One-Way Street

Chook Lit

Breaking news from contemporary literature: Chick lit has been replaced by chook lit. Translated from the Australian, chook lit means "chicken lit." The Atlantic calls it farm lit. The genre features heroines who flee big cities--New York, Chicago, and LA, the only American cities in chick lit world--for "slower, more rural existences" to be found in the country.  According to Emily Matchar, the rise of farm lit is a sign of the times.

So many of chick lit's tropes—stilettos! Fighting for your big break in journalism! Cute i-bankers! The hottest new nightclub in the Meatpacking District!—were part of a boomtime economy. These days, we're mostly wearing flats, journalism is breathing its last gasps, we'd rather throw i-bankers in jail than date them, and cupcake baking seems a lot more fun (and cheaper!) than clubbing.

So it makes sense that light, female-centric literature would be angling for new aspirational fantasies. And in this era of Brooklyn backyard chickens, farmer's markets-as-social events, Anthropologie aprons and hipsters baking homemade bread, what's more aspirational than running away to a farm?

via www.theatlantic.com

In one farm lit novel, a woman leaves Manhattan for Georgia, ranked 25th on iVillage's best states for women. In another, a heroine from Los Angeles marries a rancher in Oklahoma (49th on the list). 

What was the last novel to feature a heroine who ran away to the suburbs? Has that allegory vanished altogether?

Wal-Mart Blue Highways

The other day I saw a hipster-type guy driving a Mini Cooper with a big Route 66 bumper sticker on it. I wanted to stop him and ask, "Did they let you drive on Route 66 with that car and those glasses? I thought you had to ride a Harley or drive an RV or William Least Heat-Moon would call the state police."

Nicholas Howe precisely identifies the phony authenticity of those off-the-beaten-track travelogues that shame us into believing we're cultural traitors for stopping at a rest area Burger King. Howe says the genre as exemplified by Heat-Moon's Blue Highways (1982) is based on a misreading of late regionalist writers such as Edwin Arlington Robinson and Sherwood Anderson. Least-Moon saw in their novels the last vestiges of the real America, while those writers saw the same small towns as pockets of drabness.

Howe continues,

I think about this sometimes when I’m drinking coffee in a fast-food place along an interstate. Usually, I’ve driven too far that day and need to slow down; the discipline of hot coffee is that it takes more time than a cold drink. I like chain places because they clean the toilets and keep the place anonymous. They remind me that the most enviable of travelers—adaptable and graceful medievals like Ibn Battuta or Marco Polo—stuck to the main roads, the caravan routes, the pilgrimage ways. On the beaten track, they found what they needed: the exchange of goods, the ebb and flow of human beings moving about for all imaginable reasons, confirmation that life lies in motion and transfer. They knew that routes, like places, have their stories.

via www.kenyonreview.org

The reality of rural America today is that a good portion of its residents work in fast food franchises, along with national retail chains. In most of America the blue of the highways is Wal-Mart blue mixed with the Golden Arches yellow.

Screening Gatsby

A film adaptation of a famous American novel is bound to provoke some backlash. Kathryn Schulz offers a contrarian view of the novel.

Indeed, The Great Gatsby is less involved with human emotion than any book of comparable fame I can think of. None of its characters are likable. None of them are even dislikable, though nearly all of them are despicable. They function here only as types, walking through the pages of the book like kids in a school play who wear sashes telling the audience what they represent: OLD MONEY, THE AMERICAN DREAM, ORGANIZED CRIME. It is possible, of course, to deny your readers access to the inner lives of your characters and still write a psychologically potent book: I give you Blood Meridian. But to do that, you yourself must understand your characters and conceive of them as human.

via www.vulture.com

Schulz offers the old no-likable-characters critique. I don't know about you, but I never find these arguments very persuasive, nor do I ever remember putting down a novel because I couldn't relate to the characters. 

David Denby likes the book, but not the movie, yet I think he understands the novel better than Schulz, who can't seem to allow herself to.

