among the amok

Query for a novelist.

2011-09-23T14:06:00.001-05:00

When a character is alone in the house, just thinking, how do you create dramatic conflict?

A) Bourbon.
B) Flashback of something terrifying.
C) Flashback of something pleasant.
D) She senses an ominous presence.
E) An unexpected phone call triggers either (B) or (C).
F) Auto-eroticism, especially as a result of (B), (C), or (E).
G) You get her out of the house and to a bar where there are people, stimulants, and dramatic potential.
H) You stop writing for about a week until you figure out what all the possible options are, then either:
      i) lose interest altogether and write a trashy romance/chick-lit
      j) find a conference to submit a proposal to so that you'll have to write that instead
      k) update your blog
      l) enact both (A) and (F)
      m) go to a bar where there are bartenders, televisions and plausible deniability.

Proust Questionnaire (here)

2011-09-18T17:59:00.000-05:00

Unabashedly stealing this from Magnapoets because I missed the original summons (which was almost a year ago):

(If you’d like to take part in the Magnapoets’ Proust Questionnaire feature, simply answer the questions at the end of this section, and send them to Magnapoets AT Gmail DOT com. Be sure to include a short bio (no more than three-sentences), along with a photo (the latter is optional). Magnapoets will assemble a supplementary booklet to be sent with the July 2011 issue of as many responses as we can reasonably include. Submissions open now til February 1st, 2011.)

And because I want to use social media to disseminate perfectly harmless yet overly confessionary information about myself.

1.) What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Lots of money and lots of sex (I know in my heart this can't be as wrong as everyone reading this will think).

2.) What is your greatest fear?
Poverty and celibacy.

3.) Which historical figure do you most identify with?
My students say this all the time, "identify with," in that they either do or don't, which then becomes the basis for a judgment of value. That and "relate to." I'm unclear on this. Do I identify with Coco Chanel because she seems to me to have been a glamorous, tragic yet iconic figure? Do I identify with Michelle Obama because she seems to have great grace under pressure and enviable upper body strength? Anita Loos because she wrote "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes...but they marry brunettes"? Gloria Steinem because, come on, she infiltrated the Playboy Club and lasted three days in a corset and heels?

4.) Which living person do you most admire?
Professors, collectively. They managed to get through it all and publish amazing things. In fact, anyone who publishes anything amazing (that is, something I can identify with).

5.) What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
The ability to watch an entire season of anything in one sitting.

6.) What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Extreme productivity. (Settle down. Watch some tv.)

7.) What is your greatest extravagance?
The time I spend weaving intricate storylines for myself as if I were a character in a melodrama.

8.) On what occasion do you lie?
Sex.

9.) What do you dislike most about your appearance?
The impending threat of jowls.

10.) When and where were you happiest?
Italy, 2005.

11.) If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
An award-winning novel.

12.) If you could change one thing about your family, what would it be?
Descendants of Cornelius Vanderbilt.

13.) What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Haven't done it yet.

14.) Who is your favourite artist, and who is your favourite composer?
Miro and Chopin.

15.) What is your most treasured possession?
A glorious and self-elevating imagination.

16.) What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
Poverty and celibacy.

17.) Who are your heroes in real life?
All my students who have a great deal of energy, idealism, faith, and optimism.

18.) What is it that you most dislike?
That adolescent boys get their sexual fantasies affirmed in every aspect of society (tv, movies, songs, websites, anything featuring, mentioning, glorifying, or touching breasts) and adolescent girls don't.

19.) How would you like to die?
---

20.) What is your motto?
Marry young, divorce early.

Book Review (click)

2011-09-18T17:01:00.002-05:00

On Lee Rourke's The Canal...

A novel whose epigraph is Martin Heidegger's "We are suspended in dread" would seem to be giving itself a great deal to live up to. Lee Rourke's The Canal, an engaging and disturbing story of a man coming to terms with boredom and the people who seem to challenge his peaceful conception of it, literally sits the unnamed narrator down in the middle of a busy, oblivious, and constantly moving populace to establish its central premise: most people—office workers, dog walkers, gangs of youth, soccer fans—mindlessly fill their lives with pointless activity and entertainment, erroneously trying to snuff out their boredom, unaware of its ultimate and liberating power. Boredom compels us, says the narrator, to do things. Boredom, he insists, is good.

