Paul Strohm and the Art of the 100 Word Story

If you want to know about masculinity, music, and aging (and more), then Paul Strohm is the guy to turn to.

The Bay Area scholar, author, wit, and bon vivant has just published a series of exquisite shorts—stories of 100 words that perfectly capture the telling turns of his life, whether it’s styling his childhood friend Billy’s “carroty hair” or partying with the Pixies.

Each story acts as a snapshot, a pivot that defines the act of memory in dashes of details, episodes rising with cinematic and often ribald ironies. While there is a certain trendy novelty to genres such as the six-word novel/memoir or Twitter stories, I find that these forms often rely too much on a joke, a gimmick, or just make little sense (although I like Hemingway’s “For sale: baby shoes, never used.”)

With 100 words, Strohm manages to stretch out and truly evoke a moment, if not spin a yarn, while maintaining the nuanced hints that are crucial to such a short form.

Strohm is working on a series of 100 of the shorts, and having completed 99 of them, he published nine in the California College for the Arts lit journal Eleven Eleven.

Since the stories are short, I’ll quote the story “Meeting Girls” in its entirety:

My high school friends and I were afraid of girls but thought we should be meeting some. Wilbur (‘Stiff Sheet’) Coultis—a.k.a ‘Coitus’—claimed he knew how. Under his supervision, we went cruising every Friday night in Martin’s Nash Rambler. Seeing a girl walking, we’d slow the car so Coultis could roll down his window and shout ‘Yo, Snatch!’ before we sped away. Our friend Valentine pointed out after several weeks that this wasn’t working, and proposed ‘Hey, BeeBay!’ with no better results. Back at Martin’s we smoked cigarettes and complained about no luck. But that became Valentine’s nickname: ‘BeeBay.’”

Millions of words have been written about this topic, but what more do you need to know? Many a man has cherished such painful, anguished bonding (although mostly in retrospect), and we can only hope our techniques improve with age. But probably not much, as the story points out in the second, more tender, yet still misguided advance.

Strohm is most known for his scholarship. He’s Garbedian Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and has published books such as Social Chaucer. But let’s hope we see the other ninety 100 word stories from him soon.

Writing Tip No. 647: Never Try to Please the Boss

I guess one can consult the Greek oracle on this one. Know thyself. Sounds easy, but most of us spend a lifetime reaching and dodging and jumping through hoops and doing deep breath exercises and throwing the occasional punch (if not tantrum) in pursuit of such solid ground.

Becoming a good writer is akin to becoming a good human being in so many ways, after all. So here's a good quote from Chuck Palahnuik, he of The Fight Club (because it's all a fight).

As a writer, I felt compelled to toe the publishing line until I realized I was flushing away all my free time. I was starting to really hate writing. It looked like just another f---ing job where I was trying to please some boss. There had to be a way for writing to be fun.

So he wrote The Fight Club.

It sounds so simple, huh? Be playful. Know thyself. Don't answer to anyone. Write like a kid, a madman, a dancer, a clown. Search for meaning on your own terms.

It doesn't matter if you're writing Moby Dick, Waiting for Godot, or Jack and Jill. It's the same tip. Never try to please the boss. Kick the boss out of the house.

Put up your dukes.

Writing tips. And more writing tips...

A while back I wrote a post about Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing. I also wrote a piece on How Not to Write About Sex.

For those still looking for more rules (how to and how not to), here are some more splendid writing tips from the Guardian from the likes of Richard Ford, Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Franzen, Anne Enright and more--because, seriously, who can get enough rules for writing?

Especially if one is avoiding writing by studying the rules for writing--and neglecting the first rule: just do it (apologies for the Nike tie-in).

Margaret Atwood on plot

Don't sit down in the middle of the woods. If you're lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page.

Anne Enright on persistence

The first 12 years are the worst.

Richard Ford on the writing life

Don't have children.

Jonathan Franzen on the Web

It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.

Zadie Smith on revision

When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.

Jeannette Winterson on ambition

Be ambitious for the work and not for the reward.

Neil Gaman on readers' critiques

Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

These aren't the best excerpts. In fact, Anne Enright's are worth executing in their entirety. "Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity."

And, as a final tip, be assured that you'll be able to return to this blog for more wrting tips. And even more tips after those.

Writing tip no. 3,046: Sam Shepherd and voices and cowboy mouths

Voice. How to hear it, how to speak it, how to write it?

Some are lucky in that voice or voices seem to possess them in such an overwhelming (yet perhaps unforgiving) way. Think Rimbaud, Kerouac, Virginia Wolf, William Faulkner, Malcolm Lowry—all of the mad caps of literature.

But whether voice possessed them like a poltergeist or not, they had to honor the voice, listen to it, give it form. The voice didn’t just speak itself.

This is all to say that I don’t think writers should be too mystical about voice. I don’t think Rimbaud’s “derangement of the senses” is the path, just a path. One might seize upon voice through prayer, or, I don’t know, jogging, crocheting, sipping tea.

Voice is a commitment. To hear it you simply have to privilege listening to it over the din of the other noises in your life.

I’m thinking about voice because I just read the profile of Sam Shepherd in the Feb. 8 New Yorker. It’s always interesting when someone like Shepherd emerges out of nowhere, literally stepping off a bus in New York City in 1963, unread, unschooled, unconnected, and then he writes such a tangle of compelling stories, seemingly without the tortured ambition and wrangling with revisions that others muscle through.

He’s one of those blessed (or cursed) naturals. Because he listened.

“I had a sense that a voice existed that needed expression, that there was a voice that wasn’t being voiced,” he said.

Is there any better definition of the first powerful impulse to be a writer?

“There were so many voices that I didn’t know where to start. I felt kind of like a weird stenographer….There were definitely things there, and I was just putting them down. I was fascinated by how they structured themselves.”

Shepherd’s plays grow out of a certain beat tradition, the words, characters, and structures spawning from his trust in the more intuitive forces of creation.

“You find all the rhythms and the melody and the harmonies and take them as they come,” he says.

Such a raw trust in voice seems absent in most of the stuff I read these days (with the exception of Roberto Bolano). I suppose the easy answer is that we’re living in the age of MFA programs and social networking and email. Authors are well-read and schooled and connected. Our age of writing is very practiced, very intentioned. Stories tend to be neat, not messy. It takes a very brave writer to trust in the voice more than the structure, the sale, the marketing, etc.

I don’t know if that’s right or wrong.

The article includes so many of Shepherds voices as he chronicles “the whacked out corridors of broken-off America.”

People want a street angel. They want a saint with a cowboy mouth.”

Shepherd also provides a nice angle on characterization: “I preferred a character that was constantly unidentifiable.”

An author shouldn’t answer for a character’s behavior, in other words, or at least not entirely. These are the people we’re compelled by in real life—the ones that don’t fit into our expectations. The ones who trouble us.

It fits with a quote I remember reading from Shepherd over 20 years ago: “Always write within a contradiction.”

Voices colliding…

Literary Drunks and Addicts and Scourges

What do William Burroughs, Ayn Rand, James Baldwin, Jim Carroll, and Louisa May Alcott have in common? They all enjoyed substances, whether alcohol, amphetamines, or absinthe (or all of the above).

LIFE Magazine has put together a slideshow collecting portraits of some of history’s most notorious literary dabblers in all varieties of substances (and some of the photos are even for sale, for those who like to hang drunken authors on their walls).

We love our literary addicts, don't we? It's almost a shame the tradition is dying. I certainly don't want to be an advocate for addiction, but there's something a bit dismaying about the image of contemporary writers at 24 Hour Fitness, keeping a calorie count on the elliptical, dallying over organic salads afterward, turning down a second glass of wine at the weekend's dinner party.

There's a magnificent photo of Dorothy Parker (one of my favorite artistes of the drunken barb), as she bangs away at a typewriter, her eyes and jowels all full of the bags of a weary, joyous life of revelry and damnation--and then there's a wonderful view of the countryside behind her, a man who looks like Rock Hudson lounging in the next room. But she's writing, writing and writing and writing.

