Bookplanet: writers attacking writers

Here are a few attacking links from MaudNewton.com that I've strung together, starting with the attack on Jonathan Franzen by Ben Marcus in Harper's which goes on for 10,000 words, but in this summary is reduced to a handy 250 by kindly Emma Garman, a Maud contributor:

1. HANDS UP who’s managed to plough through Ben Marcus’s Harper’s essay? I did, but only with a liberal summoning of will power and discipline. It’s smart and everything, I just couldn’t escape the feeling he could’ve made his points in considerably fewer words. In fact, I’ve taken the liberty of condensing about 10,000 into about 250:

Difficult prose - a.k.a. literary language - is good for the brain. People like Jonathan Franzen and Dale Peck dismiss this important fact. They think authors of "experimental writing" are elitists, and they don’t mean it nicely. I’m one of those so-called elitists, but that’s not why I’m writing this essay. Jonathan Franzen used to be an experimental writer, but got all bitter when his first two novels (which, just entre nous, I couldn’t get through due to their supreme tedium) didn’t make him rich and famous, so he changed tack. Now he writes in a style that’s OK, but not at all innovative, whereas I really, really value innovation. This has made Franzen a bestseller. Unlike me, but that’s not why I’m writing this essay.

Conformist authors - like Franzen - see their method of representing reality as the only method. How dull and narrow-minded is that? I prefer to write (and read) prose forging a new direction away from narrative realism, because I actually enjoy language and its rich multitudinous possibilities. If this means eschewing a mass audience, then that’s my noble and dignified cross to bear. At least this way I enjoy new synaptic pathways firing in my brain.

Franzen thinks that people only write difficult fiction to show off. That may have been his reason prior to selling out, but it’s not mine. I only want to defend the artistic progress Franzen & Co are trying to stultify. Without me standing up for writerly innovation, literature might literally die. Die right in front of your eyes!

2. MARCUS VS FRANZEN: The latest literary wrangling in Harper's leaves everyone confused -- by Jess Row (in Slate)

Not long ago, not even a generation ago, there existed a rough consensus in certain parts of the literary world that the novel was dying, or dead, and that something else—metafiction? The nouveau roman? The New Journalism?—was about to take its place. "The art of the novel has fallen into such a state of stagnation," the French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet wrote in 1956, "that it is hard to imagine such an art can survive for long without some radical change." A decade later, in his essay "The Literature of Exhaustion," John Barth delivered the coup de grâce: "narrative literature … has shot its bolt." In those heady days it seemed—to certain writers at least—possible to wave a hand and make age-old assumptions and prejudices disappear. These writers had seen the future the rest of the world hadn't, and they used all the tools passed down from Marx, Nietzsche, Valéry, Pound, Marinetti, Breton, to proclaim it—the apocalyptic foreboding, the tone of concern mingled with contempt for the naive and complacent victim of What Is To Come.

Living, as we do, in the aftermath of this age of grand theories, it's hard to read Ben Marcus' essay in the current issue of Harper's—with the wonderful tongue-in-cheek title "Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It"—without asking: Does he really mean it? Title notwithstanding, it seems he really does. He means it when he says, "In the literary world, it's not politic to suggest that the brain is even involved in reading"; when he proclaims that "literature is dying"; when he describes himself as "responding to an attack from the highest point of status culture." These sentences have the unmistakable flavor of the avant-garde, in the original military sense of the word. They carry what Barth (referring to his own work) called "the whiff of tear gas at their margins." "This is not a manifesto," Marcus concludes. But if not, it's as close to one as we're likely to see from a writer of fiction today. Profoundly nostalgic—as so many manifestoes turn out to be under close examination—it returns us to the pure spirit of modernism and the rhetoric of cultural crisis, of vanguards and reactionaries, of the Chosen and the Left Behind. As such, it's an unnecessary, and disingenuous, attempt to repolarize American literary culture.

Though Marcus' essay extends over 13 pages of small text, at its core is a very simple premise: Contemporary American fiction has lost its innovative edge and its interest in language as art, and Jonathan Franzen is largely, if not exclusively, to blame. In particular, Marcus focuses on Franzen's 2002 essay "Mr. Difficult," in which Franzen chronicles his growing disenchantment with the novels of William Gaddis, and more generally with the modernist-inspired ideal of "difficult" literature—the belief that "the greatest novels were tricky in their methods, resisted casual reading, and merited sustained study." Writers like Gaddis, Franzen argues, are "Status" authors, who see themselves (again, in the modernist mold) as obligated only to their art, and who for the most part ignore the interests and desires of the reader. With some reluctance, Franzen places himself in an opposing camp: "Contract" authors, who place a high value on the relationship between narrator and reader, who primarily see the novel as a device for social and cultural communication, and who take human life (rather than, say, language or ideas per se) as the ultimate subject of their fiction.

The question Franzen raises in "Mr. Difficult" dates back at least as far as Henry James' essay "The Art of Fiction": Namely, is the novel a popular art, like the ballad or folk opera or television sitcom, or a high art, like poetry, ballet, and conceptual installations in which naked men are nailed to Volkswagens? James, while firmly in the second camp, makes an appeal for serious fiction as an art form that can appeal to the masses, because it creates what he calls "an impression of life" unmatched by any other art form. Franzen takes the opposite tack, arguing that, while Gaddis and his peers (Pynchon, Coover, et al.) wrote out of a sense of genuine crisis and malaise, fiction—"the most fundamental human art"—remains "conservative and conventional." He worries that if the novel makes too many demands on the reader it will go unread and forgotten—especially in an age when fiction competes against other, flashier, forms of entertainment: movies, video games, even (strangely) extreme sports.

We might expect Marcus to point out that Franzen's essay is a caricature of this very old debate, and that in other contexts Franzen has shown himself to be extremely reluctant to label himself a popular author—notably, his confessed ambivalence at having been named an Oprah writer. Instead, Marcus treats us to a humorless diatribe, as if he and Franzen had invented their respective positions and were obliged to defend them like nuggets of newly panned gold. Dismissing The Corrections as "a retreat into the comforts of a narrative style that was already embraced by the culture," he claims that Franzen has become a public advocate against "literature as an art form, against the entire concept of artistic ambition." Most curiously, he blames Franzen for putting the small publisher FC2 in jeopardy with the NEA by writing a New Yorker "Talk of the Town" piece in which he mistakes a package from FC2 for a bomb. We'd all like to think that a novelist's 300-word anecdote could prompt a congressional hearing. But to make this kind of claim seriously is to betray a certain willful paranoia. It's as if Marcus just can't resist playing David to Franzen's Goliath.

To his credit, when he's not busy attacking Franzen on all fronts, Marcus makes a credible case for his own vision of "experimental" fiction. Unlike Franzen, he expects his readers to work, to become "fierce little reading machines, devourers of new syntax." Defending Gaddis, he writes, "it is arguably sublime when a text creates in us desires we did not know we had, and then enlarges those desires without seeming desperate to please us." Referring to Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, he praises fiction that is "free of coherence, so much more interested in forging complex bursts of meaning that are expressionistic rather than figurative, enigmatic rather than earthly, evasive rather than embracing." In short, echoing statements made by Virginia Woolf and James Joyce and Ford Madox Ford almost a century ago, he makes a very good case for why high modernism still matters.