Sex and the American Male Novelist (click here)

2010-01-03T21:50:00.003-06:00

This link: Katie Roiphe's "The Naked and the Conflicted," in the Sunday New York Times.
On Roth, Updike, Mailer, Bellow, Franzen, Chabon, Wallace, and Kunkel.

[as if no time had elapsed at all]

2010-01-03T18:14:00.000-06:00

An interesting comment

2008-05-25T19:29:00.002-05:00

In response to "novelists and the president" (see below), Marmorea replies:

I think that one of the ways in which Israel, or Latin America, or even France for that matter, is different from the United States is that those countries have a real active left movement, which we haven't seen basically since Sinclair. The 1930's (according to one historian) saw the end of the connection between an artistic and a political avant-garde). Radicalism is not only absent from the political landscape, it is absent from the artistic landscape as well. It's interesting to observe that for all our guaranteed freedom of speech, I think the failure of literature to really participate in the political life of this country is a result of a consensual self-censorship that is perhaps more scary than the state-enacted variety.Israel is also a particularly interesting case in point because although it is nominally a democracy, it is an extremely repressive state, with secret police and secret prisons and a vast number of disenfranchised inhabitants. At the same time, the cultural conversation within Israel includes the voices of a triumvirate of left-wing novelists including Grossman (whose See Under: Love is extraordinary), Amos Oz (perhaps the most well-known Israeli novelist) and A.B Yehoshua (the most experimental of the three). All are actively involved in Israeli politics; they write editorials, serve as reservists in the Israeli military like most Israeli men, and are committed to peace. Grossman has written two excellent nonfiction books about his work with Palestinian artists and writers to build peace coalitions, a process alive all over the region which the state and would-be state governments in the region (Hamas, Fatah) do their best to short-circuit. In fact it seems to me that it might be in the "cultural" sphere, in literature and film, that a real peace process is taking place.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Novelists and the President

2008-05-20T15:09:00.009-05:00

Jeffrey Goldberg's cover article in The Atlantic this month ("The Unforgiven") is on the state of Israel's future, since May marks its 60th year. NPR has a six-minute interview with Goldberg in which he talks about the Prime Minister and David Grossman, an Israeli novelist, "the leader of the left."

A brief excerpt from the transcript on npr.org:
Brand: Now, in your article you interview two important men in Israel. In fact your article revolves around both of them. One of them is the Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, the other an Israeli novelist called David Grossman. How do these two men symbolize the differences among Israelis, and how do they symbolize the future of Israel?

Mr. GOLDBERG: They are rhetorically not that far apart. [...] you have a prime minister who is weak, and as you know under investigation right now for corruption, and who can't seem to get out of the West Bank. And David Grossman, you have a novelist who is the leader of the Left [...] he's upset with the prime minister because the rhetoric is not matched with deeds.

In Israel, then, novelists matter -- at least this novelist matters. Not only is he "engaged" with the culture, but he's the leader of the Left and considered an "important" man (this is Franzen's greatest yet, according to him, most futile ambition). It's hard to imagine an American novelist being thought of in a similar manner. Say, George Bush and Gary Shteyngart facing off...or Bush and Ursula Le Guin? It's difficult, in the first place, to imagine any American president (no Bush-bashing here) being knowledgeable of a contemporary novelist at all. (Roth just doesn't seem to count...or is he the only possible representative of American novelists other than Vonnegut or Morrison who can be said to have ubiquitous recognition?) But even beyond that, it's difficult to imagine an American president speaking to or with or about an American novelist, much less being compared to one in any publication other than The Onion: novels don't rank as matters of national importance.

