Why We Write About Ourselves - Ed. Meredith Maran (2016)

For NaNoWriMo 2015, I wrote a 60,000 word shitty first draft of a memoir, to be published when I was 33, to document these first 33 years, with the thought that I might do it again at 66, if I live that long.  This, apparently, would be a horrible memoir, because no one wants to read about every meaningful event of some random person's existence.  No, they want to read about more specific events in your life, things that happened which were extraordinary--pain you suffered--which you can relate on a universal level.

This is the lesson I learned from Why We Write About Ourselves, another rare book that was sent to me by a publicist.  It's ironic to mention two gifts that two of my sisters received on Christmas morning.  My younger sister received a copy of Tales of Two Cities and my youngest sister received a book by Cheryl Strayed, which I think was The Beautiful Things.  My sister hadn't read my review, but she specifically requested the book, and I guess neither had my mother.  It's the only time I was "ahead of the curve" with this blog, and I hope that's the case here again: certainly my youngest sister would be interested in this one, as a fan of Strayed.  And frankly, between this and Tales, this was the better read.

Unfortunately, it won't be named to the Best Books of Flying Houses list, to make for a perfect trifecta with Raymond Carver and Patti Smith, but that is only because the form this book takes.  It is a different sort of book than I have ever read, and it reads more like a very long magazine article.  It's a very good article, but it's written to be read in little candy-sized nuggets.  I think that makes it especially appealing in today's socio-cultural climate of social media saturation and ADHD.  Basically, it is not aiming for canonical status.  Instead, this book is perfect for one of two things: checking out from the library, or gift-giving.  One could certainly purchase this book for themselves if they have made up their mind to write a memoir, but it's more of a book to expose yourself to once and learn from, rather than to pore over and savor for the richness of its language.

Still, I am very happy I read this book, if only because of its ulterior motive: publicity.  There are 20 chapters in this book.  Here are the writers that I knew going in: Anne Lamott, Cheryl Strayed, Meghan Daum and Edmund White.  There were some writers I didn't know, but knew of vaguely: Pat Conroy, David Sheff and Sue Monk Kidd.  For the 13 other writers for which I had no direct reference point, I was forced to be exposed to their minds: what they wrote about, why they wrote about it, and how.  And I will definitely be putting a few of their books on my reading list.

As previously mentioned with these anthologies, they make for difficult reviews.  I don't want to give short shrift to any of the contributors, but I don't want the review to go on endlessly.  I suppose the best thing to do is hit the highlights--for me, personally.

The first section that struck me as quotable came from Anne Lamott.  Now I have mentioned Bird by Bird before on this blog, somewhere, and upon reflection I had to read it for a creative writing class my senior year in high school, and I think it did inspire me at an impressionable age to throw my whole self into the writing thing, which was a huge mistake (however, it was not nearly as big a mistake as throwing myself into the whole lawyer thing--while the law may ultimately provide me with an avenue for an outwardly respectable career, it has impoverished me, robbed me of the last vestige of youth and destroyed my self-esteem and self-respect).  At least a couple times in this book, Bird by Bird is referred to as something of a "bible" of creative writing.  I'll have to check it out again.  Lamott's section in this book is a definite highlight:

"I wrote a piece about my mom in Traveling Mercies, and it really hurt her feelings.  I thought it would be such a great thing to tell the truth about my mom, because my whole life had been about about this made-up relationship, pretending I wasn't mad about the damage she'd done to me.
I wrote this very tender piece about her in her last days, when she had Alzheimer's.  It wasn't even a critical piece.  It just said that she could drive me crazy.  Sadly she didn't have bad enough Alzheimer's.  She read it and went bonkers.  My mom's twin sister called me up and said, 'You will never be forgiven for this, Annie.'
The crisis passed.  Then it turned out it was great to have told the truth about deeply crazily I loved her and that she'd been a handful."  (136)

These sort of themes emerge over and over throughout this book.  What will my friends and family think of the memoir?  How much personal information can I reveal about other people?  Do I have to reveal everything about myself?

Most seem to agree that, you should always make yourself look as bad as possible.  As a person that has often followed this rule without hearing anyone else say it, this felt comforting.  Moreover it feels refreshing in 2016, where our public image has to be so squeaky clean on social media and anything the slightest bit non-PC can end up leading towards ostracization from the in-crowd.

