Philip Roth - 1933 - 2018

2 giants in 2 weeks, in their mid-to-late 80's. I don't write obituaries for everyone, but I try to write them when I think I can speak properly to their import. In the case of Tom Wolfe, I wasn't familiar enough with his oeuvre to say anything of substance. The New York Times Book Review podcast briefly addressed his passing and while I had intended to do Bonfire of the Vanities and maybe The Right Stuff (one day), their comments seemed to indicate that Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is his seminal work. So maybe that will have to come first. 

Wolfe will be remembered for "New Journalism." What will Roth be remembered for? Not winning the Nobel Prize. He was a Nobel Prize-level writer. I think he will be remembered for demarcating the line between toxic masculinity and horniness. Among other things.

Recently, there was a very scandalous book published that apparently details an affair with a fictional stand-in for Roth. The author admitted that she did, in fact, have an affair with Roth, and not all that long ago. Roth was also recently in the New York Times for an e-mail exchange checking up on him, after all the #metoo revelations, to get his take on the finer points of male desire. He had been retired from his occupation as a novelist over the past several years. 

I read Everyman over 10 years ago now, and that seemed to be his comment on retirement. Indignation still came after (as did The Humbling and Nemesis). American Pastoral was the best. I still haven't read everything. 

Here I've only written about American Pastoral and The Professor of Desire. Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy's Complaint should be re-read. Both are essential. People have said The Plot Against America is prescient and/or prophetic. I want to read that and Sabbath's Theater.

It's hard to do better than Roth. That is the only thing of substance I can say here, and I'm not even sure that qualifies as substance. 

We wrote about Salinger eight years ago. Salinger was silent for years. He practically hadn't published anything since Roth had first published. They were 14 years apart in age. I consider them equals. They're two of the best 20th century American writers to have lived. Surely there are many great writers that nobody knew about. They both relayed truths rarely spoken, yet often felt. 

Roth's prolific career is a work of art on its own, and this writer is not so deeply familiar with it that an authoritative tone may be struck. Suffice to say, this entire site is filled with instances of exhortations to read so-and-so and while I do truly try to be careful not to overwhelm the casual reader, everybody knows that Roth was a true modern master (in the same way that I know Bellow was, though I haven't read him). He's in the Pantheon. Our world is rapidly evolving and one expects a similar change in the way we consume literature, as well as our expectations of how we expect to be transported by it. So maybe there will be a new literature, and Roth is a relic from a bygone era. History has shown that writers will be remembered if their words can stand up to eternity. Roth is not Plato and he will likely not be referenced by Westworld-types of entertainment 2,000 years from now. Roth may not even be Hemingway. I see many parallels with Vonnegut in terms of output and cultural relevance. Vonnegut was not seriously rumored to win the Nobel. Both were zany, though Vonnegut was zanier. People will inevitably compare him to Wolfe if only for their sense of timing. They were true writers. They made their living off writing their books. Roth was popular, but never commercial. One hopes that writers such as him may still exist and prosper. 

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: an Introduction - J.D. Salinger (1959)

It's hard for me to write about J.D. Salinger without coming off a certain way, so I'd like to open this review by mentioning my friend Libby.  Libby and I met our freshman year at NYU.  One day, she started talking to me about Salinger, I forget why.  Like a lot of people, my primary exposure to Salinger was Catcher in the Rye.   I don't think I had read any of his three other books.  But Libby laid down the line and went through a brief synopsis of each, in particular mentioning how she had written a paper about religion in "Teddy," which was the last in Nine Stories, and extremely beautiful.  She explained that the majority of his work, outside of Catcher, concerned the Glass Family: Seymour, Buddy, Boo Boo, Walter, Waker, Zooey, Franny, Bessie and Les.  Seven children of vaudeville performers, several of them gaining notoriety on a children's quiz show radio program, and others entering careers in show business, the military, the clergy, prose and poetry (sort of).  At least one out of Nine Stories is specifically about Seymour--"A Perfect Day for Bananafish," which is a masterpiece.  Franny and Zooey rightly earns its place on the Best Books List (and Catcher in the Rye, I predict, will make it when it is reviewed--I read Catcher like 6 times over the course of 6 years, but I haven't read it in the last 9).  I had been meaning to read these for the first time in any case, but after Libby's mini-lecture, I made it a priority and read them my freshman year.  I remember having a particular soft spot for Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: an Introduction and thinking they were as good as any of his other published writings.  I loved him so much at this point, that I tracked down the old issue of The New Yorker that had published his story "Hapworth 16, 1924," and photocopied it and put it in a nice binder and gave it to my mother for her birthday, as she was a massive Salinger fan. I thought this was one of the better gifts I had ever gotten her, but then I actually read it.  Do not read it.  Read it only if you want a reading list.

