Where did it all go? Fiction and blogging and favorite books

I've had occasion recently to read through some of this blog's six-plus years of archives. Turns out I used to write about literature! Quite frequently! Ha! It's difficult to imagine having actually written some of those posts—when did I have the time, the energy? When was I thinking about that stuff? Where did it all go? In any case, reading some of those older posts, reading recent blog- and other online sources, engaging in some enjoyable off-blog literary conversations, and, oh yeah, reading a bunch of good fiction, have all helped reinvigorate me just a little bit, to remind me of some of what I might have forgotten. I'm hopeful to get things moving here. Well, hopeful might be too strong a word. We'll see.

To reflect some of this, I've refreshed and jumbled the literary links in my blogroll. Blogs newly added include Danny Byrne's — see his excellent review of the first volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard's marvelous novel/memoir, My Struggle — Daniel Davis Wood's Infinite Patience — his two most recent posts (one, two) are fascinating meditations on the omniscient narrator (which he calls "the knower") in Edward P. Jones remarkable novel from 2003, The Known World — and Ethan's new blog, Marooned Off Vesta, which seeks to "develop [his] own personal poetics of science fiction and of poetry", and which takes as one of its key influences, among other books and authors, the perhaps seemingly unlikely figure of Gabriel Josipovici, in particular his book What Ever Happened to Modernism? (reminder: my review is here). Samuel R. Delany and Joanna Russ are more obvious inspirations, of course, but topics of other posts have included T.S. Eliot and Hart Crane and Denise Levertov. Good stuff. (Also added to the blogroll is David Winters' Why Not Burn Books, which however seems mostly to link to his typically excellent reviews that appear elsewhere - a handy service nonetheless.)

Since I'm providing some literary links, I would be remiss if I didn't mention long-time fellow traveler Stephen Mitchelmore's This Space, still my most essential literary blog. Like me, Stephen's posting has been very light on quantity this year, but unlike me, he's taken the time to write several excellent longer form reviews and essays. His recent essay on one of my favorite books, V.S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival, is a particular highlight, as are reviews of new novels from Josipovici (Infinity: The Story of a Moment) and Enrique Vila-Matas (Dublinesque), as well as his own review of Knausgaard's My Struggle, which, as is so often the case, led directly to my purchase of that book.

And I have been reading a fair amount of fiction lately. If I had to name the authors that have received the most attention (or at least the most attention to which I took enough notice to acquire and/or read a book) in my literary cohort (as defined by people whose blogs I read and twitter feeds I follow), I'd name, in loosely descending order, László Krasznahorkai, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Lars Iyer, Clarice Lispector, Helen DeWitt, Gerald Murnane, Christine Schutt, Enrique Vila-Matas, and Gabriel Josipovici. All with new books, or books newly translated into English.

I've read books by all of these writers this year, except for Krasznahorkai, whose Satantango I have so far been unable to get anywhere with. DeWitt's very funny Lightning Rods I mentioned early in the year; Iyer's even funnier Dogma, ditto. Knausgaard's My Struggle is a great book - I eagerly await the English translation of volume II! - and I'd like to have something interesting to say about it, but there've been several good reviews of it (including especially the two linked above), so I feel no particular need to add another, at least for now. Lispector's first novel, Near to the Wild Heart was one of four newly translated Lispector novels published by New Directions this year, and was also my introduction to the Brazilian writer. It left me with little I could say about it, other than wanting to express a recognition that she was the real deal and that I will be reading more by her (also, in truth, I wasn't writing anything at the time I read it, so the result is that there is, several months on, little now left to report). But some stunning, often baffling writing in that novel. I enjoyed Vila-Matas' Dublinesque, but, again, would refer you to Stephen's review or David Winters'.  Gerald Murnane's Barley Patch seemed promising, and I liked quite a bit of what he was doing with it, but ultimately it didn't thrill me, sorry to report. I found myself bored with it, at times (though admittedly sometimes this boredom interested me).