It's unsettling, then, as an American novelist, to think about the connection between novelists and politicians in other parts of the world: Africa, South America, the Middle East, Israel -- nations whose nationhood is itself volatile, chaotic, threatened (one wonders about the gestating novelists in Iraq -- will they develop a new strain of magic realism? of wisdom literature? of lamentation?). Under circumstances of political volatility, novelists become important figures --their fictive representations of the culture become the glue used for national unity, whether for good or for evil. So either the U.S.'s entrenched political system is so beyond the threat of external intervention that its cultural products have essentially become "lame ducks" (especially the ones purporting to be "political"); or the corporatization of publishing houses (and the mergers with Hollywood studios) has relegated novelists to the status of "entertainers," which is by far easier to mass market than "outspoken anarchist." But of course, really, it's a combination of these two things -- without the former, there couldn't be the latter, and vice versa.

It seems, though, that maybe a hundred years ago that wasn't the case in the U.S.. Perhaps the political system was felt to be more vulnerable in 1906 -- Upton Sinclair's The Jungle was so powerful not just because of its "muckraking" expose, but also because the author was an outspoken socialist who ran for governor of California shortly thereafter. Of course, plenty of changes in the last hundred years have transformed the publishing industry (not the least of which is niche marketing) to the point that it's now questionable whether a novel can even have the same kind of political or social clout that The Jungle had -- memoir, it seems, is the new novel.

As (novelist) Cris Mazza said: If Walter Benn Michaels had been writing a hundred years ago, The Trouble with Diversity would have been a novel.

Is it a fair statement, then, to say that Americans want their novelists to be entertainers (the funnier the better), their journalists to be moral guardians (a la Woodward and Bernstein), and, perhaps, their intellectuals to just get a real job?

Is there even such a thing as an American novelist?

And Keith Gessen responds...

2008-05-14T14:44:00.006-05:00

Earlier this week I was surprised to find an email from Keith Gessen in my inbox. He had found my blog and read my (I believe the term I used in an earlier posting was:) DorothyParker-like vitriol regarding his novel All the Sad Young Literary Men. I asked him if I could post our email exchange, and he agreed. So here it is in its entirety....

On Monday, May 12, 2008 Keith Gessen wrote:
Dear Cynthia--
Hi there. I see that you don't like my book very much--which is ok. But a question that I can't help asking: Were you the woman who very politely and pleasantly asked the question at the reading about "all the sad young literary women"? And if you wanted to follow up on it--why didn't you? I do think my book is lad lit, if you want to call it that---I'm not uncomfortable with that designation. I think the main distinction to be drawn between, to go back to the original question, chick lit and not chick lit, is in the form the characters' aspirations take and how seriously they get treated by the author. But I'm not sure.
Best,
Keith

On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 4:56 PM, Cynthia Cravens wrote:
Hi Keith,
Yes, I am the one who asked the first question at your reading in Chicago. I must say I'm somewhat stunned that you came across my blog, considering it has only been up for a couple of weeks and was never intended to be public. And I have to admit I'm a little embarrassed as well -- contrary to the impolite and indignant tone of those postings, I actually am a polite and pleasant person! Those postings were more of an experiment with voice (and a bit of a rant, it must be said) and not bonafide reviews that I would stake a claim against.

I really appreciate your writing me and being generous in not taking me to task for the things I said -- it certainly would've been well within reason for you to do so, and if you don't mind a lengthy email, I'd like to respond (thoughtfully this time) to your comment. Just in the interest of full disclosure, I'm writing a critical paper about this issue of representations of the American novelist and I'm including a discussion of All the Sad Young Literary Men as a primary text (along with Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year, Breen's The Fiction Class and George Gissing's New Grub Street). So what you read in my blog pages was my attempt to exorcise sarcasm -- sort of like chick-lit commentary.

I think you're right in making the general distinction between chick-lit and not chick-lit as the treatment by the author -- but I'm curious as to what you mean by the form the characters' aspirations take. Do you mean something along the lines of a domestic/family/personal crisis and an obsessive attention to, I don't know, maybe feelings or emotions or their mothers (this, by the way, sums up The Fiction Class) vs. an epic/social/global concern and anxiety over the human condition...? This seems to indicate the two extremes of fiction at this moment, and the way publishers seem to differentiate between commercial/popular and literary. This, as you mentioned at the reading, is also a consideration that novelists have to reckon with when writing their novels -- and perhaps women more so than men.

