the new novel

So those of you who read my Facebook news-feed know that I've accepted an offer to teach two writing courses at Boston University this fall, loosely themed around the topic of "The New Novel."

This is a topic I can have some fun with, obviously, and I quickly decided that a good course on the New Novel should endeavor to include the following things:

• A more-or-less classically-structured novel, but which deals with topics that are distinctly "21st-century" in orientation. [Something like William Gibson's Pattern Recognition or Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis or Falling Man are the types of books that fit comfortably in this slot.]
  

• Something that deals with similiar topics, but is more experimental or progressive in terms of its form. [Patrik Ourednik's Europeana might work well here, and I'm tempted to include something like Ben Marcus' Notable American Women or Leslie Scalapino's "trilogy" The Return of Painting, The Pearl, and Orion, but these are probably both slightly too ambitious for college freshmen.]
  

• A hybrid text, something that is "novelistic" in orientation but clearly reacting to the pressures of "visual culture" / multimedia. [Steve Tomasula's VAS: An Opera In Flatland would be a blast to teach, but something like Lynda Barry's "illustrated novel" Cruddy or Zach Plague's brand-new boring boring boring boring boring boring boring could work equally well.]
  

• Something "outside" the realm of the literary novel, preferably a graphic novel. [In a pinch I could use a piece of genre fiction, most likely SF or horror.]

I also am [typically] concerned with balance of representation, so I'd like to see at least one novel by a non-Caucasian writer and at least one novel by a non-North American writer, and I'd like the list to be fifty/fifty in terms of gender distribution.

The problem, sadly, is that I'm trying to limit myself to only four books (ultimately the course is a writing course and not a Lit survey), and trying to fit the four "types" that I want with the gender and ethnicity constraints that I set up is proving something of a diabolical logic puzzle. I'm pretty close to "locking in" on Gibson and Tomasula, white men both (sigh), which means that ideally I'll find a graphic novel and an experimental 21st-century novel, both written by women, at least one of whom is non-Caucasian.

Persepolis is holding a lot of appeal in the graphic-novel category, but its autobiographical status as a memoir might eliminate it from the running, and as far as I can tell, most crticially-acclaimed graphic novels by women tend to be memoirish. (See also: Alison Bechdel's Fun Home.) Has anyone out there read Jessica Abel's La Perdida?

If I swap out the graphic novel for a genre novel, Octavia Butler is a potentially fruitful person to work with, although her only 21st-century novel is Fledgling, not generally considered her strongest work.

In terms of the experimental novel, I think Miranda Mellis' The Revisionist might hold some appeal, and its SF trappings might tie it well to the Gibson and Tomasula, but I haven't read it (a copy is winging its way to me as we speak).

You readers are good at this kind of thing. Recommendations?

100 book challenge: part one: fiction

Here are the first 25 picks, all from the Fiction shelves.

• The Mezzanine, by Nicholson Baker
  [One of my favorite authors, and this is my favorite novel by him.]
  

• Labyrinths, by Jorge Luis Borges
  [This book has enough provocative, imaginative ideas in it to last one a lifetime simply by itself.]
  

• The Age of Wire and String, by Ben Marcus
  [Still one of the most common books for me to read a random passage out of to someone.]
  

• Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino
  [Like Labyrinths, this is a book that opens up onto a nearly infinite "possibility space."]
  

• If On A Winter's Night A Traveler, by Italo Calvino [The other really essential Calvino novel.]
  

• Story of the Eye, by Georges Bataille
  [A 1928 pornographic novel so mindbending it borders on the Surrealist.]
  

• Crash, by J.G. Ballard
  [If we're bringing along experimental pornography, we should definitely include this.]
  

• Naked Lunch, by William Burroughs
  [And this.]
  

• I'm going to cheat here, and count Burroughs' "Cut-Up Trilogy" (Nova Express, Soft Machine, and The Ticket That Exploded) as one volume
  

• Another cheat: William Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive).
  

• I actually don't need to cheat on this one, because I have the single volume that collects The Complete Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe, by Douglas Adams, but it's really the first only the first volume that matters deeply to me. I can, however, see myself enjoying re-reading the others at some point.
  

• The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien.
  [I've still never made it all the way through all three of these, but it's good to bring an unfinished book along with some of the faves, and good to have a book you could feasibly read out loud for a year.]
  

• The Annotated Alice, by Lewis Carroll [annotations by Martin Gardner]
  [Another good out-loud book, plus it's essential to have at least one book on hand that could entertain children. Having Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass together in one volume make this an absolutely indispensible choice.]
  

• Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace
  [I'm not entirely sure that I'll ever re-read this, but there are some great bits in it that often pop up in my mind, and I'd like to be able to refer to those bits at some point.]
  

• The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon [I'll include Gravity's Rainbow later, if there's room]
  

• Underworld, by Don DeLillo
  [Maybe my favorite "realistic" novel of the last 100 years.]
  

• White Noise, by Don DeLillo
  [Fights with Underworld for the title.]
  

• Time's Arrow, by Martin Amis
  [My favorite Amis novel, and the most successful and beautiful extended meditation on the flow of time that I've ever read.]
  

• Blindness, by Jose Saramogo
  [Like Time's Arrow, this is a book that's effectively a fantasy, but nevertheless profoundly captures both the horror and the beauty of real-life humanity.]
  

• Europeana, by Patrik Ourednik
  [An experimental novel that's also a concise history of the 20th century.]
  

• Lolita, by Vladmir Nabokov
  [Or maybe Pale Fire? Whew, tough choice.]
  

• Valis, by Philip K. Dick
  [Far and away the best of his novels.]
  

• My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist by Mark Leyner
  [An indescribable mish-mash of cyberpunk, experimental poetry, and humor writing.]
  

• Schrodinger's Cat, by Robert Anton Wilson
  [More coherent and more intellectually provocative than the cluttered Illuminatus Trilogy.]
  

• Magic For Beginners, by Kelly Link
  [A weird but often delightful collection of fantastical short stories.]

Next up: poetry.

some recent capsule reviews

I've updated this year's reading log with some new reviews, posted below for your reading convenience:

Easy Travel to Other Planets, by Ted Mooney
There's a lot to like about the way this novel chronicles the interpersonal drama among a group of intellectuals and artists. The conversations are stylish, fragmentary, and mediated; the prose is compressed, with a cinematic sense of editing; a quasifuturistic theme (interspecies communication) provides ample opportunity for strange riffs; an atmosphere of geopolitical tension permeates obscurely at all times, threatening, at any moment, to condense into apocalypse—at its best, it recalls the energy and thrust of early DeLillo. At its worst, it reads like high-end erotica posing as lit: Mooney's attention to the sexuality of his [female] protagonist lurches towards the prurient at times (in the first thirty pages of the novel, she participates in three sex scenes, including one with a dolphin).

Drawing From Life: The Journal as Art by Jennifer New
Book dedicated to showcasing intricate art journals, mostly hand-drawn. The journals themselves are so self-evidently fascinating that it's hard to say why presenting them in this fashion doesn't quite work. The choice to reduce intricate journal-pages down to postcard size, rendering them mostly unreadable, certainly doesn't help; I think there's also a problem with the sheer number of journals represented here, which helps to give a sense of scope and variety but eliminates the ability to really immerse yourself in any particular journal. The framing essays profiling each journal-maker are worth a read, but ultimately they're not nearly as interesting as the journals themselves: it's just one more degree of remove between the reader and the subjectivity that's alive in the journal-pages. There's so much "frame" here that the art itself is choked out.

Only Words, by Catharine MacKinnon
MacKinnon is an anti-pornography feminist, which can cause people on both ends of the political spectrum to reject her ideas without taking the time to engage with them first. This is a shame, because MacKinnon's argument here is one of the most interesting anti-pornography arguments I've read, avoiding the easy use of anecdotal pathos, in favor of a legal argument, suggesting that pornography's status as "protected expression" is a classification error, and that it belongs more properly in the category of speech acts that are treated legally as actions rather than ideas (hate speech; sexual harrassment). Elegant and deft.

The Amber Spyglass, by Philip Pullman
Final volume in the His Dark Materials trilogy, a children's fantasy trilogy built around the (Gnostic) notion of a War Against God. The fact that such a thing ever achieved a moderate success on the shelves of American booksellers strikes me as so profoundly improbable that Pullman earns points just for pulling it off; that goes double when you also consider that this book also features two heroically pair-bonded male angels and features a young girl's sexual awakening as a major plot point. But to focus on the anti-Narnian qualities on display here is to overlook the sheer strength of Pullman's prose and storytelling craft. In this volume, these strengths are most evident in Pullman's sequences of genuine terror (the passage into the Land of the Dead) and heart-rending tragedy (the parting of lovers). Heavy stuff, but Pullman is right to not flinch from confronting children with emotionally weighty material: it dignifies them as fully human.

