Embarassment of riches

Two great recent finds:

• Robert Birnbaum's author interviews at Identity Theory.

A great literary website with more author interviews you can stick a shake at, the newest being a chitchat with Susan Orlean:

RB: Do you have any fears about people stopping reading?

SO: No. That seems like it is never-ending—the form might keep changing in terms of how things are delivered but what you are talking about is basic human impulse to communicate. I just don't see how you could assume that would go away. And people will always, there will be people who will want to be communicated to and people who want to do the communicating. Whatever the form is, who knows?

• Don Swaim's audio interviews at Wired for Books.

Audio interviews with authors originally broadcast by CBS Radio in the 1980s and 90s. Swaim is a remarkably fluid interviewer and can switch gears and keep the conversation flowing with just about anyone. If you ever wanted to know what your favorite writer sounds like, here's your chance. John Barth speaks in long, elaborate sentences just like the college professor he is; Joyce Carol Oates often seems not to know exactly how to explain what she does; and two Stanley Elkin interviews reveal a slightly cantankerous individual (surprise, surprise).

What kind of crap are you reading this summer?

It must be the temperature; the higher it goes, the lower the standards sink. Like such a fuddy-duddy I sound, but still... how it is that summertime came to equal dumb, weightless entertainment has always mystified me. Yeah, I like to see girls in bikinis and shit blowing up just as much as the next guy. That's me, down there in the middle of the theatre, hooting at car chases and leering at Keira Knightley, mainlining Skittles and soda like heroin. (Oh, and in case you haven't heard: Snakes on a Motherfucking Plane.)

Still, when it comes to the reading, my habits tend to be inversely proportional to the rest of the world's. (I save the silly crap for the wintertime, when I'm so brain-fried by cabin fever that even a Clive Cussler potboiler could seem stunningly profound.) Last summer was the one I picked to dive into Swann's Way and War and Peace; the summer before, it was Heller's Something Happened and Barth's Coming Soon. I don't know what it will be this summer, but impossible behemoths like Gravity's Rainbow and Life and Fate are keening their siren song. (But please, friends and relations, if you catch me with schnozz a-buried in something gloriously disreputable like Carl Hiassen or Joe R. Lansdale, just pretend I'm mastur-- er, masochistic -- and look away.)

So over at Slate, currently in the midst of a welcome celebration of pulp fiction, authors chime in: Scott Turow is diving into Greg Iles, Michael Connelly and Ridley Pearson; Thomas Mallon is rolling around in Kenneth Anger; Rick Moody is soaking up a Motley Crue tell-all. There are snooty exceptions, of course. Michael Chabon claims that he doesn't "change what I read when I go to the beach or on a vacation. I just read more." Joyce Carol Oates and George Saunders politely refuse to answer the question, with Saunders' explanation being a particular standout (in that unmistakable Saunders fashion):

For my money, the best beach read is How To Get Sand Out of Your Private Areas, by Hitch C. Groyan. Ha ha! No seriously. The best beach book is I Floated Nearby, Full of Envy by Moby Dick. It's the heartbreaking, true-life story of a whale who longs to come up on the beach and befriend the wealthy, joyful people he sees there but can't, because he has no legs and is totally naked. Also, he is a little sensitive about his last name. In the sad conclusion, this cranky guy named Ahab kills "Moby" to make him into lantern oil, only to find that lanterns are no longer used. Then—I haven't read it in awhile—I think Ahab gets so depressed about the lantern thing that he cuts off his own leg, and then this crocodile keeps chasing him around, and the crocodile learns to fly and decides never to grow up, and asks the audience if they believe in fairies, and then gets arrested for using language insulting to gay people. It's sad, but it's also depressing, and really makes you think while totally bringing you down and making you want to have about six more drinks and go for a swim.

Not to be outdone, USA Today asks the same question of writers including Stephen King, Dennis Lehane, Wally Lamb and E. Lynn Harris. Always the straight shooter, King, when asked about his summer selections, cuts to the chase:

Why these authors? "Because they're good!"

Listmania strikes again

• The New York Times tallies up the votes for "the best works of American fiction in the last 25 years."

The winners: Beloved by Toni Morrison, Underworld by Don DeLillo, American Pastoral by Philip Roth, Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy and John Updike's four-book "Rabbit" series.