[Director Baz] Luhrmann whips Fitzgerald’s sordid debauch into a saturnalia—garish and violent, with tangled blasts of music, not all of it redolent of the Jazz Age.  [ . . .] The picture is filled with an indiscriminate swirling motion, a thrashing impress of “style” (Art Deco turned to digitized glitz), thrown at us with whooshing camera sweeps and surges and rapid changes of perspective exaggerated by 3-D. [ . . . ] Gatsby’s excess—his house, his clothes, his celebrity guests—is designed to win over his beloved Daisy. Luhrmann’s vulgarity is designed to win over the young audience, and it suggests that he’s less a filmmaker than a music-video director with endless resources and a stunning absence of taste.

Schulz is troubled by the surfaces of Fitzgerald's novel, while Denby is troubled by the surfaces of Luhrmann's film adaptation. The story Jay Gatsby is a story about surfaces--not so much the surfaces people present to others, but the surfaces upon which people project their own desires. 

Gatsby's West Egg life is essentially a movie he's created for Daisy, who, in turn, is a surface upon which Gatsby has projected his own desires. Unfortunately for him, Daisy is also a screen upon which her husband projects his desires. Her sole act of volition is to choose her husband's projections over her lover's, in the process killing her husband's lover as if she were a spectre in a movie.

Perhaps Luhrmann’s vulgarity is somehow appropriate to the material, which is inherently cinematic. I haven't seen the movie yet, but I doubt it will look that way. Luhrmann is Nick, the point of view through which we watch the movie Gatsby has created for Daisy. This may be why Luhrmann transitions so awkwardly from Nick's narrative voice to the action of the story. Some ethical mooring is lost when Nick's point of view is lost. 

As Schulz notes, Fitzgerald knew Daisy was poorly drawn and her relationship with Gatsby was opaque. However, he didn't do anything about it despite his designs on a popular reading public. Her complaint about the coldness of the characters is not only poor literary criticism. It also misses the point of the novel, which is all about the dangers of projection, not its pleasures.

George Saunders and American Neo-Surrealism

Last night, after I finished George Sanders' Tenth of December, I thought to myself, very nice, but this isn't the best book I've read all year, and it's only February. I haven't had a chance to write up my notes yet, but Daniel Green has already pointed to one source of disappointment in Saunders' collection. Green points out that despite the surface weirdnesses of Saunders' fiction--the source of much of his appeal--Saunders is fundamentally a realist.

 Even Saunders’s more radically surrealist stories do not really depart from the requisites of conventional storytelling, and in this his fiction is consistent with (probably one of the inspirations for) most of the neo-surrealist fiction that has become quite a noticeable development in recent American writing, for example in the work of Aimee Bender and Stacy Levine. If anything, this fiction observes the dictums of plot development even more scrupulously than traditional realism, as the freakish or oddball characters and absurdist events are chronicled in a strictly linear way, comprising appropriately rising actions and clear resolutions and generally satisfying any reader’s need for narrative. At the same time, claims are often made that this mode of fiction is nevertheless audacious and unconventional, claims based entirely on its defiance of the surface logic of ordinary reality. Thus the alternative posed to “realism” is a diametrical anti-realism that informs as story’s content but not its form. Saunders is himself probably the most accomplished of these new surrealists, but his stories only illustrate most prominently that such fiction derives its appeal from conjuring fanciful flights from reality related through familiar narrative strategies. That Saunders employs his vision of an altered reality at the satirical level to achieve the traditional goals of realism — to depict the way things are — could lead us to the conclusion that Saunders’s ambitions aren’t that far removed from those associated with the realist tradition — they might be seen as two sides of the same literary coin.

I agree with Green that Saunders isn't a cutting-edge writer. I don't think he's particularly imaginative, which compromises his effectiveness as a political writer. Also, it never occurred to me to classify him as a surrealist, but that label makes sense, even though he's not in the same league as Andre Breton or any of the other surrealists of high modernism. Still, it's good to know there are such things as literary surrealists working now. 

Would Detroit Have Been Better Off Without Henry Ford?

