Author Archive
At the beginning of John Updike’s novel “The Witches of Eastwick,” Alexandra Spoffard stands on a beach in Rhode Island and conjures a thunderstorm out of a clear, blue afternoon; she wants the beach for herself 
and her dog, and she resents the intrusion of carefree, careless young people. The spell and the description of the gathering storm occupy only two paragraphs, but the effect is cosmic and exhilarating, a tour de force of rich Updikean evocation. Such conjuring is emblematic of Updike’s mode of literary creation, his spellbinding inventiveness, his brilliant, provocative powers of physical and psychological simulation.
Published in 1984, “The Witches of Eastwick” is set in the late 1960s, that era of unbuttoned sexual freedom and feminist liberation, of tuning in and turning on. The divorced trio of witches — Alexandra, the sculptor; Jane Smart, the cellist; Sukie Rougemont, a newspaper gossip columnist — is like a hot spot, an exposed nerve, in their small town, where their exclusivity and sexual high-jinks (particularly with married men) cause rumors and suspicion. All three fall for Darryl Van Horne, a wealthy newcomer who buys the old Lenox mansion to use as a base for his dubious scientific experiments — and his cocktail- and drug-fueled orgies; he finds the witches willing participants, together and separately. Inevitably, matters spin out of control, the witches murder a young woman, Jenny Gabriel, who steals Van Horne’s attention away from them and their coven dissolves in confusion and recrimination. Read the rest of this entry »
A Russian folk tale includes the refrain, “a wondrous wonder, a marvelous marvel,” and that’s the praise I would advance for Cary Holladay’s new novella, “A Fight in the Doctor’s Office” (Miami [Ohio] University Press, $15). Holladay, who teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Memphis, has produced one novel and three collections of short stories, but in “A Fight in the Doctor’s Office” we have a rare work of fiction that possess the impeccable tone and poise of a brief masterpiece.
On September 10, the Library of Congress is going to present, for the first time, an award for lifetime achievement in fiction-writing. The award will be presented in a ceremony to –
Well, wait a minute. Before I actually name the lucky author, let’s speculate on whom it could be. Let’s consider the obvious choices for a lifetime achievement award in fiction writing. Of course, one criterion is that the writer be, you know, living.
On with the thinking cap. Here goes.
John Updike
Joyce Carol Oates
Philip Roth
E.L. Doctorow
Toni Morrison
Anne Tyler
Thomas Pynchon
Don DeLillo
Ernest J. Gaines
Richard Ford
Reynolds Price
Cormac McCarthy
J.D. Salinger? (He’s alive. Or aliveish.)
Doubtless my literate readers will have other suggestions. Remember, though, that the award is for a lifetime of writing achievement, not for a few well-known books, so maybe Salinger doesn’t qualify. Don’t forget, Norman Mailer is dead.
So, while you’re placing your bets and trying to slake your anticipation, I’ll tell you that the winner of the first Library of Congress award for lifetime achievement in fiction is –
Herman Wouk. 
You’re all smacking your foreheads and going, “Duh, well, yeah, of course, Herman Wouk. ‘The Caine Mutiny.’ ‘Marjorie Morningstar.’ ‘Youngblood Hawke.’ Those mini-series about WWII.”
Perhaps the intention is to present the award for longevity. Wouk, born May 27, 1915, happens to be 93, which makes him 16 years older than the next oldest possibility, E.L. Doctorow (b. Jan. 6, 1931). In fact, the award could simply be made each year to the next author in the chronological line, eliminating the cheap and petty element of suspense. There wouldn’t even have to be a ceremony. A certificate could be emailed to the winner. In that case, the roster would look like this:
Wouk (May 27, 1915)
Doctorow (Jan. 6, 1931)
Morrison (Feb. 18, 1931)
Updike (March 18, 1932)
Gaines (Jan 15, 1933)
Price (Feb. 1, 1933)
Roth (March 19, 1933)
McCarthy (July 20, 1933, a big year for writers!)
DeLillo (Nov. 20, 1936)
Pynchon (May 8, 1937)
Oates (June 16, 1938)
Tyler (Oct. 25, 1941)
Ford (Feb. 16, 1944)
See, that takes care of the award for the next 12 years, assuming that these authors all live that long. Pesky ol’ Death. The Library of Congress comittee doesn’t even have to have another meeting. They should have called me first.
Walter Kirn certainly got up on the curmudgeon’s side of the bed the day he wrote his review of James Wood’s new book, “How Fiction Works” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24). The cover of The New York Times Book Review is generally reserved for raves, but on August 17, Kirn came out swinging. His disdain barely conceals his rage. Que pasa?
