July 31, 2013
I’ve been a contributing editor at the new Philadelphia Review of Books for a few months now. It has been a real learning experience, but the most rewarding part has been seeing so many up-and-coming writers starting to find their voices.
This (unpaid) gig has given me a new appreciation for how hard it is to put together a good review section. We’re still working on improving the diversity of books assigned and of the thinkers we’re assigning them to. The VIDA essay I wrote for The Rumpus a little while ago signaled the beginning of some good improvements, I hope. Just to give an idea of what we’ve been up to so far, I’ve chosen a few personal favorites from the many, many excellent essays we’ve published.
Malcolm Bates, “Precious Cargo”
Report from Sardinia, 3/6/13
Christopher Breu, “Unfinished Revolution”
Review of the videogame Bioshock Infinite (2K Games, 2013), 7/11/13
Brittany Harmon, “What We Want to See”
Review of the novel Equilateral by Ken Kalfus (Bloomsbury USA, 2013), 5/6/13
Max Marin, “The Heart is Something Extra”
Review of the novel Irritant by Darby Larsen (Blue Square Press, 2013), 6/20/13
Susan Scutti, “Revelation in Contemporary African Art and Fiction”
Review of the novel Submergence by J.M. Ledgard and the exhibition Jane Alexander: Surveys, 6/19/13
Joshua Sicard, “Pain in the Old Man’s Hands”
Interview with Matthew Beard, author of the Dungeons & Dragons novel “The Last Garrison” (Wizards of the Coast, 2011), 6/13/13
July 28, 2013
My review of The Letters of William Gaddis ran in my hometown Philadelphia Inquirer on 7/28/13.
The Letters of William Gaddis
Edited by Steven Moore
Afterword by Sarah Gaddis
Dalkey Archive Press. 545 pp. $34.50.
Unless you’re a pope, canonization is a slow and ugly process. When William Gaddis published his magisterial debut novel The Recognitions in 1955, it was reviled by the shortsighted literary critics of the time and considered obscene. Of course, the same had been said about Moby-Dick and Ulysses, two novels that are now undisputed classics. You know a book has caught on when the mayor shows up once a year to help read it aloud at the Rosenbach Museum and Library.
In hindsight, it’s clear that The Recognitions is among the greatest American novels of all time. That book ends – spoiler alert! – with a terrible tragedy in an old church. Of the organist trapped inside, Gaddis wrote:
“He was the only person caught in the collapse, and afterward, most of his work was recovered too, and it is still spoken of, when it is noted, with high regard, though seldom played”
Gaddis’ novels have suffered a similar fate. They have earned a small cadre of loyal and rabid devotees, but perhaps because of their perceived difficulty, they have yet to gain a foothold with a broad reading public and are seldom read.
It will happen, though. These things take time. In the meanwhile, we happy few who already love these books have The Letters of William Gaddis, a selection that, according to editor Steven Moore, amounts to “less than a quarter of his extant correspondence.” (It’s worth disclosing that Moore and I have had some personal and professional contact over the years.)
William Gaddis was born in New York City in 1922. By the time he died in 1998, he had written The Recognitions and four other novels: J R (1975), Carpenter’s Gothic (1985), A Frolic of His Own (1994), and the posthumously published Agape Agape (2002). Two of those – J R and A Frolic of His Own – won the National Book Award, which attests to the well-deserved critical respect, if not popular success, that Gaddis was afforded later in life. This welcome selection of his personal correspondence gives us a look behind the scenes of a great artist’s life and career.
The earliest letters here date from the early 1930s, and they get particularly interesting when Gaddis enrolls at Harvard University in 1941. It would be a short stay, due to an episode involving public drunkenness, and upon his departure his adventures began in earnest. He was sailing through the Panama Canal on his way to California when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.
Gaddis’ many jobs throughout his life included wrangling horses, installing a pipeline in the Mississippi River, fact-checking at the New Yorker, and writing for a U.S. State Department publication in Iran. He went to Costa Rica to join a short-lived revolution in 1948, then lived in Europe for a while, and Mexico, and all the while sent letters to his mother, Edith, asking her to send clothes or books.
Some of his most fascinating letters were to the writer Katherine Anne Porter. In one sent from the Canal Zone in 1948, he describes himself as
“one of the thousands of Harvard boys who never learned a trade, and are writing novels furiously with both hands. In order to avoid the mental waste (conversation &c.) that staying in New York imposes, I am here working on a crane on the canal and writing the inevitable novel at night.”