Francine Prose wrote an essay in Harper's a few years ago discussing the domestic/epic dichotomy, in which she focused not on the marketing of commercial vs literary fiction, but on the reception by critics: that the same style of prose is perceived as either "masculine" or "feminine" based on the context (i.e epic and global, or domestic and sentimental) and invariably, the "masculine" and epic novel was judged more profound, more literary, and just generally better than the "feminine" and sentimental novel, even though stylistically, the prose might be nearly identical.

I think this may be the underlying issue that complicates a chick-lit or not chick-lit classification. (I think also, this is why "lad lit" is a problematic category in American publishing at the moment.) I just finished reading Heidi Julavits's novel The Uses of Enchantment -- and there are lots of ways that it reminds me of All the Sad Young Literary Men: specifically, the tone, the voice, the style, the word choices, the characterizations, the multiple points of view. The major distinction between the two is that Heidi's is about a young woman trying to come to terms with her past and the death of her mother (it doesn't get more domestic than that) and yours is about three young men trying to come to terms with their position in a turbulent society (a la Franzen's "social novel"). In Prose's schematic, even though they're stylistically similar, their critical reception is bound to be markedly different because of the "placement" of the main character in the social world of the novel. It's an interesting problem.

So, I think my own reception of All the Sad Young Literary Men is more complicated than a like or dislike -- even though I admit those blog postings don't leave much room for equivocation. Really what I find interesting about your novel is what it says about the condition of the American intellectual right now (and perhaps what it says about American publishing too -- of the two aspiring novelists in the novel, one abandons his potential epic outright and the other can't get his published; but the journalists, and especially the blogger, are comparatively successful), and clearly, if it hadn't struck a nerve with me on some deep level, I wouldn't have spent so much time writing about it.

Thanks again for writing -- and sorry if this was quite a bit longer than you expected. Like I said, I appreciate your willingness to talk about it. Would you mind terribly if I posted your comment and my response? It's kind of nice to be "called out" for something and have to reconsider my position....

All best,
Cynthia

On Tuesday, May 13, 2008 Keith Gessen wrote:
Dear Cynthia—

I *thought* that must be you. But it's almost impossible to believe. You were, as I say, polite and pleasant, and now you are again. And yet in a public forum---I found it very easily by Google Blog searching my name and "Myopic"--gosh, a lot less so.

So, let's make a deal: Since you've posted those already, you need to post your paper as well. That will really be something.

In terms of my book and the American intellectual, I mostly want to plead satire---I was trying to imagine a kind of worst-case scenario for these guys (within reason). The writer for the Times Style section actually put it well when he said it was a "dark joke" on my literary career--but it wasn't a description of it. If you look at n+1, you'll see that actually we're the opposite of not-confident about the place of the writer and intellectual in American society. I'd also want to plead satire in getting out of the comparison to Uses of Enchantment--which is not a satire, for the most part, as far as I can tell. I would think Sloan Crosley's book, which came out at the same time as mine and deals with a lot of the same things (I think) would be a more useful place for comparison.

That said: as Hitchens once said to Bellow in a review when Bellow claimed he was making fun of something in one of his novels: "I think we'll be the judge of that." In other words it's only as satirical as it reads to its readers, no matter how I meant it.

As for women and domestic fiction... I need to think more about this. Yes, there's the "social novel" aspect--my book does try to be roughly accurate in a sociological way, e.g. in terms of how much money these guys have and where they can afford to live etc. (Like New Grub Street!) But chick lit, at least what I've seen of it, also does this, I mean worries about money. So did Jane Austen's characters. But Jane Austen was honest about it. In fact you could probably argue that starting with Jane Austen fiction written by women has been more honest about the financial aspects of courtship than male fiction---Middlemarch, for example--and where male authors tread into this territory they almost did it in drag---Trollope. To some extent even James. Whereas Anna Karenina, on the other hand, very much a domestic fiction, was clearly written from a male perspective.