James Baldwin's eyes pop out in the livliest, most electrified way.

Jean Cocteau is being lifted to heaven (or taking a roundabout way to hell).

You've gotta live, right? Or you've gotta die to write.

Consider thes quotes--which might be more magnificent (or downright disturbing) than the photos:

You just got to see that junk is just another nine-to-five gig in the end, only the hours are a bit more inclined toward shadows. -- Basketball Diaries

I'm Catholic and I can't commit suicide, but I plan to drink myself to death."

-- Jack Kerouac

To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving.

-- Jean Cocteau

Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you're allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It's like killing yourself, and then you're reborn. I guess I've lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now."

--Charles Bukowski

I'm an alcoholic. I'm a drug addict. I'm homosexual. I'm a genius.

--Truman Capote

Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl's clothes off.

--Raymond Chandler

We'll leave the drinking right there. With all of the clothes off. Drama shall ensue.

The Strange Hours Travelers Keep by August Kleinzhaler

All reviews are a reckoning of expectations. In this case, my expectations were perhaps too high for The Strange Hours Travelers Keep by San Francisco poet August Kleinzhaler.

One, there’s Kleinzhaler, who was awarded the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry for Sleeping it Off in Rapid City—a must-read book for me after reading the reviews.

Then there’s his tantalizing title for the collection, The Strange Hours Travelers Keep, that promises a skewed, evanescent, shady vision of our lives in motion and a probing of what travel means.

And finally, and most importantly, there’s the gripping first poem that’s eponymous with the title of the collection.

The markets never rest

Always they are somewhere in agitation

Pork bellies, titanium, winter wheat

Electromagnetic ether peppered with photons

Treasure spewing from Unisys A-15 J mainframes

Across the firmament

Soundlessly among the thunderheads and passenger jets

As they make their nightlong journeys

Across the oceans and steppes

I might venture to say that this short stanza defines the movements and machinations of the world as accurately and evocatively as any 50 words could.

Kleinzhaler combines the words of commerce, capitalism, technology, and nature in such a criss-cross of restless movement that it makes me feel life as a strange force—both mechanistic and natural—beyond our understanding (and this was before the economic crisis of the last year—he easily could have sprinkled in “mortgage derivatives,” etc. to signal another wild weave of the pattern).

The poem goes on to relate the life of our strivings, our production, to nature itself in its metaphors— “Nebulae, incandescent frog spawn of information,” and “Like an enormous cloud of starlings”—while still evincing the essential loneliness one can experience in such a world through a simple image: “The lights of the airport pulse in the morning darkness.”

I wanted every poem in the collection to riff on these themes, to rise in a crescendo—or perhaps a swarm—of similar startling and telling images. Alas, I don’t think any of the rest of the poems in the collection are nearly as good, which isn’t to say that they aren’t good.

“The Old Poet, Dying,” touches on a different kind of travel—the fadings in and out of one leaning toward the grave. Fragments. Memories. Bodily functions. Strange TV shows. Stories and nurses.

Kleinzhaler is best when he’s focused as a witness, either to another’s story or as an observer of the world; his poems become less compelling the more personal they are.

In “Citronella and Yellow Wasps,” he’s fortunately on the road again, much as he is in “The Strange Hours Travelers Keep,” and he patches together images of I-35, Austin into a fragmented blur of the crazy yet sometimes disturbing beauty of the American road, whether it’s methamphetamine, NASCAR, or Jesus.

Before the heat and after

The little pink beeper ship and the flamingo

In the logo

Same color as the icing on the cookies inside

And the votive candles that heal bad sprains

Also, the billboards overhead

Through the dusty branches

Big square decals mounted against sky

A bit of nose here, some lettering

Jesus or barbecue

Exit 205

Cobalt blue background cut out of sky

Kleinzhaler writes without judgment; his poems are at once critique and appreciation. America’s kooky, yet sometimes menacing road images become totems of a traveler’s appreciation in “An Englishman Abroad.” Our talk radio hosts go with “coral pink” sunsets in a way that no other country can match.

In such travels, a placelessness can ensue. As he says in “On Waking in a Room and Not Knowing Where One Is,”

Cities each have a kind of light,

a color even,

or set of undertones

determined by the river or hills

as well as by the stone

of their countless buildings.

I cannot yet recall what city this is I’m in.

It must be close to dawn.

The book closes with a bang—or more than a bang actually. The definition of travel shifts to those marauding bands of yesteryear, “attached to their ponies like centaurs,” and the strange hours they keep are spent in a similar pattern as the opening poem, except they’re pillaging places, destroying buildings they never aspire to live in. It’s a vicious poem, full of “Ripping the ears off of hussars and pissing in the wounds.”

We’re born with an urge to pillage, to travel. Creative destruction. Destructive creation.

Perhaps I liked the book more than I thought I did.

Watch video of Kleinzhaler reading:

The Eternal Life of Holden Caulfield

Okay, since everyone is writing about J.D. Salinger, I have to as well.

Little known fact: The “J” stands for Jerome. Would anyone have read Catcher in the Rye if it had been written by Jerome Salinger? Sometimes it's all in a name.

But seriously, one thing that interests me is the literary legacy of Holden Caulfield. He’s like the strange alpha male of teen angst protagonists—characters just keep flowing and flowing from him as if he’s reproducing everywhere.

As Michiko Kakutani said in the Times, Catcher in the Rye is “a book that intimately articulates what it is to be young and sensitive and precociously existential.”

For one, consider the recent young adult novel King Dork, which is a ribald update of Catcher. How about James Dean in Rebel without a Cause. Timothy Hutton in Ordinary People. Heck, even Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver.

Salinger nailed the Holden type—the kind of teen that, well, practically every teen identifies with in some way. Even jocks. Even phonies. Reading Catcher was—and perhaps still is—a rite of passage. The struggle between phoniness and authenticity is a lifelong challenge, and it sadly always will be.

Which is why that Holden crosses generations: He can be a punk rocker, a hippie, a drama nerd, a skateboarder, hell, a skinny kid holding an iPhone and texting.

So here’s the challenge: Name all of the characters in literature, in pulp fiction, in movies, in song, etc., that owe a debt to Holden Caulfield.

Think Jesse Eisenberg as Walt Berkman in the Squid and the Whale. Think Juno in Juno. Think Belle and Sebastian’s "Le Pastie de la Bourgeoisie."

In the meantime, join the phonies mourning J.D. Salinger. Salinger wouldn't have it any other way--would he?

How Fiction Works by James Wood

I’m a sucker for each new, hyped book about how to write fiction. You’d think I was in my twenties, not my forties.

Several years ago it was Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer. Then James Wood’s How Fiction Works came along.

Yesterday I wrote about the death of fiction (at least for literary journals). Conversely, the one thing that isn’t dying—and is thriving—is the publishing industry’s slew of how-to’s on the craft of writing fiction (perhaps this also explains the 822 MFA programs in the country).

Which all means that it’s difficult to differentiate yourself, either as how-to writer or a fiction writer. Even if you’re fancy pants James Wood who writes for the New Yorker and is married to the esteemed Claire Messud.

A lot of critics disparaged Wood’s book, but I won’t get into that because I thought it was a decent read. At this point, I don’t read these types of books for the originality of their tips, but for the reminders they include—and for the quotes from other authors, who always say things perfectly (Wood has a great penchant for Henry James).

So here are the eloquent reminders (tips) on the craft of writing fiction that Wood provided for me.

On Description—Or Becoming the Whole of Boredom
As a resister of the contemporary forces of description (or over-description), I appreciate Wood’s take on description in narratives:

“Auden frames the general problem well in his poem ‘The Novelist’: the poet can dash forward like a hussar, he writes, but the novelist must slow down, learn how to be ‘plain and awkward,’ and must ‘become the whole boredom.’”

It’s this notion of the “descriptive pause,” a phrase Wood takes from Gerard Genette, when “fiction slows down to draw our attention to a potentially neglected surface or texture.”