Most seem to follow the rule that, if they write about one of their friends, they send it to them and make sure they are okay with it being published.  I've never really had to do this because I've never been published in any meaningful way.  However my younger brother became very upset when I made a reference to "wanting to kill my parents" in an unfortunate section of Think and Grow Poor, and upon reflection I should have deleted that (note: I later did after this throwaway line inspired by Tao Lin remained unforgettable after 15 years--though he only wrote he "wanted to go on a killing spree.").  You can't say I don't know anything about memoir writing.  I guess I just subscribed to the view that Edmund White expresses near the very end.  Actually, the last sentence:

"In general, I try to be very honest in my memoirs.  If I lose the friendship, so what?  I believe Milosz, the Nobel-winning Polish poet, who said, 'Whenever a writer is born into a family, that family is destroyed.'
On the other hand I sometimes say the best way to keep a secret is to publish it, since no one reads.  My books aren't indexed.  So anyone who wants to know what I wrote about him has to read the whole thing." (254)

Speaking of White, he is the only author to appear in both this volume and Tales of Two Cities.  He also makes this ridiculous, Wilt Chamberlain-esque claim:

"My protagonist in A Boy's Own Story was much less precocious intellectually and sexually than I was.  He was shyer.  If I'd written about myself as the freaky boy I really was, very few people could have identified with that novel.  That book came out in '82.  I don't think that was quite the period yet for my own true story.  In real life, I had had sex with five hundred men, most of them older than I was, by the time I was sixteen.  The boy in the book has one or two experiences, with boys his own age." (250)

My only response to that is, what the fuck dude!
But yeah, I'll probably check out some of his books.

***

There are a few glaring omissions from this volume.  It would have been remarkable to read a section by James Frey, but instead he is just referenced by another writer (again, White):

"There have been so many scandals about memoirs that weren't true.  The author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil confessed that he'd taken two phone conversations that were crucial to the story and collapsed them into one.  People were very disturbed when the author of A Million Little Pieces, which purported to be a memoir and was directed to a very vulnerable population of recovering addicts, admitted that his girlfriend hadn't really committed suicide.  There were some other events that he falsified, which led to his denunciation on Oprah.
That's a good example to keep in mind.  People do feel cheated when you lie in a memoir because you've broken your contract with your readers." (252)

I've never read A Million Little Pieces and I think most people nowadays would say it's not especially necessary to do so, but one cannot forget the cultural import that the book briefly possessed.  The other writer that should be here is Dave Eggers.  A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius has not been discredited and seems to defy most of the "rules" that these writers pronounce.  Eggers hasn't written anything like it since, but I still believe it's his strongest work and a true high watermark of the medium.  It's far from perfect, but I still think if I read it again 14 years later, it would make the Best Books list (The Real World interview chapter alone should qualify it).  Then again, this is an unfair criticism to make.  It's not clear if Maran reached out to these authors or if perhaps they could not write outside of their contracts with their current publishers.

I want to mention Meghan Daum.  I first became aware of her in 2008, when I was offered a limited free subscription to the Los Angeles Times.  I read her column every week and looked at her picture and thought she was cute and prayed that she would be my girlfriend.  She was cute and I liked what she wrote and she had a regular newspaper gig--did anything else really matter?  Subsequently I left L.A. and forgot about her.  Then, about a year ago, I came across her name in relation to her new book about making the conscious decision not to have children (Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decisions Not to Have Kids) and my crush was briefly renewed at an even more intense level, until I found out she was married.  Also, she was 13 years older than me.  Not that that's a deal-breaker or anything--she looked good for her age.  I mean, she wrote an essay and then a book about being deeply indebted in her 20's called My Misspent Youth.  She also made me feel better about my newest NaNoWriMo project:

"That thing I said earlier about weighing each detail to determine whether it's worthy of inclusion?  That's for the third, fourth, or fifth draft.  Not the first draft.
The 'morality' of any given project has to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.  If you're writing about yourself just for the sake of writing about yourself, and other people are going to get dragged along for the hellish ride, it might it might be wise to examine the worthiness of the venture.  If you have something important to say that can only--or at least most effectively--be said through the lens of your own story, then go for it." (86)

***

Randomly, in here, I'd like to excerpt a brief snippet from Darin Strauss's section, as Raymond Carver and Gordon Lish are still fresh in our memories on this blog:

"Amy Hempel tells a good story about when she was in a beginning workshop with Gordon Lish.  He had the class write about the one thing that most embarrassed them.  The only restriction was that you had to write it as honestly as possible.  She said that out of that class of fifteen people, seven or eight published pieces they wrote in that class.  If you write something honestly, it'll be worth reading.  If you don't, it doesn't matter how good a writer you are.  The reader will feel it." (200-201)

***

I could mention Ayelet Waldman's contribution as another highlight, or the weird celebrity spouse connections (she is married to Michael Chabon, while contributor Nick Flynn is married to Lili Taylor (ironically another unusual crush of mine)), but the last thing I want to mention is the one bit of advice on which I do not agree.  Waldman mentions it as a piece of advice given by Chabon, but like other tips in this book, it shows up in various forms:

"When I first started writing, Michael told me that if you're not uncomfortable, you're not writing what you need to write.  If your work feels really safe and pleasant, there's a problem." (222)
"If you're not uncomfortable and scared while you're writing, you're not writing close enough to the bone." (230)

David Sheff also adds, "If what you're writing about wasn't intense, you wouldn't be writing about it.  Writing a memoir can dredge up every awful feeling all over again.  Make sure you have the support you need to make it through." (192)

Now of course, a memoir about how your life has been so happy and perfect will make people want to throw up, but there are brighter sides to life as well, and we should know because we've seen them, if not very often.  You know I have always wanted to read Morrissey's Autobiography.  Maybe that's not a memoir, though.