Let's see, I've read Underworld and American Pastoral (and both are extraordinary), and maybe one or two of Updike's Rabbit Engstrom books (which I liked less than some of his other works, like In the Beauty of the Lillies and The Witches of Eastwick). Beloved has sat on my shelf for years, tempting me, but I've put off reading it mostly because it seems more like homework than anything else; something I should read as opposed to something I want to read.

What struck me most was the dominance of Philip Roth in the runners-up, five strong including Operation Shylock, a book which drove me up the wall. I can understand Roth's reputation, especially amongst the urban literati types that made up the panel of judges, but come now, he's not the only top-notch writer out there. Personally, I would have bumped DeLillo's White Noise into the top position; Underworld is great and all, but White Noise, to me, is far more focused, precise and effective. (Meghan O'Rourke has a great piece at Slate that discusses the lack of "small" novels in the Times' list of winners & nominees.)

One good thing about these lists is that they can turn you on to books and authors that have never crossed your radar before; I'd never heard of Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale before, for example. Another attribute is that they can get discussions going about the many deserving writers that didn't make the cut; some that came immediately to mind when scanning the list included, among others, Thomas Pynchon, Stanley Elkin, John Barth, William T. Vollmann, Jonathan Safran Foer, Michael Chabon, T. C. Boyle and Jonathan Lethem, who've all published some great works in the last quarter-century (and that's just for starters). The flipside, however, is that listmaking is a double-edged sword, buttressing already-established writers' reputations while shoving others even further towards the fringes. Instead of making a list that's all about everyone's idea of "the best," why not try putting together a list focusing on the most underappreciated works of American literature in the last 25 years?

Are the selections safe choices? Maybe, maybe not. Times critic A. O. Scott wrote an excellent companion essay to the list which illustrated its inherent pitfalls and made a number of prescient points about the state of American literature. I'll end this with Scott's thoughts on the general thrust of the selections:

We - Americans, writers, American writers - seem often to be a tribe of mavericks dreaming of consensus. Our mythical book is the one that will somehow include everything, at once reflecting and by some linguistic magic dissolving our intractable divisions and stubborn imperfections. The American literary tradition is relatively young, and it stands in perpetual doubt of its own coherence and adequacy - even, you might say, of its own existence. Such anxiety fosters large, even utopian ambitions. A big country demands big books. To ask for the best work of American fiction, therefore, is not simply - or not really - to ask for the most beautifully written or the most enjoyable to read. We all have our personal favorites, but I suspect that something other than individual taste underwrites most of the choices here. The best works of fiction, according to our tally, appear to be those that successfully assume a burden of cultural importance. They attempt not just the exploration of particular imaginary people and places, but also the illumination of epochs, communities, of the nation itself. America is not only their setting, but also their subject.

It's a guy thing

• The Guardian explores "the books that move men."

And the winner is... Albert Camus' The Stranger. (Apparently, across the pond it's known as The Outsider... po-tay-to, po-tah-to.)

Yeah... check. That one's been an all-time favorite ever since I read it in English class in 11th grade. But the Big 3, the books that really reshaped my conception of writing, were Richard Adams' Watership Down, George Orwell's 1984 and Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Orwell, of course, gets the mention in the Guardian piece, but then again, he's a homegrown hero over there.

We found a strong sense of nostalgia among male readers as they looked back to their formative years; many had tended to lose interest in fiction in favour of non-fiction on entering into adulthood. One consequence of this was that several men admitted that they were reluctant to reread a book which had been almost painfully important to them at puberty. "I'm afraid I might find it mawkish now", "It might not live up to my memories", "It might read as dated now" became familiar responses.

Men also recalled a kind of "mentoring" by authors encountered as a teenager - the same word was used by a surprising number of those we interviewed. Having found an author who "spoke" to them, a man would have trusted them as a literary guide, reading all of their works, and also works quoted from or cited by them. Orwell, in particular, was cited frequently as having guided our male reader in his choices of author. This idea of mentoring had never cropped up in our survey of women's reading, though word-of-mouth recommendation by other readers regularly had (men mentioned word-of-mouth much less often).

I admit, I haven't reread any of the above books in many, many years, but not necessarily because I'm afraid of finding them to be lacking; it's just that there are too damn many other books I haven't read yet.

As for authors who've become mentors by proxy, well, I've read just about everything Stephen King has ever written, but I wouldn't necessarily consider him to be a guiding light. (Despite the fact that many of his books feature as a central character a screwed-up writer type.) I have, though, discovered authors and gone through phases where I read everything by them I could get my hands on; writers including (but not limited to) Richard Russo, Arthur Koestler, Don DeLillo, John Barth and T. C. Boyle have always left me hungry for more.