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
Post-apocalyptic minimalism from master prosesmith Cormac McCarthy. This book could fruitfully be partnered with Jose Saramago's Blindness: both stare unflinchingly into extremes of human ugliness in an attempt to unsentimentally illuminate the fragility and sheer miracle nature of human love. In Blindness the love is between a man and a woman; here it is between a father and son, a framework that allows the book also to also rewardingly explore some of the thornier questions of parental ethics—when is it appropriate to lie to a child, for instance? What forms of protection are valid and appropriate? The book disappointingly pulls a few punches in its final pages, but prior to that it was one of the most rewarding novels I've read this year. Recommended.

Half-Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, by Jesper Juul
If I were to pick a book that this one most reminded me of, it would be Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics: you could practically entitle this Understanding Video Games and be none the worse for wear. Like McCloud, Juul comes to his chosen branch of the media tree with a fresh eye, determined to coherently examine its component elements in order to build a new conception of the way they work their effects. For Juul, the key elements are narrative and rule-based play, and the unique experience of video games grows out of cooperation (as well as tensions and slippages) between these forces. Fascinating reading, clear and lucid, an essential work for anyone interested in the academic study of video games or cross-platform narrative. Highly recommended.

(Those of you who are interested in that last one might want to take note that all my "scavengings" from the book (85 in total) can be found here.)

some recent capsule reviews

Here are some reviews of stuff I read back in April. I didn't get a chance to review them then, because back then I was posting reviews of stuff I read in March. Oh well.

The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography: Volume 1 by Bob Perelman, Barrett Watten, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Tom Mandel, Ron Silliman, Kit Robinson, Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, and Ted Pearson
Ten Language poets take turns writing reflections on their origins. This volume (the first in a proposed ten) covers 1975-1980 and is loosely organized around a theme of "love." The unusual collective authorship scheme here is overtly designed to evoke multiplicity and ultimately create a "community of memory," although a less kind read might be to point out that it also serves to build the Language Poetry "brand," perhaps as part of a bid for long-term canonization. After all, the very point of writing autobiography (on one level) is to self-aggrandize, and although the Language thinkers, with their grounding in theory and radical politics, are more likely than most to critique this implulse, they don't manage here to transcend this aspect of the genre. All the same, the group assembled here is basically an all-star list of important poets writing today, and it's fascinating reading for anyone interested in putting their poetic work in context.

The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz
Strange, episodic story cycle of life in a gloomy Eastern European city (Drogobych), which is overstuffed with decaying marvels, cryptic artifacts, and just plain trash. (Same goes for the protagonist's home, which seems both cramped and weirdly infinite.) The book is populated by colorful / quirky / mad characters, most centrally the protagonist's father, who obsesses first over raising exotic birds and then later, over developing a quasi-Gnostic theory about tailor's dummies as a form of imprisoned matter. Uniquely European high weirdness, likely to be enjoyed by fans of Calvino's Invisible Cities or Kafka's parables.

Among the Names by Maxine Chernoff
For this book, Chernoff gathered various texts pertaining to the concept of "giving" or "gifts," ranging from Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay "Gifts," to Marcel Mauss' The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, to DivorceSource.com's "The Question of the Ring." Thus gathered, she culls interesting phrases from them and jettisons the rest, effectively taking the discourse and exploding it into a book-sized cloud. This doesn't reduce it to nonsense, however—the theme of the gift persists—but by shattering the originals she decontextualizes the fragments, transforming them into curious artifacts, rewarding of close examination. The result of arranging these artifacts is not to make an argument about giving, exactly, but to do something more valuable: to try to illustrate (albeit obliquely) the entire sphere of human thinking that surrounds the concept. Fascinating, occasionally moving. Recommended.

the inevitable harry potter posts: III

Finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Harrows a while ago, but only now found the time to write it up. Essentially spoiler-free, but in the comments area, anything goes:

Here, in the series' final book, is where Rowling strives most evidently for long-term grandiosity, from the Pullman-esque epigraphs, to the honest-to-God old-school Fantasy Quest, to the (disappointing) abandonment of "school" as the primary framing device. She also takes this as an opportunity to effectively trash the franchise, attempting with unrestrained relish to definitively retire most of the major characters (in one fashion or another). Some of the sacrifices thusly endured would feel (more?) capricious if it weren't for Rowling's selection of Life Under Enemy Occupation as the replacement frame. As anyone glancingly familiar with the history of WW-II-era Europe can tell you, enemy occupation makes for harrowing circumstances, and it is these circumstances that the book, at its best, convincingly evokes: no place is safe, everyone is constantly at risk, ignoble death can strike seemingly at random. This is a dark place for the series to go, but it sets the stage for satisfying closure.

