G.O.A.T.?

A few contemporary critics have said this about War and Peace: It is the Greatest Of All Time. Slugging my way through this novel, which is not Tolstoy’s masterpiece, reminded me of that well-known Greek myth too often invoked. Doomed for all eternity to push a boulder up a mountain Sisyphus tries and tries again but can’t quite make it and the boulder rolls all the way back down. It’s not quite the right analogy, but you get the idea.

War and Peace is not a difficult book because of plot twists or changing narrators or 10,000-word paragraphs or lapses into stream-of-consciousness. It covers a definite series of events that comprise the Napoleonic wars and the lives of Russian aristocracy during those wars; it covers a clear period of time (1805-1812); and it moves through that time in chronological order. It is just very, very long, and it feels very, well, archaic. Whereas I found Anna Karenina accessible, absorbing, and the love story wholly believable, in War and Peace romance is made dull by its ubiquity: “passionate love” comes along every few pages; women frequently “burst into tears” over their “broken hearts.”

Still, I was determined to finish, so I set a daily quota of fifty pages. I read early in the mornings, during meals, in the WC. Starting a novel and not completing it can leave you feeling a nagging sense of guilt. When you pick up a work of fiction there’s some unspoken contract entered into that says you will read every word, beginning to end. With nonfiction, skip chapters, give it to your local library — no big deal. The last novel I did not finish was Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, which is very dark (surprise, surprise) and political. For this, Fyodor, I apologize. Maybe someday I will be ready.

The time spent on W & P was completely worth it. Read it not to say you have but because Tolstoy is a painterly writer, and he depicts either a battlefield or a ballroom so damn well that you’ll think it would be impossible to say it any better:

They crossed the ferry where he had talked with Pierre a year before. They drove through the muddy village, past threshing floors and green fields of winter rye, downhill by a drift of snow still lying near the bridge, uphill along a clay road hollowed into runnels by the rain, past strips of stubble land and a copse touches here and there with green, and into a birch forest extending along both sides of the road. In the forest it was almost hot; there was not a breath of wind. The birches, all studded with sticky green leaves, did not stir, and lilac-covered flowers and the first blades of green grass lifted and pushed their way between last year’s leaves. Dotted here and there among the birches, small fir-trees were an unpleasant reminder of winter with their coarse evergreen. The horses began to snort as they entered the forest and the sweat glistened on their coats. (491)

Since finishing War and Peace I’ve been reading Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran. It was unintentional that this book would follow Tolstoy, but I appreciate Nafisi’s conception of what a novel is, the novelist as artist, and what the novel does for its reader. In her discussion of Henry James’s Washington Square, Nafisi writes, “Empathy lies at the heart of the novel. It is the quality that links Austen to Flaubert and James to Nabokov and Bellow. This, I believe, is how the villain in modern fiction is born: a creature without compassion, without empathy. The personalized version of good and evil usurps and individualizes the more archetypal concepts, such as courage or heroism, that shaped the epic or romance.”

That’s just it: War and Peace is all courage and heroism. Its characters are all basically good people — there’s no evil in the story, even in a world at war, Russia and France in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Even Napoleon, who invades Moscow and torches the city, assumes heroic attributes. There’s no counterbalance to all the gallantry. There’s zero irony and too much earnestness. It’s both an epic and a romance, doubly hard for the modern-day reader who knows the nothing-is-sacred worlds of Franzen and Eggers and Pynchon and Foster Wallace.

There is one scene that stands out for me: a group of Russian soldiers are at a tavern late at night. They’re flirting with a woman, the only woman in the place, while her husband is asleep on a nearby bench. For those few pages, the soldiers’ honor plummets: they jeer at her to the point of harassment, gawking while she pours their glasses of tea and rum. They chide her husband mumbling in his sleep. Here, the dialogue between the men snaps back and forth; their banter is colloquial and engaging. Most other times, however, Tolstoy’s characters speak in very careful language that seems too careful for how we really speak, or spoke.

Still, even with these Russian officers spending a lot of time considering the cut of their uniform, their rank, and their honor, what Tolstoy has to say about war itself — even if the actors do look like actors and not fleshed-our real men — is worth repeating:

War is not a polite recreation but the vilest thing in life, and we ought to understand that and not play at war […] The aim and end of war is murder; the weapons employed in war espionage, treachery and the encouragement of treachery, the ruining of a country, the plundering and robbing of its inhabitants for the maintenance of the army, and trickery and lying which all appear under the heading of the art of war. (922)

Obit and Lit: Mourning David Foster Wallace

On Friday, September 13th, David Foster Wallace died at age 46. Yesterday’s New York Times published an article, nay, a sort of elegy, to Wallace, by writer A. O. Scott.

Scott does an excellent job of situating Wallace in his generation of great minds, and in the broader scheme of literary innovation, comparing Wallace’s role in post-modernism to Ezra Pound’s in modernism.