So I looked forward to revisiting these two novellas, similar in length to Franny and Zooey.  And I found that I felt exactly the same way about Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters.  It is a masterpiece on the level of his other three books (to be clear, I do not think I would consider Nine Stories to be in Best Books league, though parts of it certainly are--at least "Bananafish" would make a Best Short Stories list, which isn't a bad idea for a project).  It is hilarious, socially observant, brilliantly detailed, breezily delivered, intriguing, and inviting.  Seymour: an Introduction, however, had aged badly in my mind.  This may come into play in the upcoming series planned for Flying Houses, the Kurt Vonnegut Project, for which I am reading Slaughterhouse Five presently, and for which I have this to say: these books may be influential to young would-be writers because they see the authors having fun with the medium.  You get a sense of the possibilities of literature.  At the time, when I was 19, going through the most artistically fecund period in my life, I thought the conceit of a story like Seymour was tremendously encouraging and successfully experimental.  I don't feel the same about it now.  Basically, I would put Carpenters in Best Books territory, and Seymour in Egregiously Frustrating territory.  I guess I can't actually do that because they're together here.  Anybody that reads Carpenters will go onto Seymour and maybe some people will slog their way through it out of a sense of loyalty to the author and the characters, but they might be better off putting it away after about 30 pages.  I will get more deeply into the details of the plots of each in a moment, but I wanted to put this down for now, to give an overview of my general feelings on Salinger's oeuvre and distinguish my opinions on this, his final published volume.
***
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters is 89 pages long.  It is about Seymour's wedding day.  Buddy is the main character.  The time is May 1942.  Buddy is in Georgia and wrangles a three-day-leave from a stay in the military hospital to take a train to New York to attend the wedding.  He has no time to go to his apartment so he leaves his luggage in a locker at Penn Station.  He gets in a cab and goes to an old house where the wedding is to occur.  After an hour and twenty minutes, the bride, Muriel, leaves.  The guests are told to "use the cars" and Buddy ends up getting into one with Muriel's aunt (Helen Silsburn), the Matron of Honor, the Matron's husband (Lieutenant), and a little old elderly mute man (Muriel's great uncle).  The Matron of Honor is furious with Seymour.  Nobody knows that Buddy is Seymour's brother.  The tension in the early part of the scene is fantastic.

[I have to break in here and make a note.  I'm finding this review hard to complete because of the great deal of time that has passed.  I read Carpenters in early June.  Then I read This Fight is Our Fight, Days of Abandonment, Meet Me in the Bathroom, and Giant of the Senate.  Then I read Seymour: an Introduction.  So while Seymour is relatively fresh in my mind, Carpenters is not.  I can only attribute the gap to library deadlines and procrastination.]

Really, the cab ride reads like a play.
***
Again, another long break has occurred.  You know what I'm going to say.  Carpenters is great, Seymour is not, so I will attempt to illustrate that with 2 (only 2) excerpts, one from each.  It is a tall task to pick out a representative sample but I think for Carpenters the choice is clear.

