Lev Grossman, book reviewer for Time Magazine, has bravely prophesied an end to modernism. In his Wall Street Journal article, Grossman posits that the modernist stranglehold on novel-writing is finally over. A new day has come! Nuts to you, Joyce, Eliot, Faulkner, and Kafka. You guys are history! No longer will readers suffer through beautiful language to get to an epiphany. Today's readers want plot, plot, and more plot. "Lyricism is on the wane," gloats Grossman, citing high sales of the Twilight series as proof that plot trumps beauty for these kids today.

Grossman, possibly unaware that Joyce and Eliot have been dead for fifty years, believes that these "modernists" have tricked us into thinking that a decent plot is indicative of a weak book. So, we're secretly reading mysteries and scifi, wishing literary writers would just take heed. "Should we still be writing difficult novels?" he asks, "Isn't it time we made our peace with plot?"

Grossman has graciously forgiven the moderns for blowing up the conventions of the Victorian novel. But he now feels that the time has come to embrace plot again. His evidence? The popularity of young adult novels, which never aspired to disregard plot in the first place. For Grossman, there have been no intervening literary movements. No novels of consequence that delivered any measure of plot with their lyricism, or any lyricism with their genre. The article has the intellectual weight of a strawberry tart, and yet the internet is upside down with panic over it. Is literary fiction over? Do we all have to start writing vampire novels?

Relax. Grossman's thinking is reductive, cowardly, but mostly just silly.

Consider these three major flaws:

1. It's weak on literary history. Did modernists shatter plot? Maybe. But look at the novels Grossman cites: Wharton, Hemingway, Lawrence, Fitzgerald. Really? These writers may be moderns, but in theme and ethos, not in formal experimentation. Pound, yes. Kafka, yeah. Joyce, okay. But Grossman's list of defiant modernist novels is full of plot. Sorry.

2. He uses the word "Pavlovianly."

3. His prognostications don't make sense. In proving his point that plot is back in style, Grossman uses Chabon, Lethem, Niffenegger, Gaiman, and Susanna Clarke as examples. These are the literary champions that are boldly bringing back the storylines we have all been silently, hopelessly craving for 80 years. However, these writers are all contemporaries of the Twilight juggernaut. The figures that Grossman so gloomily references (adult trade sales down 2.3% while Twilight author Stephanie Meyer sells 8 million books) would seem to reflect that while Chabon and Niffenegger may have been slinging Grossman-approved level of plot, the book-buying public wanted to buy Twilight books anyway.

I hope that writers of difficult books will not pause to listen to Grossman's confused ramblings about how literary movements from one hundred years ago are stultifying contemporary fiction. I hope writers will disregard all petulant whines about how "we the people" really want to read inglorious garbage like Twilight. I hope writers of difficult books will not take plot advice from a guy who lifted his own plot from Harry Potter. Yes, Twilight is selling. Yes, cheap fiction does move. It always has. But greatness is not easy, in reading or writing, and you weren't really writing for guys like Grossman anyway. Write for the smart people, the people that filled a football stadium to hear T.S. Eliot, the people who still celebrate Bloomsday. Write for me. I will still work for an epiphany.

Labels: book culture, lev grossman, literature, modernism

Since I have been writing about American Idol for two days, I feel the need to elevate the tone of this blog a little. Of course John Irving called this book "entertainment" as opposed to "literature." I'm not going to get into it with John Irving on the merits of various books. John Irving and I have never had a problem before, in all the many times we've exchanged thoughts on art and pop culture.



After I recover from the effort, I will read another book by Tom Wolfe. Maybe I Am Charlotte Simmons. Want to trade your copy of that for my copy of this? Wolfe takes a long time to write his novels. I like that about him. A Man In Full was just wonderful. I highly recommend.

Labels: a man in full, book reviews, books, literature, reading, tom wolfe

Sometimes you realize the true meaning of a familiar story suddenly. As if a curtain has been lifted on the face of an old friend, and you suddenly realize that the friend looks like Alf. Or, something more sublime than that.

Labels: literature

Who wants to take a ride with me on Cinderella's Golden Carousel? Now put your hand down if you're not made out of literature. I’m going to take ten books to Disney World. Books that deserve it. Books that need it.

I have been trying to read Doctor Zhivago for several months, and between the lengthy surnames and all the railroads going this way and that, I am ready to conclude that what this book needs is to get out of Russia for a while. To ride the spinning teacups. To meet Donald Duck.

I can think of lots of books that need a trip to Disney World. Heart of Darkness. Bleak House. How about As I Lay Dying?

My books spend most of their time spread open, lying upside down. Periodically they get shoved into the diaper bag, where they get drowned in apple juice, squashed with M & Ms, and have to babysit Barbies. When I’m finished reading them, I publicly criticize their authors, make fun of their movie versions, and snicker at their cover art. What kind of life is this?