Marcus is justified in criticizing a publishing industry, and a culture, that often recycles the same ideas and stories while ignoring writers whose work is too unpleasant, or destabilizing, or unsympathetic to be absorbed at a glance. His list of writers who "interrogate the assumptions of realism and bend the habitual gestures around new shapes" is one many readers would embrace, and his contention that The New Yorker doesn't publish enough challenging fiction is absolutely on the mark. But ultimately he's pantomiming a battle that, if it ever really existed, ended decades ago. "Literature is fighting for its very life," he says, "because compromise is mistook for ambition, and joining up is preferred to standing out … literature is fighting for its very life because its powerful pundits have declared a halt to all artistic progress, declaring it pretentious, alienating, bad for business." If this is so, how can we explain that Marcus chairs the MFA program in fiction at Columbia, one of the most prestigious graduate programs in the nation? Or that he was trained by John Hawkes and Robert Coover in the writing program at Brown? How can we explain the success of McSweeney's, which has helped launch the careers of many young and innovative writers, including, of course, Ben Marcus?

It would be one thing if the literary world really did comprise omnipotent insiders and destitute outsiders, arrogant avant-gardists and thoughtful Contract novelists. But Marcus and Franzen are both shadowboxing around a more complicated truth: that the modernist credo—To Make It New—is part of every contemporary novelist's DNA, as is a certain degree of ambivalence about the gravitational pull of narrative toward certain well-established forms. We need a vocabulary that can explain a novel like Edward P. Jones' The Known World, which at times feels deeply archaic and yet unfamiliar, rewarding the reader's expectations on one level and frustrating them on another. Resorting to terms as all-encompassing and diluted as "realist" and "experimental" isn't furthering the debate. These days few writers would self-consciously place themselves firmly on one or the other side of these boundaries. Living, as we do, in the wake of a century that celebrated, even fetishized, novelty and growth, we need a more nuanced way of articulating our relationship with the past.

Marcus' essay concludes: "The contract I signed? Not to stand by when a populist pundit puts up his dull wall and says what literature can and cannot be." But he can't resist the urge to re-enact the great prizefights of the past—Kerouac vs. Capote, Barth vs. Gardner—as if what we really need, in 2005, is two white male writers fighting over something that can't be circumscribed, much less owned. Isn't it time we allowed the scorched-earth rhetoric of avant-gardes and ancien régimes to drift, like the tissue-thin sheets of an old aerogramme, into the dustbin of history?


3. UNFAIR SENTENCE: The case for difficult books -- by Meghan O'Rourke (also from Slate, about the previous fight, which started in the Atlantic a few years ago)

Everybody loves a fight, especially literary critics. Conveniently, there's nothing easier to fight over than books, because taste is subjective. The latest poker in the fire is a piece in the current issue of the Atlantic Monthly—bombastically titled "A Reader's Manifesto" (sadly, it's not online). The author, a previously unpublished critic named B. R. Myers, attacks contemporary fiction for being pretentious and self-consciously difficult, and book reviewers for praising such willfully obscure nonsense. Novelists Annie Proulx, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, David Guterson, and Paul Auster are all guilty, Myers argues, of writing "affected prose" and contributing to what Myers calls the "cult of the sentence." Instead, we ought to return to a time when fast-moving, accessible stories were considered "literary." Readers are cheering: The London Times said that the piece was "brilliantly written." "Hallelujah and praise God!" wrote a reader on the Atlantic Monthly online discussion thread. "We have nothing to lose but our stupefaction."

At the heart of Myers' screed is an implied conflict between "story" and "style": a notion that story trumps style, or that it ought to right now, since we've come to overvalue arty writing. In the first camp, you've got, say, Trollope and Theodore Dreiser. In the other, you've got Flaubert and Joyce. We could divide many of today's fiction writers into these camps: On the side of story, there'd be John Irving, Amy Tan, Norman Mailer, and Stephen King, among others. On the side of sentence, or style, there'd be Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, Rick Moody, Jayne Anne Phillips, Bret Easton Ellis, and so on. But these categories are crude and reductive: Where would you put writers such as Philip Roth, Richard Ford, Jane Smiley, Michael Chabon, and John Updike?

Even if we did feel that the five writers in question were egregiously overrated, complaining about them now seems a little like pointing out that the emperor's not wearing clothes after everyone else has noticed. At this point, French critics are more excited than their American counterparts by Paul Auster. David Guterson's reputation is based on one hit novel; his second was mostly regarded as a disappointment. White Noise was published 16 years ago. All of this makes Myers' essay seem crudely off target.

Myers' real frustration isn't with the writers but with the reviewers who laud them. At the heart of his complaints is a buried anxiety about cultural elitism, a peculiarly American distrust of showiness and artiness. Myers' dislike of writing that is self-consciously about ideas or language reflects an essential distrust of difficulty—i.e., it's snooty and only there to make the cognoscenti feel good about themselves—or the idea that fiction might ask questions that it has no answer for. At the 1999 National Book Awards, Oprah Winfrey said that she sometimes had to stop and puzzle over Toni Morrison's sentences; Morrison responded, "That, my dear, is called reading." This enrages Myers: "Great prose isn't always easy, but it's always lucid; no one of Oprah's intelligence ever had to puzzle over a Joseph Conrad sentence," he writes in return. This seems patently wrong, but Myers' jeremiad has met with an overwhelming response from readers who are relieved to find that they're not philistines, even though they failed to finish Underworld or Infinite Jest. (The irony, of course, is that they feel they're not philistines only because a critic in a glossy literary magazine has reassured them they're not.) Of course they're not. But the danger of Myers' irritation is self-evident: It implies we needn't ever challenge ourselves as readers. It wants a literature of lucidity and leaves little room for mystery.

Although his reading of contemporary fiction seems painfully narrow, Myers nonetheless raises (if indirectly) a genuine point about reviewing: Many critics foreground the importance of "craft," vaguely praising a novel for its "evocative" or "compelling" prose. Their faces are so closely pressed against the window that they see more of the glass than what lies beyond it. There are some obvious reasons for this. First, both novels and their reviews are often written by people who have taught (or been taught) creative writing, much of which centers on a discussion of craft. After all, you can teach an aspiring writer how to construct a sentence, but it's harder to teach imagination, or how to invest fiction with intrinsic intelligence or useful social observation, or something as elusive as emotional truth. Reviewers tend to judge a book on its own terms, and sensibly so. It's unfair (and fairly useless) to fault Raymond Carver for not being Donald Barthelme, or vice versa. Still, reviewers sometimes don't tell readers what to expect or explain that a book's primary pleasure is linguistic rather than narrative, for example.