If there’s a modern master of the descriptive pause, I think it’s Ian McEwan—simply because he pauses in perfect balance to delve into the intricacies of the mundane while balancing that with the driving suspense of the overall narrative. Saturday might be the perfect example of this, and his thoughts on suspense certainly inform this approach.

It’s a tricky balance, the descriptive pause. Too much description tips into a “fetishization” of detail—a tendency that can cripple contemporary fiction according to Wood (and me—I even accuse his wife of such criminal acts, just as he takes on Nabokov and Updike).

“Nabokov and Updike at times freeze detail into a cult of itself. Aestheticism is the great risk here, and also an exaggeration of the noticing eye (There is so much detail in life that is not purely visual),” Wood writes.

To take on Nabokov is a risky endeavor for even the most erudite, but Wood bravely proceeds: “…Nabokov wants to tell us how important it is to notice. Nabokov’s fiction is always becoming propaganda on behalf of good noticing, hence on behalf of itself.”

What an efficient take on at least one aspect of Nabokov.

Characterization
Most writers blind spot is the area they think is their strength: characterization. I think it’s because we often think that because we love people, indulge in observing them, have friends and lovers and family, etc., that we inherently bring an assorted cast to life on the page.

Wood quotes Iris Murdoch on this point: “How soon one discovers that, however much one is in the ordinary sense ‘interested in other people,’ this interest has left one far short of possessing the knowledge required to create a character who is not oneself.”

Writers tend to compensate by providing a lot of God awful character background, answering all of those questions they hear in their writing workshops.

No.

It’s about mystery. Wood quotes from Stephen Greenblatt’s analysis of Shakespeare, how he minimized causal explanations and psychological rationales and “took out a key explanatory element, thereby occluding the rationale, motivation, or ethical principal that accounted for the action that was to unfold. The principle was not the making of a riddle to be solved, but the creation of a strategic opacity.”

In other words, E.M. Forrester’s notions of “flat” and “round” characters don’t matter as much as the intrinsic intrigue of a character.

As Virginia Wolf writes after reading Crime and Punishment and The Idiot, “These are characters without any features at all. We go into them as we descend into some enormous cavern.”

There’s much more, of course, but in the end these things come down to an author’s quote. For this one, I’ll conclude with Wood’s selection for his opening quote.

“There is only one recipe—to care a great deal for the cookery.” –Henry James

What more do you need to know?

The death of fiction...one more time

As much as I loath "death of fiction" articles, I'm compelled by them. I guess it's the watching a train wreck thing. Except that it's watching the wreck of the train I'm traveling in.

Damn.

The "death of fiction" is actually a new and thriving genre. By the time fiction actually dies, each and every reputable journal, magazine, and newspaper (and, um, blog and website and wiki and other doodads) will have predicted and analyzed its demise. Roll over Tolstoy, Augusten Burroughs is singing the blues.

Mother Jones just published a keenly insightful reckoning of lit mags, those subsidized tomes that usually make their homes at the nation's finer universities, and have carried the torch of publishing challenging and emerging authors for a good century or so. The article is penned by Ted Genoways, the editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, who's seen by parents he meets at his children's activities as practicing an "arcane craft they assumed was kept alive only by a lost order of nuns in a remote mountain convent or by the Amish in some print shop in Pennsylvania Dutch Country."

Not only does Genoways provide the mathematical analysis of the doomed (the number of creative writing programs multiplied by the number of graduates each year, etc.--which tallies somewhere in the millions, or it might as well), but he provides an interesting angle into how we got into this vicious circle of storytelling demise (not that it could have been avoided) after commercial mags started dropping fiction.

One would think that the rapid eviction of literature from the pages of commercial magazines would have come as a tremendous boon to lit mags, especially at the schools that have become safe harbors for (and de facto patrons of) writers whose works don't sell enough to generate an income. You would expect that the loyal readers of established writers would have provided a boost in circulation to these little magazines and that universities would have seen themselves in a new light—not just promoting the enjoyment of literature but promulgating a new era of socially conscious writing in the postcommercial age. But the less commercially viable fiction became, the less it seemed to concern itself with its audience, which in turn made it less commercial, until, like a dying star, it seems on the verge of implosion. Indeed, most American writers seem to have forgotten how to write about big issues—as if giving two shits about the world has gotten crushed under the boot sole of postmodernism.

I'm not sure if his analysis is entirely true--maybe readers just started watching TV or playing video games or doing drugs or reading blogs by jackasses, present company included. I don't know.

I remember reading that fiction was the number one reason people bought magazines in the '20s (hence paychecks of $3,000 to $5,000 for a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerad), but now it's the last reason anyone would buy a magazine--which is why even magazines with a literary heritage have quit publishing fiction.

Genoways lists several lit journals that have been around for ages (e.g., TriQuarterly, which never accepted one of my real world stories), but are losing their skin to the axe swipes of budget cuts (who's going to notice, or care, when the journals disappear is the argument of the administration). So, he says, like newspapers, lit journals have to think fast--go out there and get an audience.Now, dammit!!

So, in short, game over.

Still, this odd game of fiction persists--whether in online form or other rogue ways. Although the 822 MFA programs in the nation are like guppies on Viagra breeding out of control, they represent and produce a hungry reading and writing public.

To tell the truth, I read a lot of books--short story collections, poetry, novels, literary criticism, etc.--but I never really read literary journals, despite buying them regularly. There was always something a bit unappealing about them.They were often just overly serious tomes, prohibiting by design. Obdurately opaque. Of the tower, not the street.

Maybe, as Genoways writes, I just never saw myself in them even though I, like every writer I know, submits to them.

Maybe this is a good chance to revisit some of the Bay Area's lit mags. ZZZYVAA, Fourteen Hills, Zoetrope, McSweeney's, to mention the obvious ones. And, oh yeah, The Three Penny Review and Narrative. Gosh, it suddenly doesn't feel like ficiton is dying. It feels like it's everywhere. Just check out this list of Bay Area lit orgs, publishers, magazines, etc.

How Not to Write about Sex

Since Katie Roiphe's recent article in the Times a couple of weeks ago has sparked conversations among the lit set about sex scenes (or the absence thereof) in novels past and present, I thought I'd pass on this list of how not to write about sex--cribbed from Sonya Chung's thoughtful response to Roiphe on the www.themillions.com

It's a list that every MFA program should consider distributing--day one of the first semester (because as a former MFA student, I know how young writers grapple with sex scenes....but not me, of course).

And by the way, here are a couple of my thoughts on Roiphe's essay The Naked and the Conflicted.

Here are Sonya's five commandments on writing sex scenes....

In 1993, Auberon Waugh (son of Evelyn) established The Literary Review’s “Bad Sex in Fiction Award” – “with the aim of gently dissuading authors and publishers from including unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing, or redundant passages of a sexual nature in otherwise sound literary novels.” Reading through passages from this year’s “Bad Sex Awards” shortlist, along with an all-time bad sex passages list published by Flavorpill, it becomes clear the minefield one braves when crafting a linguistic experience of sex for a contemporary literary reader. If one were to develop a “Don’ts” list for fiction writers suiting up for the challenge, it might look like this (warning: graphic language to follow):

1. Beware of sensory descriptions which include food analogies – “honeydew breasts” (Styron), “like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg” (Littell), “the oysterish intricacy of her” (Anthony Quinn), “he felt his cashew become a banana, and then a rippled yam” (Updike) – or “wet” verbs like smear, suck, lick, slither, slide.

2. Be sparing with anatomical terminology for sexual organs, whether scientific or slang; and if your passage does contain such words, beware of mixing and matching high diction and low diction, i.e. it’s nearly impossible to get away with raunchy lyricism. (Here I will spare the reader specific examples, but suffice it to say that sex-organ diction, both high and low, is apparently like neon paisley; it doesn’t go with anything.)