Would Detroit have been better off without Henry Ford? Mark Binelli, author of Detroit City Is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis, never asks this question, but it occurred to me while reading his account of how Detroit became the poster child of urban dysfunction in America. Without the auto industry Detroit may have turned out to be another Milwaukee. It wouldn't loom so large in the public imagination, and it wouldn't be free of its share of problems, but at least the property values would be stable.

In Binelli's telling, Detroit has never been a genteel city or a model of urban stability. Founded by roguish Frenchmen in the early 18th century, Detroiters were content to be left alone in their muddy, non-description outpost in the primeval North American wilderness. Early in its history Detroit developed an insularity that would have profound consequences today: a virulent racism that still stings and a lack if interest in acquiring any municipalities beyond Eight Mile Road. Unlike many other American cities, Detroit never annexed its suburbs to sustain growth. A larger municipality may have helped Detroit avoid contraction in the twenty-first century.

The opening of the Erie Canal, followed by the discovery of copper in the Upper Peninsula, shocked the town into the industrial age, and for a while the city made a nice living making wood-burning stoves and paint varnish.

Then Henry Ford and the auto plants arrived. By 1919 the city was overwhelmed by a sudden influx of European immigrants and African-Americans. The city's infrastructure was strained to the breaking point. African-Americans were largely consigned to Black Bottom (named for the quality of its soil), a neighborhood with the city's oldest and most dilapidated housing stock. Prejudicial real estate practices ensures they would stay there. Prejudicial lending practices ensured they couldn't improve their homes. By the time Detroit recovered from the boomtown mess the auto industry was past its peak.

The history of Detroit between the height of the V8 era to the present is a sad and familiar story. Binelli was one of many journalists who dropped in to report on the decay. What sets Binelli apart is that he is a native of southeast Michigan. His father ran a knife sharpening business in the city. Binelli is clear-eyed and unnostalgic. His Detroit is not the zombie apocalypse theme park of the popular press. He doesn't drop in on the guy who sells raccoon meat for food. Yet he doesn't flinch from the details of an American city threatened with extinction. Nearly everyone he meets in the city has some bullet wounds to show him.

Binelli is as much of a storyteller as he is a journalist. Detroit City reads like a historical novel, with the narrator deftly interweaving the history of the city with its present predicament. With so much material, Binelli is better when he moves the story along quickly. One vignette tells the story of a man who shot his gun in the air to scare away a burglar. When a weary police officer finally shows up, he advises the homeowner, "Next time, aim lower." But another more in-depth story about urban farmers--about half of Detroit is uninhabited--drags on a bit too long. When Binelli is on his mark, which is most of the time, the book is a surprisingly gripping read.

At the end of his story, Binelli is honest enough to say he doesn't know which direction the city is headed. He doesn't think the city will remain "Detroit the cautionary tale; Detroit the forsaken; Detroit the city of outlaws and eviction and perpetual fire." By the same token some hipster sightings doesn't mean the city is on the fast track to become the Brooklyn of the Upper Midwest. However, sometimes despite itself, the city has always moved forward--not always in the right direction, but it's never stood still. 

It's only a small exaggeration to say that Detroit once created the future of America. Now it has to create its own future.

Added, Friday, February 8, 2013: Mark Binelli has an update on the state of Detroit. Billionaires want to buy part of it and set up their own country with its own currency, the Rand. 

Fun Friday: Martha Returns Edition

For this edition of Fun Friday, a novel about drug addicts in India, an exhibit on digital fabrication, a digital Shakespeare, a chance to revisit the work of a major American architect, and Martha Stewart.

Fun Friday: Romney and the Dog Edition

With the summer winding down, it's time to start looking toward the fall. There's the U.S. election for one. As disheartening as the discourse has been, you can's say it's been dull. These women dedicated a song to a certain candidate for the U.S. Senate from Missouri.

 

Todd Akin is hardly alone. Timothy Egan lists a rogue's gallery of other crackpots in positions of power. 