In other words this is all very interesting! I guess for me the most interesting comparison is between, say, my book and a movie like "Knocked Up"----are they really the same thing? Or something like Nick Hornby's book about a caddish dude in his 30s---I guess I'd argue hopefully that my book's darker, though not darker enough, in part because it does take the guys seriously enough that when they do shitty things in the book, you don't as a reader have that much distance--you don't say, Well of course he did that. I've been told from page 1 that he's a cad. And also the guys don't get redeemed by, for example, having a baby. If anything they make a quasi-cynical calculation about it. So.

OK. Thanks for your email. You can post all this I guess if it's of interest, but only if you post everything in full, ok?

Over and out.
k

On Wed, May 14 2008 at 12:03:19 Cynthia Cravens wrote:
Hi Keith,
Yes -- I can imagine that reading the postings and reading my email side by side is a bit like experiencing The Three Faces of Eve. I want to claim something about the liberating quality of sarcasm in a seemingly anonymous forum (something akin to road rage, I think, when you feel beguilingly protected and deceptively self-righteous), but of course, it's not an anonymous forum, when name, profile, and contact information are emblazoned on the page. So, that's lame. I think maybe I was temporarily infected with a Perez Hilton virus (damn those celebrity bloggers and their spiteful virginity countdowns...), but of course without the requisite cult status upon which that spite seems to feed.

You bring up a really interesting point about the way readers "read" satire. It would seem that some of the reviewers of SYLM have missed the satirical intention altogether -- and I confess that there were points in the novel where I actually wrote in the margins "is this satire?" I think what it comes down to is how willing we are as readers to identify something as satirical, and maybe even how well-trained we are in the conventions of satire and irony. To paraphrase David Foster Wallace (perhaps badly), pretty much all of us in this generation can't help but think ironically since we were weaned on television and advertising and schadenfreude and celebrity gossip. And I think it was Pynchon who said that after postmodernism, we can't go back to saying "I love you madly" without saying it ironically; without meaning it ironically.

So on the one hand, sincerity is looked upon as something suspicious, but on the other hand, the kind of satire and irony we know exhaustively is middlebrow, mass-produced, overly familiar, and canned. So perhaps the kind of satire that falls outside of this familiarity, satire that is subtle, maybe even a bit submerged with the characters' otherwise sincere thoughts, is not only hard to recognize, but hard to accept as satire. And rather than challenge our own reading habits, we're more likely to accuse the author of not living up to our expectations.

I think this ties back to an impression I got from the reading at Myopic as well: for the most part, it was a fairly youngish audience, one that I would imagine is the target market group. One line you read was in Russian (I lent my copy to a friend so I unfortunately don't have it in front of me; Mark's dissertation hero allegedly quips a witticism regarding "well, I'd rather be a ..., than a ..."). There were two twenty-ish something young ladies in the front row (one was twisting her hair) who laughed at this, I mean laughed when you read this in Russian. At first I thought they must know Russian...and I was pretty impressed. But then you said, "Wait, I'll translate" and I realized that they laughed not because they understood the joke, but because they're accustomed to hearing punch lines; they're accustomed to the rhythm of humor, and were lulled, I think, by the tone -- one that they interpreted as humorous and light, and punctuated by one-liners.

The general sense I got was that they, and also the young man who introduced you, found the book funny, like a comedy, rather than a satire. And I think that goes back to a certain kind of informal training on the one hand (i.e. television) and just a general non-exposure to different kinds of tones on the other (i.e. there are only so many books a twenty-something can have read in twenty-something years...). And so, yes, maybe the comparison to Knocked Up is appropriate here in terms of differentiating punchline comedy from satire and our expectations of each as a genre. Hmm.

I haven't heard anything about Sloan Crosley's book, but I'll look for it.
Thanks for writing!
Cheers,
Cynthia