Critics might do more to alleviate the frustration Myers and so many other readers feel. Perhaps we need a criticism of more frank responses, of more risk taking and ardent contestation—reviews that could celebrate a so-called "fun read" without patronizing it and ones that would help readers access difficult works instead of just opaquely praising their merits. Critics are less elitist than Myers thinks. No one wants to slam a first novelist or even a mediocre book. Especially when it's not immediately apparent how a reviewer ought to handle the question of taste: Unlike nonfiction reviewers, fiction critics have few objective criteria (such as quality of research, scope of argument) upon which to base their assessments. All this contributes to what Dwight Garner aptly called "literary grade inflation."

At any given point in history, there's going to be more bad writing than there is great—or even good—writing. Let's take a look at an earlier time, one that Myers is nostalgic for. In 1900, both Sister Carrie and Lord Jim were published. Both received critical attention, and neither was a best seller (although, to be fair, there's a Byzantine story behind the initial publication of Sister Carrie). What were the best-selling novels that year? Unleavened Bread and Red Pottage and When Knighthood Was in Flower. Myers' idea of a happier cultural moment, when best sellers received serious critical attention, is a sentimental lament for an imagined past—a time when all writers were great, all readers ideal, all books beautifully bound, and the girls were smart and pretty.


4. POOR FRANZEN. He had to go and write a popular book, and then upset Oprah.
I tried to read "The Corrections" myself, but after two pages, I gave up. I like prose that calls attention to itself, like Nabokov's, but Franzen's prose threatened me with diminishing verbiage-to-insight returns, so I stopped. Heck, for all I know, the book is great, but I wasn't in the mood to plough my way through a thicket of "fine" writing with my ice-breaking reader's prow on ever-alert.
Anyway, here's "Jonathan Franzen: A Defense," from Slate 4 years ago (remember?):

From: Chris Lehmann
To: Eliza Truitt and Jodi Kantor
Subject: What's the Beef?
Thursday, Nov. 1, 2001, at 2:01 PM PT

Jonathan Franzen stands accused of insufficient Oprah gratitude. And since his infamous banishment from the Winfrey polis on Oct. 12, that sin, in turn, has dilated into nearly every character flaw imaginable—he's arrogant, elitist, hypocritical, snobbish, and flat-out stupid. Such, at any rate, has been the verdict of nearly every commentator since the curiously inert affaire Oprah has exercised the literary world and its wags.

But what, exactly, has he said? He's ambivalent, that's all. In an interview with the Portland Oregonian, he did utter the fateful characterization of himself as a writer "solidly in the high art literary tradition." Yet right after that damnably high-falutin' "high art" phrase, he said, "but I like to read entertaining books, and this [i.e., his Oprah selection] helps bridge that gap, but it also heightens the feelings of being misunderstood." Regardless of what anyone thinks about Franzen's talent, that sentence is much too convoluted and halting to be hypocritical or disingenuous. Likewise, his other infamous pronouncement, on the Powell's bookstore Web site, bespeaks less foppish disdain for the besotted taste of the masses than simple bewilderment. Yes, he said that Oprah has "picked enough shmaltzy one-dimensional [novels] that even I cringe." But he also rushed to remind his interviewer that "I think she's really smart and fighting the good fight. And she's an easy target."

Well, not so easy as it turns out. Not only did Oprah disinvite Franzen from his scheduled October "Book Club" appearance; she issued a self-serving pronouncement that clamored with unseemly haste to the rhetorical high ground: "It is never my intention to make anyone uncomfortable or cause anyone conflict." The press then duly intoned the pleasing untruth that Franzen had pronounced himself too delicate and refined for the Oprah set; and the piling on of columnists and correspondents commenced.

But why is it, I wonder, that amid all the righteous posturing over Jonathan Franzen's alleged elitism, no one has expended any critical scrutiny on Ms. Winfrey's particular haughty outburst? Here, after all, is a leading arbiter of public taste breaking off a brewing literary debate on grounds of prospective discomfort and conflict. As a longtime bookworm (and let it be known, a good American fan of a great deal of mass culture), I had always taken conflict and discomfort—and ambivalence, for that matter—to be robust signs of a health in a cultural democracy. These chafing virtues are how literary debates (and kindred political ones) get settled. They are also how we remind ourselves that something serious is at stake in literary life—that it's not simply a healing anodyne for souls in various states of recovery, but something on which we can risk public disapproval, feuds, fallings out, even lawsuits. Some 40 years ago, critics and novelists would routinely accuse each other of every manner of aesthetic and political betrayal, and our literary culture thrived. There were even heated debates over high, low, and mass culture, which proceeded on the unabashed assumption that all parties concerned—general readers emphatically included—could benefit from hashing out literary hierarchies, and that such hierarchies need not be dirty words. It was an atmosphere that bred a rich ferment of innovative, challenging and popular new novels, such as Catch-22, The Adventures of Augie March, and The Group. Now, everyone has the good pseudopopulist sense to deride the simple notion of "high" art—largely due to the befuddled, mistaken transposition of such terms into the register of class antagonism—and a thousand Wally Lambs bloom.

Instead of condemning the tortured Mr. Franzen into the outer darkness of NPR, the thin-skinned Ms. Winfrey should have had him go ahead and air his mixed feelings on her show, the way he had before other interviewers. They seemed able to handle it. And maybe she and her book club, who have indeed performed many good services for American readers, could then come to accept that ambivalence, conflict, and discomfort are nothing to fear.

From: Eliza Truitt
To: Chris Lehmann and Jodi Kantor
Subject: Franzen Is the Victim
Thursday, Nov. 1, 2001, at 2:34 PM PT

Dear Chris,

I agree wholeheartedly that ending the debate was a weak move by Oprah. If she wants to play the literary game, she should engage in the discussion that goes along with it. This point of view has been entirely absent so far in the Franzen dust-up debate.

But more to blame than Oprah is the literary community and the press, who have been merciless toward Franzen. Yes, it was ungracious for him to call Oprah's picks "shmaltzy." But good for him for saying her corporate logo made him uncomfortable. It's fair for him to feel iffy about being grouped with many of her young-girl-recovering-from-bad-childhood picks. If anyone should be exempted from the current universal requirement to profess a deep love for crappy culture, it's fancy-pants literary authors.

When the press chides him as disingenuous for saying he didn't understand the way the media work, they're also being unfair. According to a recent New York Times Magazine profile, he really is a hermit. He wrote The Corrections in "a spartan studio on 125th Street in East Harlem, behind soundproof walls and a window of double-paned glass. The blinds were drawn. The lights were off. And Franzen, hunched over his keyboard in a scavenged swivel chair held together with duct tape, wore earplugs, earmuffs and a blindfold." Before that, "for five years in the 1980's, Franzen and his wife … shared cramped quarters in Somerville, Mass., in which, separated by only 20 feet, they wrote eight hours each day and then, after a dinner break, read for five more." He went out to dinner once a year. He doesn't own a television. If that doesn't qualify him as a genuine media naïf, what would?