Sorry for that.  Anyways, sometimes when I'm writing a piece of creative non-fiction, there are some wonderful moments back in there that you want to share with a reader, you want to put them there with you, you want them to feel the happiness you felt.  Is that so wrong?

That's really my only criticism of the "wisdom" of this book.  I think it's okay to write about the times when life was good.  It's not a useless nostalgia trip.  It's a document that you were alive, and that it wasn't all pain and misery, even though much of the time it felt that way.

In short: read this book if you have any designs whatsoever on writing a memoir.  It's a quick read (less than a week), it's entertaining, and it should help put you in the right frame of mind to accomplish your task.  Also it lists all of these writers' Twitter accounts so I'm going to start following them right about now.

How Literature Saved My Life - David Shields

Recently I went to the post office to pick up a package, and the woman behind the counter said, "We've been holding this one since January 1, is this for you?"  It was a big, flat manila mailing package--a book.  "Oh yes, that's mine."  It said 184 Clinton St and it said Flying Houses (I live at 148 Clinton, f.y.i.)

This was the first piece of mail I received for Flying Houses from a major book publisher (Random House/Knopf/Borzoi Books).  I was expecting it to be Taipei by Tao Lin (from Vintage).  I had requested that book.  I did not request How Literature Saved My Life.

Regardless, I took this to be a moment of divine inspiration: slowly but surely, Flying Houses was turning into a reputable media outlet.  I would not pass up the opportunity. Unfortunately I wish I had because I fear this review will satisfy no one.

David Shields (not James Shields, the pitcher for the Kansas City Royals formerly of the Tampa Bay Rays, who has also written a book) has written thirteen books, the most prominent of which appear to be Reality Hunger and Remote.  They also appear to be written in a "collage" style that eschews traditional forms of character and plot development in favor of a sort of stream-of-consciousness.  How Literature Saved My Life is also written in this style.  I have many problems with this book so I will enumerate them.

#1: Shields does not really discuss how he was about to lose his life

This is not The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression by Andrew Solomon.  It will not make you feel better if you are sleeping 20 hours a day and eating something and worry that you have no purpose to fulfill on earth.  He does describe some moments of ennui at a famous MFA program:

"I remember hearing my highly alliterative short story 'The Gorgeous Green of the Hedges' gently demolished in class and, upon returning to my apartment, eating bowl after bowl of mint chip ice cream until the room spun.  I remember admiring how some of my classmates (Elizabeth Evans, Mike Hutchison, Walter Howerton, Michael Cunningham, John Hill, Jan Short, Peter Nelson, Sarah Metcalf, Bob Schacochis) had figured out how to get their own personality onto the page.....I remember people saying that nothing ever happened to anyone in Iowa City and me wondering what in the world they were talking about.  I remember, above all, during the five years I lived in Iowa City, believing that what mattered more than anything else in your life was writing as well as you possibly could." (119-120)

He also later described being unemployed at age 30 and sleeping on his father's apartment couch in San Francisco and watching a uni-cyclist juggler on television, and how that had moved him to tears--and how, had he seen the feat in person, he would not likely be moved anywhere near as much.  This was a nice vignette.

The book is separated into more than a hundred of such vignettes, but the vast majority of them focus on Shields's engagement with a text or other such work of art.  In a sense this is prime material for Flying Houses because it gives us the very exciting opportunity of comparing his opinions to my own.

"Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past.  The book that I think of as mattering the most to me ever, but I read it more than thirty years ago and I find that I have trouble reading it now.  Seems sad--do I still love it, did I ever love it?  I know I did.  Has my aesthetic changed that much?  If so, why?  Does one resist that alteration?  I think not.  The book still completely changed me, still defines me in some strange way.  Proust for me is the C.K. Scott Moncrieff translation in paperback, all the covers stained with suntan oil, since I read all seven volumes in a single summer, supposedly traveling around the south of France but really pretty much just reading Proust.  I came to realize that he will do anything, go anywhere to extend his research, to elaborate his argument about art and life.  His commitment is never to the narrative; it's to the narrative as such as a vector on the grid of his argument.  That thrilled me and continues to thrill me--his understanding of his book as a series of interlaced architectural/thematic spaces."  (152-153)

I could not read Swann's Way four years ago, and it is one of the three posts of Flying Houses that is (incomplete), though I did remark that,

"When I first heard about him, I thought it lied very close to the same aims I hoped to produce in my own work--the inexplicable singularity of a life, with all of its attendant idiosyncrasies, which thereby educates an audience more as to the total "meaning of existence." Lofty ambitions indeed, and I will say, after 60 pages, that I am sure Proust succeeds on his own philosophical level, but that 21st century American readers will find it extremely difficult to 'dig.'"