The semi-dullness I experienced at the hands of Barley Patch, followed by a clutch of non-fiction (world-systems analysis and feminism), had me grasping for crime fiction to clear the air a bit. So I read the first two of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley books (The Talented Mr. Ripley and Ripley Under Ground), and the three novels comprising Denise Mina's Garnethill trilogy (Garnethill, Exile, Resolution). I'll have nothing whatsoever to say about these books, except that I found them interesting and entertaining and, especially with the Mina trilogy, sigh, gripping (I know, I know). But they did help clear some space.

Since then, I've been on something of a roll - reading great fiction, reading well, thinking about it, talking about it off-blog - yet struggling to find time or energy to write about it. An enthusiastic, passing mention, in the first Marooned Off Vesta post of Marge Piercy's 1976 feminist science fiction classic, Woman on the Edge of Time, encouraged me to read it immediately. I'd already had a friend's copy lying around gathering dust, and had by coincidence been eye-ing it as a possible next read. And I loved it. My initial sense was that it was formally conventional, that it was the ideas and the situation I was responding to, but as I read further, and discussed it, I began to question this sense. It encouraged me to really think, again, about what we take for granted in fiction.

A review by Dan Green of Diane Williams' new collection of stories ends with a comparison of Williams' work with Gary Lutz's. Next thing I knew, I'd ordered and read Lutz's brilliant and bizarre and fascinating early story collection, Stories in the Worst Way. And in Lutz I've found a new favorite writer (and may have fallen in love a little bit) (see also this fantastic and hilarious interview with Lutz at the Paris Review; on whether the stories in his new collection, Divorcer, are more "accessible": "Even in the lengthier of these new stories, despite their elliptical and fragmentary nature, there is something at least approximating an ongoingness of a sort, if not exactly a plot."). Thinking about Lutz's strange stories while also contemplating certain effects in science fiction was a useful and, for me, helpful exercise of recontextualizaton. Around this time I was reminded, via a twitter exchange, of Christine Schutt, who has a new novel out, Prosperous Friends. I'd previously read and liked her novel Florida, when it had been part of the scandalous class of 2004 National Book Award fiction nominees (that is, they were all books written by women). I was also aware of her name from the Dalkey Archive backlist. Prosperous Friends starts out as if it's going to be merely another entry, if a fantastically written entry, in the tired "dissolution of a marriage" novel genre, but it turned out to be much better and more interesting than that. Incidentally, Lutz, Schutt, and Williams were all edited by Gordon Lish - who now emerges as a rather more interesting figure to me than he had been previously (given his association in my mind with Raymond Carver, who I've never read, nor intend to).

Mixed in here was Josipovici's Infinity - an excellent novel, which I am also not prepared to write about at all, yet. I'd again refer you to Stephen's review (and I'd recommend, too, David Winters' review, at PN Review Online, though it's unfortunately subscription required).

Since then, over the last few weeks, I've been alternating some science fiction from Clifford D. Simak (two novels - Time is the Simplest Thing and Why Call Them Back From Heaven? - which, despite some clunkiness and other issues, have, like the science fiction mentioned above, helped me think about fictional problems in ways I haven't quite before) with multiple novels each from Gilbert Sorrentino (Steelwork and Red the Fiend) and John Hawkes (The Passion Artist), two giants of American post-war so-called post-modernism who I'd read quite a bit of before starting this blog but had not much returned to in subsequent years (long review of Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew notwithstanding). Included here are re-reads of Sorrentino's Aberration of Starlight and Hawkes' The Lime Twig. Early returns are that the fiction of Sorrentino and Hawkes holds up, unlike that of other early favorites, such as Martin Amis.