3. Avoid spiritual-religious metaphors – “salvation” (Palahniuk), “rapture” (Ayn Rand), “magical composite / weird totem” (Roth), “on the edge of a precipice beyond which can be glimpsed a dark-green distance in a reeking mist and something shining out at them, a pulsing point of light” (Banville), “my licking a primitive form of language in a simple prayer” (Theroux) – or any language that gestures toward the grand or the epic: “weeping orifice” (Ann Allestree), “Imperial pint of semen” (Neal Stephenson), “Defile her” (Roth), “like a torero…trailing his cape in the dust before the baffled bull,” “gravid tremulousness of her breasts” (Banville).

4. Be hyper-vigilant about clichéd metaphors and similes, particularly oceanic ones: “like a tide determined to crash against those ancient rocks” (Simon Van Booy), “it was as if he were splashing about helplessly on the shore of some great ocean, waiting for a current, or the right swimming stroke to sweep him effortlessly out to sea” (Sanjida O’Connell).

5. Avoid machinistic metaphors: “with his fingers, now experienced and even inspired, he starts to steer her enjoyment like a ship towards its home port” (Amos Oz), “I’m going to pull the lever, I’m going to let the blade drop” (Littell), “he enters her like a f*cking pile driver” (Nick Cave).

I am here reminded of a word that, throughout grade school, never ceased to elicit mouth-covering giggles: rubber. We could be talking about the elastic things you shoot across the classroom at your nemesis, or the soles of your shoes, and yet still we couldn’t hold back the laughter. It was nervous laughter, of course, because at the age of 10, a condom – the danger, excitement, and illicitness that object conjured – was taboo, mysterious, unknown. We snickered out of anxious, uncomfortable curiosity; and, of course, to be cool.

Is it possible that our fun with “Bad Sex” lists – rooted, I’d argue, in our ambivalence about whether sex on the page, in all its linguistic sensory sloppiness and spiritual-existential achingness, is comedy or bathos or misogyny – reflects (along with our sound aesthetic judgment, of course) a devolving anxiety and discomfort about our core physical sensuality? Why do we scoff at all things exuberantly, epically sensual? Are sexual relationships really so blasé, so measured, in our modern lives? Is this how we now define “mature love,” i.e. as relationships in which an appetite for sex—the force of sex—is considered unevolved or juvenile; in which sex “doesn’t matter,” or, perhaps, shouldn’t matter?

There you have it folks. Start writing your sex scenes.

The Naked and the Conflicted by Katie Roiphe

Roiphe's Sexual Continuum: A Phallic Narrative

The great thing about Katie Roiphe’s recent essay in the Times, The Naked and the Conflicted, a historical analysis of male authors' approach to sex scenes (or lack thereof in the case of contemporary authors) is that it got everyone talking. No matter what your take might be, Roiphe hit upon a cultural nerve, something that any lit reader must reckon with.

It's the kind of essay that people will refer to years from now. In fact, it's the kind of essay written to be the kind of essay that people will refer to years from now.

And it all began with a friend of Roiphe’s throwing away a Philip Roth novel (The Humbling of all books) in a New York subway because she was revolted by his sex scenes—the “disgusting, dated, redundant” nature of them.

“But why, I kept wondering, did she have to throw it out?” Roiphe asks. “Did it perhaps retain a little of the provocative fire its author might have hoped for?”

Roiphe eloquently provides a literary history of male authors' (all white and straight) embrace and indulgence in provocative sex scenes as a way to explore life and assert an existential stance of dare and virile conquest—at least those authors who came of age in the ‘50s.

In short, she’s validating the efforts of writers who have been maligned for their sexism, giving a long overdue shout-out for the nuances of their carnal endeavors. After all these years, she sees that their writing is about sexual connection and what that means to human connection. (To think that anyone could have maligned them as immature sex pots, traffickers in lit porn, specialists in the male gaze!?!—which they're guilty of, of course.)

“After the sweep of the last half-century, our bookshelves look different than they did to the young Kate Millett, drinking her nightly martini in her downtown apartment, shoring up her courage to take great writers to task in Sexual Politics for the ways in which their sex scenes demeaned, insulted or oppressed women,” Roiphe writes.

But Roiphe’s challenge isn’t so much in taking on Millett’s narrow view. It’s questioning the "heirs" of Roth, Updike, and Mailer—those emasculated, sensitive souls such as David Eggers, Michael Chabon, and Jonathon Franzen (who all probably read Millett in college, talked with their female friends about feminist theory, and did their damndest to be upstanding gentlemen of this new world in their behavior and their writing—only to end up being chastised for not slinging their dicks more in their prose—ouch!).

She describes today’s straight male authors as “cautious, entangled, ambivalent, endlessly ironic,” while the old guard is “almost romantic”: “it has a mystery and a power, at least. It makes things happen.”

“Our new batch of young or youngish male novelists are not dreaming up Portnoys or Rabbits. The current sexual style is more childlike; innocence is more fashionable than virility, the cuddle preferable to sex,” writes Roiphe.

Roiphe recounts a scene in Egger’s road trip novel, “You Shall Know Our Velocity,” where the hero leaves a disco with a woman and she undresses and climbs on top of him, and they just lie there: “Her weight was the ideal weight and I was warm and wanted her to be warm.”

Contrast that with a passage from Mailer’s “controversial obsession” of the “violence in sex, the urge toward domination in its extreme.” A sampling: “I wounded her, I knew it, she thrashed beneath me like a trapped little animal, making not a sound.” “He must subdue her, absorb her, rip her apart and consume her.”

While Roiphe’s points are compelling and worth a great deal of pondering—and Eggers' scene of warmth might be a tad laughable—she misses something. Perhaps it’s in her insistence that Eggers, Chabon, and Franzen are Mailer, Updike, and Roth’s heirs. They’re not.

Even as Roiphe's post-feminist feminism is reclaiming the male maestros of the sex scene, men have moved on. The above passages from Mailer sound utterly ridiculous now to a man exploring sexual attraction—or even conquest. If you’re a straight white man writing today (and for the first time in literary history, this is actually a fairly problematic endeavor, as Roiphe’s essay certainly demonstrates), a sex scene like Mailer’s has not only been ridiculously overdone, it’s become absurd in the past thirty or so years (let's call it game over with Bukowski).

Such writing is often only a few lyrical phrases above a Penthouse Forum column, and the contemporary male writers that Roiphe chastises for being, um, not man enough to write a sex scene, are man enough to plumb other nuances of male/female relationships that Mailer, Updike, and Roth are only scarcely aware of at best.

And who is to say that Eggers’ “cuddling” isn’t a different sort of commentary on the human connection that Roiphe claims to value?

In other words, the sex scene doesn’t make the man. And it’s a bit insulting to value an author’s work in such a scanty, narrow way. These contemporary authors haven’t posited sex as their subject like Mailer, Updike, and Roth did, so Roiphe’s comparisons aren’t truly relevant (i.e., she calls them “heirs” relentlessly, just because they are white, male, straight, and critically celebrated, not because they’ve patterned themselves after this old guard—in fact, they’ve disregarded the old guard).

One has to feel sorry for poor David Eggers and Benjamin Kunkel on Roiphe’s chart, doomed to reside on the “snuggling” end of the sexual continuum while Roth and Updike are celebrated with a long (gosh, even penile!) bar on the other end for their “outrageous behavior.” It's as if Eggers and Kunkel are the nerdy, bookish boys in high school being teased for not having muscles.

Isn’t Roiphe's graphic strangely phallic, but without irony? Suddenly the old, leering, lascivious professor seems to be back in vogue.

Still, Roiphe says that the “crusading feminist critics” who objected to the likes of Mailer “might be tempted to take this new sensitivity or softness or indifference to sexual adventuring as a sign of progress.”

But, no, this isn’t progress, Roiphe says. “The sexism in the work of the heirs apparent is simply wilier and shrewder and harder to smoke out. What comes to mind is Franzen’s description of one of his female characters in The Corrections: “Denise at 32 was still beautiful.”

Is that all of the sexism she can come up with. Is that wilier and shrewder and harder to smoke out?

Gosh, a guy can’t win for losing. A youngish male author has to feel somewhat doomed. Most of one’s young adult years spent hearing about how that “outrageous behavior” was, well, outrageous. Now it’s as if Katie Roiphe is hanging around Jack Nicholson, chuckling and winking with him, calling him “Uncle Jack.”