This does lead to the next topic, which is adapting literature to new forms of technology, but I would pause to remark that the above quotation may shed light on why I did not like How Literature Saved My Life: we seem to have a similar philosophy when it comes to creating literature that is "useful," but we go about it in different ways.  I do not like the "collage" method, though I did employ it in the past.  That method is popular with writing group peers and the so-called "MFA Contingent" but I prefer to take cues from modern masters and not try to invent new forms when society itself is enough of a spectacle that it bears relating in plain language, without the jumping around from topic-to-topic, channel surfing, twitter news-feed scanning, etc.  While I recently joined twitter about a week ago, and plan to use it sparingly, for marketing purposes (or to record funny incidents in my Tax Law class) I hope to fight against this urge to make literature more "user-friendly" for the "Me Generation."

#2:  This is not Taipei

I requested a galley copy of Taipei, which is Tao Lin's 3rd novel, from the author himself.  He told me that he would forward my information onto Vintage Books and that "hopefully" they would send one in January.  When nothing arrived, I cursed Vintage and major publishing houses (Melville House had sent my Tao's 2nd novel Richard Yates) and then went to pick up the package in early February.  It looked like they had come through!  Then I opened the package, incredibly, to find that it was this book and not Taipei.  Perhaps this is some elaborate trick or "test" being played on me (since Flying Houses may be "famous" for excerpting large sections of text), but I am sad that I will not be able to keep up with Tao's oeuvre.  However, while I don't necessarily disagree with Shields' statement, "I don't want to read out of duty," (167) I do want to read out of duty if people want my opinion on something.

But Tao is a good entry-way into the next point about technology.  For those unaware, Tao Lin is the foremost writer of my generation (we graduated in the same class from NYU) and has built his following entirely on his own through the various forms of social media.  His evolution as a writer has been fascinating to observe, and perhaps with this book he may actually enter some "year end best lists," as Mr. Shields apparently has. And the strongest part of this book, for me, are its comments on the current literary world:

"The individual has now risen to the level of a minigovernment or minicorporation.  Via YouTube and Twitter, each of us is our own mininetwork.  The trajectory of nearly all technology follows this downward and widening path: by the time a regular person is able to create his own TV network, it doesn't matter anymore that I have or am on a network.  The power of the technology cancels itself out via its own ubiquity.  Nothing really changes: the individual's ability to project his message or throw his weight around remains miniscule.  In the case of the web, each of us has slightly more access to a mass audience--a few more people slide through the door--but Facebook is finally a crude personal multimedia conglomerate machine, personal nation-state machine, reality-show machine.  New gadgets alter social patterns, new media eclipse old ones, but the pyramid never goes away....New artists, it seems to me, have to learn the mechanics of computing/programming and--possessing a vision unhumbled by technology--use them to disassemble/recreate the web." (188-189)

The only other point worth mentioning about Tao is usage of the term "scare quotes":
"Updike: 'I loathe being interviewed; it's a half-form, like maggots.'  Gertrude Stein: 'Remarks are not literature.'  Um is not a word, but I like how people use it now to ironize/mock/deflate put scare quotes around what comes next.  The moment I try not to stutter, I stutter.  I never stutter when singing to myself in the shower." (133-134)

"Scare quotes" are not a component of literature that has been accepted by the public on a mass scale by any stretch.  Tao Lin is largely responsible for the excessive use of "scare quotes" (and the reason I must put it in quotes, regarding Shields's failure to do so as a "hipper than thou" mistake) in new books, but Shields point is well taken nonetheless.  I confess this is a minor quibble but "scare quotes" deserve at least a moment of clarification.

#3: Recommended Reading

In order to fully appreciate this book, I really think you have to have read all of the books that Shields references--and there are many:

(1) Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner
(2) Dead Languages by David Shields
(3) The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead by David Shields
(4) Spiderman (2002 film)
(5) Prometheus Bound - Aeschylus (?)
(6) Reality Hunger - David Shields
(7) Shortbus (2006 film)
(8) Laura (1944 film)*
(9) Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing (1973 film)
(10) Le Gout des Autres (2000 film)
(11) Anagrams by Lorrie Moore*
(12) "Weekend" by Amy Hempel*
(13) Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem
(14) The Last Studebaker by Robin Hemley
(15) Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer
(16) Built to Spill - Perfect From Now On (1997 album)
(17) In Bruges (2008 film)
(18) Calendar of Regrets by Lance Olsen
(19) The Guardians by Sarah Manguso
(20) The Name of the World by Denis Johnson
(21) Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer
(22) Zona by Geoff Dyer
(23) Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee
(24) This Is Not a Novel by David Markson
(25) "This is the Life" by Anne Dillard
(26) Butterfly Stories: A Novel by William Vollman
(27) History of a Suicide: My Sister's Unfinished Life by Jill Bialosky
(28) The Brothers by Frederick Barthelme
(29) The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
(30) Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity by David Shields
(31) "The Dead" by James Joyce
(32) Sherman's March (1986 film)
(33) Speedboat by Renata Adler*
(34) Shit My Dad Says by Justin Halpern
(35) Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself by David Lipsky
(36) Now and Then by Joseph Heller*
(37) The entire oeuvre of J.D. Salinger
* books I actually want to read after this.