Then there's Romney. Instead of choosing Paul Ryan to be his running mate, he should have chosen a dog. Whenever Romney starts to stray off script, the dog would bite him. Here's the latest gaffe:

 

The capital in John Lancaster's novel of the same name is London, but edit out the Britishisms (the meaning of "knackered" became clear after repeated use, but "manky" is still a mystery to me) and you could have Manhattan in the last days of the Bush administration. No American novel has yet come close to depicting that moment in September 2008 when all the wheels came off the global economy. I will have more to say about this novel soon, but I highly recommend reading it as soon as possible. 

I'm sad to say that another book to which I'll return can't be recommended. Roland Barthes'  Travels in China has been released in English translation. It's strictly for his hardcore fans, of which I'm one. I can recommend another new translation of Barthes, Mythologies, which appears in a complete edition for the first time in English. Originally published in French in 1957, Mythologies was the first great analysis of everyday life after Walter Benjamin died.

The Interlude Life: Richard Ford's Canada

The reviews of Richard Ford's novel Canada are in, and from the four or five reviews that I saw, these two points was made consistently: One: Canada is one of the best American novels of the year because of Ford's prose. Two: The tone is haunting and heartbreaking without being cloying or sentimental.

I heartily agree with both points. Canada is carried by the quality of its writing. The novel is narrated by a sixty-five year old Dell Parsons whose parents robbed a bank in the summer before he was to enter high school. The first half of the novel, set in Montana in 1960, follows Dell's parents' unlikely transformation into felons. The second half of the novel takes place in Canada, where Dell contemplates the arrest of his parents and the disappearance of his twin sister. 

The first half of the novel--the American side, if you will--is the better one. It reads like a crime thriller, albeit a slowly-paced one. Ford gives away his major plot element right away. We know Dell's parents will rob a bank from the opening sentence of the novel. The suspense comes from watching Dell watching his parents, a retired Air Force officer and a teacher, formulate a plot to rob a bank. Dell struggles to understand why two ordinary people would decide to commit a crime. We struggle a bit, too, especially to understand why Neeva, his mother, agrees to be an accomplice. The tautness of the prose and the suspense as the plot unfolds carry us past the problems with motivation. Who knows, really, why anyone commits a crime? Dostoevsky and Camus both knew better than to explain criminal behavior too thoroughly.

After his parents are arrest, Dell is sent to live with a strange cast of characters in Saskatchewan. To Americans, Canada is a vague place, neither foreign nor domestic. In Dell's eyes Canada is a spooky landscape waiting to be re-enchanted, a place where the effects of civilization are ebbing away. He had grown up with a family that had felt itself alienated from Western American society. In Saskatchewan Dell must find his way in a society with seemingly no connective tissue at all.  Before his parents' arrest Dell had been plotting out his life like a chess game. In Canada he's stuck in a ghost town. He goes from a plotter to an observer; his life story changes from a conventional narrative arch into a transformative interlude in which suspension becomes a mode of being.

Dell's experience in the weeks leading up to his parents' crime is repeated in Saskatchewan. Once again an unlikely person commits a terrible crime--this time, a murder. The buildup-payoff formula doesn't work as well the second time around because of the bleak hopelessness of Dell's time in Canada. In effect Dell re-experiences the trauma of his parents' crime, their awful revelation of their own helplessness. 

 The vision in Canada isn't tragic so much as traumatic. Tragedy can be dramatized, but trauma never enters language.  Ford's novel, like Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, is structured by trauma without depicting it directly. The result is a flattening out of language and vision. Dell concludes his story with this curious statement:

I believe in what you see being most of what there is, as I've taught my students, and that life's passed along to us empty. So, while significance weigh heavy, that's the most it does. Hidden meaning is all but absent. The interlude is the life.

All Dell can do is "connect the unequal things into a whole that preserves the good," which is pretty much all Hemingway's prose does. For both Ford and Hemingway the actions of life have gravity but no meaning. Characters are trapped by the pull of gravitational fields. Neither Dell nor Hemingway's Jake can change. Dell never develops beyond his thwarted plans for high school. He never leaves Canada, constrained by absence.

