The value of absolute clarity

• Michael Dirda on Paul Auster in The New York Review of Books.

Till recently, few innovative, literary novelists could rival Auster in his gusto for reframing tales of mystery, fantasy, and adventure. Auster repeatedly uses these genres to illuminate, often with great poignancy, life's fundamental relationships: parents and children (especially fathers and sons), married couples, mentors and disciples, artists and their work, even owners and their pets. All these affiliations are generally placed under severe strain—there are secrets between friends, suspected or actual infidelities, eruptions of street violence into ordinary life, distressing revelations. In Moon Palace the likable young hero inadvertently causes the deaths of his grandfather, father, and child. More recently, Auster's books—certainly the last half-dozen—have focused regularly on elderly, debilitated men with literary or intellectual vocations, as though their author were preemptively working through his own later years (Auster is now in his early sixties).

Some of Auster's tics or techniques—the incestuous literary connections, the skewed autobiography, the ambiguous blurring of fact and fiction, the pervasive fatefulness—might sink any ordinary novel from sheer portentousness. And portentousness, as well as sentimentality, has been a criticism regularly leveled at his work. At its best, his tone is unruffled, meditative, intelligent, yet sometimes it does grow gravely august, both orotund and oracular. His characters are all too often the playthings of invisible forces; and the most trivial action—answering a telephone, buying a blue notebook—can bring about the most improbable and dire consequences. What may look like chance is usually kismet, and to Auster New York really is Baghdad on the Hudson, an Arabian Nights world of omens, shifting identities, unexpected windfalls, improbable meetings, wildly good and bad luck, and all those sudden peripeteias that seem more the stuff of melodrama than of modern fiction.

I sometimes think of Paul Auster as the godchild of the legendary New Yorker journalist Joseph Mitchell: introspective and wistful by nature, both are drawn to society's more charismatic pariahs, bohemians, and misfits, and feel at home in the odd corners of metropolitan life. And both suggest that Americans are as lonely as the men and women glimpsed in the paintings of Edward Hopper.

A ceaseless torrent of unhappy things

• Michael Dirda tackles the Sisyphean task of examining Joyce Carol Oates' body of work in The New York Review of Books.

Not least, there's also a common complaint about the character of Oates's fiction—that it is grim, full of violence, relentlessly dark in tone, and largely populated by psychopaths (usually male) and their prey (usually female). When people describe her novels they generally reach for words like Dreiserian, gothic, expressionist, and grotesque. Though Oates can be funny—most obviously in some of her scenes of academic life, but also in books like A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982)—she admits that her imagination "seems to turn instinctively toward the central, centralizing act of violence." In fact, she points out that such violence generally "seems to symbolize something beyond itself. Like a lightning flash illuminating part of a culture or an era." She questions whether her writing is unduly violent: to her mind, she's simply presenting the moral and social conditions of America.

A fresh look at Tolstoy

• Michael Dirda reviews Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky's new translation of War and Peace in The Washington Post.

At some point in their lives, Some day, nearly all serious readers say to themselves, I really should sit down and start War and Peace. For many of us, though, that day never quite comes. After all, the book is enormously long: Some editions take up two, three or even four volumes. Those confined to one, like this new Knopf translation, possess the heft and appearance of small cinder blocks: With the right mortar, you could lay foundations with them. What's more, the book's extensive action embraces multiple storylines, three generations, and half of Europe; and, as the pages mount up, Tolstoy repeatedly theorizes at tedious length about the nature of history. Even the characters names can be confusing--at one point a man named Kuragin courts a young woman named Karagin. Still, for many readers the book's most off-putting element is probably its reputation: It's not just a novel, it's, well, it's . . . War and Peace.

But a fine new translation, especially one by the widely acclaimed team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, offers an opportunity to see this great classic afresh, to approach it not as a monument (or mausoleum) but rather as a deeply touching story about our contradictory human hearts. Stressing that their War and Peace sticks more closely to the Russian text than any other, including Louise and Aylmer Maude's semi-canonical 1923 version, Pevear and Volokhonsky retain the considerable amount of French used by Tolstoy's counts and princesses, preserve the author's penchant for word repetition and aim to match his tidy syntactic conciseness. The result certainly reads smoothly, its English being neither egregiously contemporary nor inappropriately old-fashioned. In this respect, the Pevear-Volokhonsky War and Peace joins company with recent translations of The Tale of Genji, Don Quixote and In Search of Lost Time, these being among the few works of classic fiction equal to Tolstoy's in scope and richness. Given so capacious and generous a masterpiece, it's simply impossible to do more than offer -- with due humility at how much is being overlooked -- a few introductory propositions for the would-be reader.

The novelist's curse

• Michael Dirda reviews Milan Kundera's newest book of essays in The Washington Post.