Note that this does not include the "55 works I swear by" section, along with perhaps a handful of other texts that are mentioned more briefly.

You do not need to read all of these books to "get" How Literature Saved My Life, but the book tends to function as a collection of books that inspired it.  While the book is marketed as "blending confessional criticism and anthropological autobiography," there is decidedly a focus on the former.

There are three parts worth noting where Shields slams Toni Morrison for complaining that her book didn't win an award and where Shields admits that he is actually kind of like George W. Bush and where Shields talks about Bryan Singer sitting next to Bush in first class where Bush confesses that he has been on Ambien "for years."  These are probably the "sexiest" parts of the book, though other parts do indulge in vague-erotica.

#4: Been There, Done That

The big takeaway from this book (for me, at least) is the "collage" as the new form of literature--and I don't buy it.  My zine "Autointoxication," (2003) flirted with this medium, and while some viewed it rather charitably, I am mostly embarrassed by it in retrospect.

Bite-size chapters (like in, oh say, Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut) may be something else entirely, but blending a work of creative non-fiction by mixing in one's own patina with the aggregate of artistic cultural linguistics amounts to a book of aphorisms that may serve as a nice collection of potent quotables (things to write on a piece of paper that you tape to the wall in your "writing station") but does not compel me to run out to my friends and tell them to read.

Shields has written 13 books and has been quite successful, it appears.  However this book leaves the impression that he has given up on fiction as a method towards reaching psychological realism.  He is, as he notes, an extremely ambivalent person, and I am quite ambivalent about this book.  On the one hand, I am quite honored that someone decided to send it to me, and it has certainly opened up my mind a bit when it comes to literary experimentation (while I doubt that I will return to the "collage" form anytime soon) and there are a few nice passages, such as this one:

"Some people seemed to think I was the Antichrist because I didn't genuflect at the twin altars of the novel and intellectual property (there's an oxymoron if ever there was one).  I became, briefly, the poster boy for The Death of the Novel and The End of Copyright.  Fine by me.  Those have become something close to my positions.  The key thing for an intellectually rigorous writer to come to grips with is the marginalization of literature by more technologically sophisticated and thus more visceral forms.  You can work within these forms or write about them or through them or appropriate the strategies these forms use, but it's not a very good idea to go on writing in a vacuum.  The novel was invented to access interiority.  Now most people communicate through social media, and everyone I know under thirty has remarkably little notion of privacy.  The novel is an artifact, which is why antiquarians cling to it so fervently.  Art, like science, progresses.  Forms evolve.  Forms are there to serve the culture, and when they die, they die for a good reason--or so I have to believe, the novel having long since gone dark for me..." (129, emphasis mine)

Even in this comparatively pristine paragraph Shields make a comment with which I take issue: I am under thirty (for another 60 days, at least) and I think I have a notion of privacy.

There is also a nice part about him working at a law firm:

"My entire twenties, I lived on practically nothing, slept on my father's couch for ten months.  At thirty-one, I was a proofreader for Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro (PMS), a San Francisco law firm that represented the wrong side of every case.  The lawyers hated their jobs.  I loved mine, though, since I spent my entire time there finishing my second novel.  All the other subalterns were as bored as I was, and they were happy to print out copies of drafts for me, retype pages for me.  It was Team Shields.  We also discovered something new called a fax machine.  Very exciting.  I'd arrive before anyone else, and the lawyers would thank me for being such an eager beaver." (163)

That passes the LSAT Test!  A newly formulated test on Flying Houses that says any mention of legal culture on page 163 in any book passes the test (163 was my LSAT score).

But on the other hand, I just get annoyed when people write D.F. Wallace or DFW.  Sure, he is literature's answer to Kurt Cobain, but I think he's put up on a bit of a pedestal.  Sure, I've yet to review Infinite Jest here, but I will, I will...I just can't put him on the same level as FSF--and no one refers to that master as F.S. Fitzgerald.  In my opinion, David Foster Wallace is occasionally great, but more often tedious, and it can be quite difficult to derive pleasure from reading his work--he has about a 10% success rate and a 90% fail rate, though admirers of his will slap me for saying this, and I may disagree with myself whenever I get around to reading Infinite Jest (2013 or 2014--that's a promise!).