When he said, "I feel like I'm solidly in the high-art literary tradition," he probably had no idea that's a sentiment currently considered hopelessly gauche. But really, after reading his various essays in Harper's, did anyone doubt his ambition was for the stratosphere as opposed to a B&N end-cap display?

Franzen is a victim here, mainly of the publishing world's kowtowing to Oprah. Newsweek quoted a literary agent as saying, "Most of the people I hear talking about all this now refer to Franzen along the lines of 'that pompous prick.' " Another agent, quoted in the New York Observer, called him an "ungrateful bastard." What publishing person in his right mind would get on the wrong side of Oprah, when she has the power to make your career with a single phone call?

And any writer who defends Franzen in this fight does so at the risk of ruining his own chances of ever scoring that cash cow. Why else would Rick Moody and Harold Bloom tell the New York Times' David Kirkpatrick that it was hypocritical to object to Winfrey's logo? What if Franzen had been asked to sell his book on QVC? He'd have moved plenty of copies. Would that have been acceptable to turn down as too commercial?

But Franzen is also a victim of a lack of self-knowledge. His comments show he's afraid of losing his literary credibility. Though Jonathan Yardley called the Oprah blunder "a move so stupid as to defy comprehension," I'd say it was more an expression of an author in deep denial about his own book. The Corrections, which I absolutely loved, is mainly an Anne Tyler-style family drama sprinkled with Don DeLillo-ish modern cultural trappings. After throwing down the gauntlet to the literary world that there weren't enough serious social novels, what has Franzen done but written a novel in which the "important" social aspects are the parts most readers don't care for? It must be a terrible thing to face.

Best,
Eliza

From: Jodi Kantor
To: Chris Lehmann and Eliza Truitt
Subject: Don't Mistake This for a Literary Debate
Thursday, Nov. 1, 2001, at 2:50 PM PT

But Chris: Did the Partisan Review crowd quibble over seals and jacket covers? Don't mistake this for a literary debate; for that see the continuing furor over Franzen's 1996 Harper's essay on the decline of the social novel. Covergate is really about Oprah's Book Club; people have been dissing or praising it since its inception, and Franzen's red-faced dithering has made The Corrections into an unwitting referendum on the club. Some variation on the same dust-up would have occurred if Oprah had picked any chic, complex, highly praised novel. So if this is a literary debate, it's the most tiresome kind, the kind that's about everything in the universe but the book itself (which is a shame; as I'll explain in a second, some discussion of the content of the book would add worthy, important fuel to the debate, possibly elevating it to the kind of discussion you ask for). If everyone who's followed this debate had actually read The Corrections, Franzen wouldn't need Oprah's sales help.

And Eliza, I just don't buy the Franzen-is-a-rube line. The guy's a master of nuance, social analysis, expression, word choice. He's published three well-acclaimed novels. He's been interviewed by everyone in the universe. And the maxim he's violated is the most basic, clichéd one in the book, and about a book: He's judged one by its cover. Worse, he's judged his own book. And even worse than that, he's done so in a way that betrays his characters and makes him seem like a different Jonathan Franzen than the one who created this entrancing novel. As Laura Miller alludes to in this wisely argued Salon piece, Franzen wrote a generous, unsnobby book. In fact, his heroine, Enid, is the kind of consumer who would opt to buy the Oprah-endorsed cover over the plain one. Franzen's slow vindication of Enid is utterly moving, convincing, and there's not an ounce of condescension in it either. It's disappointing that he can't muster the same largeness of spirit in life that he does on the page—it's like seeing a priest steal or a judge lie. And a bad publicity move, of course: If Franzen had been clearheaded and sensible enough to tell readers, "Just read the book, forget what's on the outside," maybe they would listen.

Readers comment:
ELIZA asks: "What publishing person in his right mind would get on the wrong side of Oprah, when she has the power to make your career with a single phone call?" As someone who's worked in publishing for 20 years, I think she's missing a much more basic source of the fury launched against Franzen by publishing types. When an editor finds a manuscript she loves, she'll often devote years to making it into a successful book. She not only has to work carefully and closely with the author to make the manuscript as sharp as it can be. She's also got to do constant battle within her own company to make sure the book gets attention from the marketing and sales staff. And in the end, what happens 99 percent of the time? The book comes out, sells a lousy 3,000 copies, and is completely forgotten in a month. What offends publishing people about Franzen's Oprah dis is that he blithely blew his grab at the gold ring--to actually have his book, his baby, read by a whole lot of people. It's an opportunity few authors ever get, so it's just plain ugly to see it squandered.
--Neely O’Hara

Who can blame [Franzen]? There have been any number of Oprah picks that aren't at all shallow. Andre Dubus, Tawni O'Dell (and who would have thought that someone named Tawni could write a serious book), and, of course, Toni Morrison (and who would have thought that someone named Toni...never mind). Still, who came blame any serious writer for being a little ambivalent about the whole selection. This is Oprah we're talking about, a reasonably intelligent and articulate person, no denying, but she's also someone who called Gary Zukav's nonsensical Seat of the Soul the most important book she's ever read!
--Edita Booke

Is it possible to defend Franzen? Probably not, but I'm always up for a logical challenge.

Franzen's assertion, put crudely, is that his book is too deep for the likes of Oprah and co. I don't believe this to be true, but it also isn't inconceivable--for example, some books require special training or background to read (textbooks, for example). Franzen's assertion then could simply mean that high art types have a different background than Oprah's people which allows them understand his book. Is this true? This is difficult to answer because it is only in Franzen's minds that these groups really exist in coherent form--but I can also imagine believing that anyone who values Oprah's opinion on books might be ill-equipped to read Franzen's book. This is clearer if you imagine a Pat Robertson book club--it might sell books, but a lot of people wouldn't like to be on his list, just for reasons of fundamental incompatibility (without implying failings on the part of the readers).

Given that Franzen made this assertion in an insulting fashion, Oprah responded quite reasonably--but she also could have shown him his assertion is incorrect by inviting him to discuss his views. Now, you don't wish to have an idiot on to discuss his views, but if she initially held a positive opinion of his ideas (indicated by the book selection), his expression of disdain for her should not alter that--although she might not personally respect him.

So here's a positive spin on it:

Franzen's Assertions:
1) Oprah's audience comprise a set of individuals with some commonalities of philosophy and style .
2) That philosophy and style are contrary to my own and so I do not wish to promote my book to these people.

Oprah's possible responses:
1) That's it for you!
2) I respect the ideas expressed in your book and believe you to be incorrect in your judgments about my audience. Regardless of your opinion of me, why don't you give it a shot, and we can also discuss your thoughts on "high art."