She seems to think that sexism is inherent in men, so they might as well embrace it in a Maileresque way, to spear rather than cuddle? In this sense, she posits such a ridiculous either/or of masculinity that her arguments become adolescent despite their erudite veneer. She reduces straight men to a single, highly limited sexuality. It’s a view that’s as reductive as, well, pornography.

I applaud Roiphe for revisiting these authors’ "outrageous behavior" and saving them from the politically incorrect graveyard. But I think she needs to rethink her position on the likes of Eggers and Chabon and grant them their own existential pursuits, their conquests—not as heirs, but as independent creators.

Journeys and battles and conquests don’t all have to happen in the bedroom, after all. Isn’t this one of the great benefits of feminism? Feminism didn't only unshackle women; it set some men free as well.

Elmore Leornard's writing tips

I just stumbled across this article of Elmore Leonard's "10 tricks for good writing." As fun and interesting as the series of Paris Review author interviews is, I don't think one needs to go much further than this, at least for starters.

1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said”…he admonished gravely.
5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two
or three per 100,000 words of prose.
6. Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose."
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

On the other hand, here's an excerpt from a Paris Review interview with Philip Roth, so the interviews do deepen a list of tips--just a bit:

"Beginning a book is unpleasant. I’m entirely uncertain about the character and the predicament, and a character in his predicament is what I have to begin with. Worse than not knowing your subject is not knowing how to treat it, because that’s finally everything. I type out beginnings and they’re awful, more of an unconscious parody of my previous book than the breakaway from it that I want. I need something driving down the center of a book, a magnet to draw everything to it—that’s what I look for during the first months of writing something new. I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there’s a paragraph that’s alive. OK, I say to myself, that’s your beginning, start there; that’s the first paragraph of the book. I’ll go over the first six months of work and underline in red a paragraph, a sentence, sometimes no more than a phrase, that has some life in it, and then I’ll type all these out on one page. Usually it doesn’t come to more than one page, but if I’m lucky, that’s the start of page one. I look for the liveliness to set the tone. After the awful beginning come the months of freewheeling play, and after the play comes the crises, turning against your material and hating the book"

I'm sure Elmore Leonard might have a snappy retort for Roth, like, never open a book with weather, which is a sort of literary koan if you think about it.

Reading Resolutions

This is about the time of the month where New Year's resolutions start to tail off, right?

After struggling through the first 10 pages, or perhaps the first 10 sentences, of Finnegan's Wake, you decide to read the cloaks and daggers and symbology of the latest Dan Brown novel instead. Your salad first turns into a chicken salad, and then into a cheeseburger.

So, here's a fresh look at resolutions, at least reading resolutions--and perhaps a more inspiring guide than my last post on reading resolutions. This one comes from the Times, and recounts notable 2009 best seller's take on the subject of reading goals, flagellations, and joys.

One of my favorites is Alexander McCall Smith (“The Lost Art of Gratitude”), who has carried Vikram Seth’s 1,400-page novel A Suitable Boy with him through airports for years. It's like that resolution to lose five pounds each year. You might as well just enjoy your cupcakes. But I love his intention (my equivalent is Hermann Broch's Sleepwalkers--it will be such a shame if I die before completing the heavy slab).

On the opposite end of wrangling with the tomes of our times is a resolution much more do-able, and perhaps more meaningful. Doug Stanton, the author of Horse Soldiers, aims to "reread side by side the last lines of Robert Frost’s ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ and the last lines of the first paragraph in Cormac McCarthy’s novel All the Pretty Horses. They both end by repeating a last line, and it’s in the white space, or pause, between these lines that art is made. They are like an eerily silent magic trick.”

What a beautiful resolution. To return to white space where art is made. If I can achieve that, then who cares about the five pounds--or Hermann Broch's Sleepwalkers.

But I'll keep trudging around with Sleepwalkers. For what would the joy of reading be without lugging around such strivings. To think that my last words might be, "I wish I would have read Sleepwalkers."

Ian McEwan and the Art of Suspense

I’ve always thought of Ian McEwan as a sort of modern day Graham Greene. It’s not about their subject matter or their style, but the discipline, the concise and unwasteful approach they take to their narratives.

All of Greene’s novels seem to be more or less the same length, as do McEwan’s. Likewise, Greene and McEwan share an appreciation for a straightforward story, carefully plotted, with a keen sense of suspense.

Suspense. It’s an enviable narrative skill, no matter if you’re writing genre fiction or experimental fiction. McEwan, like Greene, is able to write challenging, thought-provoking novels while keeping you on the edge of your seat—just enough so.

The February 23, 2009 New Yorker published a nice profile of McEwan, focusing largely on his evolution as a novelist of scientific reasoning, but also capturing his thoughts on craft. One of his goals is to “incite a naked hunger in readers,” he said. To create this hunger, he gives a great definition of suspense: “Narrative tension is primarily about withholding information.”

This approach stands in contrast to the more expositional “background” approach to characterization that is so often proselytized. Know your characters’ eye color. Know the way they soap themselves in the shower. Know if they had pets as children, etc., etc.

But this sort of background knowledge can not only bog down the story, but weigh heavily on the writer, killing the notion of suspense.

The profile calls McEwan a “connoisseur of dread.” “At moments of peak intensity, McEwan slows time down—a form of torture that readers enjoy despite themselves.”
McEwan can slow down and create tension in such a way because he’s Nabokovian in his ability to “fondle details.”

McEwan explained, “Writing is a bottom-up process, to borrow a term from the cognitive world. One thing that’s missing from the discussion of literature in the academy is the pleasure principle. Not only the pleasure of the reader but also of the writer. Writing is a self-pleasuring act.”

Gosh, how interesting. In other words, don’t think of your reader in Peoria, think of yourself.

I envy McEwan for his ability to strike this chord of narrative leisure while attenuating the action to such a degree. “McEwan believes that something stirring should happen in a novel. Though he is animated by ideas, he would never plop two characters on a sofa and have them expound rival philosophies.”

In fact, he keeps a plot book full of scenarios two or three sentences long. “Here’s one,” he said. “’A comedy of beliefs set in a laboratory. Into this realm comes a young Islamic scientist who is technically brilliant. The head of the laboratory is a secular humanist, and the two become entangled. Something short and vicious, like Nathanael West.”

I can’t say that I’d want to read that novel, but then perhaps McEwan could make it interesting.

For more on McEwan, read

• Notes on Saturday, by Ian McEwan
• Ian McEwan's Supposed Plagiarism
• The Discomfort of Strangers

How to Write? The Definition of an Author

I'm reading James Wood's How Fiction Works. It's a somewhat masochistic task. No fault to James Wood, who, after 25 mildly interesting pages, provides a perfectly adept and writerly dissection of the free indirect style--the kind of analysis I literally ate up in my 20s, when I was trying to figure out how to write.

Except that I can't imagine that anyone can truly learn to write while reading such stuff. It's good undergraduate fare for understanding exactly what his title posits--How Fiction Works--but to write the damn stuff, I don't think any author thinks of sentences the way Wood thinks about them.

Wood gets out his scalpel and shaves the words out of sentences to show which words are authorial, omniscient, and which close in on a character's lingo or point of view. He's a good surgeon, but, to get just a bit mystical, I think writers feel their way through a story more than they diagram it in a blueprint (to mix metaphors, of course, because the world is a bunch of mixed metaphors--I've never understood why a mixed metaphor is a bad thing).

In other words, I think James Joyce or Jane Austen could write the sentences he deconstructs without giving a second thought to the labels of style he's obsessed with. Free indirect? Even Joyce, our author of all, is primarily absorbed in just telling the story, like a hunter pulling the trigger, largely by sight and reflex and experience. He just has more mechanisms at hand than some authors do.

I think of Richard Poirier, who was recently profiled in the Times, who said that the most powerful works of literature (to revere the word "literature") become "rather strange and imponderable" over time. The best authors elude readers, take them away from the roads of a story than can be easily charted, rather than mastering something like the free indirect style.