To say Wallace will be missed is a vast understatement. To borrow from Scott, “He will be terribly missed by those of us who were lost with him in the maze of self-consciousness and self-doubt. He illuminated the maze brilliantly, even if he couldn’t show us the way out.”

Lessons from Mother and Daddy

Mary Karr’s memoir The Liars’ Club opens with an epigraph from Ezra Pound (“nothing matters but the quality / of the affection / that has carved the trace in the mind“) and her earliest memory: she is seven, and the family doctor sits before her at her home in east Texas. It is 1961. We’re not sure of her injury, but the police are there, and her drunken father has been fighting. (Not, thankfully, with Mary nor her sister; a drunk through and through, he never lays a violent hand on either of his girls.)

It all started years before when Karr’s mother left her last marriage (she had many) and life as an artist in New York City and found herself pulled over at a gas station in Leechfield, Texas. The man she met there — her next husband and Mary’s father — was, “in short, a Texas working man, with a smattering of Indian blood and with personality traits that she had begun to consider heroic.”

It is a childhood marked by unseemly moments that hold a whole lot of meaning for a nine-year-old girl. When Mary and her sister Lecia find out that their mean, prosthetic-legged grandmother has died, their school’s principal drives them home from school. At home,

Daddy was squatting on the porch in his blue overalls and hard hat, smoking, when we pulled up. He was dirty and smelled like crude oil when he hugged Lecia and me, one under each arm. Our principal didn’t pause, though, before shaking his hand, didn’t even dig out his hankie to wipe the oil off his palm after he shook. He was partial to white starched shirts, but knew when to set that aside.

Mary endures. Her mother and father fight more and turn to the kind of sun-up-to-sun-down drinking (he whiskey, she vodka) that takes over their lives.

But it’s not all heavy. Karr’s book title comes from her father’s brotherhood of unionized oil workers who pass their non-working hours over Lone Star beers, hand-rolled cigarettes, pool, and stories at the American Legion bar in Leechfield. The Liars’ Club, young Mary calls them; they embellish almost everything they say. Daddy calls her “Pokey,” and she sits with the men while they tell stories.

Of her father’s pal Blue, she writes, “He was one of those clean, featureless men who can move for decades on the periphery of a pool game buying his fair share of beers without ever uttering a full sentence.” She says that something about the Legion made her “solid inside,” that it clarified for her who she was. Rural 1960’s Texas comes fully alive on her page.

Karr’s book, published in 1995, set a certain standard for the coming-of-age memoir, and the recent publication of J.R. Moehringer’s The Tender Bar holds a similar stature. The Tender Bar is similarly honest and vivid in its portrayal of a boozy boyhood on Long Island. I reviewed Moehringer’s memoir in 2006, writing:

He was a fatherless boy who loved nothing more than the Mets, and wanted nothing more than happiness for his mother. The two of them lived in the smelly, falling-apart home of his grandparents just steps from the local watering hole, Publicans. There Wall Street execs and blue-collar workers alike were made to feel at home, and literature and war were discussed with the same frequency and emotion as New York sports.

If these two tales are any indication, it’s the case that, for better or for worse, American bars can sometimes do a better job than parents in raising a child. The Liars’ Club, for me, is also closely reminiscent of Tobias Wolff’s excellent 1989 memoir, This Boy’s Life.

Literary Fiction and the XX Chromosome

I admit that the “Currently Reading” banner to the right of this text has had Infinite Jest blazoned across it for some time. As mentioned here in my July 2nd post, the novel is some 1,ooo-pages-plus-footnotes, and each page is packed with long words and sentences that begin “And but although…” David Foster Wallace is a master of his craft; few would dispute that.

But today’s post is about something a bit larger than DFW and the many-faceted brilliance of Infinite Jest. DFW is one of a handful of masters of contemporary lit fiction. Some other writers garnering fame in today’s literary fiction field are Dave Eggers, Thomas Pynchon, Jonathan Franzen, and Haruki Murakami. The folks behind the fat, bi-annual literary publication n+1 are all Harvard boys. n+1 editor Keith Gessen published his first novel, All the Sad Young Literary Men, this year, and its title may give away exactly what I’m getting at here.

Where are all the XX chromosomes in today’s fiction scene? This question popped into my head while I read this brilliant exchange between Infinite Jest protagonist Hal Incandenza and brother Orin Incandenza:

[The scene: Hal and Orin discuss over the phone Orin's recent tryst in the trailer of a woman he had just met]
HAL: The trailer person’s name. Jean. May. Nora. Vera. Nora-Jean or Vera-May.
‘…’
HAL: That was my question.
ORIN: I guess I’ll have to get back to you on that.
HAL: Boy, you really put the small r in romance, don’t you.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing offensive about this scene. Two brothers discuss their sexual escapades; a woman’s name is forgotten. So be it. But where is the XX analogue to DFW’s take on gender relations? Where is DFW’s brilliant counterpart, writing about punchy, precocious women and their dysfunctional families á la the Incandeza family of Infinite Jest?