It's a petty thing but people that abbreviate him DFW are part of the larger problem of the "MFA contingent," who like to wax philosophical about Amy Hempel and Barry Hannah and maybe occasionally Nabokov but never Mann.  These are new 20th-21st century writers that have taken the short story form as far as it can go while still being recognizable as a prose piece.  I don't intend a blanket criticism of everything they've ever done--I just shudder at the thought that the new way to write is to get an MFA, get published, and just keep writing really good short stories--forget about a novel--takes too long--with the weird middle coming in "linked-short stories."

I guess I am like Kafka "who was unusually susceptible to textual stimuli, [and] read only a couple of pages of a book at a time" (182) and just don't have the time to go to the library, on a full stomach, and sit there for hours devouring literature in a huge chunk.  I want to check my e-mail and worry about some more "real" urgency ahead of me.

In summary, this book reads like a law review article.  It's not particularly enjoyable, there are tons of citations to authority (sadly without footnotes--but happily with a Cf. or two that I believe means "indirect support), and a reform is (sort of) proposed.  However, I am afraid that I have not gotten deeply enough into the mind of David Shields to fully appreciate his comic-linguistic asides.  Fans of his may love this, but as a newcomer and as a neutral critic, I can only regard this work as a "virginity loss" type experience--but laypersons generally don't receive galley copies.

Palo Alto - James Franco

I sat on his couch and he went over to his writing desk.  He opened a drawer and pulled out a few pieces of paper. 

                “This is the first story I want to publish,” he said to me, “Think it will be easy?”

                “Because you’re already famous?”

                “Read it.  Give me your honest opinion.”

                I read it, and I liked it.  It reminded me of a few stories I had read by Richard Lange.  The protagonist was suicidal, so that was one point in its favor.  There were hints of aberrant sexuality, so that was two points.  There was a fair amount of drug use in it, so three points.  I finished it, and looked over at him, who was hunched over his coffee table, breaking up weed to put into a bong. 

                “What’s your diagnosis?”

                “I think you’ll be able to publish it.  Everyone is going to think you’re a doofus, but if they read the story it will shut them up.  I think you have the potential to be one of the most singular artists of our generation.”

                “I’m not trying to monopolize all of the entertainment mediums; I just want to improve my writing skills.  I also want more people to read literary fiction.  I think my fans already are readers—but if I can get just a few more people reading—maybe my books could snowball into others—and I could help to end this massive ignorance threatening to destroy our world.”   

                “I just want to write because it’s fun,” I said.  “I don’t expect to change the world.”

                “Bono wants to change the world,” he said.

                “Are you like Bono?”

                “I’m not bigger than Bono, but I do aspire to raise my cultural cache to his level.”

                “And that involves ending hunger, war, poverty, environmental destruction?”

                “If you have the ability to make good things like that happen, why wouldn’t you?”

                “He doesn’t have the ability,” I said, “And neither will you, and neither will I.  Obama doesn’t even have it.  Nobody can save the world now.  Apple owns the world.  Digital cable companies own the world.  Maybe Verizon owns part of the world.  The only way the world could be saved would be the disappearance of these products.”

                “I think you’re going a little overboard,” he said as he handed me the bong.  I hit it.  He did the same and then he asked me:

                “What was your favorite part of the story?”

                Random question.

                “When the guy says, ‘don’t you ever get jealous of those girls in pornos in the middle of all those dicks?’  So hilarious.” 

                He laughed, and after a beat promulgated, “That was kind of when I realized how much more freedom there is in literature.  I mean, this could be adapted into a short film, it could, but most movies don’t have dialogue like that.  I don’t like how movies make everything seem cooler and easier—I want to represent reality in its fullness.”

                “You know, I have the exact same goal.”

                “Can we stop talking about work for a second?  It’s making me nervous.” 

-"Storyteller," Part II, Chapter 5 

This is an excerpt from my third novel, which I could not complete before starting law school.  I am looking forward to returning to it in about 9 months but I am afraid it will no longer be so topical.  I felt it was useful to include this in my review of Palo Alto because it pretty much sums up the way I felt about it--that is, the way I thought I would feel about it back in April of 2010, and it was published in October 2010.

The story referenced above is "Jack-O,'" which is the final story in the collection.  This was published in Esquire in March of 2010 and it was titled "Just Before the Black" back then.  It may serve as a barometer of the general quality of all of the stories in Palo Alto: it is "pretty good."  