Poirier's definition of "great writers" is those who are tormented and thrilled by "what words were doing to them and what they might do in return." It's a game, a love affair, a war, a religion, a pilgrimage. And then something more.

He said that the act of writing is an assertion of individual power. What an interesting take on this troubling, often debilitating obsession some of us have. To think of it in such a way is such a fresh, and, well, empowering way to think of what is so often marginalized, trivialized, disdained.

Gosh, writing as an assertion of power. Take that. My truth. Like a sword.

I guess this is all to say that one might learn a bit from a book like Wood's, but writers might learn more by thinking about their assertiveness, the keen angles of their perception. That crazy intuitive sense of truth that's so difficult to trust in the din of voices that always militate against a writer's wishes: to write, always, with delusions within arm's reach, hopes in the cupboard.

Think of this sentence. "Struggling for his identity within the materials at hand," they "show us, in the mere turning of a sentence this way or that, how to keep from being smothered by the inherited structure of things."

Who needs the free indirect style? Or rather, who needs to be so conscious of how it works when there's something so much more urgent to wrestle with? (Yes, I sometimes like to see this all as a mythological battle of sorts. Why not?)

Life, after all, is about contradiction, messiness, far more than it is about technique.

King Dork vs. Catcher in the Rye

Beware high school English teachers: If Catcher in the Rye is a standby of yours, King Dork challenges what’s become the sacred text of teen angst in the past—let’s say it—60 years (ouch!).

Part social satire, part mystery, and part tribute to ye olde Catcher, King Dork starts like any good adolescent taunt—or outright defacement, rather—sporting a dust jacket with the cover of Catcher scratched up and chiseled with a ball point pen.

It’s as if a bored high school kid had nothing else to do in class and resented the crazy adult teachers who assign teen angst literature from their youth for him to read.

That bored kid would be Tom, who stands in as our modern-day Holden. Not quite as eloquent or dark, and maybe not as insightful, but he's game to tear down the world around him with similar snarls of wit set to a drum beat of dweebish desires.

''I don't command a nerd army, or preside over a realm of the socially ill-equipped,'' Tom, aka King Dork, says. ''I'm small for my age, young for my grade, uncomfortable in most situations, nearsighted, skinny, awkward, and nervous. And no good at sports. So Dork is accurate. The King part is pure sarcasm, though: there's nothing special or ultimate about me. I'm generic.''

Alienation and its kissing cousin humiliation are the themes here—surprise!—all wrapped up in scratchy blankets of cynicism. And there's superiority, of course—because how to survive teen alienation and its depredations unless you believe you’re kick-ass superior (the King moniker isn’t pure sarcasm; it never is). High school is the one bonafide time in life when arrogance comes in handy.

Above all, though, King Dork is a pleasant read, a bit like an extended sit-com (say, a two-hour episode of Freaks and Geeks). In fact, the first 80 pages are essentially repeated four times and could easily spin through a few more times, like a rerun, except not quite.

The novel so conspicuously lacks a narrative arc or any true character change that Tom, who tells the story with a banter similar to Holden’s, even comments on the story’s lapses toward the end of the book—a sort of last-minute metafictional recompense that lets us know that the author’s editor and agent had qualms about the story’s loose episodic tendrils.

But the story is otherwise conventional, traveling through the usual high school pranks and pitfalls in a playful and nostalgically pleasant way for those of us who survived the unpleasantness of those glory years (or think we survived). Fast Times at Ridgemont High meets Juno meets Superbad.

Among the scariest pranks are “Make-out/Fake-outs,'' in which a cute girl decides ''it would be fun to put her arm around you and pretend to be hitting on you to see what you would do, with everyone laughing at you the whole time.''

Sound familiar? (If not, you’re blessed.)

Tom’s technique is to deflect bullies by flashing guns-and-ammo magazines—an effective strategy for a while, kind of like screaming while walking through a shopping mall. People keep their distance.

Although the booby traps of the high school are inherently predictable, the episodes of Tom and his one friend Sam make the novel memorable, even special. Tom and Sam spend most of their time making up imaginary rock bands—“Margaret? It's God. Please Shut Up”—and devising accompanying logos and album titles.

The duo cycles through 25 different names in the course of the book—all of them delightfully silly and grandiose (similar to your favorite rock n’ roll bands, in other words—such as author Frank Portman’s successful Bay Area punk band “The Mr. T Experience”).

It’s a nervous tic that’s actually a survival mechanism. A nerdy kid’s counterpoint to low status—flippin’ the bird to the popular kids in day dreams, a “just you wait until I’m playing arena shows.”

While Tom’s tone and language aren’t as erudite as Catcher, he strives for the same ironic, humble truth: find a way to cut through these crazy layers of phoniness that life serves up like cafeteria food and come out on top.

Like Holden, Tom finds himself dodging and despairing of the adults around him. His mother is a distant self-medicator (Sam is friends with Tom in part to steal her valium), and his stepfather is a well meaning but annoyingly goofy, aging hippie, who’s kind of sweet, but tries too hard to connect, so he doesn’t. But at least he tries.

His teachers are frequently negligent or misguided or downright weird (and all too often cultishly obsessed with Catcher). How could they be otherwise? The climax of the novel has Tom and Sam bringing down the evil vice principal at the school assembly when their band Balls Deep….

Well, you’ll have to read the book. Or see the film, which is due out in 2010.

Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates

There have been so many novels and movies about the vacuous nature of suburban life, the biting angst that dooms just about anyone who wears Dockers and lives in a subdivision or at the end of a cul-de-sac and, gosh, God forbid, works hard to earn a living for the family, that it’s perhaps the most tired and clichéd storyline of our times.

At the same time, this pernicious confrontation between the urgent need for individual expression in the vicious swarms of conventionality is a peculiarly gripping storyline that’s uniquely American.

Revolutionary Road might be the grandfather of this genre, despite the fact that Rabbit Run was published one year earlier, in 1960; it’s influenced everything from The Ice Storm to American Beauty and the television series Weeds.

But Revolutionary Road doesn’t have any freaky moms selling dope in order to keep up appearances as Weeds does. In fact, while reading it, I wondered how a novelist could pitch such a story today. Everything about it drips with the sort of ordinariness that agents and publishers shy away from. There’s not a gimmick to be had in this novel—no alchemists, time travelers, or circus freaks. Its hook is existential angst, straight up, no chaser. Who wants to read such stuff?

And yet the novel is refreshing—still, nearly 50 years later—in unexpected and stunning ways. I don’t think I’ve read any domestic drama that is quite so disturbing—not because of any extreme actions or events that take place, but simply because of many small yet tragic pivots that life and love turn on.

It’s the mundane that is the most disturbing thing of all in this life.

Yes, there’s a big whopping tragedy at the end that’s plenty disturbing, but it’s the quotidian arguments, the daily tussles with the self that truly haunt me. These people try, no matter how ineptly or awkwardly, to make it all work—and that’s the key to the tragedy, they do try—but they fail in a way that probably isn’t too far from the way most of us fail or nearly fail or could fail. Life is a horrid summation of all of their small missteps and downfalls, the small traps that they fall into—traps they unfortunately often set for themselves.

The novel begins fittingly with a wide-angle group shot, as if Yates is on a hillside describing a herd of sheep, except he’s describing the dress rehearsal of the Laurel Players, a theatre group that some of the more imaginative and perhaps more daring members of the community put together. No one is singled out for description; the director addresses “them” as if they are a team, all wearing the same jerseys and masks.

Yates gives this herd of sheep, these gutsy artists, the same hopes and fears—both of which sabotage their happiness and success. “The trouble was that from the very beginning they had been afraid they would end by making fools of themselves, and they had compounded that fear by being afraid to admit it.”

Fear debilitates the best of efforts of the characters in this story. Their fear causes them to mangle their lines, and the performance turns embarrassing, perhaps most noticeably for April Wheeler, who plays the lead role and pins the most hopes on the theatre group.