I’ll tell you another book I’m going to take to Disney World: Anxious Pleasures. Lance Olson’s publisher sent me a review copy months ago and I’ve been belligerently sitting on it, waiting to reread The Metamorphosis before I read this rewrite. A few rides on Space Mountain should put things right.

I’m going, I’m really going, in the middle of November. I might even take my children. But will I be able to get Ariel to pose with Moby Dick? Will they fine me for littering if The Bell Jar throws itself off the ferry railing? Will The Sun Also Rises get kicked off Small World for shouting at the animatronic children?

Do you have a book you think needs a trip to Disney World?

Labels: books, disney world, literature

Literary magazines, the time has come that we all knew was coming. It’s over. It’s done. The lady in the Viking corset has belted out the final high C sharp. Please exit quietly at the rear door, but leave your plastic 3D glasses in the bins provided. You will no longer be hosting the revolutionary planning sessions. The revolution already happened, and at someone else’s house.

You had a good run. Well, not really, but for the sake of politeness, we’ll say that you did. I have no ill will. I have no desire to wound you in these, your final hours. You once served a purpose, but the purpose is extinct, and so are you. No more glossy coverstock. No more precious author bios. No more black and white photography opposite poems about rain on the window pane and how it’s like roads. No more “This page purposefully left blank.”


I’m with you, and we can go through this together, but let’s face the facts. Literary magazines used to exist for two reasons. The first was immediacy. Rather than waiting for the long, grinding, seasonal cycle of big traditional publishers to get new books on the shelves, readers could find fresher fare in literary magazines, published quarterly, or even monthly. The second reason was for content, as literary magazines reached farther out of the mainstream, farther into the margin, to pull new writers, strange writers, uncommercial writers, into the world of print and out to the world of readers.

Now we have the internet. Do I need to explain, or would it be too painful?

With web sites enjoying daily updates, the old publishing schedule of even an ambitious quarterly magazine now seems yawning and slow. My attention span stretches approximately to the update cycle of The Onion, and then shatters into a thousand pieces. Are you publishing your literary magazine twice a year? Are you kidding?

Then there’s the content and readership. Any brilliant, strange, new, marginalized writer with a Blogger account and a willingness to network can gain far more readers than any literary magazine was able to reach in the history of time. In fact, any jackass with a LiveJournal can reach more of an audience than most literary magazines have ever boasted, even the big ones. I’ve been published in respectable, established literary magazines that I bet fewer than a hundred people actually read. And that is true. Hold me. It is true.

Then there’s the subject of money. The internet is, mostly, free. And well, you know the rest.

So, really, do we need another literary magazine? Just one last really special one? Do we need to hear about how this publication is different, this one is going to be a “really beautiful object,” this one is going to change publishing forever? Do we need to hear from another self-congratulatory editor-in-chief, lovingly stroking his in-jokes, musing fondly on how many subscribers he’ll need to break even, figuring out how to woo in another bored midlist author to showcase in the autumn issue? How about one more magazine named “BRICK” or “PHYLACTIC TUNA”?

Let’s admit it, we were all there at one time. Graduate school can make you feel like that. I freely admit that I, with milk-white hope in my shiny heart, at one time published a collection of short stories written by a friend of mine, and got it placed in local bookstores. I think I was twenty-two. It was fun to play pretend that way. But for the love of Kinko’s, as grim as it may sound, you have to grow up.

Enough is enough. You cannot change the world with really expensive paper, you cannot revolutionize literature by being “more ironic than McSweeneys” (is that even possible?), and you cannot sell a literary magazine. Literary magazines are not books, no matter how you try to fetishize them, they will never be on the shelf with the novels. They never have and they never will. Literary magazines are the cousins of newspapers. Novels are the cousins of history.

What can we do? I would call for a boycott, I guess, but boycotting literary magazines would be like boycotting sandpaper pants. Nobody’s rushing out to the stores to grab them up anyway. The sad fact is that nature will take its course, and these beautiful, exotic creatures will be eaten by literary evolution. But will anyone survive?

The lumbering giants will survive: The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Triquarterly, etc. These are the litmags you have to get in because they put a big gold star on your resume, and they will survive because of their prestige and tradition. People still want to break their heads open on the editorial boards that published Jack Kerouac, Flannery O’Connor, Samuel Beckett. We’ll eventually be using The Paris Review to line the fork drawer, but not yet.


Which brings us to blogs. Remember zines? Blogs are the new zines. People used to staple together mimeographed pieces of crap in their grandmother’s basement and distribute it via copy machine, coffee shop counter, and word of mouth. They were subversive, populist, and updated instantly on the whim of the publisher. Blogs are the zines of the new millennium – now instantaneous, with open access for all. With all of this magic at the other end of a short wire, is it really worth our time to go around trying to sell paper and glue for ten dollars a glob?