I've covered a lot of ground here, mentioned a lot of writers. But what about those writers not published at the major houses, or even the already better-known independents? Neither FSG nor New Directions or Dalkey Archive? Not Grove, nor even Melville House? Do we as readers take chances on absolute or relative nobodies? I don’t really have an answer for that. My guess is, on balance, no. But, the thing is, I've left out one writer, in the meandering list above - Edmond Caldwell. Caldwell's Human Wishes/Enemy Combatant is published by Say It With Stones, which primarily publishes poetry. They have it on their website; it retails for $15. It’s a decent-looking trade paperback, with entertaining back-cover copy in the place of blurb, plot summary, and author bio, in keeping with the spirit of the book. Yet I admit that I only know about the book, or took notice of it, because Edmond Caldwell has himself been a member of my blogging/tweeting circle (you may remember him from his blogs Contra James Wood and The Chagall Position). In connection with that, we’d blogrolled each other and linked to each other’s posts on occasion, and have exchanged some friendly e-mail. He was nice enough to send me a copy of the novel. I was already curious about it, but frankly, had little real idea what to expect. I’d gathered it included some material on the critic James Wood and, I admit, this made me a wee bit wary. I’d liked most of what he’d written about Wood’s domestication of various writers and their work, but still, I didn’t feel quite the animus towards Wood and at times wondered at the energy expended in the effort. And, to be honest, whenever Edmond posted a link to one of his stories appearing online, I had difficulty getting very far into them. While I had no trouble attributing this difficulty primarily to my own apparent inability to focus at all on fiction published online, this did little to mitigate my wariness. I admit to having fretted a little about how I'd read a novel by someone I'm friendly with (what I'd say, if asked). And when I received the book and read the apparently bland opening sentence (“They had just returned to the United States.”), I was even less sure … Yet, something nagged at me, a feeling that I’d want to read this novel, despite all of these trivial misgivings.

I needn’t have worried. This is a damn good novel. Better than that: it's fucking brilliant. I should here say that it was Dan Green's review of it that reminded me of the novel, which had slipped my mind and gotten filed away amid the post-move chaos over the summer. But, while Dan's review is positive, I feel he does some violence to the book (Steven Augustine objects on similar grounds as mine in his comments there, and he articulates these objections well). But at least it's a review! There are so few of them, and it very much deserves to be read and reviewed and discussed. I hope to have quite a bit more to say about Human Wishes/Enemy Combatant soon myself, but for now, let it suffice to say that it's frequently very funny, formally interesting, as well as being an excellent example of, horrors, politically viable fiction. I daresay it's an important book. Which I only mean in the best possible sense of: you should read it.

To finish up, were I to name my favorite new books of this year, I'd go with Human Wishes/Enemy Combatant; My Struggle; Dogma; Lightning Rods; and Infinity: The Story of a Moment.

Fiction Notes

I know, I know. I was going to be reading all this fiction, wasn't I? And presumably writing about it, but it's been seemingly all non-fiction all the time here at the blog. So it might seem. And yet, it turns out, of the 20 books I've read so far this year, 13 have been fiction. Though writing about it is something else entirely. So then this is something of a first-quarter round-up (which runs the risk of making it sound like I expect/plan to be doing quarterly fiction round-ups; note/reminder: no announced plans have ever come to fruition on this blog).

Anyway, here are the 13 I've read as of today, with remarks, maybe:

• Lightning Rods, Helen DeWitt — I really enjoyed this novel, and frankly, it was just the thing I needed to get back to fiction. It's smart, not difficult. And funny, very funny. I thought the workplace satire was spot-on, and I loved the piled on clichés, some of which were just perfectly employed to comic effect. It's not the brilliant novel that The Last Samurai is (few books are); it's much more modest in scope, doesn't try to do too much, or convert its satire into an obvious message. 

The other day, DeWitt pointed us to the discussion at The Morning News Tournament of Books, in which her book was pitted against the latest by Julian Barnes in the quarterfinals of their ridiculous annual competition. Though it's hard to argue with Kevin Guillefoile's observation that Lightning Rods might be a difficult book to recommend in certain company ("I would have to know you really well before I would suggest that you would like this novel."), the conversation (or "meta-commentary") between him and John Warner didn't offer much (not that I expected it to), and worse, led me into reading the annoying and stupid comments that followed. Actual complaints about a lack of realism. Arguments about verisimilitude, in connection with inaccurately reported details from the book. Fun.