Oprah largely chose option 1.
--Devil on the shoulder of the ghost of a-z


5. WHILE we're on attacks, here's Ruth Franklin attacking McSweeney's two years ago:

The 98-Pound Gorilla in the Room: How the spindly McSweeney's short story became a menace -- by Ruth Franklin

McSweeney's, the idiosyncratic literary journal run by Dave Eggers, has lately grown predictable in its unpredictability, but the new issue is a true departure. Rather than the usual mix of rambling letters-to-the-editor and quirky short fiction, "McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales" is an anthology of substantive stories by heavy-hitters such as Stephen King and Harlan Ellison. Published by Vintage Books, the issue was guest-edited by the novelist Michael Chabon, who believes it his mission to rescue short fiction from a menace currently stalking the literary world—"the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story," better known as the "New Yorker short story." Arguing that American short fiction has misplaced the multiplicity of genres that defined it until the 1950s—the detective story, the ghost story, science fiction, and more—Chabon has tried to provide a corrective. He's solicited works from "non-genre" writers who were eager to experiment (Sherman Alexie, Rick Moody) and from writers of genre novels who ordinarily find no commercial outlet for short fiction (Michael Crichton, Elmore Leonard).

But the irony behind Chabon's argument is that the "New Yorker short story" is no longer the hegemon it may once have been. In fact, this collection of "thrilling tales" actually serves as a more effective counterbalance to an entirely new phenomenon. Call it the "McSweeney's short story"—younger and hipper and more experimental, but no less influential.

When Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern (as the magazine was formally known) made its debut nearly five years ago, it consciously positioned itself in opposition to the mainstream glossies. "Welcome to our bunker!" proclaimed dense block lettering on the plain white cover of the first issue. The magazine was produced almost single-handedly by Eggers, who was about a year from publishing A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius; it playfully claimed to have been "created in darkness by troubled Americans," typeset "using a small group of fonts that you already have on your computer, with software you already own," and "proofread, but not by paid professionals." The eponymous Timothy McSweeney was identified as "a troubled fellow, an outsider, a probable genius of indeterminate age ... put simply, he wanted attention, some consideration, an attentive ear."

In its early days, McSweeney's read like the dead-letter office of a hipster writer's dream zine—a repository for witty letters, articles, and other random (and occasionally brilliant) musings that could find their way into print nowhere else. Readers got a peek at a piece by Rick Moody that was rejected by the New York Times Magazine or at one by Stephen J. Shalit, originally written for "a certain magazine concerned with enjoying the outdoors and looking great doing it" and accompanied by extensive marginalia detailing everything from Shalit's conversations with his editor to his thoughts on journalists who wear black jeans. There was also a lot of humor: A subversive and hilarious dissection of a Korean phrase book by Ana Marie Cox; a series of conversations with famous people recorded by a bookstore clerk. (Clerk: "Would you like one of our discount cards?" John Tesh: "Heh heh. No thank you. I'm not from around here.") In these first couple of issues, the joke—self-aggrandizement disguised as self-effacement—was funny. It worked.

But with the third issue, published in the summer of 1999, the magazine's tone changed. While the dead-letter office remained open—particularly memorable was Gary Greenberg's oddly fascinating 50-page opus on Ted Kaczynski—McSweeney's had re-imagined itself primarily as a literary journal, not a collection of castoffs. It would now devote itself to publishing fiction—and fiction of a very particular type.

The type? One that rejects the very idea of revelation. The McSweeney's story may share certain things with the sub-genre Chabon identified as "the New Yorker short story"—it's contemporary, it's often quotidian, it's certainly plotless—but it substitutes nihilism for epiphany. In an early issue, a set of facetious manuscript guidelines warned that "material possessing beginnings, middles, or ends will be read with suspicion"—which isn't a bad description of the work of the young writers the magazine has consistently championed. These are writers (Arthur Bradford, Lawrence Krauser, Ben Greenman, among them) who reject conventional notions of structure, character, or coherence. They owe a lot to Barthelme's surrealism and Barth's parody. But their work replaces the joyful playfulness that characterized the experimentalists of the 1960s and '70s with a lugubrious fictional haze in which ideas and images float unbound by anything resembling form or insight.

Take the story "Red Dresses" by Ken Foster, which appeared in the third issue. The main character attends a party at which all guests, male and female, must wear red dresses. He reminisces about his wife, who has left him, and recalls contemplating suicide. While walking home, he is attacked by a stranger and winds up in a hospital. Does this sound disjointed? It's because the story itself meanders randomly, with dramatic shifts in tone that defy explanation. Foster is clearly trying to create a sense of disequilibrium in the reader, but he does so at the cost of sense. (In a typically quixotic move, McSweeney's asked writer Ana Marie Cox to respond critically in the margins and then allowed Foster to rebut her remarks. The irony-laden result makes the reader unsure what to take seriously, if any of it.)

At one point the magazine seemed to realize it might be on the wrong track. "We would like to announce that with this issue we are plunging headlong into the World of Normaler Fiction … with a number of pieces that are friendly to read, and make a good deal of sense, and have beginnings and middles and, for the most part, ends," the fifth issue proclaimed. But the writing style did not change; in fact, McSweeney's quickly became an inevitable stop along the successful young writer's route to success. Even established writers began showing a desire to get in on the game; a painful case in point is Zadie Smith, who appeared in the magazine not long after the publication of her excellent debut White Teeth. About a year later, she came out with her horrendously disappointing—and noticeably McSweeney-esque—second novel, The Autograph Man. Rick Moody's digressive and self-indulgent (and universally panned) memoir The Black Veil also shows clear symptoms of McSweenification: the disingenuous irony, the typographical gimmicks. Meanwhile, the magazine itself grew from a fly-by-night operation run by Eggers into a multipronged entity complete with a publishing house (a number of the McSweeney's writers have brought out books under its imprint), a new literary review called The Believer, and a volunteer tutoring center.

In some ways, McSweeney's has been a useful counterpoint to the mainstream publishing scene. Regardless of whether its self-referential play is to your taste, it's the first bona fide literary movement in decades—with all the old-fashioned energy that such a term implies. And with his dedication to self-publishing, Eggers has given the literary world a needed jolt, proving that a small press can still flourish in an age of conglomerates.

But the quality of the work inside McSweeney's has yet to live up to the promise of the magazine's gloriously designed packaging. In their haste to strip the short story of any suggestion of epiphany, these writers ignore one of literature's most essential qualities: the ability to amaze. It's easy to admire the McSweeney's stories, but it's impossible to be moved by them.

In one way, at least, Chabon's issue does provide hope. The point is not that genre fiction necessarily "liberates" writers—most of the pieces here are dreadful, especially the ones by genre stalwarts like Crichton and King. But a few of them are actually profound. These are the ones in which the writers didn't adhere too strictly to their chosen genre—in fact, it's not always easy to determine what that genre might be. They seem, rather, to have taken the idea of genre as simply a reminder that stories can have plots, and characters, and even epiphanies. These stories are experimental, in their own way—some of them are quite self-conscious—but their experimenting is a means to meaning, not an end. Who are these old-fashioned writers? None other than McSweeney's own Nick Hornby, Rick Moody, and Dave Eggers.

(Ruth Franklin is senior literary editor at the New Republic.)