It’s time to stop the presses. I know it’s not easy to pull that plug. Litmags are icons of intellectual privilege. You have to fight against a lifetime of programming that’s telling you literary magazines are good, therefore more literary magazines must be better. You respond out of habit, and assume it’s good news, like when a baby is born. It’s not. Magazines aren’t babies. In the world we live in, we need literary contraceptives. So stop. Put down the telephone. Put down the really nice pen. We don’t need another literary magazine. Literary magazines are dead.

Labels: books, literary magazines, literature, publishing

A man walks into a bar, gets drunk, sells his longsuffering wife and infant daughter to a stranger for five smackers. POW! What a hook. What a first chapter. The next day, he wakes up sober, repents, and walks to the nearest church. At the altar, he swears off drink for the next 21 years. He looks for his wife, but it's too late; she's gone. WHAT WILL HAPPEN!?

If I'd had a seat, I would have been on the edge of it. Fortunately I was sitting on the floor, watching the children in the tub. But I was riveted to the point that the children were in danger of hypothermia. That's a hook, my friend, worthy of a high concept Hollywood road movie starring Vince Vaughn and and Benicio del Toro. What, you don't think they would be good together? They would be GREAT together.

The Hollywood movie would then switch over to the wife with her new husband, see how they're getting on, and then switch back to the original husband, etc. Not this book. Instead, Hardy takes 19 years out of the story, brings us back to the wife returning to look for the original husband, daughter in tow. Okay. Now he's the mayor of a fine big town and one of the big time corn dealers as well. Rich, famous, well-respected, and still not drinking. From there, things go downhill, as you might expect from a Thomas Hardy novel. You will not be surprised to learn that the couple did not quietly reunite and live out the rest of their days happily and without notice. They were noticed.

Another thing I have come to expect about a Thomas Hardy novel is a female main character whose virtue or position is compromised in public court of opinion through no real fault of her own, but just because she was following a logical course of action, or acting under impulses we today would find quite normal. Tess, Sue, Elfride, all are caught both by cultural circumstances and mistakes that we all can see they should not make. The bad ends to which they come are both brought on by their own bad choices and dictated by the restraints of Victorian society, both high and low.

In this novel, there is no such character. Lucetta comes close to this, but isn't really central enough, or independent enough, to fit. I realized only when I was near the end that the main character was actually the man, or the men, the two men who share the title "Mayor of Casterbridge" during the span of the book. Then it all became clear. The main character, Michael Henchard, the man who originally sold his wife, is the one whose impulsive, passionate character and rotten choices seal his tragic failure -- he has more in common with Tess, actually, than the other women do -- uneducated, irrational, earthy, but bizarrely driven by good intentions. Donald Farfrae, the other mayor, has much in common with Bathsheba from Far from the Madding Crowd, as he also gets his final quiet happy ending, with the one he should have had all along.

It made more sense once I figured out I wasn't supposed to really like the females, because I didn't. I love the way Hardy writes women, particularly Sue Bridehead. Particularly the incomparable Tess. But the women in this book were unsatisfying. Maybe he just hadn't got there yet -- Sue and Tess were to come later. Bathsheba was ten years previous.

People who are not fans of Thomas Hardy are permitted to skip the previous three paragraphs. Oh, should I have mentioned this before you slogged through all that? Woops.

Here's a writerly note: The opening scenes of the novel are really an *excellent* example of how the pros used to do third person objective point of view, you know, just the human witness, no insights into anyone's thoughts or feelings, motives or past. The opening of the book was really SO amazing. I do so love Thomas Hardy. Just look at him there, with his moustache. You could just eat him.

I think now I have read all the Thomas Hardy I need to read. I've read five of his novels, including all the famous ones and one of the romances. It makes me a little sad. I remember when I first read his poem, "Neutral Tones," and I initially thought, what a dull little plop that was, but it really stayed with me, okay, I know this makes me sound like a SUPERFOOL, but I always remember that first reading of it. Here it is:

NEUTRAL TONES

by: Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

We stood by a pond that winter day,
And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
And a few leaves lay on the starving sod,
--They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.

Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
Over tedious riddles solved years ago;
And some words played between us to and fro--
On which lost the more by our love.

The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strength to die;
And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
Like an ominous bird a-wing….

Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,
And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree,
And a pond edged with grayish leaves.

Yeah! Makes you want to go out and write a bunch of valentines doesn't it! That's Thomas Hardy for you. Writer most likely to make you feel like rolling under the bed and rotting already. Bless his grey little heart.

Labels: books, literature, novels, thomas hardy, victorian