I stop short of calling it "excellent" for several reasons.  My primary complaint with the collection is that the narrator in (almost) every single story is affirmatively dumb.  Or, if not dumb, at least stupid or irrational in some really obvious way.  Now this is to be expected, as Franco's subject matter is, generally, adolescence. Perhaps the narrator in "Lockheed," a girl who does not like math but who is very good at math because her father tells her to be, is the most intelligent.  She works at Lockheed Martin for a summer internship and her job sounds exactly like the type of thing that high school interns would do:

"My job was to watch old film reels of the moon.  There were hundreds.  I worked in a cold, windowless basement.  The reels would run from one spool to another on this old machine that looked like a tank.  I was supposed to record blemishes and splices in the film.  Sometimes the moon was full; sometimes it would get a little more full as I watched.  Sometimes the film was scratched so badly it skipped, or it broke.  I was in the basement forty hours a week.  I watched so many moons."  (15)

She starts to get bored and starts drawing while she does her moon studies at Lockheed.  She works for a man named Jan, and he notices that she has been making some drawings, but does not seem to care.  Later, he offers her an anecdote that is probably one of the better pieces of "advice" in the book:

"'I did these when I was at school,' he said.  'I wanted to be artist.  But it was no good.  It is no good to be artist.  I practiced every day, eight hours a day.  Then I could draw like Michelangelo.  Then what?  There is already Michelangelo.  I realized there was nothing more to do.  In science, there is always more to learn.  Always more.'

I didn't look at him; I looked at his pictures.  I felt very lonely.  I pictured him and his wife, alone at a long table, eating some bland Swedish food, not talking.  The only sounds were from the utensils hitting the plates, and the squish of their gentle chewing.

'So, he said, 'You see.'  He reached over and shut the portfolio to punctuate the 'You see,' but I didn't know what to see.  Then I looked at him.  He stood there and looked at me.  We were so awkward."  (16-17)

Later she witnesses some kind of fight at a party at a kid's house in Menlo Park.  The fight is the "climax" of the story, and is fairly well-done.  "Lockheed" is thus one of the better stories in the collection.

But if forced to pick the absolute best, I would have to say that "April" a 3-part story that is 33 pages long, is the best in the collection.  "I Could Kill Someone," while suffering from perhaps the worst title in the book, comes next in terms of quality (I know it can be hard to give good titles to things and so I am forgiving when it comes to that aspect of creative writing).  Finally, "Chinatown," another 3-part story, though only 16 pages long, fills out the top three in the collection (a mon avis, bien sur).

If you add up the content of those stories (and include "Lockheed") then it is about 85 pages and the book is 195 pages long.  So that is another reason I say the book is "pretty good" (if 170 pages were of this quality it would be "excellent").  But it is very important to point out that I read this entire book in one day.  And it is also striking that I took it out from the Brooklyn Public Library (the day I got my card) along with The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis, another book I similarly read quickly on an airplane trip (that one from NYC to Paris; this one from NYC to Denver).  

There is a very strong connection between these two books, and it is almost as if Franco's characters are the same as in The Rules of Attraction--just a few years younger, a little bit dumber, and generally from poorer families (Palo Alto does not equal Beverly Hills, or the other rich suburban L.A. upbringings of Easton's characters).  

In fact, one of the "praise" quotes on the back spells this out further--Ben Marcus wrote, "Think Bret Easton Ellis, Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker.  Or better yet, just think James Franco."

I will admit that I once purchased Ash Wednesday by Ethan Hawke (at the Printer's Row Book Fair in Chicago at a discount) and would like to use a line that my younger brother suggested, but I cannot.  Without having read that book, though I would say Ethan Hawke is, myyyyyyyyyyyyyyy second favorite fiction writer-cum-actor.

A couple quotes before ending this review seem fitting, or else people may still continue to write off this "second career" as an exercise in pure dilettantism.  It is important to note at this time, when the debate on "school violence" is peaking, that Franco seems to hit at the very core of the problem in more than one story.  While I have previously suggested that the Internet is to blame for every ill that has felled our society over the past dozen or so years, Franco's story takes place in the pre-Internet era.  And while I certainly appreciate the references to Street Fighter II, The Legend of Zelda, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, "gangster rap," Menace 2 Society and Boys in the Hood, and other influential artifacts of the 80s-90s, Franco shows that my explanation is far too simple-minded to be taken seriously:

"This is Brent's joke: 'What's the difference between a faggot and shit?' I didn't know the answer.  'Nothing, you fucking faggot.'  He told that joke one time, and then kicked my foot to trip me into dog shit on the quad lawn.  I didn't fall, but everyone thought it was funny.  

Brent says I'm a faggot because I quit the football team freshman year.  I asked him about it and that's when we had our first little scene.  

'You think I'm a fag because I quit the team?' I said.

He stopped.  He had his usual black San Diego Chargers hat on backward.  His long face looked suprised, and the one stoned-looking eye opened a little bit more.

'You are a fucking fag,' he said.  He looked like he was getting a little emotional about it.  I could see it in his retarded eyes.

'Why do you think that?' I said, and my voice trembled.

'I don't think it, you are!'  Then he walked off.  It's weird, but I think it's because he was going to cry.  After that he always called me a faggot."

"After the locker room I decided that Brent needed to die.  He was never going to get smarter, and he was a bigot.  And I couldn't stop thinking about his acne-corroded flesh being opened, and his thin racist blood matting the hair of his beastly body.

I was standing over near the underpass next to the school where people smoked.  Some people called it the Bat Cave.  