6. JAMES WOODS has stoutly defended "realism" as the only valid mode of novel-writing (whatever "realism" is). Here is a blogger who is not impressed, and attacks old James:

James Wood Does Not Impress

If James Wood's new essay, "The Blue River of Truth," was meant to be some kind of definitive annointment of realism as The Only True Genre, I find it wanting. I don't find a whole lot to convince me that

Realism, seen broadly, cannot be only a genre; instead, it makes other forms of fiction seem like subgenres. For realism teaches everyone else. It schools its own truants: it is what allows magical realism, hysterical realism, fantasy, science fiction, even thrillers, to exist.

If I'm reading Wood correctly (and this is iffy since the prose is fairly opaque) his argument is that realism is top dog because even wacky experimental fiction is trying to get at real human emotions. No matter that Kafka writes a story about a dude turning into a bug--what's important it that he's doing it to get at a human mind.

Realism can best be defined as the persuasive mimesis of plausible human activity. And perhaps not even of plausible human activity; perhaps one needs just to say "of the human." Kafka's Metamorphosis and Hamsun's Hunger and Beckett's Endgame are not representations of likely or typical human behavior; but they draw their power, in part, from their connection to the human. This, we say to ourselves, is what it would feel like to be an outcast from one's family--an insect, a young madman, an aged parent kept in a bin and fed pap. In his "Preface to Shakespeare," Dr. Johnson reminds us that "imitations produce pain or pleasure, not because they are mistaken for realities, but because they bring realities to mind."

I'll grant that this is a pretty clever argument because it flips things around. Just as no one can make a map that is perfectly accurate, no one can write a book that's 100% real. Realism is just one out of a multitude of "experimental" styles, all trying to depict reality. But since depicting reality is all books do then no matter what you write, so long as its human it all goes back to realism. And what human can write anything beyond humanity?

Seen from this perspective, realism isn't one among equals, but rather the style that gets closest to the impossible summit of depicting things exactly as they are.

I see some problems with this. First, it seems like Wood is engaging in some goalpost shifting. No one ever said that experimental fiction wasn't trying to get at meaty human emotions. Most books--experimental, realist, whatever--try to say something about humanity, but I don't see why Wood can claim that as the province of realism. Because emotions are "real" and hence realism invented the "human-emotion-rendering" genre?

Second, I'm not sure that depicting human emotions is the one and only task of literature. Certainly it's something that is important, and authors who want to write frigid works bereft of emotion had better have something to replace the humanity that they've stripped from their works.

Lastly, even if real human emotions are the holy grail of literature, why is it that realistic depictions of the world are the best at rendering them? The protestations of Moody and others (cited by Wood at the beginning of the article) that straight-up realism is "quaint" is a reflection of that fact that the world we now live in is dramatically removed from the world realism grew up in. Perhaps realism was just fine to describe the world of the 19th century, but perahps now something a little different is needed to get at the complexity of things as they are.

Comments:
Really great, thought-provoking post. Your views seem far more thoughtful than Woods'. Actually, I found myself not remotely interested in his blurb, but you made even his thoughts more interesting. Thanks for the brain snack.
Posted by: jmfausti

The whole concept is absurd. If the ur-genre of realism allows others to exist what do we make of Greek tregedy. Surely it gets to human emotions (thus the whole catharsis concept of Aristotle), but one can't say it is realism.
Posted by: derikb

The nice thing about literature (or one of the nice things) is that we don't really have to worry about rankings, who's number one, etc. It's not really a competition between realism, super-realism, minimalism, experimental writing, etc, etc, and I'm surprised that Wood feels the need to establish a hierarchy, if that's what he's doing. Having said that, it's hard to argue that Realism isn't the most important movement, at least in American literature of the last 150 years, not because it's better than some other style but because it informs most of them. That is, a reaction against realism may or may not be interesting but it certainly reinforces the importance of realism. I'd disagree with Wood in his definition by the way, in the sense that he limits realism's important to its depection of human emotions. It does this, but I'd broaden things to say that it attempts to mimic or transform human experience. At least the best realists do. And as for Scott's claim that it was important in the 19th C but not now, check out Barth's essays on the subject in which he first talks about the "literature of exhaustion", i.e. realism and then recants ten years later writing of the essential nature of story-telling. One could, of course, extend realism, as I guess Wood does, to include all human reactions to anything, but this seems suspiciously like cheating to me. In order to talk seriously about art, one has to make distinctions. Realism and experimental writing aren't the same, but they are related. Or so it seems to me.
Posted by: David Milofsky

this entire argument is mindless
in order to rank different 'kinds' of literature, first of all, you have to have a philosophy of life in which there is a 'goal'
only then can you say that one kind of literature is 'better,' and in that case you'd only mean 'better' in order to achieve your own 'goal
for example, if your goal is to create a master race of only blue-eyed, blond-haired aryans, then... yeah
using the words 'better' or 'best' when talking about literature is not unlike saying that a certain kind of person is 'better' than another kind... assuming that the people being talked about are all living equally harmless lives, because literature is harmless in that way... it isn't alive
this entire thing, like almost all conversation everywhere, just seems to me like a question of semantics, people trying to impose their own definitions of words onto other people
Posted by: readerofdepressingbooks |

I wonder if you even read what I said since I specifically argued against the idea of ranking styles of writing. Nothing wrong with semantics, btw, though that isn't what this is about. The meaning of words is one of the things I think is truly important in the world.
Posted by: David Milofsky

The only way to decide what to read is to judge and rank. I'd like to trash what's rank, in order to read what's not redundant. I end up, by chance, affirming re-formed realities by simply choosing to read what seems most valid and important, even when it's bursting with repetition (as in Vollman). I make these choices, perhaps only to reify my own post-modern reality, which coughs up Flaubert alongside Vollman. Morandi, Laxness and Miller are discovered in bed with Homer, Shakespeare and Orwell. So, there's not really a heirarchy of approaches necessarily. But, there is a heirarchy based on my own sense of aesthetics and tastes, which are in essence, judgemental and unabashedly critical. It's important to critique all of it, but only so much time to read what's come before. I say, bring on the heirarchies, but base them on quality, rather than on style. Writing and reading is what births genres. Genres don't birth or affirm other genres, people who write and read do this.
Posted by: Terri Saul


7. AS A CORRECTIVE on all this attacking, here's a piece about husband and wife Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt -- "real" writers, and their actual, real lives:

Reflections on Glass -- by Andie Miller

In 1998, Daniel Auster, the son of author Paul Auster, then 20 years old, was sentenced to five years probation in the Manhattan Supreme Court after pleading guilty to stealing $3,000 from the body of murdered drug-dealer, Angel Melendez. The Reuters report stated the facts, but what happened on the night of the killing is much more murky and unclear. Melendez was killed by New York "club kid," Michael Alig, who then cut up his body. And though Daniel was never implicated in the murder, he admitted to being in the apartment while it took place.

