That’s Entertainment!
categories: Cocktail Hour
21 comments
Laurence Sterne, postmodern writer.
The Huffington Post has picked up a list of the 15 most overrated writers by a writer in no danger of being overrated, at least not quite yet, one Anis Shivani of Houston and Harvard, or so he identifies himself. You know it’s going to be no fun, but there’s the item and it’s about books and so second or third time through Huffington at cocktail hour I clicked on it, hoping for I don’t know what, entertainment, I guess, since that’s what reading is, right? Even reading the news? I might even have hoped for a smart conversation (which is also entertainment, come to think of it), but.
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Mr. Shivani rails in an introduction about conglomerate publishing and the stranglehold of, um, MFA programs, also the gutlessness of critics, also the clubby world of literary prizes, also academics, especially post-structuralists and deconstructionists, also multi-culturalism and political correctness, so you know he’s a guy who’s seen some rejection and other torment on whatever path it is that has taken him from Harvard to Houston.
We know we are on the wrong path when he calls Denis Johnson cloying. That is not the right word for Mr. Johnson, who is blunt and quite hard-edged. The group Mr. Shivani clumps with Mr. Johnson are what I would call pretty much 80s writers, still going strong most of them, minimalists all, heirs to Raymond Carver, and all of them strong voices, good entertainment, if none my favorites, and none very much the names of today. But for Mr. Shivani, they are devils because they’re “easy enough to copy.” In the MFA programs, he means.
I don’t know. At Ohio State when I taught in the MFA program there we were very proud of the diversity of writing approaches our students brought along with them, and even prouder of the diversity of approaches they left with. We weren’t guaranteeing (and few programs would dare) successful writing careers, just offering a chance to learn and grow as writers and readers. We certainly weren’t tied in to any publishing/prize nexus. (Though maybe Dan Brown’s next novel could be THE SHIVANI CODE—wherein the secrets of the writey-prizey-criticky monks are revealed.) And neither was Columbia, where I took my MFA, though I’ve heard different often. I mean, our fellow students would become successful writers (because they were good writers), and editors (because they were good editors, and good readers), and certainly critics (because they were smart and all of the above), and we’d stay in touch, and make this or that social and professional connection (my agent and I were classmates, for example, and some of us helped smuggle Obama over from Kenya when he was born), but that hardly amounts to a conspiracy. And I don’t remember having students copy anything, though it could be a good assignment.
At one point, Mr. Shivani makes a splendid point—mainstream reviewing is crumbling by the minute. It would have been an even better point ten years ago. The point right now is that publishing is crumbling. Serious writers (by that I mean this: writers who are serious)(except comic writers, who are serious too, but funny)(I don’t mean literary exactly)(well, yes I do, goddamnit)(okay, let’s just make it writers in general, no value judgment), I mean most writers, are struggling to be heard. Even the most published, the best-prized.
So what’s needed is some mediocrity to come along and bash them! Let’s not go after the really bad writers who line the best-seller lists (many exceptions, I know, with luck myself one day). The trouble with B.R. Myers (who wrote an annoying article called “A Reader’s Manifesto” in the July/August 2001 issue of the then increasingly and now completely annoying Atlantic Monthly)(B.R. is now an English Professor in Korea), is that he’s too easy to imitate. The writers are different now, but the justifications are just as lame, the picks just as bizarre, with the same smell of vendetta (are any of Mr. Shivani’s picks Harvard Profs, for example?).
Also the definition of good writing. As soon as you see the phrase “lack of a moral core,” you know you’re with someone who stopped really reading back in high school with John Gardner’s “The Art of Fiction” (a great book by a great medievalist and novelist, but still, “On Moral Fiction,” that was pretty backwards even then).
Who cares who wins the Pulitzer Prize? Mr. Shivani does. Apparently it’s a bad idea to do so. It insures future invisibility, unless it doesn’t. Because it’s both a great goal and a cultural curse. I mean, says Mr. S. (in so many words) who ever heard of John Hersey? Yeah, who ever heard of him? The guy who wrote “Hiroshima,” one of the first books to bring novelist storytelling to a work of journalism in the bravest and most crucial human and fucking moral context imaginable? Also “Blues,” a book I dearly loved, since I liked bluefishing at the time. Also “A Bell for Adano,” a great favorite of my high-school English teacher, Mrs. Fudgepickle. And 17 other books, many still in print.
