excerpt:
As Sansweet writes, “By the time the last of what we now call ‘vintage’ Kenner figures worked their way through stores worldwide in 1985, about a quarter of a billion of them had been sold.” In her book “Glittering Images,” the theorist Camille Paglia points out that the enormous success of those toys — the official, licensed ones, I mean — is in part why many art historians have not yet fully embraced “Star Wars.” “[George] Lucas’s massive product licensing and merchandising tie-in, which he presciently negotiated with studio executives who saw little future in them, made him a billionaire,” she writes, “but his phenomenal success as a shrewd businessman has certainly slowed his recognition as a major artist.”
That is the art world’s loss. The extent to which those toys opened up so many young imaginations is the same extent to which Lucas remains unappreciated by so many of the self-styled gatekeepers of Art. Those of us who know better appreciate that the Star Wars universe constitutes one of the indelible mythic creations of our time, and some of us even have the toys to prove it.