Over and over again during my read of the series, I thought about the act of world-building, and how it is distinct from or related to the more traditional acts of narrative construction. Expect a discussion on this point soon, using the Potter books (and possibly the Pirates of the Carribean series) as the prime exhibits.

the inevitable harry potter posts: II

Three more Harry Potter reviews. I'm in the middle of reading the last one, which is appropriately harrowing; expect a non-spoilery review here soon.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
The transitional book in the series. Rowling still feels indebted to the "boy wizard-detective solves mystery" structure of the earlier three books, but she's also clearly grown more interested in character development and the long-term narrative elements of the story world. This creates an interesting tension: between the desire, on the one hand, to write another self-contained book (like the first three) and the desire, on the other, to write a book that functions as an installment in an ongoing serial. The tension isn't fruitfully resolved: this book is the slowest to get rolling (it takes nearly 200 pages just to get to Hogwarts) and Rowling's heart doesn't seem to be entirely in the mystery: it's the one of the first four which has the least satisfying Big Reveal, which requires an entire chapter's worth of flavorless talk to fully clarify.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
The first book in the series where Rowling assumes that the readers have read the previous books. Freed of the necessity to ponderously re-establish the backstory-- the flaw that weighed down Goblet of Fire --Rowling is freed up to hit the ground running: the turbulence begins to hit with the first chapter. As with the earlier books in the series, the book is centered around a mystery here, although unlike the earlier books, it doesn't truly belong the the genre of The Mystery as such--there is no real way to puzzle out the solution, for instance. But the series doesn't really need to rely on mystery structure any longer anyway: by this point the long-form plot has amassed enough potential energy that it can soar simply by exploiting the conflicts already set up in its first four installments. Which isn't to say that there aren't new ones as well, notably in the form of Dolores Umbridge, whose petty abuses of power, disdain for the autonomy of young people, and Kafkaesque punishment schemes make her all-too-familiar: possibly my favorite villain in the series. Recommended.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Feels a bit like a book-length positioning of pieces for the big finale of Book Seven. Not that there's anything wrong with that: Rowling, at this point, has developed a very rich world, populated by literally dozens of characters who we care about, each with their own interesting plot arc. (This may form the basis of an entire later post.) Watching this network click forward in the standard increment (one year) is fascinating unto itself; the Voldemort backstory that forms the real backbone of this book is an added bonus.

the inevitable harry potter posts: I

So I've been putting off reading the Harry Potter books for what feels like forever, despite the fact that this means that I'm at a real social disadvantage when hanging with my fanfic-writing pals. With the approach of the seventh final book, however, I realized that I'd have only a short amount of time to ever try to read them without knowing The Ending, so I decided to make ripping through the six existing novels my big July Reading Project.

As all of civilization knows, the final book went on sale last night at midnight, so it looks like I missed my deadline: I've finished the first four books and am about halfway through the fifth. Hopefully I'll get fully caught up before stumbling upon any spoilers, although I'm wondering if this is even possible without having to go on Full Media Blackout.

Anyway. What follows are reviews of the first three, free of all but the most mild spoilers:

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
A good read. Chugs along surprisingly swiftly, drawn by the well-plotted and essentially rewarding mystery story that forms the book's core. The main characters (Harry, Hermione, Ron) are charming, albeit a bit sketchily-drawn in this early volume (and some of the bit characters, primarily the Durselys, are cast with a heavier hand than is perhaps necessary, even for childrens' literature). The book's real stroke of genius, however, is the utilization of the familiar triumphs and trials of Going To School as a way to ground us in the quirky tweeness of Rowling's universe. Perhaps a minor quibble after this praise is the matter of the prose, some of which is occasionally clunky or slack (I don't know what enchanted letters shooting out of a fireplace flue are like, but to say they "like bullets" is no help). I'd probably let this pass if I hadn't just read Phillip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass, a piece of children's fantasy literature that uses prose so finely-wrought and precise that nearly anyone looks clunky and slack by comparison.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
The second book in the series brings back some of the same pleasures of the first-- the likeable characters, the fast-paced narrative, the "boy detective" elements (clues, red herrings, a finely-crafted Big Reveal) --and also introduces a subtle new one, specifically, a sense of repetition and variation that emerges from Rowling's decision to plot the books around a school year. Many of the milestones from the first book (summer trouble at the Dursley's, a Diagon Alley outfitting trip, the Sorting Ceremony, the Quidditch season, Christmas break, etc) recur here, which adds to our comfort and familiarity, but changing perspective and changed circumstances keep the book from feeling repetitive. The interplay between these poles is essentially the interplay that lends pleasure to any sort of tradition, and it does similar work here, making this book a read that satisfies more deeply than the first-- even if the Dursley's still feel heavy-handed, and even if the climax still has a touch of the deus ex machina about it (tell me again why a sword comes out of the Sorting Hat?).