"The Matron of Honor seemed to reflect for a moment.  'Well, nothing very much, really,' she said.  'I mean nothing small or really derogatory or anything like that.  All she said, really, was that this Seymour, in her opinion, was a latent homosexual and that he was basically afraid of marriage.  I mean she didn't say it nasty or anything.  She just said it--you know--intelligently.  I mean she was psychoanalyzed for years and years.'  The Matron of Honor looked at Mrs. Silsburn.  'That's no secret or anything.  I mean Mrs. Fedder'll tell you that herself, so I'm not giving away any secret or anything.'"
.........
"'About the only other thing she said was that this Seymour was a really schizoid personality and that, if you really looked at things the right way, it was really better for Muriel that things turned out the way they did.  Which makes sense to me, but I'm not so sure it does to Muriel.  He's got her so buffaloed that she doesn't know whether she's coming or going.  That's what makes me so--'"
She was interrupted at that point.  By me.  As I remember, my voice was unsteady, as it invariably is when I'm vastly upset.
'What brought Mrs. Fedder to the conclusion that Seymour is a latent homosexual and a schizoid personality?'
All eyes--all searchlights, it seemed--the Matron of Honor's, Mrs. Silsburn's, even the Lieutenant's, were abruptly trained on me.  'What?' the Matron of Honor said to me, sharply, faintly hostilely.  And again I had a passing, abrasive notion that she knew I was Seymour's brother." (36...38)

This is the climax of the first "act" of the story, and probably the whole story.  I believe it is representative of the qualities that make for an excellent piece of writing.  I have not seen many other writers italicize portions of words to denote accents on certain words.

I also believed Salinger was something of a pioneer in his use of a footnote or two in Seymour, but recall that Nabokov published Pale Fire in 1962.  Seymour is an intriguing premise.  It is an artistic biography of Seymour by Buddy.  The opening sentence (after two excerpts by Kafka and Kierkegaard) gives a fair indication of how bumpy things are about to get:

"At times, frankly, I find it pretty slim pickings, but at the age of forty I look on my old fair-weather friend the general reader as my last deeply contemporary confidant, and I was rather strenuously requested, long before I was out of my teens, by at once the most exciting and the least fundamentally bumptious public craftsman I've ever personally known, to try to keep a steady and sober regard for the amenities of such a relationship, be it ever so peculiar or terrible; in my case, he saw it coming on from the first." (96)

This is a difficult piece of writing.  It can be very charming at times.  The trope of Buddy writing in a stream-of-conscious style--commenting upon his drinking or the late hour or a recent illness--is one of its more amusing qualities.  One will not deepen their understanding of Seymour by reading it.  It is more about Seymour's effect on Buddy than Seymour himself.  He is every bit as inscrutable a character as he appears in any other place. 

Seymour is mostly notable as Salinger's comment on celebrity.  If one reads the story in this context, it becomes much more interesting.  Buddy is pretty much a stand-in for Salinger.  He lives alone in the woods isolated from society.  He wrote a bunch of the stories that Salinger published.  There are a few moments that definitely break down the fourth wall. 

Salinger has such a small oeuvre, and it is of such a high quality that anyone who wants to read beyond the first exposure (Catcher) will likely go through them all.  This is the weakest piece, but it's still Salinger, and it's not a bad story.  It's just difficult.  It's very frustrating. 

Because then I see the parts I underlined some fifteen years ago and am reminded that to a particular sort of young person, the story is a treasure:

"I'm so sure you'll get asked only two questions [when you die].  Were most of your stars out?  Were you busy writing your heart out?  If only you knew how easy it would be for you to say yes to both questions.  If only you'd remember before ever you sit down to write that you've been a reader long before you were ever a writer.  You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart's choice.  The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe as I write it.  You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself.  I won't even underline that.  It's too important to be underlined." (160-161)

Letters to Felice - Franz Kafka (1973)

Oeuvre rule: I have read "Metamorphosis" and The Trial by Kafka.  As a liberal arts student at NYU, I was somewhat heavily exposed to him.  "Letter to His Father" was also read in the course "The Letter as Literature," and he is casually mentioned by everyone in academia constantly.  He is, in fact, one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, and one of the most important artists in history, period.  Giving him this designation when his oeuvre is quite small (I still need to read Amerika, The Castle, and some short stories like "In the Penal Colony" and "The Judgment") puts him on similar ground to J.D. Salinger, but it even feels blasphemous to compare the two.  Do not forget that Kafka died at a young age (40), whereas Salinger lived on to age 90.  Kafka's work is classic, everlasting, whereas Salinger's influence may, or may not, be waning.  It is too early to tell with the latter.