Probably Mr. Shivani is right. Most of his readers won’t have heard of Hersey. Nor will they have heard of any of the writers he pans. Unless they have MFAs, which insures at least that some reading’s gone on…. Or if they’re interested in creative nonfiction, in which controversial field the dude’s a god. (Please, Mr. S, don’t take on the subject of creative nonfiction–there’s enough mud in that water….)
The other blazing argument against the Pulitzer is that good books in given years didn’t win. But someone has to win. It’s $3000 big bucks! The stuff cabals are built on! And, you know, a couple thousand contenders and then ten or so finalists have to not win. Damn cloying, I know. I should have won seven times over, at least. “But awards are not substitutes for critical judgment.” That’s right. Mr. Shivani is right. He’s right, in fact, about a lot of stuff. But of course this particular observation is a straw man. Who said awards were a substitute for anything? And then again, not a straw man, just stupid, because awards are indeed the results of critical judgment. Just not my critical judgment. Unless I’m the judge. Which I am, sometimes. Which is why I know that if Mr. Shivani never wins a Pulitzer it will only be because of knocking the thing. Insanity! Jesus, doesn’t he know where his gears are greased?
I’m not on board for the kneejerk, jerk-jerk, politically correct, I-got-a-C-in Eighteenth-Century-lit-from-a-lesbian “deconstruction is bad” twaddle, either. All deconstruction really says is that there’s no single truth, no central way to evaluate anything, that point-of-view matters. So, for example, no one biography can really capture its subject (love how historians insist on the excellence and primacy of their research over the romantic ramblings of others and then base whole books on love letters). The plain truth of that hurts when you believe in right and wrong, good and bad. When you’re a modernist, that is, and can’t stand anything published after 1951. But wait, no, that’s the academics who believe that, at least in Mr. Shivani’s estimation. Sorry. My brain is frying a little—many mixed messages coming from our man.
These post-modern games! Stuff that started with that new-wavey Milton guy. Or maybe Homer, I don’t know. Certainly Laurence Sterne and his under-overrated “Tristram Shandy.” Damn them! Too easy to copy! (Hey moralists–whatever happened to the Bible, literature that can only be interpreted one way!)(that’s why there’s only one church in the whole world!)(And only one religion!)(Easy to copy, too).
Anyway. Critical judgment, let’s face it, comes down to taste. More or less educated taste, it’s true, but it’s taste every way you lick it. And more important, reading of any kind except maybe, like, military manuals and camera instructions (but including literary criticism) is ENTERTAINMENT, which, simply defined, is a diversion from the reality of death, suffering, and so forth.
So have your list, Mr. Shivani. But please, take Antonya Nelson and Billy Collins and Michael Cunningham off! They are great writers all. I know it, because I say so! I love them! I love their books! Also, they’re friends and acquaintances of mine, and I don’t like to see them hurt. Not that there’s any major injury likely. Kind of like in Central Park once when a brat with his radio car crashed it into my ankle, slightly scuffing one of my warm new winter boots. I refrained from crushing the car underfoot or kicking in into the boat pond or just simply bending over and breaking the antenna off because, well, even though he was full of spite and malice and will probably cause great problems in the world, he was just a kid.
I love another man’s vitriol. What could be more entertaining, even occasionally enlightening? We should learn to sip acid, too, with pleasure.
I read the HuffPo piece and found it hugely entertaining: annoying as hell when he listed writers I love (Antonya Nelson) and hilarious when listing writers I hate. We all have our own “overrated” list, one that would enrage one reader and validate another. Anybody who doesn’t get Jane Austen, for example, strikes me as a dope; on the other hand, the canonization of Philip Roth mystifies me. One year, I hear the Pulitzer winner and think: ABOUT TIME. Another year: WTF??? So, there you go. I loved Shivani’s piece; LOVED it, both as a piece of provocation and a brilliant PR move. Would love to see a running column, with a different set of overs and unders each week. I mean, honestly, wouldn’t it make you feel better about the future of reading?
I’d love to see a book-review section in which, say, seven reviewers wrote about every book and then argued… I mean, now that war is over and the bankers and oilmen have given back their excess profits, there’s money for this kind of thing, and plenty of education to go around, the future of reading and thinking assured!
Bill, that’s the best idea I’ve ever heard. I stopped reviewing for the San Francisco Chronicle a few years ago because I couldn’t stand criticizing other novelists. However, if I knew that my review was going to be part of a group argument/debate on the book’s merits and flaws, I would love it. I guess that’s what blogs like this are for.