This is the first review I have read in which the reviewer mocks the author of the book about literature and writing for being too well-read. Wood, a well-known literary critic, essayist and reviewer who writes for The New Yorker, mentions at the beginning of “How Fiction Works” that the books he cites (94 novels and a handful of short stories) are from his own library; he didn’t go to a public or university library or order anything from Amazon, a fact that seems to inflame Kirn’s sarcasm. “Wood’s study must be vast, with well-stocked shelves, judging by [Wood’s] inarguable erudition,” he writes, making erudition sound like a particularly loathsome STD. Wood, says Kirn. “drops his quotations and references as copiously, easily and freely as a man on a bench in Central Park scattering cups of birdseed.” How one could compose a book about how fiction (or anything else) works without using quotations and references defeats my imagination, and I would certainly hope that the author of such a book knew what he was talking about and possessed the background in reading and thinking — call it erudition — to write convincingly.
Having “the whole Western canon at his disposal, apparently” and conveying a “tone of genteel condescension,” the “vicarish” and “sequestered,” Wood, who possesses “a donnish, finicky persona,” “flashes the Burberry lining of his jacket whenever he rises from his armchair to fetch another Harvard Classic.” Ouch, talk about condescension! This is getting really personal. I Googled as hard as I could but I couldn’t find evidence that Wood, known for damaging reviews, attacked one of Kirn’s novels or dissed him personally. No, Kirn just freaking despises Wood and his book, and he makes no distinction between them.
Among Wood’s sins is that his author-heroes are “semimonastic introverts” like Henry James and Gustave Flaubert, writers who refuse to “let themselves be distracted and overwhelmed by the roar of the streets, the voices of the crowd,” in the way that one of Kirn’s heroes, David Foster Wallace, does (according to Kirn). I have to say that, having struggled through David Foster Wallace’s turgid prose and sophomoric satire, I think his writing bears as much resemblance to the authentic roar of the streets and voices of the crowds as Dr. Scholls does to Dr. Faustus. And what nonsense this is when Wood happily praises the exuberance of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, the sneaky wit of Jane Austen and Muriel Spark.
Lydia Millet writes strange, provocative, disturbing novels that illuminate recesses of the human psyche most people would rather not have revealed. At the same time, her work is horrifically funny, profoundly satirical yet committed and compassionate. Such previous novels by Millet as “George Bush: Dark Prince of Love,” “My Happy Life” and “Oh Pure and Radiant Heart,” will remind readers of Melville’s full-dark mode of “Bartleby the Scrivener” and “Billy Budd”; of Kafka’s short stories like “A Country Doctor” and “A Hunger Artist”; and Nathanael West’s bitter, incisive little novels, “Miss Lonelyhearts” and “The Day of the Locust,” all works that deal in different ways with isolation, alienation and loneliness, with complicated desires and quenched passions, with the weary workings of humanity worn down to an essential, terrifying nub, the locus where choices are extremely limited and profoundly inevitable.
With “How the Dead Dream” (Counterpoint, $24), Millet delivers a novel that strips a character of all pretense, custom, 
habit and certitude, even of personality, to leave an entity that moves blindly forward in a world of blunt instinct. Even as a boy, the novel’s central figure, T., loves money, examining the faces of the Founding Fathers depicted on currency to understand their characters: he admires Andrew Jackson because it seems as if “no passing insult could compel him to emote.” This slightly curious locution mirrors T’s own sense of formality and detachment; he requires neither friends nor praise, only the satisfaction and protection that success and money bring. Though a genius at business, he lives modestly, alone, but in the grip of a vision:
Currency infused all things, from the small to the monolithic. And to be a statesman the first thing needed was not morals, public service, or the power of rhetoric; the first thing needed was money. Because finally there was always a single answer. As there was only one intelligence residing in a self, as trees grew upward toward the sun, as women lived outward and men walked in insulation to the end of their lives: when all was said and done, from place to place and country to country, forget the subtleties of right and wrong, the struggle toward affinity. In the lurch and flux, in all the variation and the same, it was only money that could set a person free.
Yet contingencies arise, cracking T’s world of purpose and discipline. First, driving from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, T. hits a coyote; getting out of his car, stunned, confused, he sits with her as she dies: “the fullness, the terrible sympathy.” T.’s father unaccountably leaves his mother; she moves in with her son and gradually becomes obsessed, then eccentric, then demented. Improbably, T. acquires a girlfriend — “it was her self-possession that got him” — but there is a flaw in her heart, an unpredictable nick of the sort that doctors only know is there after a person inexplicably dies. Now T. begins to realize: “Authority was not all.”
Despite the fact that for millions of Americans the juxtaposition Milton Pound might as well be the name of a rock band, two recent issues of The New Yorker devoted space to essays about English poet John Milton (June 2) and American poet Ezra Pound (June 9 & 16). The piece on Milton, written by Jonathan Rosen, was motivated by a roster of books published this 
year to mark the 400th anniversary of the birth of the author of “Paradise Lost.” The piece on Pound, by Louis Menand, takes impetus from the first volume of a new biography about the poet, essayist, editor and noted fascist.