• Zone, Mathias Énard (French; Charlotte Mandell, trans.) — The back copy of this novel claims it is "One of the truly original books of the decade—and written as a single, hypnotic, propulsive, physically irresistible sentence . . . " Propulsive? Yes. Hypnotic? Possibly. Occasionally. Physically irresistible? Hm, at times, OK, yes, I'll allow this. A single sentence? I've already tweeted about this to some annoyance, but it's not a single sentence. It's not even close! The novel is primarily a stream-of-consciousness sort of narrative, the thoughts and memories of a French-born Croat who's spent the previous couple of decades doing awful things, as a spy, a soldier, etc, in some of the worst wars and hot spots in Europe ("the Zone"), on his way via train to Rome, where he is supposedly to hand off a briefcase full of intelligence on countless other similar types of bad characters, some of whose stories we are treated to as he recalls their adventures, after which he is to ride off into the sunset under a stolen identity. There is not a single full stop in these parts of the novel. Where people get the idea that a sentence must have a period in order to come to an end is beyond me. This is not exactly written according to Strunk & White's guidelines. For one thing, it's divided into chapters, each of which begins what is obviously a new sentence, punctuation or no punctuation. For another, several thoughts are completed, and do not grammatically belong with the thoughts that follows them. Complete sentences! Perhaps I'm belaboring the point and no doubt you don't care. But also: there are three chapters that are from the novel our narrator takes a break from his reveries to read from. Its prose is fairly conventionally punctuated. Sentences! OK. Enough with that. The novel itself is quite good (propulsive, at times even hypnotic). I may have already mentioned this, but it reminded me a great deal of Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones, in particular the detailed descriptions of the unpleasantness of war, which we usually prefer to ignore.


• Liquidation, Imre Kertész (Hungarian; Tim Wilkinson, trans.) — I'm sorry to have to report that I have nothing at all to say about this novel, other than I liked it, I think. It didn't leave much of an impression. It came to my attention via David Auerbach's discussion of the other Hungarian writer, László Krasznahorkai, who all of the lit blogs I follow have been talking about constantly lately; he referred to Liquidation as "stunning", so when I saw it at the library, I took a shot.


• Stoner, John Williams — I wrote about Stoner here. To re-cap: I thought this novel was wonderful. I'd begun a second post about the novel, intended to focus on Stoner's wife, but I have as yet been unable to finish it. I make no promises that I ever will.


• Dreaming of Dead People, Rosalind Belben — Belben is a favorite of Gabriel Josipovici's, which automatically makes her a writer I want to read. And yet I've had difficulties. Our Horses in Egypt, while at times quite lovely, nevertheless seems written with a very specific, that is to say necessarily small, audience in mind: readers familiar with horse jargon, World War I military jargon, and Edwardian slang. I am, it turns out, not one of these readers; as such, the book was at times very nearly unreadable for me. And yet, for all that, I nevertheless found the book charming (though not enough to feel I needed to keep my copy or ever read it again). I'd been assured that some of her earlier novels were likely more my speed. And, indeed, Dreaming of Dead People is frequently marvelous. The recollections or meditations of a lonely old woman, observing the world around her, and the course of her life, it is at times heart-breaking. And sexually frank, which was something of a surprise.


• I., End of I., & Meyer, Stephen Dixon — I have a post in the works on these three Dixon novels; stay tuned.


• Slowness, Milan Kundera (French; Linda Asher, trans.) —entertaining; not as good as The Unbearable Lightness of Being, better than Life is Elsewhere. Alternating tales of seduction, two hundred years apart. Seemingly a trifle, and not without its cloyingness, but the stuff on slowness and time and memory set it apart a bit, and help it remain in the library.


• Mavis Belfrage, Alasdair Gray
• Now that you're back, A.L. Kennedy — The fact that I'm lumping these two books together is a sure sign that I have next to nothing to say about them. Years ago, I traveled to London with a friend. I took with me a list of Scottish authors and titles to look for. I was in the midst of my expansive attitude toward fiction, but before the despair had set in. I think I'd read Janice Galloway's excellent Dalkey-published novel, The Trick is to Keep Breathing, and had read an interview with her in which she named several other Scottish writers. And I'd by then already acquired my copy of Gray's Lanark. So, this is where I first found James Kelman's novels, and where I got these two books, both of which, I just noticed, are story collections. I appreciate some of Gray's work (Lanark still seems worthy, as does Janine, 1982); this particular collection, as with the novel Something Leather, is mildly diverting, but ultimately slight and forgettable. Kennedy's collection is not unlike Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains in its evident skill—she's not a bad writer at all—and in my overall indifference. A couple of the stories achieved a kind of creepy dread that made them stand out from the whole (like, "A Perfect Possession"), but overall not terribly memorable. Of the six books by Gray and Kennedy mentioned in this paragraph, all will be discarded, save Lanark and Janine, 1982. I also have two other Kennedy books that I need to at least sample before deciding their fate.