Which famous review was it that claimed, “You’ll like this book if you like this sort of book.” Isn’t that kinda what it all boils down to? Is there, honestly, ANY hope for agreement these days on greatness? I’ve read GATSBY three times in my life, (last year gave it another shot) and I just. don’t. get. it. The most overrated book in the history of consciousness. There. I said it. Now somebody’s going to come after me. With dogs.
I got rejected from all six MFA programs I applied to, so it’s hard for me to give an opinion on them without bias. So I won’t bother.
As for the ethnicity thing, I’m with Anis (am I a bigot for laughing at that?), though I think the problem is not the rambling about ethnicity, though that does happen in Bellovian fashion at times; the real problem is that so much of the appeal of those writers (Tan, Lahiri, Diaz) is their ethnicity. They are ethnic and therefore cute. I ask people what they like about Lahiri, whose books are a sick practical joke on the world of short fiction [but she is totally hot, btw], and I’ve never heard anything other than “she gives us a fresh voice, a new perspective.” In the sense that Shakespeare does? In the sense that Cervantes does? Are you taken up out of yourself? No. The prose is the worst I’ve ever read published and the stories are trivial. Diaz at least writes about serious problems, though I do get tired of the voice after awhile (I’m referring to Drown, here)–just sprinkling little Spanish words where there are plenty of sufficient English words, intentionally bad (and therefore obfuscating) grammar, narrow (and therefore imprecise) vocabulary. Diaz at least understands drama and emotional import; Lahiri has never heard of such a thing. She just likes the sound of her own insipid voice.
You’re right: Denis Johnson is not cloying at all. In fact, the problem is the opposite one–his stories seem utterly pointless. Salvatore Scibona read one in a recent New Yorker podcast and I fell asleep within five minutes (literally). You try to assemble the incidents into some organic whole, some rational order, and you can’t. And Scibona went on to praise Johnson for ending the story without resolving it, so that it’s “like an earworm.” Fuck that. I’m left with the feeling that I just wasted my time.
Most of these writers I haven’t got to (I haven’t even got to Madame Bovary yet–gimme a break!) He’s right about Ashbery, though. People say his poems don’t mean anything. And they say it like it’s a good thing. I went to a reading of his once and couldn’t believe what I heard.
I can’t make up my mind about Foer. I’ll get back to you after his third novel comes out. I’ve read Gluck but haven’t understood how one poem is better than another in anything written after 1830.
There’s a lot of crap out there. There’s always been crappy writing going on. There’s just more of it now. But just as big schools usually have big football teams, look at all the amazing writing going on now! Philip Roth is alive; Don Delillo is alive; Pynchon, McCarthy (!!!), Bill Roorbach! No one should be surprised that there is more garbage being published than ever; it is a sign that we are blessed with material wealth and technological excellence.
But this is just the tip of the iceberg of the conversation. Deconstructionism and its incestuous lover Multiculturalism (like Satan and Sin in Paradise Lost) is the suicide (coup de grace, perhaps) of literature, philosophy, and, thereby, civilization.
Now that I’ve offended everyone, how ’bout this weather, huh?
I’m sorry Steven, but you do sound bigoted, also sexist… Ethnicity isn’t cute, it’s a source of pride and struggle and too often shame, even violence, some of the stuff literature is made of. The question is whether a given piece of work is pleasing or not, and on that I’m happy to entertain discussion. I like Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories very much. They’re quiet, as you say, but the clash and uneasy alliances of cultures depicted and examined in them is powerful, and also completely relevant to our world. Her sentences are sweet and musical, her voice is strong, in my view. Ashberry, Johnson, all these people have earned the respect of smart readers, though they can be difficult. It’s up to us to read them carefully enough to at least understand why they are loved. Then complain from there. Things have moved along quite a ways from Shakespeare, who was unabashedly Anglo-Saxon, very cute, and of course Hispanic Cervantes. Talk about hot!
As Henry James said in the Art of Fiction, we judge a writer on their execution, not on their subject matter. Granting that, it is therefore as much of a fallacy to say you like Jhumpa Lahiri because “the Indian-American voice has been missing blahblah” as it is to say you DON’T like Jhumpa Lahiri because she’s Bengali. Which is more bigoted? It’s a close one.