'You really want one?' said Barry.  Barry was my friend.  He was chubby and lovable, and Mormon, and smoked pot and loved John Bonham.

'Yes,' I said.  'I want one.'

I wanted a gun.

Barry couldn't get me one, but he knew a guy who could." (170-171)

The story does not have a happy ending or a sad one, and fails to provide any easy answers.  But it is clear that the stupidity of teenagers--going both ways in terms of typical bigotry and the other in terms of intellectual snobbery--is a serious problem that is not easily solved, though the increased awareness of the devastating effects of bullying and the passage of criminal laws on the matter have been steps in the right direction.  

There is still, however, the problem of simply "giving up" and taking others down with you:

"'What do you think about that suicide?' I said.

'I think the parents made him do it,' said Teddy.

'He was Asian,' said Ivan.  He was on the other side of Teddy and I couldn't see him.

'What does that mean?' I said.

'That they worked his ass like crazy and pressured the shit out of him.'

'Do you think it hurt?' I said.

'For a second,' said Teddy.  'But if it's all going to be over anyway, then why does it matter?  Pain only matters if it's prolonged.'  Ivan was sucking long on the joint, then he said, 'If I was going to kill myself, I wouldn't waste it.  I would do a bunch of crazy shit first.  Maybe kill some people I didn't like and take 'em with me.' 

We all thought about that.  Then I said, 'Wouldn't it be better to do a bunch of crazy good things before you died instead of killing people?'

'Like what?' said Teddy.

'I don't know.  Give your life to save a bunch of kids or something.'

'But that's what you're supposed to do every day, not if you're suicidal,' he said.  'If you're suicidal you're probably only thinking of yourself.'

I drank the syrupy alcohol.  

'I try to be good,' I said.

'Me too,' said Teddy.

'Fuck good people,' said Ivan, and we laughed.  

We finished the joint and I gave them both cigarettes.  The stars were dots between the branches.  On the other side of Teddy, Ivan started carving in the tree with a knife.  He carved SUICIDE RULZ.  Teddy was next and wrote FUCK GUNN.  They told me I had to write something.  

'I feel bad, the tree is so old.'

'Fuck you, said Ivan. 'Do it.'

I drew a heart.  It was hard to make it round because of the bark, so it was jagged on one side." (137-138)

In summary, I have to say that this book is "pretty good"--but maybe even a little better than that.  Though it was not "excellent" and I am not going to run around telling everybody that Franco is the greatest living American artist in his prime, I do have to say that he is certainly one of the most interesting.  And I am very happy that our works seems to coalesce.  The quotation above from my incomplete third novel, and the tangent that the novel goes on, were not made without considered judgment.  Palo Alto is a collection of "linked" short stories that could be a novel if it wanted to be--not unlike my first novel.  It has taught me that my first novel is not a total failure, but could be much more "digestible" if converted into something of a similar product.  My second novel basically deals with the same themes as Palo Alto and attempts to portray the same "period" of psychological development.  Moreover this book is a paean to the community in which he was raised, as is S/M.  And the third novel posits the life I might have led if I had gotten into the MFA program at Columbia and entered in the Fall of 2007, when it was certainly possible that Franco could have been my classmate (or friend).  

I hope that he continues to write because it is important for people to realize that subjective human experiences are not always best told through the objective lens of a camera.  It is also clear that Franco has a  very good sense of humor about himself, which is important in an undertaking such as this:

"'Picasso started off painting in a classical style, but it was only after he had mastered the masters that he broke tradition and became Picasso.  He knew he had all the skill of Raphael at age sixteen, but that wasn't enough.  Technical skill is never enough.  He needed to find his voice.  We all have a voice or a style, but it takes practice, practice to find it.  The technical stuff needs to become second nature.'  Everyone agreed with this part too.  Wilson said quietly to me, 'You remind me of Sylvester Stallone.'  I stopped drawing.  Wilson went on: 'I used to go to art classes with him.  He was always trying to break away from classical form.' 

One of the ladies spoke up.  'Sylvester Stallone, the actor?'

'That's right.  He's a huge art enthusiast and not a bad artist either.'  Everyone was surprised and talked about it for a bit.  Someone said that underneath all that muscle he was actually a really intelligent guy.  'He did write Rocky, after all.'" (122-123)

Stallone did receive his BFA from the University of Miami in 1999, but this excerpt may be apocryphal.  Regardless, Franco's enthusiasm for literature is not likely to be questioned by anyone.  Though I would not be surprised if I am in the minority in my praise of this work.  I judge it according to the standards of my former classmates in creative writing classes.  If one of them had submitted such materials, I would have put them in the class of the top three or four (among the 70 or 80 total) that deserved to have their work published.  Unfortunately, not all of us have the advantage of taking classes taught by Amy Hempel, Michael Cunningham, Gary Shteyngart, Jonathan Lethem, or Dave Eggers.  Or Joyce Carol Oates for that matter....