So we come to Letters to Felice.  First, some background.  I was offered a review copy of this book in mid-November 2016.  I love Kafka, but I was not sure the book would be for me.  For one, it is a book of letters, and second, I still felt there was more of his fiction to digest.  Yet it seemed like an interesting book, so I requested a copy 8 days after receiving the e-mail.  Then it came quickly, and it is a beautiful book, but I was immediately shocked by its size.  There are 550 pages of letters alone in this volume, to say nothing of the introduction, the end notes, and other appendices.  I took me a long time to read, but I supplanted it with about five other books as they arose.  While I am tempted to name it one of the Best Books, ultimately I must deign to the notion that it will primarily appeal to the academic community.  Still, there are so many classic moments in these letters that there is much to discuss in this review.

Let us start with "Kafka's True Will, An Introductory Essay," by Erich Heller, who also edited this volume along with Jurgen Born.  I needed to read it a second time after finishing the book to try to understand what I had just read.  It begins by discussing Kafka's testamentary wishes, which famously directed that his unpublished writings be burnt.  Kafka had shown this will to his friend, Max Brod, in 1921, and Brod had told him he would not carry it out.  There is brief mention of another will, written in pencil (the first was written in ink--both appear to be holographic) that dictates six stories should not be burnt, though they had already been published.  In any case, had Kafka's wishes been honored, Amerika, The Trial, and The Castle would never have seen the light of day, to say nothing of his diaries, or Letters to Felice.  One imagines Kafka rolling over in his grave, but then perhaps, being secretly pleased that his life's work had not been done in vain.

Kafka's first letter to Felice Bauer is dated September 20, 1912.  The last letter reproduced in this volume was sent October 16, 1917.  Thus, five years, averaging out to 100 pages of letters per year-- yet the first year alone takes the reader to page 320.  Over the course of these five years, Kafka asked Felice to marry him twice.  As the book ends, the reader does not witness the breaking off of the second engagement, but it apparently happened in December of 1917.  

It is very difficult to review a book of letters, and I have not read many books of letters.  I read a book of letters between F. Scott Fitzgerald to Ernest Hemingway, and that was very readable and entertaining.  Of course, The Sorrows of Young Werther is a beautiful epistolary novel.  But Letters to Felice was not meant to be published, and as noted above, will be unappealing to most readers except those seeking a greater understanding of Kafka's psyche.  It is documentary evidence of his inner state and replete with extreme honesty.

Owing to this difficulty, there are only a few more things I can say about this book.  First, I have put asterisks or smiley faces next to many of the passages in my copy (the benefit of avoiding twerpery), and I will excerpt several of these.  Second, if there is one thing that comes across more clearly than anything else, it is this: Kafka became very insecure and paranoid when Felice did not respond quickly.  He often remarks upon this in his letters, and it led me to feel this was an acceptable practice with texts.  For some reason, I kept imagining Kafka living in the world of smartphones and text messages, and freaking out when Felice would not text him back, and asking, "What were you doing with your time that made it impossible for you to reply?"

There is also the matter of Kafka's profession, which appears to be a claims consultant or adjuster for an insurance company after obtaining his law degree.  Of course this holds great personal interest for me, and it was difficult at times to not want to act like Kafka.  That is, as a writer that makes his actual living (or wants to) in an offshoot of the legal profession.  His comments on his job, and the few times he has to go to court, are hilarious.

Since we are addressing a legal aspect to this book, I have to mention a sincere annoyance of mine, and one thing law journals get right: use footnotes instead of end notes!  There are 27 pages of end notes, and over 500 individual references.  Much like Infinite Jest, it drove me nuts to have to constantly flip back and forth between them, perhaps because I tended to read the book during my lunch hour, with it sat propped in a silver, standing holder, and I would need to flip back, causing the holder to topple over.  Now as terrible as law review articles tend to be, and as ridiculous as they look, what with half of their page being taken up by the text of footnotes, I wish that larger volumes such as this would put the explanatory note on the same page.  This may be a petty thing, but I needed to point it out.  In fact, to mention him again, I do believe Salinger used an occasional footnote or two in Seymour: an Introduction, and kept them on the same page.