Improbable as it may seem, Milton and Pound share some characteristics. Both were formidably well-read and learned, and their writings encompass an astonishing breadth of allusion. Both attempted to embody a world-view in an epic poem, Milton in “Paradise Lost” and Pound in “The Cantos.” Both were polemicists, leveling sharp critical prose at cultural, social and political concerns; the feverishly productive Pound issued hundreds of essays and pamphlets on myriad subjects including modern art and poetry (especially the necessity to “Make It New”) and dangerously crackpot theories of history and economics, while Milton is best known for “Areopagitica,” his brilliant defense of freedom of speech, “Doctrines and Discipline of Divorce” (he was unhappily married), and “The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates,” in which he espoused the notion that power resides in the people.
Both Milton and Pound were considered traitors, the former for supporting and working for Oliver Cromwell and the Commonwealth for 20 years (Charles II was not in a forgiving mood when restored to the throne in 1660, and a warrant was issued for Milton’s arrest, and he went into hiding), while Pound, after spending World War II broadcasting anti-American and anti-Semitic 
propaganda from Rome was captured by American soldiers in 1945, sent back to the United States and was committed to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, from which he was released in 1958.
Here’s another common bond: Outside of academia, neither Milton nor Pound is read today. Their voluminous writings are considered obscure and difficult (and in Pound’s case often downright crazy), reflecting cultures we no longer understand and that are completely irrelevant to the early 21st century, though surely Milton’s deeply liberal (if not libertarian) opinions on education, freedom of the press and the relationship between people and their governments are, during the tenure of George W. Bush in the White House, more meaningful than ever. Read the rest of this entry »
Julie Hecht’s collection of stories, “Do The Windows Open?” made my list of the best books I read in 1997. Here’s what I wrote in my end-of-the-year wrap-up:
If ever a book displayed impeccable tone, it’s Julie Hecht’s winsome, wry and steely “Do the Windows Open?” (Random House, $21). The nameless narrator of this group of connected short stories embodies a curious combination of fragile resilience and crisp, endearing wit. The world, demanding choices and implying judgments, is too much with her. Set mainly in East Hampton and Nantucket and heavily imbued with what the rest of us think of as Manhattanesque angst, the stories are, however, neither arch nor tedious; Hecht invests her narrator with such perfect self-effacement, delicacy and quirky intelligence that we trust her, if not love her, almost at first sight. Whether she’s trying to photograph an egotistical doctor with his dog or launching a quest to replace glasses frames from an optometrist she suspects of being a Nazi sympathizer, our narrator treads, in her sensible but pretty shoes, the touchy territory of hope and bruised innocence.
Now Hecht has published a second (and eagerly awaited by her coterie, which includes — included — me) collection of stories titled “Happy Trails to You” (Simon & Schuster, $24) and I am sorry to report that the book, far from exhibiting the 
impeccable wry, winsome, steely tone of its predecessor, is — and I never thought that I would write these words in a million years — petulant, aggrieved and wearisome. Quel disappointment!
The stories in “Do the Windows Open?” were gently satiric, verbally adroit yet oblique, resilient yet fragile, a constant weaving of optimism, pessimism and cluelessness. The stories in “Happy Trails to You,” on the other hand, have exchanged subtlety for complaint and quixotic punctiliousness for anger. The world is still too much with our still nameless narrator, but now she takes the situations she encounters personally and crankily. America in the late 20th and early 21st centuries has become a different place from what it was when she was a child — quelle surprise! — and the blunt disgruntlement that fills these stories is depressing and narratively inept. Eleven years ago, the narrator’s nervous and neurotic nature seemed quirky and charming, almost a victorious function of her intelligence and privacy; now it seems querulous and ungracious and crippling.
She corrects people’s grammar in public. She explains things to people who don’t want things explained. She deplores “the horrible new century,” “this era of bad behavior” and “the new junk world of America,” and she remembers “an era of history and life that was so much more fun than the present one” and “the past decades of store service and just plain civility in America.” She points out “more evidence of the lack of education in the new, decadent, lazy generation” and “the new generation that knows only the music of the past couple of decades.” In two stories, she calls George Bush the “Alfred E. Neuman president.” In two stories she (being a vigilant vegetarian) mentions reading that a rabbi can ritually cleanse a stove upon which meat has been cooked.
Well, let’s just dump out the entire wheelbarrow of book-reviewing cliches: “Wildly inventive.” “Rich with detail.” Verbally dazzling.” “Wise and insightful.” “Poignant and moving.” “You’ll laugh your guts out.”