In subsequent pages of "The Curtain," Kundera discusses humor, 19th-century fiction's discovery of the "scene," an author's rights, the main problem of modernity -- "the 'bureaucratization' of social life"-- and how such masters as Broch and Musil used the novel as a vehicle for real thinking about society, politics and human purpose. Throughout, Kundera writes plainly but with passion. He bewails our current "ethic of the archive" -- the conviction that every scribble from a writer's hand is important -- and urges instead an "ethic of the essential." Only the aesthetic project itself truly matters, the fully achieved novel, poem or play. In this light, the desire for artistic fame isn't mere egotism:

"Every novel created with real passion aspires quite naturally to a lasting aesthetic value, meaning to a value capable of surviving its author. To write without having that ambition is cynicism: a mediocre plumber may be useful to people, but a mediocre novelist who consciously produced books that are ephemeral, commonplace, conventional -- thus non-useful, thus burdensome, thus noxious -- is contemptible. This is the novelist's curse: his honesty is bound to the vile stake of his megalomania."

One may disagree with this -- surely, there is a place in our lives for entertainment and escape -- but, as the French expression goes, Kundera always gives you furiously to think.

Sordid lives

• Michael Dirda reviews Written Lives by Javier Marías at The Washington Post.

The anecdotes from the review alone put this one on the top of my wish list:

In his preface, Marías notes that he generally writes with "affection and humour," though he confesses that he feels very little of the former for James Joyce, Thomas Mann and Yukio Mishima. The chapter on the self-important Mann is a comic masterpiece:

"Any writer who leaves behind him sealed envelopes not to be opened until long after his death is clearly convinced of his own immense importance, as tends to be confirmed when, after all that patient waiting, the wretched, disappointing envelopes are finally opened. In the case of Mann and his diaries, what strikes one most is that he obviously felt that absolutely everything that happened to him was worthy of being recorded. . . . [The diaries] give the impression that Mann was thinking ahead to a studious future which would exclaim after each entry: 'Good heavens, so that was the day when the Great Man wrote such and such a page of The Holy Sinner and then, the following night, read some verses by Heine, that is so revealing!' "

***

According to Marías -- and it's hard to argue with him -- Malcolm Lowry, author of Under the Volcano , seems "to have been the most calamitous writer in the whole history of literature." An alcoholic, he was known to drink shaving lotion and his own urine. Shortly after their marriage, his first wife started going off with other men, once climbing onto a bus in Mexico "to spend a jolly week with some engineers." He tried to strangle his second wife. Twice. And he had lots of trouble with animals, once punching a horse in the ear so that it fell to its knees:

"Even sadder was what happened to a poor little rabbit that he was absentmindedly stroking on his lap while talking one night to the pet's owner and the owner's mother: the rabbit suddenly went stiff; Lowry had broken its neck with his small, clumsy hands. For two days, he wandered the streets of London carrying the corpse, not knowing what to do with it and consumed by self-loathing."

Ouch.

Living in the gutter and acting like a raving asshole doesn't guarantee great work and/or recognition, but, at the same time, you do need a bit of madness to accomplish great things; you have to put your own humanity aside. Whether or not you ever get it back is another question, but in this world, sometimes that's not a great loss.

Bad dogs, great works and one brave woman

• Malcolm Gladwell looks at the “pit bull menace” at The New Yorker.

Another excellent piece from Mr. Gladwell, a writer who manages to be consistently insightful and intelligent without condescension or pretense. I’ve not yet read his Blink or The Tipping Point but I’ve been a fan of his New Yorker pieces for years, and a new one is always a high point of the day. Gladwell’s technique is to juxtapose two seemingly incompatible topics -- here, an anti-pit-bull legislation passed in Canada and racial and criminal profiling in New York City -- and hit “puree”. Gladwell asks pointed questions and comes up with equally pointed answers, and never backs down from uncomfortable truths. A very good read, as usual.

• Michael Dirda reviews John Carey’s What Good Are The Arts? at The Washington Post.

An interesting point from Dirda and Carey closes out the piece:

Literature accomplishes so much because it makes us think as well as feel. In his last chapter, Carey proposes that indistinctness -- arising through the use of metaphor and simile -- grants poetry and fiction their particular, elusive richness. We are forced to build up in our minds complicated notions and images: "As the indistinctiveness of a text increases, so the reader's imaginative effort has to intensify." Such effort results in that "personal ownership" of a poem or story that is written art's "unique gift."

I’ve often thought that most of the great works of art tend to have a hole in them, a void where anyone can bring anything they want to the table in terms of interpretation. What separates the wheat from the chaff is the work’s ability to sustain a multitude of interpretations, be it intentional or not. You want your works to have that fluidity, to last, but it only happens some of the time (if you’re lucky enough to have it happen at all).

• As of January 30, freelance reporter Jill Carroll is still alive.

Let's hope this truly brave woman makes it home safely.