I also enjoy his remarks on Napoleon:

"Only last Sunday afternoon Max said to me on a similar occasion: 'You talk like a girl,'  But this is not quite true, for in an excellent collection of Napoleon's sayings (Note 126), which for some time now I have been dipping into whenever I can, these words are recorded: 'It is terrible to die childless,' and he was by no means sorry for himself; friends, for instance, whether by choice or necessity, were not indispensable to him.  He once said: 'I haven't a friend other than Daru, who is callous and cold and suits me.'  And to judge the true depth this man had access to, take this remark: 'He who knows from the beginning where he is going, will not get far.'  So that when he talks of the terror of childlessness, one may believe him.  And I have to be prepared to take this upon myself, for apart from everything else I would never dare expose myself to the risk of being a father."  (134, December 30 to 31, 1912).

There is another passage about Napoleon too, but this review runs the risk of being interminable if I am going to excerpt every entertaining quote.  As a whole, this book is not very entertaining.  The love affair between Franz and Felice is quite mundane.  They met at the home of Max Brod in August of 1912, and they saw each other 2-3 times a year, in a sort of long distance relationship.  In June of 1913, he asked her to marry him, and she remained evasive and did not agree until April of 1914.  In July of 1914 the engagement is broken off in what seems the most dramatic "action" in all of Letters to Felice, the scene at the Hotel Askanische Hof.  Yet they remained close, and the next three years seem to pass by in a blur, as they become engaged a second time in July of 1917.  As has already been shown, the majority of this book consists of letters in their first year of knowing one another.  Kafka was a prolific letter writer, sometimes sending off multiple letters a day, and expecting, if not the same depth of effort, at the very least a timely reply.  Again, though, an absurd amount of this book is Kafka being like, "Why haven't you written yet?!"

Along the way, however, there are tons of beautiful quotes, and hilarious observations and confessions.  And my comparison to texting is not totally without precedent.  Felice works for a company that sells parlographs, and Franz offers a list of ideas:

"5.  Invent a combination of telephone and Parlograph.  This really can't be too difficult.  The day after tomorrow, of course, you will tell me that this has already been accomplished successfully.  But it would really be of immense importance for the press, news agencies, etc.  More difficult, but surely quite possible, would be a combination of gramophone and telephone.  More difficult, simply because one can't understand a word the gramophone says, and a Parlograph can't very well ask for clearer pronunciation.  A combination of gramophone and telephone would not be of such great universal importance; it would only be a relief to people who, like me, are afraid of the telephone.  People like me, however, are equally afraid of the gramophone, so for them there is no help whatever." (168, January 22-23, 1913)

 As I flip back through the pages of this book, looking for marginalia, I am struck by the feeling of familiarity with the character of Franz.  He is such a humorous and sardonic fellow!  It is as if his life is a great absurd comedy in which he generally does not want to live, except to write.  A recent co-worker of mine had referred to him as neurotic.  I would describe his style as consciously absurd and pseudo-dramatic.

"I have only just started reading the book; on the whole I stay away from everything, including books.  It is extremely clumsy; but it does manage to produce one distinctive character, of whom for the time being I really don't know what to think.  In any case I am not a critic, am no good at analyzing, easily misunderstand, frequently miss the point, and am left in doubt as to the overall impression." (463, March 1916)

There is really something of a surprise dramatic "twist" in the book, which I shouldn't spoil, but the letters to Grete Bloch merit mention, because they are introduced so fucking ridiculously:

"Grete Bloch and Felice Bauer met probably in 1913.  Their friendship lasted a great deal longer than their relationship with Kafka.  As late as 1935 Grete Bloch, as a refugee on her way to Palestine and finally to Italy, visited her friend who at that time was living with her family in Geneva.  It was then she handed over to Felice some of the letters she had received from Kafka." [While we are on the subject of historical background, allow me to mention that Felice Bauer eventually moved to the United States in 1936 where she lived until she died in 1960.]
"Kafka met Grete Bloch for the first time at the end of October 1913 when, at Felice's request, she went to see him in Prague to act as an intermediary between them.  The following represents all that has survived.  In the third revised edition of his biography of Kafka (English edition, p.241), Max Brod published part of a letter from Grete Bloch to a friend in Palestine; this was written April 21, 1940, from Florence, where she was then living.  In it she says that years ago she had an illegitimate child, a son who "when nearly 'seven years old died suddenly in Munich in 1921.'  If this is correct, the child must have been born about 1914.  Although the father's name is not mentioned it was clear to the recipient, Max Brod's sole informant on the subject, that she attributed the paternity to Kafka." (323)