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
The best of the first three. At this point in the series, Rowling's confidence appears to surge dramatically, resulting in the book being more inventive than its predecessors, most notably through Rowling's decision to introduce creatures that are brand-new to the series universe (Dementors, boggins) instead of simply choosing to revamp of already-existing fantasy creatures (as she does with the pixies, goblins, dragons, centaurs, etc. of the earlier books). In addition, the mystery is more complex and satisfying (although the Big Reveal accordingly requires deployment of huge chunks of dialogue in the center of what's ostensibly a moment characterized by murderous desire). Finally, the book has a thrilling post-Reveal final act -- something absent from the earlier two books -- and a satisfying profusion of loose ends, which begin to give some sense to the shape of the larger seven-book arc. Recommended.

More to come in a while.

the corrections, by jonathan franzen

So I've finally gotten around to reading Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, a novel which is now five years old. I ended up avoiding the book at the time of its publication, as a result of the now-infamous "Oprah controversy," which made it difficult for me (depite basing my understanding of the controversy completely on second-hand retellings) to think of the book as anything other than a node in a complicated argument about literary elitism, corporate populism, and garden-variety sexism. Eventually I grew less interested in this argument and more interested in the more basic question of whether the book is any good.

Short answer: it is. The world of The Corrections is more keenly and deeply envisioned than any that of any other novel I have read in recent memory. Franzen's great triumph here is to have produced a set of believable characters and built their personalities, histories, and current contexts in extremely fine-grained detail. Furthermore, Franzen routes this information to the reader through channels that feel consistently fresh, proving that there are still artful ways to present exposition in an essentially traditional narrative.

And make no mistake: this novel is, at its core, a traditional dysfunctional-family drama, a book with aspirations that are essentially modest, despite the tendency among some critics to talk about The Corrections as a "big" social-novel-type book.

In fairness, Franzen himself speaks perfectly clearly about the book's true scope: in this Bookpage profile, Franzen says that an earlier draft of the novel "was much more about the stock market, insider trading and prisons. I finally found that the big social picture stuff wasn't working so well, whereas the little crises these characters were involved in interested me a lot." I think Franzen's right to trust his instincts here: in my own reading of the finished novel, I found that the stuff that works best was the attention to the nuances of interpersonal crisis, whereas what works least well, at least for my money, was the stuff that seemed most obviously intended as Important, Relevant Commentary. (I'm thinking specifically of the psychophamaceutical drug Aslan, which enters the book almost exactly at the halfway point and functions, in my opinion, as a glaringly "devicey" plot device in a book that otherwise sticks to more realistic terrain.)

Franzen makes related points in this interview: "[T]he problem with the social novel is that we don't need it anymore. Before TV, people would actually read a book to learn about a subject, and TV does it so much better. The serial dramas like ER and the news do it so well. So, if you have something important to say why would you write a novel? If you are trying to advocate two sides [books] aren't a good way of doing it. But, TV is really good at it."

These claims, which show Franzen moving from personal feelings about his own novel to broader claims about the Novel in general, work a little less happily, in fact, there's almost no sentence here that doesn't make my mind ache. Is the point of the social novel really to "advocate two sides?" Is TV news really that good at helping people "learn about a subject?" Are the people who have "something important to say" really all working as ER scriptwriters? (It's fuzzy thinking like this that helps to justify something like Ben Marcus' hatchet job on Franzen-the-critic that ran last fall in Harper's.) For all its flaws, though, I feel the quote does adequately sketch out the scope of Frazen's ambition.

Which still leaves me feeling puzzled by pieces like this one at N+1 (actually a profile on David Foster Wallace's recent work). In it, critic Chad Harbach makes the claim that The Corrections serves as a worthy follow-up to Wallace's Infinite Jest, a claim which strikes me as frankly bizarre: although the two novels share a degree of thematic overlap, they have radically different ambitions (not to mention broad differences in their respective formal concerns).

So: is The Corrections worth reading? Yes: but you'll need to dig through some misleading hype to discover the excellent (but modest) novel which lies beneath.