The movie of Michael Alig's clubbing years, Party Monster, starring Macauley Culkin in the title role, has done the festival circuits. But Culkin's own strange childhood, as the angel-faced star of movies like Home Alone (1 and 2) and Getting Even With Dad notwithstanding, we can be fairly certain that he bears as much resemblance to the character as does Charlize Theron to Aileen Wuornos. Facts are generally far less esthetically pleasing than fiction.

The "better together" recommendations at Amazon for Party Monster suggest that it should be purchased with That Was Then, This is Now, S. E. Hinton's 1971 American classic about WASP vs. Hispanic teen gangs, written by and for teenagers. The movie stars Emilio Estevez.

Susan Hinton's books were my favourites as an adolescent, even as a South African. How much it had to do with a romantic idea of children living without parents, and eating chocolate cake for breakfast, I can't say. But I can still recall the opening line of her first book, The Outsiders: "When I stepped out into the bright sunlight, from the darkness of the movie house, all I had on my mind was Paul Newman and a ride home." At least I think that's how it went.

In Paul Auster's first novella, City of Glass, part of the 1985 New York Trilogy, his detective, Daniel Quinn, is so confounded by the case he is investigating -- of a young man having been imprisoned in a room by his father as a boy, and now afraid that his father is going to kill him -- that he seeks out the help of an author called Paul Auster (mistaking him for a detective of the same name).

Whether this is the same Paul Auster who is writing the novel, we are not sure. Though he borrows from the genre of detective fiction, the search in his writing is invariably the search for self. And he says wryly, "I grope my way forward in darkness as I'm doing it."

While Quinn and Auster are in conversation, Auster's little son Daniel arrives home with his stepmother. Paul introduces the two: "'Daniel, this is Daniel.' The boy burst out laughing and said, 'Everybody's Daniel!'"

Maybe so. Maybe there's a cautionary tale in this story for us all. After all, how well do we really know anybody? Even those closest to us.

"Sometimes the same people, sometimes different ones," says Auggie Wren, the storyteller in Auster's screenplay, Smoke, who photographs the same spot for "four thousand straight days in all kinds of weather... And sometimes the different ones become the same, and the same ones disappear. The earth revolves around the sun, and every day the light from the sun hits the earth at a different angle." Daniel Auster had a small role in the 1995 movie (he was the "book thief"), though he went on to become a photographer by profession.

In Auster's first book, published in 1982, The Invention of Solitude -- this one not fiction, but a memoir of his father's death ( Portrait of an Invisible Man ), and his meditations on becoming a father to Daniel ( The Book of Memory ) -- Auster goes on a journey of discovery of his own father, Samuel, who had been a remote enigma throughout Auster's life. Only in the process of writing this book did he unravel the mystery of what had shaped his father, and made him who he was.

When Samuel was just seven years old, "on 23 January 1919, precisely sixty years before my father died," Paul writes, "his mother shot and killed his father in the kitchen of their house." She was found not guilty of murder on the grounds of mental instability, but the family (she and five children) spent the rest of their lives in poverty, constantly moving. So when he grew up, he had spent most of his life in denial of and oblivious to what was going on around him.

Auster describes his experience of his father. "For fifteen years he had lived alone. Doggedly, opaquely, as if immune to the world. He did not seem to be a man occupying space, but rather a block of impenetrable space in the form of a man. The world bounced off him, shattered against him, at times adhered to him -- but it never got through."

So much so, that once, after Paul and his sister and parents had moved, his father -- who regularly took a nap before dinner -- mistakenly drove to his old house and slept surrounded by the new owner's things without even noticing he was in the wrong house. "Even today," writes Auster, "it still makes me laugh. And yet, for all that, I cannot help regarding it as a pathetic story. It is one thing for a man to drive to his old house by mistake, but it is quite another, I think, for him not to notice that anything has changed inside it... For as long as he lived, he was somewhere else, between here and there. But never really here. And never really there... And if the mind is unable to respond to the physical evidence, what will it do when confronted with the emotional evidence."

Auster's father was no more emotionally conscious than he was physically, and Paul describes the first meeting between grandfather and grandson. "Daniel was just two weeks old when he first laid eyes on him. [He] pulled up in his car, saw my wife putting the baby into the carriage for a nap, and walked over to say hello. He poked his head into the carriage for a tenth of a second, straightened up and said to her, 'A beautiful baby. Good luck with it,' and then proceeded to walk into the house."

While he was writing The Book of Memory, and reflecting on having himself become a father, Auster was also translating Stephane Mallarme's A Tomb for Anatole, about the death of Mallarme's young son. These fragments that "aspire to the condition of poetry," Auster describes as "anguished and moving material for me."

you can, with your little
hands, drag me
into the grave--you
have the right--
--I
who follow you, I
let myself go--
--but if you
wish, the two
of us, let us make...

an alliance
a hymen, superb
--and the life
remaining in me
I will use for--

Auster, whose body of work revolves around coincidences -- "the rhythms and rhymes in the world", and "the music of chance" (the title of one of his books) -- comments on the fact that looking at photographs of Mallarme's son Anatole, and his own son Daniel "at that age, when they were very small, they could have been twin brothers."

Of Mallarme, Auster says that he "was able to transform more thoroughly than any other writer, the real into the imaginary, and to blur the distinction between the two."

Auster himself, of course, is a master of the blurring of fact and fiction. So is his wife, novelist Siri Hustvedt. In her most recent novel, What I Loved (that took her six years to write), she explores the effects of a troubled child, a pathological liar, on those around him. At once chastised for exploiting her stepson by thinly disguising the story of the Angel Melendez murder in the book, and then defended, because after all it is fiction, both ends of the spectrum of argument seem to be missing the point. More important are the issues she's exploring, and the way that she does it. Interviewer Michael Silverblatt puts his finger on it. It's "the interpenetrations of actual actions and literary ones" that are so remarkable, he thinks. What he describes as "the enjambment of fiction and reality."

This interpenetration that happens between fact and fiction in style, extends also to what she is exploring in the book, Hustvedt explains: "I'm very interested in the idea of our openness, and the fact that people really are created through each other in some important way. It starts in childhood, the intimacy that we have with our parents, maybe most particularly with our mother, or whomever is taking care of us in the beginning. And that intimacy is a kind of interpenetration of character, and that's how we develop. It goes on in life in friendships as well... Any ordinary conversation between people, there's that space where the language is taking place... Dialogue is something rather magical. The words are going into us, and coming out of us."

And this permeability seems to be heightened in art, she says. "Art, it seems to me, is probably the place where private life meets the culture in some way. With art we have the strange experience of looking at another person's inner life and unconscious through the vocabulary of the culture. Whether it's a written work of art, or a painting, art always borrows from history. It is never created in total isolation, never in a vacuum. You use an artistic vocabulary that you've inherited, from art history."

No doubt this borrowing from history extends to each other's personal histories, too.

The illusion of separateness and creation in isolation is what Auster was also exploring in The Invention of Solitude. The path of the solitary artist alone in a room is an alter ego that he has explored in his fiction, as well. He muses from time to time, with wry alarm, on who he might have become had he not met Hustvedt.