What!  The editors then go on to say that the tone of the letters to Grete does not suggest that Kafka had an intimate relationship with her--but I'm not quite sure I agree!  It's almost like, he and Felice are going through a rough patch, and all of the sudden Grete comes through, Felice's friend, and Kafka is like, oh damn this girl is pretty special too.

"Once, in Dr. Weiss's company (when she happened to be lively and very friendly toward me), she said jokingly (I had been telling them that you had very much liked the Galley): Frl. Bloch seems to mean a great deal to you.' I could only answer in the affirmative.  I can really say nothing about F.'s attitude toward you, less even than about her attitude toward me." (358, March 7, 1914)

Some of his letters to Grete Bloch seem more lively and interesting to read, as if he does not get bogged down by his feelings of anxiety and paranoia expressed in the letters to Felice.  So there are quotable observations such as this:

"The last of my closer, unmarried, unengaged friends [Felix Weltsch] has got engaged; while I have foreseen the engagement for 3 years (for the outsider, no great perspicacity was required), he and she have known of it for a mere fortnight.  Thus to some extent I am losing a friend, for a married friend isn't a true one.  Anything he is told will be revealed to his wife either silently or explicitly, and the woman in whose head all information doesn't become distorted probably doesn't exist.  Moreover, even if this were not so, one can no longer think of him alone, cannot expect from him that intimate comfort and help, nor even assume the possibility of such comfort or help, for now, whatever happens, one is faced by a partnership.  But apart from the fact that I naturally wish him the best of everything." (349-350, February 19, 1914)

Oh, snap--Kafka dishing it out on people getting married and growing distant!

Here, he writes to Grete Bloch on the topic of her imminent departure from Vienna (which is a city he expresses no great affection for, apart from the Grillparzer Room):

"Incidentally, I don't believe that one's sadness at leaving is due to one having loved the thing one is leaving.  One's sadness is probably due to the opposite.  One feels that the connection are severed too easily, also that others part from one too easily; the superficial relationships which were established in the course of time and which, because they have not been closely examined during that time, almost seemed to represent intimate relationships, now prove to be as insignificant as they actually are.  Sadly one remembers the pseudo-relationships that were formed, and sadly one foresees the pseudo-relationships that will be formed.  Indeed, one needs both freedom and dependence, but each in its own place, and one feels very uneasy on realizing that one has got the places mixed up.  It has often happened to me; it doesn't matter, rejoice with me that you are about to leave Vienna." (397-398, April 26, 1914)

It is not surprising to me that, because I often seem to internally feel something about the book I am reading, and allow it to unconsciously affect my life, I went through my own bouts of paranoia about a significant other not returning a text, and became afraid of commitment, at one point sending the following excerpt in an e-mail:

"But--please listen to me quietly--what I wanted to give you was time to consider carefully your relationship with me--for, to judge from what you have said since Easter (with the possible exception of the first two letters), I was forced to believe (please, Felice, just put yourself in my place for one moment and look at everything in the way I am forced to see it) that I am now able to keep you only be artificial means, by dispatching one letter after another, and thus not giving you time to come to your senses, and thereby urging you in your haste to use old words deprived of their old meaning.  This is not my final word, for with each new letter from you even my strongest convictions begin to waver anew, but if it were so, it would really have been the only way in which you had ever disappointed me, because candor is the one thing I have expected from you at all times.  I wouldn't have been surprised if at some time you had dismissed me, because you could not immediately have known me for what I am, indeed this was impossible; it was almost as though I had approached you sideways and it took some little time before we turned to face each other.  Now of course I don't know what your final decision may be, but only imagine that I can sense it in your recent letters, and the one thing I cannot understand, Felice, is that you yourself shouldn't know how you feel about it.  You must not imagine that all I am saying is due to your letters being short and infrequent; you used to write short letters every now and again and I was quite happy and satisfied.  But your recent letters are different.  My affairs are no longer as important to you, and what is much worse: you no longer bother to tell me about yourself.  So what am I to do?  I could no longer reply to these recent letters, and pictured you at the office on Thursday morning, sighing with relief on discovering that at long last there was no letter."
-Franz (4/26/13)  (246-247)

