This Week in Books: “Shut up, or I’ll write three more.”
“Yeah, I don’t pay much attention to books after I write them, so…”
Dear Reader,
“Why… is continuity thought to be a virtue? Is a coherent life always desirable? …Perhaps academics model their lives too much on writing books…” So postulates Terry Eagleton in his gently obliterating review—what I would call his marinating and grilling of—Peter Brooks’ Seduced by Story.
I really enjoy that genre of book review that’s just “communist roastings”—it’s when a Marxist critic decides to destroy a sort of normal-sounding book by just breaking down point by point how it is blinded by capitalist ideology, mired in imperialist propaganda, and so on. The last one I can think of is when Ryan Ruby reviewed Ian McEwan’s old-man swan song and was for four thousand words going this man is an avatar of our oppression. Incredible stuff. Like, as though we have some sort of regularly scheduled ritual sacrifice of one (1) middlebrow author to the spectre of communism, as compensation for the total lack of adequate healthcare. Anyhow this is one of those paragraphs that I write and I think, I should delete this, no one will enjoy this. But… like, it doesn’t really matter.
That’s the ethos this week. The overwhelming vibe. I’m feeling inspired, especially by Percival Everett. “Why get stressed about it? And even after you publish it. What if nobody likes it? What are you going to do? Maybe somebody will enjoy the next one,” he advises in an interview with Ayize Jama-Everett (no relation) which, guys, just totally rocks. All day, I’ve been sending quotes to people. Hey, you’re people. I’m sending quotes to you.
So the gist, the throughline of the interview, is that Percival Everett is trying to empty himself of all thoughts and just vibe with his animals. “Do you remember all of it?” Jama-Everett asks him regarding his lengthy oeuvre, which he counters with “I don’t remember the last one.” And it just gets better from there. “I did three months of fieldwork with a hydrologist. I don’t remember any hydrology at all,” he says when asked about one book; and, “yeah, I don’t pay much attention to books after I write them, so …” when asked about another. At a certain point Jama-Everett turns to a prepared question he has at hand to address this malaise, which he must have foreseen, saying: “You have this quote: ‘My goal is to know nothing, and my friends tell me I’m well on my way.’ That could have been said by your main character in Dr. No, Wala. Do you have an actual obsession with nothing?” To which Everett responds, awesomely:
“What I love about writing novels is that I think I know something when I start, and by the time I finish, I realize I know less than I did when I started it. But the extrapolation of that is, after you’ve finished writing so many books, you know much less than most people. You might as well embrace it.”
So. Back to the original question. Is a coherent life always desirable? And, what of lives modeled on writing books? In her review of a new translation of A Very Old Man, the sequel to Italo Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience, Becca Rothfeld writes that “Zeno is addicted to various fictions.” He’s a fabulist. He self-aggrandizes. Both books are presented as diary entries. Looking back, writes Rothfeld, “He prizes his earlier journals because ‘the part of my life described there is the only part I have lived’. There is no Zeno outside of his own exercises in self-fashioning, but by the same token, he really is the person he at first only pretended to be.” Says Zeno,
“When everybody else understands this as clearly as I do, they will all write. Life will be literaturized. Half of humanity will devote itself to reading and studying what the other half has put down. And contemplation will take up as much time as possible – time to be subtracted from horrid real life. If one part of humanity rebels and refuses to read the lucubrations of the other part, so much the better. Each person will read himself. And whether each life becomes clearer or murkier, it will evolve, correct, crystallize.”
—Dana
1. “I’m Looking to Jump Ship Sooner Than I Should” by Ayize Jama-Everett, Los Angeles Review of Books
Ayize Jama-Everett interviews Percival Everett about his career and his latest book Dr. No (Graywolf).
I use humor as a weapon in writing. There is no better way to address serious stuff, especially with Americans, than if you can get them laughing; then you can do shit to them.
2. “After the Fatwa” by Zain Khalid, The Drift
Zain Khalid writes about the life and work of Salman Rushdie and his latest book Victory City (Random House).
…[T]he Rushdie of the early ’80s readily expressed his hostility toward British and American interference in the postcolonial world. The year before Shame was published, he said on Channel 4 that “British thought, British society, has never been cleansed of the filth of imperialism.” The following year, he wrote an essay in The Guardian decrying “nanny-Britain, straight-laced Victoria-reborn Britain, class-ridden know-your-place Britain, thin-lipped jingoist Britain.” After a trip to Nicaragua, he took on the U.S. empire, too, penning The Jaguar Smile (1987), a nonfiction portrait of the country during the clandestine American war against the Sandinistas… Ever skeptical, even of the victims of colonialism, Rushdie didn’t romanticize the Sandinistas — he recounted their various corruptions and abuses of power — but “one didn’t have to like people to believe in their right not to be squashed by the United States.”
3. “What’s your story?” by Terry Eagleton, London Review of Books
Terry Eagleton critiques Peter Brooks’ Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative (NYRB).
…Brooks is the latest in a line of critics from Coleridge to I.A. Richards for whom art, given what they see as a sterile political landscape, is an ersatz form of insight and fulfilment. Reading Henry James isn’t likely to put paid to QAnon, but like a good deed in a naughty world it shines a frail light on our unsavoury situation.
No doubt it’s tough to be a middle-class liberal in today’s United States, but feeling forlorn should be understood in historical terms, not passed off as a universal plight.
…It isn’t that Brooks thinks fiction can save us, as I.A. Richards believed poetry could; it’s rather that he can think of nowhere else to turn. Story and poetry are important, to be sure, but not that important.
4. “Striking HarperCollins Workers Reach Tentative Agreement With Publisher” by Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth A. Harris, The New York Times
Three months since its members began to strike, the HarperCollins union on Thursday reached a tentative agreement with the publishing company that includes an increase in minimum salaries across an array of jobs and a one-time bonus of $1,500 to union members.
5. “A Brief History of the Clinch” by Victoria Lessard, Hazlitt
Victoria Lessard writes about trends in romance novel cover illustrations over time.
… While the clinch is an enduring feature of romance novel covers, the most prominent cover trend in present-day romance publishing is the move towards illustrative cartoon covers. …Cartoon illustrative covers feature call backs to the popular rom-com movies of the early aughts… Casey McQuiston’s 2019 bestseller Red, White & Royal Blue features an illustration of the two heroes leaning casually on opposite sides of the cover, and their 2021 novel One Last Stop shows an illustration featuring one heroine gazing out from a subway car towards the other who is walking by, coffee in hand.
Podcast host [Erin] Leafe feels that something is being lost as publishing houses start to produce fewer of the traditional romance covers. “There’s a desexualization that’s happening in culture. […] That camp and that celebration…as romance has moved into the mainstream, we’ve lost all of that. We’re losing something bigger when we lose all of that.”
6. “Walter Mosley Thinks America Is Getting Dumber” by David Marchese, The New York Times
David Marchese interviews Walter Mosley about his career and his latest book Every Man a King (Mulholland).
[Mosley:] …When you talk about Saul Bellow and Roth, there’s a certain really small group of people who think that they’re really important in their lives. I’m not one of those people… The only people who write about them are people who have degrees in literature.
[Marchese:] I was reading about Herzog the other day, and did you know that the year it came out, that book was a huge best seller? The literary culture was so different 60 or so years ago.
[Mosley:] But wait a second. Who’s the guy? He was a crime writer. He’d write a line like “She came in the door packing a pair of .38s.” Mickey Spillane! He said, “This writer came up to me and said, ‘Mr. Spillane, don’t you think it’s a tragedy that seven out of the 10 best-selling books last year were your books?’” And he said, “Shut up, or I’ll write three more.”
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