• Dogma, Lars Iyer — I wrote about Dogma here, to widespread indifference.


• Eva's Man, Gayl Jones — I don't have a lot to say about this novel in particular, but it's made me want to revisit a long-dead post sitting in draft-mode about Jones and modernism, in connection with her novel Corrigedora, in which I'd like to include something about Eva's Man as well. In this case, the narrator is a black woman, in jail for poisoning a man. The account of the events leading to the murder is interspersed, often confusingly, with fragmented memories of various stages of her childhood and previous encounters with boys and men.

I also read several pages in books by Martin Amis, James Wilcox, and Toby Olson, as part of my plan to read and re-read books to determine whether or not I want to keep them. Wilcox and Olson don't mean a whole lot to me (they are very very different writers, incidentally; it amuses me to pair them like that, though I don't particularly care to elaborate). Wilcox's Modern Baptists is part of Harold Bloom's modern canon, and came to my attention by way of Dan Green of The Reading Experience, in a list of under-appreciated novels he posted eons ago. Count me among those who under-appreciate it. Anyway, I read it years ago, to little impact. I also along the way acquired Wilcox's novel North Gladiola. I took a few passes at reading it, and I just didn't care. Admittedly, I was being a bit rash, but given my overall indifference toward the earlier book, I just didn't see it getting more interesting for me. Then I took a long look at Modern Baptists again, too. Decided I didn't need to keep either novel. As for Toby Olson, I've previously read, and enjoyed, two of his novels: The Blond Box and The Woman From Shame. I liked them, but they weren't important to me; they're being discarded. I'd also acquired two others: Utah and The Life of Jesus. I settled onto the couch with Utah, expecting a good read, but not expecting I'd feel the need to keep it around after I was done. But I couldn't get into it. About 20 pages in, I was bored, even irritated. Where normally I'd either persevere or put it aside for later, my attitude now is: immediate discard. The Life of Jesus, on the other hand, looks just interesting and weird enough that I did put it aside for a later pass.

Which brings me to Martin Amis. I've written how Martin Amis was once one of my favorite writers, and how I'd soured on him. I've already gotten rid of most of my Amis books, but had kept back what I always think of as the big three: Money, London Fields, and The Information. Money is the one that still has the decent reputation among people I respect. London Fields was the first of his books I'd read; it was nothing like I'd ever read before, and I still have a big soft spot for it. And The Information, I'd felt, was every bit as entertaining and fascinating, even if I was confused as hell by the ending. Though my opinion of Martin Amis has shifted over the years, to the point that I now find him rather unpleasant, still I have fond memories of these three novels, and rather looked forward to re-reading them, to see if they hold up, among other things; I figured, even if they didn't hold up, they'd still be fun reads. I started with The Information, perhaps because I'd thought it was the more difficult book of the three . . . and, god, I just couldn't do it. Where I expected to find and enjoy the great prose style he's so famous for (and which I remembered), I found instead awful, turgid writing. I couldn't make it past the first ten pages! Now I look on the other two with much wariness. Will they be painful, too? Is it worth it? Wouldn't I rather keep my fond memories? Wouldn't I rather spend my time reading something else? As of this writing, I'm still undecided.

A peculiar tension between precision and disorder

Incidentally, speaking of Open Letters Monthly, as a few others have pointed out, Garth Risk Hallberg has a nice piece there about Helen DeWitt's excellent novel, The Last Samurai, one of my favorite novels. A brief sample:

Beneath the simple surface of DeWitt’s propositions . . . lurks a vast ambition: an ambition that privileges form over fact and inquiry over knowledge. Like the early Wittgenstein, DeWitt wants to clear away the confusions that arise from the sloppy use of language, and like the later Wittgenstein, she wants to run against the boundaries of language and to gesture at what lies beyond them. The result is a peculiar tension between precision and disorder. That DeWitt sustains it for more than 500 pages is as much an ethical statement as an aesthetic one.