Afterward, Frank Wheeler goes backstage to console his wife. “It simply wasn’t worth feeling bad about,” Frank thinks. “Intelligent, thinking people could take things like this in their stride, just as they took the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs. Economic circumstance might force you to live in this environment, but the important thing was to keep from being contaminated. The important thing, always, was to remember who you were.”

Remembering who you are turns out to be a difficult and ghastly thing.

Frank and April are smart, perceptive people—and therein lies the tragedy: Their sensibilities don’t guide them out the traps they find themselves in, yet they’re smart enough to realize that life should hold more. How…how…how?

When April and Frank first met, the unencumbered possibilities of youthful dreams made them look and feel brave and smart. Frank could spout his caustic, spirited, grand theories of life like a college undergraduate, and April admired his wit and intelligence because there was no reason to think that they wouldn’t lead exotic, heroic lives, that they would become bohemians, artists, even if they didn’t have an art to practice. They didn’t know that living such a life goes far beyond words and theories and requires a genuine and undeniable passion—the recklessness of fervid pursuit.

April becomes pregnant before their fanciful conceptions are put to the test, and their life quickly shifts into the deep furrows of conventionality, even though they don’t desire such a life. Frank takes a job with Knox Business Machines and becomes a “man in a grey suit,” even if he conceives of himself above it all.

Frank later thinks: “Wasn’t it true, then, that everything in his life from that point on had been a succession of things he hadn’t really wanted to do? Taking a hopelessly dull job to prove he could be as responsible as any other family man, moving to an overpriced, genteel apartment to prove his mature belief in the fundamentals of orderliness and good health, having another child to prove that the first one hadn’t been a mistake, buying a house in the country because that was the next logical step and he had to prove himself capable of taking it.”

Still, Frank hides from the reality of his life by propping up what turns out to be a chimera: that he is saving himself for an invisible “creative” life. What will make it creative, no one, especially Frank, knows.

Frank is anything but frank, after all. He moves through life trying to pull its strings like a novelist, in the hope that nothing will get ruffled, least of all his self-conception.

Frank and April’s marriage follows a pattern of connection and disconnection, as most relationships do, but the whipsaws of their arguments become increasingly familiar territory. They’re adversaries who need each other. Adversaries, who can, but seldom, comfort each other. Adversaries who love each other, except they don’t know what love is, and they wonder if they ever did. Everything, it seems, is a fateful, disturbing contradiction.

Frank’s lost and found manhood and his misplaced attempts to stave off the emasculating forces of the world—and in himself—form a dangerous undercurrent to their lives. Life in the suburbs, it seems, inherently strips a man of some fundamental and necessary aspect of manhood.

He returns to his truer nature only when swilling martinis and having an affair, or in the glimmers of moments while doing something mundane and unheroic like yard work.

“Even so, once the first puffing and dizziness was over, he began to like the muscular pull and the sea of it, and the smell of the earth. At least it was a man’s work. At least, squatting to rest on the wooded slope, he could look down and see his house the way a house ought to look on a fine spring day, safe of its carpet of green, the frail white sanctuary of a man’s love, a man’s wife and children.”

The repetition of “at least” is like a drum beat in the novel. Life is a series of rationalizations that begin with “at least.”

But then a moment emerges to break free from the “at leasts” of their lives. April proposes that they move to Paris--the last moment of springtime renewal she offers in a life devoid of more Aprils. “You’ll be doing what you should’ve been allowed to do seven years ago. You’ll be finding yourself. You’ll be reading and studying and taking long walks and thinking. You’ll have time.”

Nothing terrifies Frank more; he senses that there’s no self to find, no creativity to express. And he’d have to accept April as a breadwinner to his lethargic, empty self.

“Alas! When passion is both meek and wild!” Yates quotes John Keats to begin the novel. Such a battle ensues in the passions of Revolutionary Road, but Frank and April fail to pick up the figurative musket of their revolution to take a single shot at the enemy.

What a definition of the tragic—Keats’s meek and wild passions dueling. Does the person who complains about not having enough time for his or her true self have the courage to seize the time when it becomes available? It’s easier to complain—and therefore imagine that that better self, that better life exists—than put it all to the test.

Ah, what I could be if I only lived in Paris…

Frank can’t express his fear, for that would make him a failure, in April’s eyes and his. He goes along with things, tries to learn French, tells his co-workers and his friends that they’re leaving, and is even energized by the timidity of their reactions—finally, he can live in contrast. But when April accidently becomes pregnant, he’s saved. He doesn’t want the baby, but at least it shields him from any attempt to find—and confront—himself.

“The pressure was off; life had come mercifully back to normal,” Yates writes.

A life of fear—and security—is preferable to a life of bravery—and insecurity. What a nettlesome and devastating existential situation.

James Wood accurately described Yates’s prose as “richly restrained” and “luxuriously lined but plain to the touch” in his essay in the New Yorker. Yates’s talent was such that he easily could have succeeded in the over-the-top lyricism that commands such attention these days, but he chooses to restrain himself for mimetic reasons, it seems—to convey the simple, devastating truth that runs through his story. He’s the definition of an honest writer.

He’s so honest that he can appear cruel at times, especially because he doesn’t shy away from piercing displays of life’s cruelties. Take the scene when Frank breaks up with Norma, the secretary he’s been having an affair with, just when she surprises him with a nude dance, the wafts of a carefully cooked dinner coming from the kitchen, her naïve love about to be shattered forever. But her love wasn’t a part of his “level” breakup plans.

And nothing ends up being “level” in this novel. The suburbs, it turns out, are again full of singeing drama. Why would we ever think such a place was safe?

For more, Emily Gumport wrote a thought provoking essay on Richard Yates in Bookslut.

Read more reviews at Lit Matters.

The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud

My, what a lot of fanfare this novel received. After I read the reviews, I expected a stunning classic. A daring style. Wisdom. Maybe more.

The Emperor’s Children didn’t meet my expectations, which isn’t to say that it isn’t a good read (navigating a double negative might sum it up). It’s competent and well constructed—in the way an aristocrat ties his cravat—and surprisingly fun at times. In fact, it’s the kind of book I can feel smart reading, yet it’s no more demanding than watching TV—the perfect book to take on vacation.

Above all, it’s a writer’s novel, chock full of all sorts of descriptions, piquant and promiscuous and sometimes gorgeous, as if writing descriptions were the point of it all. Yes, Claire Messud is an active, perhaps hyperactive, describer. The narrative moves at times as if each dust mote in the air might just cry out for an adjective or two of investigation.

In fact, Emperor’s made me wonder if description is the new narrative these days, the new beginning, middle, and end. It seems to have usurped characterization, bulldozed metaphor off to the side of the road, slapped dialogue into a whimper. I read so many reviewers gush over authors who write sentences that spill over with description.

Every one of Messud’s sentences lets us know that a writer has written it, as if she’s in a writerly competition, obsessively injecting adverbs and adjectives and the odd odd word in a sentence. I came to peculiarly enjoy the way she might construct a scene—say a restaurant scene—and end up describing the salt and pepper shakers, the ice cubes in the water glass, the crinkles of the white table cloth, the part of the waiter’s hair, the fabric of the carpet, the smell of the wine, the shape of the potatoes in the soup….and then touch base with the characters and their drama. She catalogues the world, and she does it gorgeously, masterfully, even enviably, but somehow she misses the telling detail, neglecting the guts of her story in service of the wordy words in her head.

The critic James Wood wrote that “Nabokov and Updike at times freeze detail into a cult of itself.” Messud is likewise cultish with detail (interestingly, she’s married to James Wood.)

The Times calls Messud an “unnerving talent” in its review of the novel, “a crafter of artful books praised more for their ‘literary intelligence’ and ‘near-miraculous perfection’ than for their sweeping social relevance” until The Emperor’s Children, which is “a comedy of manners — an astute and poignant evocation of hobnobbing glitterati in the months before and immediately following Sept. 11.”