Knocking on the fourth wall (quietly, so no one hears)

Notes on modernism

People are drawn to art because it provides something calming, taming. Regardless of how your emotions are flamed, you still give yourselves over to the experience. You surrender something of yourself to the whim of the storyteller and his lyre; passivity is what you give in exchange for transcendence. It’s a tonic; like any other, you can get drunk on it, addicted to it.

So when someone taps on the fourth wall -- that no-fly-zone where artists aren’t supposed to travel -- it’s no surprise when the alarm is sounded. The furor isn’t over content but the delivery of it. Modernism in art has become the equivalent of getting handed a grenade, inside of which are the keys to the kingdom. Yeah, you can get ‘em out, but why the hell would you want to?

The basic disconnect is between writing and storytelling. We grow up with stories ringing in our ears, the lessons of Aesop and Grimm and the Bible attempting to shape our lives and experiences with morality and sense and decency. Storytelling is another name for the great tradition of oral histories, the passing-down of intricate, interconnected tales via the music of words and the quicksand of memory. But the vessel that brings us these stories is never questioned; what matters is only what they say, and not how they say it.

Then along come these upstarts. Rabelais, Cervantes and Sterne, all the way down the line to Joyce, Faulkner, Pynchon and Barth. Whatever the purpose, one thing is clear: the story and characters may or may not be there, but the writer sure is, and he's the real star of the show. Other writers might chafe at this, but the best way to go about it is to write what you know, and whom else do you know better but yourself? Sometimes writers will go all the way and make themselves major characters in their own stories. Barth did it with Coming Soon!!!; Roth did it with Operation Shylock; even Stephen King does it in the later installments of his Dark Tower series. Is it experimental playfulness or just egomaniacal pretension? Well, it's probably a bit of both. Once you master the training bike, it's only a matter of time before you're trying to pop a wheelie.

A writer ultimately answers to no one but himself, and those that realize that they don’t sit down to write like Dan Brown or Tom Clancy but to get at something else altogether drive themselves crazy (and everyone else around them). The path to progress is strewn with the bodies of a bunch of writers who’d have done a lot better putting pencil to paper instead of their own throats. Stories are complete, tangible. They begin and end. They’re stepping stones -- they’re terrestrial. Storytellers build them for us. Ideas, however, aren’t so compliant. They're pliant, liquid, untouchable. If they’re your stock in trade, you’ll probably end up in a rubber room, because they're also like cockroaches -- they’re impossible to kill, and they breed quickly. You go crazy just trying to keep up.

Modernism is exhausting, to be sure. Francois Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel is an enormous, bratty, tiresome novel that revels deliciously in the fact that it has no real story to tell, and has only the ammunition of outrage to offer. Reading it in one sitting is much like having teeth pulled. Yet you step away from it and are able to see its inventiveness of structure, playfulness of language, and sheer narrative bravado that you can’t believe it isn’t required reading in first grade. Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy is basically one long joke on the reader, and as such, it’s a howl, just as experimental and wildly imaginative as Gargantua, but Sterne is just as exasperating at times as Rabelais, and not quite as willing to shock and provoke. Yet the book's exuberance is infectious and, like the madman that banged his head against the wall because it felt so good when he stopped, you can’t put it down for very long.

And the whole modernist bent -- a form that flouts form -- sticks around, and always finds places to take root. Animators at Warner Brothers took many cues from surrealist and Dadaist art of the time period and filled the classic Looney Tunes cartoon shorts with stylistic and narrative devices that never let the viewer forget they were watching a cartoon. Monty Python’s entire reputation is built on their willingness to peel back the curtains, point and laugh. And writers themselves are always doing the same, even though many profess to abhor revealing the tricks of the trade. So many writers have written about writing over the years -- introductions, forewords, afterwords, notes to the reader, essays, whole books -- that it’s almost become de rigueur to put out the obligatory nonfiction collection of essays on the craft at some point. So much for the magician and his secrets.

If anything, modernism reveals our inmost secrets and most embarrassing frailties, which is why it’s never received with adulation. It’s annoying to keep having the rug yanked out from under you. Your ass starts to hurt after a while. But that’s the thing about pain -- it lets you know the engine's still working, that you still can feel.