These are the numb yet cogent terms that continually revolved in my mind — like airliners stacked in a holding pattern around a control tower — as I read “Dear American Airlines” (Houghton Mifflin, $22), the first novel by Jonathan Miles, 
cocktail columnist for The New York Times and book columnist for Men’s Journal, appropriate avocations for the author of a novel drenched in alcohol and bookishness. “Dear American Airlines” is, actually, rich and wild and dazzling and insightful and fall-on-the-floor funny and sad and tender, a first-person confession, mea culpa, erstwhile suicide note and epic letter of complaint to the airline in question for trapping its writer, Benjamin R. Ford, on the way to the wedding of the daughter he has not seen since she was a baby, at Chicago’s O’Hare airport. Once he starts writing, fueled by anger, frustration, loneliness and cigarettes, he can’t stop.
Bennie Ford is a failed poet — “back when I was scramming delicious fellowships,” he says, “for the third-rate poems I was writing” — a failed lover and father, a failed person. “God, Bennie, that’s so like you,” says Stella, the long -absent mother of the long-neglected daughter. “Offering up the impossible. The stupid ideal.” Bennie views these impossibilities and ideals, likely gleaned from his suicidal, “artistic” southern belle mother, with a mixture of romanticism and cynicism, hates himself for not living up to any standard of responsibility and decency, his own or anyone else’s. He makes a resplendent addition to the legion of smart, sensitive, observant, egotistical, rueful, raging, self-destructive and well-intentioned drunkards — i.e., American men — with which American fiction is rife.
When Franz Kafka was dying horribly of tuberculosis in 1924, he asked his good friend and executor Max Brod to burn all of his papers and manuscripts. Though regarded since the 1940s as one of the progenitors and masters of 20th century literary modernism, Kafka was unknown in his lifetime, having published only a few short stories. After Kafka died, Brod disobeyed his friend’s request and began to edit and publish his books; thus those icons of angst, dread and black humor, the novels “The Trial” (1925), “The Castle” (1926) and “Amerika” (1927), as well as Kafka’s “Diaries,” which Brod also edited and published, became available . The landscape of 20th century literature, indeed of European and American culture itself, would be far different without Kafka’s immense presence and influence.
Did Brod betray his friend? Or did his responsibility lie with his faith in Kafka’s genius and his belief that the world would profit from knowing Kafka’s writings? Brod justified his action by saying that he repeatedly told Kafka that he would not execute his wishes: “Franz should have appointed another executor if he had been absolutely and finally determined that his instructions should stand.” This statement may illustrate a fine bit of legal sophistry — isn’t an executor required to carry out the instructions of a will (as long as they’re not illegal)? — but who, having read and been affected by Kafka’s work, would not thank Brod for what he did, or, rather, didn’t do?
A new and similar case has arisen.
Beth Ann Fennelly’s third collection of poems, “Unmentionables” (W.W. Norton & Co., $23.95) is substantial in every way. The title is cute and tricky and deep. “Unmentionables” are, as the Shorter OED reports, “(chiefly joc.) underwear, esp. women’s. E19.” That is, in the early 19th century, women’s underwear began to be referred to, humorously, as “unmentionables.” For me the word conjures an image of flappers in their flimsy, filmy undergarments sipping gin and cavorting in a fountain; it’s a word Cole Porter could have fun with. On the other hand, there are the themes we often avoid mentioning: desire, loss, sorrow, obligation, culpability, death, the unmentionables that define the shadows and the inevitabilities of human life.
Fennelly meshes these seemingly incompatible motifs with brash wit, lyrical verve and verbal legerdemain, balancing, with the riskiness of a tightrope walker sans pole, sans net (perhaps sans rope), her multiple personae: a young mother both selfless and selfish; a former bad girl trying to be good; a Yankee living in the Deep South; a hard-working and successful poet — “Unmentionables,” her third book, holds 118 pages-worth of poems — still questioning her talent and confronting her masters. The ride she offers along the back roads of Lafayette County, Mississippi, one imagines in a rusty blue pick-up truck, windows wide open to humidity, honeysuckle and mosquitoes, is rough, unsettling, passionate and joyful.
Though “Unmentionables” contains a number of stirring and exciting individual poems (as well as, among them, the book’s weakest moments), its heart lies in three sequences: “Berthe Morisot: A Retrospective,” an impressionistic 15-poem biography of the French Impressionist artist; “The Kudzu Chronicles,” a witty homage to the South’s ubiquitous ground-cover and a metaphor for the poet’s sense of displacement in and acceptance of the South (Fennelly was born in New Jersey and grew up in Chicago); and, “Say You Waved: A Dream Song Cycle,” a stunning evocation of, challenge to and plea for the eccentric greatness of John Berryman, the troubled poet who committed suicide in 1972 and whose most notable work (now largely unread) was his long series of “Dream Songs.”