In recent memory, there was Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl, whose father-daughter road trip exploits led reviewers to draw a Lolita / Special Topics parallel. Which was unjustified, in my opinion. Pessl’s first novel, though engrossing, suggests more of a Da Vinci Code / Special Topics parallel. And then there’s the issue of her much-talked-about jacket photo, which led everyone to speculate that her book deal had been the result of her being, well, hot.

And she is hot. But who cares. What I care about is, she’s no DFW when it comes to literary fiction, and Special Topics need not be compared to Lolita.

Past generations have offered up some of the greatest fiction writers known to the Western Canon, who also had XX chromosomes. Virginia Woolf for starters, and the woman whose portrait headlines this blog, to name two heavy hitters.

Gender really shouldn’t have anything to do with writing literary fiction, right? We’re passed that. Generations ago. But it’s too much to ignore when all of the writers doing exciting things in this genre are of the XY type. And besides, men tend to write fiction with male protagonists. I’m hungering for something cutting edge about a brilliant, quirky, female.

A Writer Herself

American Public Media puts out a great daily e-newsletter called The Writer’s Almanac. (The radio program of the same name is hosted by Garrison Keillor.) Today’s edition of the newsletter has a poem by Joseph Mills (you can click through to hear a reading) and a run-down of notable literary birthdays, including that of Zelda Fitzgerald. Born in Montgomery, Alabama on July 24, 1900, she was the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the inspiration for one of the most recognizable female characters in the history of American fiction: Daisy Buchanan. 

Zelda was also, in fact, quite a writer herself. She wrote one novel, Save Me the Waltz (1932), but she did some of her best writing in her letters: 

Zelda wrote a letter to his family in White Bear, Minnesota after F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940: “So many years have passed since summers lost themselves in the green valley of White Bear and time floated immutable and eternal above the blue sleek surface of the lake. … Always we hoped to some day be able to offer testimonial to the courtesies that were extended us; from so many kind hearts, in so many lonesome places. … Now that [Scott] won’t be coming east again with his pockets full of promises and his notebooks full of schemes and new refurbished hope, life doesn’t offer as happy a vista. … Life has a way of closing its books as soon as one’s category is fulfilled; and I suppose the time has come. … If when things have resolved themselves more tangibly, I want to know how to find my way about the bread-line, I will write you — Don’t forget me.”

Edible Lit

Can Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma fit the mission of this blog to review literature and literary memoir? I think so. Hear me out.

Pollan points out that humans have subsisted on a variety of diets over time. Indeed, omnivores can eat nearly anything, and omnivores of the American-in-the-twenty-first-century variety have almost endless choice. From processed and pre-made to whole and organic foods, there are more possibilities for how to nourish ourselves than ever before. So Pollan goes to the trouble to help us out in making those choices. How nice of him.

More to the point, The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Pollan’s 2008 book In Defense of Food debunk the “nutritionism” that dominates the American relationship with food. We obsess over carbs, calories, fats, saturated fats, trans fats, omega-3, protein, vitamin C, and a host of other nutrients- to the exclusion of concerning ourselves with the foods themselves and the pleasure in eating them. The American eater, Pollan suggests, fails even to notice the difference between whole and processed foods, so concerned is he with the nutrients they contain.

What makes Pollan’s two books most beautiful—and apt for a post on this blog—is that they’re a gateway back to a different gastronomical era, when foods were whole, and hand-made, and nutritious, and when they were shared over a table as a staple aspect of community. That revered food writer of the twentieth century, M.F.K. Fisher, once wrote,

I still think that one of the pleasantest of all emotions is to know that I, I with my brain and my hands, have nourished my beloved few, that I have concocted a stew or a story… to sustain them against the hungers of the world.

Some of the most enchanting scenes of modern literature have taken place around a well-laid table. The pivotal scene of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse was the ecstatic, candle-lit dinner. And that’s no surprise. Woolf did famously pronounce that “one cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”

Pollan’s investigation helps us re-focus our understanding of food, and what we eat and why. If Fisher and Woolf are on to something, then it’s worth the long, hard look into our eating habits to find a path back to real pleasure at the table.

Six Two One: A Star-Studded Début

At Six Two One, we’re serious about fiction. And non-fiction. And memoir. And punchy blogging. My brother told me today that he bought an issue of Poets & Writers just because it had a picture of Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses on the cover. So, what could be better to head today’s Six Two One debut than that very image?

Six Two One—born today, June 23rd, 2008—is about delivering thought-provoking commentary on literary fiction and memoir. Stay tuned.