As for pride in one’s ethnicity, it makes no more sense to me than pride in one’s eye color (although you can change that nowadays). No great literature tells us something regional; it tells us universal truth (as indeed, all truth is universal by definition). Goodbye Columbus is not great because it tells us about Jews but because it tells us about humanity. The Interpreter of Maladies is not universal; it is hopelessly regional and smells to me of self-importance. It is bad sociology, worse literature. Her sentences are tinny, and every story is too long for its substance. “Her soliloquies mawkish, her sentiments maudlin, malaise dripped like a fever from her pores.” (p. 161, Interpreter of Maladies) My jaw dropped at that one.
As for accepting on faith a writer’s greatness due to his critical acclaim, this too is fallacious, an argument from authority. Thankfully, literature does not work on authority.
The part you left out, Steven, is how Junot Diaz writes stories that rip your guts out (haven’t you read Drown?) and how he wrote a novel that is the rival of almost anything anybody’s written in this new century. Nor have you noticed how Jhumpa Lahiri has been steadily broadening her formal experiment from the lyrical stories in Maladies to the play with overlapping received stories in The Namesake to the hypercompressed novel-in-fifty-pages stories in Unaccustomed Earth, or how the whole project is in conversation with William Trevor, Alice Munro, and Mavis Gallant. If the complaint is that they’re writing about the people they know best, then that wipes out most of the canon. But the work itself — the sentences, the structural and otherwise formal work, the pure storytelling chops — holds up against almost anybody, if we’re making it a contest, which I’m not sure why we should.
Also (sorry, but this kind of shit pisses me off), as soon as you or anybody you know writes a book as gut-rendingly beautiful as Jesus’ Son, feel free to belittle Denis Johnson.
The Internet seems lately full of people who are resentful that other people have found some readers — a hard thing to come by these days — and instead of responding by getting to work and reading their brains out and writing a hundred twenty-three drafts until they finally make something worth the reader’s time, they cheap out by posting these “look-at-me” posts that really amount to not much more than sour grapes.
The good stuff rises. It may not make you rich or famous, but some readers will notice, and they’ll tell some other readers. Just do the work it takes to make something good, and instead of piling on people because their work has been rightly validated by those who give the goodies, read them and learn something from them.
I have read Drown. Haven’t got to Wao yet. Drown is great in small doses. In large ones it devolves into self-pitying misery-porn. It starts to feel less like a story than a list of heart-breaking stuff.
There’s nothing taut, lyrical, or compressed about Unaccustomed Earth–those stories should have been ten pages for all that actually “happens.” Plus their problems are comically wimpy next to those of Diaz’ stories.
I’m not, as you say, “belittling” Denis Johnson. All i can say about him is that his stories seem plotless, pointless, and (like Diaz’s), just a laundry-list of shocking things. Johnson even said that Jesus’ Son was a collection of “memories” rather than stories.
Nor am I saying that the regional can’t be literature–Faulkner is the prototype of this. Rather than doing a “Southern people do this; Northern people do that” routine, he created an ambience of place (something Diaz has certainly done) and wrote morally difficult stories (something Diaz and Lahiri haven’t done, to my knowledge).
As for being obligated to adore someone for rewriting something a thousand times, we are not. Whatever went into the writing process is completely irrelevant to the quality of the finished product. Voltaire wrote Candide in three days. It’s still a masterpiece. Kafka wrote “The Judgment” in one sitting. It has no bearing whatsoever on the story.
And I’m sure Lahiri can handle the criticism. She has said in an interview that her stories were rejected for years before they started getting in the New Yorker. Writers have to be sensitive enough to actually do the writing, but tough enough to not go crazy from the writing biz. It sucks.
And the good stuff will rise; it will just take a long time. That’s exactly the point Anis made about the Pulitzer–at the time, such-and-such seemed cutting-edge, but now we’ve forgotten most of the prize winners in favor of the real geniuses.
I’m probably not going to read the Namesake. I’ll read Oscar Wao, though.
Love to hear what you think of Wao… I’m reading “Home” by Marilynne Robinson right now… Not sure it’s as good as Gilead yet, but I’m enjoying the subdued pace and thoughtful sentences…
Fair enough–you don’t like Jhumpa Lahiri’s work. Who do you like among contemporary writers and why? (This is a question for everyone…)
Heaney, Stoppard, Mamet, Chabon, Franzen, Rushdie, Roth, McCarthy, Delillo, Pynchon are all immortals and in any other time period would be recognized as such.