But the echoes in their work extend beyond just thematic and stylistic dimensions. They extend even to the characters in their books. When she is asked about similarities in their writing, and whether she is influenced by Auster's work, she suggests that "partly it is due to a shared world. After all we've been together for 21 years. Inevitably there are overlaps." At the same time, she reminds us, "what people often don't realise is that he's done some borrowing from me too."

In Auster's book Leviathan, one of his characters is a woman called Iris. Many people notice that this is Siri "in the mirror," as she puts it. But not as many are aware that Iris is a character of Siri's creation, from her first book, The Blindfold. Auster asked if his main character could marry Hustvedt's main character, and she "thought that was a lovely thing, because Iris was left hanging at the end of the first novel. And I thought it was very nice that she ended up married to Peter Aaron, and doing rather well." Peter Aaron of course shares Auster's initials, and is a semi-autobiographical character.

But life isn't as neatly tied up as fiction, and Michael Silverblatt wonders if perhaps our culture is encouraging its children to become pathological in order to imitate art. "When you talk about diseases generated by the culture, one of these diseases it seems to me has become the interest in the extreme case, the lurid case, the case that verges on poetry." Is pathology then the culture's self-fulfilled prophecy?

Hustvedt takes a more practical view. "I think that the human organism requires certain things in order to do very well," she says. "And it seems that some kind of consistent early nurture is really important. And I think that is the thing that to a large degree determines human health. At the same time, it's mysterious. If you read different case studies, you will not be able to find an honest psychiatrist who will tell you that you can predict. You can put two cases side by side, two children who have had very tough childhoods, and they will grow up to be two quite different people. What the factors are remain mysterious. Obviously personal history is very important, one's personal emotional history. But also one's genetic make-up. You know your nerves, the way you're strung. All of this goes together to make a human being."

Auster's first wife and Daniel's mother, writer and academic Lydia Davis, is quiet on the subject. After her divorce from Auster, Daniel moved between her and his father, and one can't help wondering about her thoughts of her child.

Writer Amy Fusselman says of her: "Lydia Davis is ferocious. When I attended her reading in NYC recently, and heard her read the piece about the old dictionary and her son, I was struck again by how that piece is one of the most fearless bits of writing I've ever read. It was all the more powerful to hear her read it in her own, soft voice."

In the piece to which she refers, a short story called "The Dictionary," from Davis' collection Samuel Johnson Is Indignant (2001), "a scholar measures her questionable child-rearing against how well she cares for a rare, antique book, and achieves a realization about how she could better treat her young son."

Davis specialises in short-short stories (sometimes referred to as "flash fiction"). In conversation with her, Michael Silverblatt observes, "I sense in your work an almost inhuman perfectionism." What is it that she is most sensitive to in her writing, he asks? "Well, taking away excess, the sentence that's one too many. Dullness. Something that's too commonplace." She recalls learning to read. "I loved learning the words 'look' and 'see': 'Run, Jane, run. See Jane run.' It was so clear and easy and unconfusing and neat."

She cites Grace Paley as an example of the "compression" that she admires. But she adds that, unlike Paley, she struggles to write slang. "I can't deal easily with casual writing. I wrote a story in slang, but to do it I had to go to a slang dictionary." She has a sense of humour about herself.

When she reads the story in question, "The Meeting," aloud, it reflects a similar sense of humour to Paley's, too. Though she cites Russell Edson as one of her earliest influences. "His subjects were from some deep psychic space that most of us don't want to touch. Family stuff. Crude, difficult family stuff."

Her story "In A House Besieged" (in full):

"In a house besieged lived a man and a woman. From where they cowered in the kitchen the man and woman heard small explosions. 'The wind,' said the woman. 'Hunters,' said the man. 'The rain,' said the woman. 'The army,' said the man. The woman wanted to go home, but she was already home, there in the middle of the country in a house besieged."

And from "The Professor": "All I wanted to do was go out into the middle of the desert, as far away as possible from everything I had known all my life, and from the university where I was teaching and the towns and the city near it with all the intelligent people who lived and worked in them, writing down their ideas in notebooks and on computers in their offices and their studies at home and taking notes from difficult books. I wanted to leave all this and go out into the middle of the desert and run a motel by myself with a little boy, and have a worn-out cowboy come along, a worn-out middle-aged cowboy, alcoholic if necessary, and marry him. I thought I knew of a little boy I could take with me... The fact is that if an alcoholic cowboy came into my life in any important way I would probably criticize him to death for his drinking until he walked out on me."

She characterises her writing as "a philosophical investigation of the relationship between imagination and reality, as well as an exploration of one's perceptions of one's identity and the subjective nature of the truth."

Davis went into the family profession, as both her parents were writers, though "it wasn't an entirely happy fate," she says. Music was her first love. But what does her son Daniel feel about being surrounded by literary celebrity?

Photographer Ned Schenk of Pavement Studios recalls introducing himself to "a cool tattooed kid on Avenue B after taking his portrait... 'By the way, my name's Ned.' The kid replies 'Hi, I'm Daniel Auster.' My response, 'That's interesting, I'm reading a book by Paul Auster; he's one of by favorite authors...' Daniel grins and says 'Yeah, I know him; that's my dad.' A few days later I read in the Village Voice that Daniel would be testifying as a witness in the Peter Gatien ecstasy drug ring trial, and that he was apparently the teenage kid who was passed out in the apartment during the infamous Disco Bloodbath clubland murder of Angel Melendez by Michael Alig."

In 1979, Auster concluded his Portrait of an Invisible Man, of his father, with these words:

"Past two in the morning. An overflowing ashtray, an empty coffee cup, and the cold of early spring. An image of Daniel now, as he lies upstairs in his crib asleep. To end with this.

"To wonder what he will make of these pages when he is old enough to read them.

"And the image of his sweet and ferocious little body, as he lies upstairs in his crib asleep. To end with this."

It was these words that touched me, and made me curious to investigate what had become of this little boy. Now I am filled with a profound sense of sadness.

In Hustvedt's book, What I Loved, the father of the troubled boy dies of a broken heart. But this is fiction. Auster is as productive as ever, still averaging a book every eighteen months. Of his most recent book, Oracle Night, Guardian critic Sean O'Hagan says that its "noir shadings... and shockingly violent interludes... are indicative of a late style that is both darker than the Auster of old, and somehow more life affirming. They speak of endurance, survival, reinvention; the trajectory that one does not give up, follows loss, attends to the grieving process."

"Every life is inexplicable," says Auster's narrator in The Locked Room, the final novella in The New York Trilogy. "No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details given, the essential thing resists telling... We all want to be told stories... We imagine the real story inside the words, and to do this we substitute ourselves for the person in the story, pretending that we can understand him because we understand ourselves. This is a deception."

Recently Auster has had little to say publicly about his son. He says only that he "is currently finding himself -- ask me again in a couple of years."