Fun Friday: Heat Wave Edition

We're having Wages of Fear weather in Chicago right now, so it's hard to think of anything fun to do except diving into a pool. After three days of temperatures over 100 degrees you start to think something, somewhere, has gone awry and we're starting to leave normalcy behind. Here are two examples of men who are showing us the way to the upcoming madness.

In the New York Times Sam Anderson announces, "There comes a time in the life span of every culture when it becomes necessary to think obsessively about LeBron James." As hard as this is to admit, Anderson may be right. In Anderson's view, James is the first truly dialectical athelete.

LeBron James has been a flying contradiction — a man whose every positive virtue contains its own negation. He is (according to the popular narrative) both lovable and odious, a ball hog and too deferential, incredibly clutch and a choke artist. He is Schrödinger’s superstar: simultaneously one of the very greatest players of all time and a fundamentally flawed squanderer of talent. If anything, his championship this year will not simplify this story. It only makes it more complex.

James isn't a model sports hero, like Michael Jordan. he of the "impossibly coherent narrative." Rather, James is a conundrum for our culture to solve. 

One possibility is that James represents the end times for American sports, it's dialectical development from elegant clarity to a proliferation of contradictions. It's a train of thought Slavoj Žižek might pick up on--how James is absolutely peripheral to the culture yet somehow embodying its central contradictions. Maybe, if Žižek could focus on the topic long enough.

The talk of book reviews this summer is Slavoj Žižek's Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. The book is supposed to be Žižek's masterwork, his attempt to finally get out from under his image as the Borat of philosophy. Jonathan Rée's review of Less Than Nothing is representative--and much like my own reaction to The Parallax View (2009), his previous masterwork:

Sad bookworms such as me, with rows of ragged volumes of Hegel and Marx on our shelves, will find plenty of well-made points in these pages, but many readers may find themselves lapsing into baffled torpor. Even if you are attracted by Žižek's Hegelian fundamentalism, you are bound to wonder how it connects with his spectacular radicalism. After all it never led Hegel in that direction: he was notoriously timid about political change. And if we accept that there is no truth without error, we may well conclude that it is better to cling to the habits that were good enough for our ancestors than to stake the happiness of future generations on a gamble with incalculable stakes and uncertain prizes.

This is a far cry from the pleasures Žižek offered earlier in his career in Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (1992) and Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (1999) when he was more interested in a teaching a set of texts, particularly Hitchcock's films. A brief and vivid view of Žižek can be found in this profile in which he veers wildly from the mortifying to the insightful. If philosophy has an id, it would be Slavoj Žižek. 

The International Style in Latin American Fiction

Mention the Latin American novel and most likely someone will picture some form of regional exotica. While magic realism can be great in the proper hands (Gabriel García Márquez), it can also be trite and formulaic in the wrong ones (Isabel Allende).

But there's another type of Latin American novel that starts with Jorge Luis Borges and continues through Julio Cortázar and Roberto Bolaño. This strain of fiction derives from the European modernism of Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Günter Grass, and Alain Robbe-Grillet. Sometimes, as in Bolaño's work, the setting is Europe, usually involving Latin Americans in temporary exile there.

Juan Gabriel Vásquez perfectly captures one of the salient qualities of this type of Latin American novel in his discussion of Andrés Neuman's Traveler of the Century. Gabriel Vásquez writes,

In the end, and despite (or because of) its European obsessions,Traveller of the Century belongs in the quintessentially Latin American genre of the "total novel": the all-encompassing narrative bent on exploring every theme, every social milieu, every emotional possibility. I stress this because it would be both easy and wrong to look at Neuman's book in the context of "globalised fiction" – novels desperate for acceptance by everyone that end up talking about no one. No: Neuman's novel is solidly inscribed in the Argentinian tradition, advocated by Borges in a famous essay, of not being recognisably Argentinian.

Neuman's novel is an example of an international style in Latin American fiction. This style isn't about a uniquely Latin American reality, as in magic realism, but about Latin Americans in world space.