I’d also like to stump for Matthew Zapruder, Julian Barnes, Piers Paul Read, Chinua Achebe, and Martin McDonagh.
Great names all–and very widely recognized as such, and very, very successful, both critically and commercially. I’m not sure why you think they’re not being recognized. Heaney won a Nobel, Roth a Pulitzer, Achebe a Man/Booker, and so on down through your list. Which has no women on it. What gives?
What I mean is something we’ve talked about quite a bit–the culture’s ignorance of contemporary literature. If 1% of the country bought a book, that would be 3.7 million books, a huge sales number. I’m not saying that the literary world hasn’t recognized these folks for what they are (timeless); I’m saying that, as I think you’ve said on here before, the days when Hemingway was like a movie star are long gone. So, my point is that if these cats had been around in those days, well, they’d be like movie stars too.
As for why there are no women on my list, I don’t know. I’m a big fan of New Criticism–I don’t care who wrote the book, and, as Foer has said and I agree, we might be better off having books without author names on them.
Part of it may be temperament–I could read Philip Roth all day but I can’t stand five minutes of Jane Austen. There are lots of brilliant people who love Austen but it’s Greek to me. Reading her work, for me anyway, is like hearing a corny joke. I get it, but I’m not moved at all.
I’m not categorically opposed to female writers. In fact, I’d be very interested in hearing a refreshingly intelligent, that is, non-cliched female voice. Marketing is a problem here–they call Eat Pray Love feminist but it’s just a harlequin romance told in memoir. So it’s hard to know what to make of gender–on the one hand I’d like it not to matter, but on the other, I see your point: a list of fifteen writers and not one woman is a bit strange considering half the globe is female.
Perhaps I need some recommendations!
The existence of overrated authors is one of those evergreen topics that magazines turn to periodically (haw) when out of other ideas. “Ten Most..” lists in general are top on my personal list of Ten Most Overused Gimmicks. I’ve read this (the HuffPo) article before, with mostly different targets, and all I can say is that this particular instance wasn’t nearly as funny as others have been. Yawn. Liked your (Bill’s) take, tho.
My wife seems to love you more than me.
I liked reading the guy’s essay and list because it entertained me and I like thinking about writing. So does the fact that it entertained me make it good writing? I think not. It’s just a list that any of us could write. It’s nothing special.
Still, I agreed with him about a couple of things. For one, while I think it’s fine to write a first and maybe a second novel rambling about your ethnicity, I think at some point you should move on and learn to tell a story, even if you’re having great success by *not* moving on. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use your ethnicity as material – I think that’s fine. But you ought to learn to put your material into story form. Long live the story!
And, I dropped out of two writing programs and am not a big proponent of them, so I guess I’m kind of with him on that. But that’s just me.
Just you, Cynthia, is a good thing to be. And long live the story, I agree. That’s a really good point about entertainment value really having no bearing on whether a piece of writing is good or bad–that there are indeed some basic literary qualities we can all agree on, and then some not so basic…. Plenty to think about here…. I’m not sure I get the ethnicity argument as it applies to our man’s list, since at least from my reading, all the fiction writers he names pay strong attention to story: Jhumpa Lahiri? She’s terrific, these taut family dramas. Amy Tan? That’s all story (though I’ve only read “The Kitchen God’s Wife.”). Junot Diaz? His novel about Oscar Wao and the Dominican FUKU goes way beyond ethnicity. It’s a study of time, among other things, definitely including ethnicity and nationality, sure. Michael Cunningham? Antonya Nelson? Compelling storytelling in both cases, ethnicity both background and crucial, if not self-conscious. William Vollman is the only Martian on the list, and I think he handles his difference well. The fact that I’ve never been a fan of his doesn’t mean he’s not a good writer, though he sucks. The poets on Mr. Shivani’s list are all interesting, too, but that’s a different discussion. The critics? Everyone hates Helen Vendler and Michiko Kakutani for the precise reason that they’ve been effective critics, whom we can only agree with when we agree with them… also Vendler gets assigned in college, yuck (though she helped me appreciate Robert Lowell)… MFA programs are intensely individual experiences… I admire you for quitting when it wasn’t good for you… which was twice!
Camera instructions are often very entertaining. Informative, too.
I would overrate Bill Roorbach but I don’t think that’s possible.