Letters to the novelist David Markson and to his children Matthew and my friend Sarah, also a novelist, are often erudite and touching in equal measure. In 1982, he wrote to a friend:
“Surely in a world like this one, integrity, if only a shred of it, is the only thing left, & there’s even something to be said for obscurity.”
There could be no better summary for what Gaddis accomplished on the page.
In his introduction, Moore acknowledges that some readers might find his own first-person annotations “intrusive and self-serving.” I did not find them terribly so, but it’s true that Charles Kinbote’s commentary on John Shade’s poem Pale Fire in the Nabokov novel did come to mind. Moore also writes that “the chief value of these letters is not their documentation of a colorful life but their revelation of how chaotic the composition of Gaddis’ novels were.” It’s a good lesson for any struggling artist.
The Letters of William Gaddis won’t help The Recognitions or A Frolic of His Own or J R (my personal favorite) gain new admirers, nor is it intended to. It is, however, a welcome book for those of us who want to learn of the financial, legal, and marital challenges Gaddis faced while writing what is without question some of the most profound – if still seldom read – literature of the 20th century.
July 15, 2013
My review of Lea Carpenter’s novel Eleven Days ran in the San Francisco Chronicle on 7/14/13.
“Throughout the relatively short history of our great nation, we’ve proved ourselves to be a warring people. Warfare has inspired some of our greatest literature, from Whitman’s poems about the Civil War to the rapidly expanding shelf of books dedicated to the Overseas Contingency Operation (once known as the Global War on Terror). Lea Carpenter’s debut novel, Eleven Days, tells a story that is at once timeless and also grounded in the very real vicissitudes brought about by current events.”
[…]
“Eleven Days raises another hugely valuable point. It’s a source of national shame, I believe, that even in wartime those of us here on the home front can stroll so blithely through our days without much thought to the women and men serving overseas. The current war is a mere abstraction to so many of us; it’s happening somewhere else. Eleven Days could very well help to close the gap between those families who are making tremendous sacrifices on behalf of the nation and those of us who are benefiting from them.”
June 25, 2013
I’m told that my review of Dossier K ran a few weeks ago in the Miami Herald, but I never saw it online so I’m pasting my unedited file here. It may differ from the published version. I’m not sure.
Imre Kertész is one of those rare authors, like George Orwell or Franz Kafka, whose work is so insightful about the sinister threats made against the human condition that his name should be used as an adjective. Kertészian fiction is often characterized by philosophical complexity, close attention to childhood trauma, the psychic scars that remain from the Holocaust, and it always seems to possess an air of autobiography. In 2002, he won the Nobel prize for fiction that “upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history.”
The Hungarian author’s best-known novel on our shores is probably Fatelessness, but Liquidation and several of his novellas have also been translated into English by the indefatigable Tim Wilkinson. When he was fourteen years old, Kertész was shipped off to Auschwitz and, later, to Buchenwald. As one might expect, his fiction deals in many different ways with the Holocaust and its aftermath. Dossier K represents his first and only memoir and it takes the form of an extended self-interview in which he acts as his own grand inquisitor.
The topics range from the young Kertész’s difficult relationships—with his parents in Budapest, with his own Judaism, with the Soviet regime in which he toiled for decades after the war, with his own humanness—to what he calls “the unfathomable relationship between fiction and reality” and “ratio of fiction and real life” in his oeuvre.
“After Auschwitz,” he tells us, “I felt the correct thing to do was not to base my relationships on personal feelings but on the principles of social progress.” He follows that up with: “It was bloody stupid of me, as I soon realized.”
Of his improbable survival, he writes: “[T]here is still no way that I can consider it rational that I, of all people, and not someone else should have been rescued from there. If I were to accept that as being rational, I would also have to accept the notion of providence. But then if providence is rationality, why did it not extend to the six million others who died there?” I’m not sure one could ask bigger questions than this one.
Dossier K never tries to clarify anything—be it history or religion or guilt or pleasure. Instead, it does what every great work of art does. It luxuriates in complexity and does so without apologizing for it. “I take delight in contradictions,” Kertész writes and, accordingly, there are no easy answers here. How could there be? That his vision is grounded in one of the worst atrocities of the twentieth century makes books like Dossier K all the more engaging and devastating. Of course, there simply aren’t very many books like Dossier K.
June 11, 2013
The choice is not between privacy and security, but dignity and tyranny.