The novel is a comedy of manners, promising hefty themes in the milieu of New York intellectuals and sophisticates, but each character is somewhat hackneyed, a cardboard cutout, the construct of an author adept at writing and researching the backgrounds of her characters, but unable to put the necessary flesh on the bones.

Marina is the typical spoiled rich girl—smart but flip and undisciplined, searching for meaning and a purposeful life, if not a husband, as she approaches 30. We’re told that she’s exquisitely beautiful and charming, but we have to take the author’s word for it. She tends to seem simply spoiled and inert on the page.

Julius is the typical gay cultural critic, caustic and callow and capricious and coked-out, exhausted by his decadent escapades and looking to settle down while also fighting the urge to skylark about town just a bit more (and you just know he’s going to be punished for his skylarking ways—the scene of his punishment is one of the most crazy, riveting scenes of the novel).

Danielle is the smart hard-working gal who can’t land a guy. She is a television producer who longs to create stories on weighty topics but instead covers liposuction—career situations like this are the definitions of tragedies in this novel; everyone deserves to be important and famous, it seems, and a story on liposuction doesn’t cut it.

Danielle has an affair with Marina’s dad, Murray, the emperor of all these children, who’s the stereotypical ‘60s activist, a truth teller who lost the truth somewhere in the ‘70s but still attempts to spout it between scotches and lurching leers. He’s writing a book about how to live, although he and we know he’s lost the necessary vision or self-respect to be able to tell that tale.

Ludovic Seely steps in as one of the two characters who aim to shake things up, especially when he begins to court Marina; he’s smarmy and arrogant, supposedly brilliant, and ready to usurp Murray’s regal role with his post-ironic sensibility, but on the novel’s pages he has about as much insight, wit, or intellect as a drunken, self-satisfied bore at a cocktail party. That’s fine except that all of the characters revere him, or at least reckon with him in ways that he doesn’t earn for the reader.

The counterpoint to all of these characters is Bootie, Murray’s lost, fervid nephew, who hews to an uncompromising truth to which even he doesn’t measure up, if only because no one can measure up to an uncompromising truth, right?

Bootie’s the character who most truly comes to life and challenges and threatens the reader, just as a young, avid thinker does to us all. Bootie might be Messud’s best character, or the only one who can carry a novel by himself; we’re never quite sure what he’s capable of, which makes him dangerous. And he is dangerous. He aims to bring down the Emperor’s house by exposing Murray’s derelict intellect, strangely thinking that he’s performing a service and naively carrying a torch for Marina at the same time.

The novel is oddly a September 11 novel, although I strain to figure why Messud literally dropped this bomb on the novel. Everything was much more interesting before September 11, and the novel didn’t do much with the event. When things were supposed to be serious, the gravity felt forced and unfulfilled; when the characters turned back into their selfish selves, the story felt diverted, neglected, hurried.

Still, despite these misgivings, Messud is a florid, adept writer. Her sentences flow, despite her infatuation with the comma. And she crafts a pretty good story—perhaps short of the “near-miraculous perfection” the Times credits her with, but one that kept me turning the pages.

I talked to several people who read this book, and they all liked it kinda, sorta, but none of them could remember much about it. One friend was able to name nearly all of the characters from a movie he saw in the ‘70s (the “Bad News Bears”), but couldn’t remember one of the character’s names from Emperor’s.

I suppose this is the risk an author takes when description is placed on such a pillar. Many readers forget the words that describe the characters they’re supposed to remember.

Perhaps that’s the telling detail.

Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse: Adolescent Reading, Adult Reading

I reread Steppenwolf as part of a little project to revisit some of the novels that swept me away when I was in high school.

The danger of a project like this is that the stories won’t measure up to my estimations of the time and ruin my beloved memories of yore—Steppenwolf certainly didn’t. That said, it’s interesting to view such books through a different lens and think about why a book like this meant so much to me.

In many ways it’s obvious. Harry, the Steppenwolf, feels different. Not only does he feel different, but he feels superior to his surroundings, and doesn’t understand why he isn’t recognized for his purity and intellect. He’s full of anger, revulsion, self-contempt….and deep thinking and integrity. Sounds exactly like a teenager, or at least me as a teenager. The novel is a natural accompaniment to early ‘80s punk rock.

Harry’s further complicated by the dual self he feels warring within himself. He’s trapped in the middle, drawn to a life of intensity, the life of a wolf who yearns to live unconventionally and in the wild, but he’s unwilling to give up the comfortable and orderly life of the bourgeoisie, even though he holds it in contempt.

A teenager’s life is often similarly fraught with such drama, with the crux of defining oneself against the materialistic or middle-class wishes of parents while struggling to discover one’s true self in all of the wild madness of being a teenager. No matter who you want to be, you’ll likely have to transgress against your parents’ wishes—or more dramatically, what feels like all of society, gosh—to figure it out.

Harry has retreated from the world, cordoning himself off in a room he rents in a bourgeoisie woman’s house (he rhapsodizes about the cleanliness and order of her entryway as a way to show his addiction to a life well provided for). He takes lonely, aimless walks through town, tends to mope, indulges in his intellectualism—which is more pure and uncompromised than a poor well-meaning professor he has an encounter with—and enjoys forays out to listen to music (Mozart, not jazz, God forbid) and drink wine.

He’s living the life of a potential suicide, in short, and dwells on the thought of suicide, even making a pact with himself to kill himself when he’s 50.

Harry’s dilemmas are made all the more compelling for the adolescent mind when a mystical component is introduced. He encounters a person carrying an advertisement for a magic theater who gives him a small book, Treatise on the Steppenwolf. The pamphlet addresses Harry by name and strikes him as describing himself uncannily.

Later Harry enters the magic theater, which holds the keys and transformations of his fate.

One thing that struck me during my adult reading of the book is that for a smart man, Harry is very petulant and self-limiting. He disdains most things that are modern, in particular the phonograph, which mechanizes the beautiful orchestrations of Mozart. The purity of the world seems to be categorically sullied by all things of progress.

I suppose I found this part of him appealing in high school—and maybe I still do, never quite trusting what’s presented as technological advances—interpreting his hatred of progress as a revulsion toward capitalism. It’s that, but something else as well—an inability to adapt that’s not particularly commendable.

Being a kid is all about expecting the world to form itself to your brilliant, superior thoughts. Being an adult is all about adapting, so Harry seems particularly rigid and immature. I'd find him interesting if I met him in life, sympathetic, but a little to sour and self-righteous to want to spend much time with. And that shouldn't condemn me as one of illegitimate sellouts who are such because they aren't him.

He’s also reluctant to dance, as if such enjoyment is base and lowly, although dance and an immersion in other “instinctual” pleasures will deliver him as much as anything in the end. He even starts to like jazz. I suppose I was so entranced by Harry’s spiritual dilemma in high school that I overlooked what a curmudgeon he was.

The more striking thing I overlooked was Hesse’s exploration of individuation—the necessity of thinking of a self not as a single ego or unit, and not even a dual self split between saint and sinner, but as an inherent multitude of possibilities. The best example of this is when Harry laughs at himself in the mirror at the Magic Theatre, and his self cracks into hundreds of pieces.

Hesse wrote this in the mid-20s, so I don’t know if he’d encountered Jung yet, but Jung’s thoughts on self and individuation permeate this novel. In fact, it’s a great book to do a school project of Jungian analysis with.

Hesse felt that readers misunderstood the book, focusing only on the suffering and despair that are depicted in Harry life and missing the possibility of transcendence and healing. My high school self did misunderstand the book, but I was one who was more interested in despair than transcendence.

Hesse is masterful at blurring the lines between the fantasy and realistic elements of the book, which is one reason the story has haunted me over the years. Hermine's death is particularly riveting, especially since it's essentially carried out in a funhouse mirror.

While I wouldn’t say it’s a great book, and I would have certainly been frustrated with it if I’d read it for the first time as an adult, it was the perfect book for an angst ridden teenager like me. I wish I could go back 25 years and read it again and be swept away.

If you want a good summary of the book without reading it, this short movie pretty much captures it.