So yes, I began to feel what Franz felt, and I had a great desire to live his sort of life--to live with my parents (to soften the weight of my soul crushing loans--something that Kafka thankfully did not have to suffer) and work as a claims consultant at an insurance company and to write in all my spare time.  And I began to feel that my life was too complicated, and that I don't do nearly the amount of writing I wish I could.  And I read this book very slowly, as I transitioned into a job which made me very depressed, in part perhaps because I had to commute by car and could not read on the train.  I would stare at the line of cars ahead of me, holding down the brake and hitting the gas erratically.  How much better it was to become lost in Kafka's idiosyncratic mind than to observe and participate in the dull monotony of highway traffic.

The other part of the book that strikes one as most notable is the scene at the Hotel Askanische Hof, which is told circumstantially through letters to Grete Bloch:

"You would be doing me a great favor if you sent me the letter that was so disastrous, for I cannot imagine what was in it that can have been so terrible." (434, July 20, 1914)

"53.  Possibly one of the letters to Grete Bloch between early May and the end of June 1914.  In these letters a number of lines in which Kafka voices strong doubts about the feasibility of a marriage to Felice are underlined in red, probably by Grete Bloch for the purpose of quoting them at the 'tribunal in the hotel' (Askanische Hof).  See Kafka's letter to Grete Bloch of July 3, 1914: 'You needn't have quoted from the letters.'" (568, FN 53)

Signs of Kafka's illness become evident at certain points throughout the text, which includes stays at sanatoriums.  There is an ominous letter near the end where he mentions coughing up blood, but one particular item written while he was in, or about to go into convalescence, struck me.

"Dear Felice, I spoke to him quite frankly, as you would have done, and eh also answered me frankly.  I said 'Why don't you write?  Why are you tormenting F.?  That you are tormenting her is surely quite obvious, from her postcards.  You promise to write, and don't.  You send a telegram "letter on way," but there is no letter on the way; it doesn't get written until 2 days later.  Once in a while and as an exception, a girl might be permitted to behave in this way, it could even be innocent, provided it is in keeping with her character.  But in your case it is not innocent, for your silence can only mean concealment, so cannot be excused.'
He replied: 'But it can be excused, for there are circumstances in which there is little difference between expressing and concealing.  My suffering is fourfold:
I cannot live in Prague.  I don't know if I can live elsewhere, but that I cannot live here is the most definite thing I know.
Furthermore: This is why I cannot have F. at present.
Furthermore: I cannot help (it is even in print) admiring other people's children.
Finally: At times I feel I shall be crushed by these torments on every side.  But my present suffering is not the worst.  The worst is that time passes, that this suffering makes me more wretched and incapable, and prospects for the future grow increasingly more dismal." (456-457, August 9, 1915)

And on it goes.  I was quite confused and wondered whether Kafka was writing about himself in the third person, or what.  It struck me as being the most "unhinged" letter in the book, like seemingly schizophrenic.

There are many other beautiful passages and droll witticisms scattered throughout the text, and if this review has run long on excerpts from the text, it is only because I do not think many readers will actually seek this out for pleasure reading, unless they are writing a paper about Kafka.  It does offer sometimes revealing looks into the creation of his literature, but yes, it is primarily an exercise in repetition and exasperation on the subject of Felice's responsiveness.  Still, it is a beautiful book, and I am glad I read it.  I do not know if, or when I will ever return to it, but I am proud to stock it in my library.

Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life - Carol Sklenicka

Go back to the year 2000 with me, if you please.  I'm in Wilmette, IL at my parent's house, home on break from school out east, getting ready to apply to college, sitting in an armchair in the living room (designated "the library") leafing through an anthology of American literature.  I'm vaguely familiar with Raymond Carver from Roger Ebert's review of Short Cuts, which I read a few years earlier, and I see the story "Cathedral."  I decide to read it, and it's beautiful, a sketch of a blind man being helped to draw a cathedral from an image in his mind of which he can have no reference.  It's a pretty quick read, but enormously moving, and I decide this might be a writer worth checking out.

Fast forward a year and I'm at NYU in a Prose Composition class and our professor gives us a xeroxed copy of Carver's poem "Fear," a list poem about things he fears.  I've seen Short Cuts at least a time or two by now (even going so far as to call my favorite movie at the time (Magnolia) a rip-off), and I go to one of those used book tables in Greenwich Village and pick up a copy of Where I'm Calling From and I read the stories sporadically throughout the course of my freshman year, all the while hearing praise of Carver from anyone the least bit connected to any creative writing class.  I pick my oldest sister for Secret Santa for Christmas that year, and though she has never really expressed an interest in so-called literary fiction, give her a copy of Where I'm Calling From, asterisking all the stories in particular that I think she should read.

So yes, I love Raymond Carver, and this biography easily makes the list of the Best Books reviewed on Flying Houses.  It's not a perfect biography, but it's very close.  It's so painstakingly researched that a reader can almost observe Carver's movements on a day-to-day basis.

Also, Carver went to the same high school as Justice Douglas.  So two of the graduates of Yakima High School would go onto lives worthy of biographies listed as Best Books on FH.  Therefore I believe my friends Byron Johnson and Erin Ecklund will be moving on to live great lives (though I think they went to a different high school).  Boarding school was a waste of money.  Families should move to Yakima to go to this school.  Then again, it would be inadvisable to base one's child's future on a career in the arts, or the law...

***

The book is subtitled "A Writer's Life" and indeed the first half of the book lays out in excruciating detail all of the obstacles that Carver had to overcome to become an author worthy of publication in The Best American Short Stories series and The New Yorker.  He marries quite young to Maryann Burk and they have their first child before he turns twenty.  Even before then, he had developed enough of an interest in creating writing that he paid $25 to the Palmer Institute of Authorship in Hollywood at the age of 16.  Sklenicka cannily observes that some of the correspondence has a ring of destiny about it--the first lesson is aimed squarely at the short story and reads:

"In becoming a Palmer student you are taking an important step in establishing yourself in a profession that enjoys the respect and esteem of all classes of people, a profession you may be proud to claim as your own...This may be the vital turning point in the course of your life...." (39)

Later, Ray goes to the Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa, several times, in varying guises--never quite earning an MFA, but sometimes taking credit for it.  In the meanwhile, he works at sawmills and barely earns enough to support their family.  Their continual poverty is a constant theme of the biography.  However, what struck me most about their family was Maryann.  She just seems awesome.  This is a biography of Raymond Carver--but there is so much Maryann in here that it might as well be a biography of her, too.  And this was the surprisingly compelling aspect of the book to me: they have this beautiful relationship, but also an extremely difficult one, and they stick it out for so long.  He owed his early career to her.  He would not have accomplished what he accomplished without her.

His first stories were published in the late 1950's and early 1960's, but he seemed to hit his first stride in 1964 with "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?" Eventually that would be the title story for his first collection, which would be released thirteen years later.  More than any other book I've read, this truly depicts the "writer's life" of living your life for your work and spending a considerable amount of time submitting to journals and magazines for publication.  The "second stride" probably came with the publication of "Neighbors" in Esquire, where Gordon Lish served as fiction editor.

There are several literary friendships depicted here.  First there is John Gardner as Carver's writing professor at Iowa (though he is only a few years older).  Second, there is Lish, who certainly comes across as one of the more entertaining (and ruthless) characters in the book.  Third, there is Tess Gallagher, and later Tobias Wolff and Richard Ford.  There is also an entertaining and sad section where a 61-year-old John Cheever drinks and teaches alongside Carver at Iowa in 1973 (Chapter 18 "Drowning," which is not quite rock bottom for Carver, but very close).

Alcoholism is another major theme of the book, and it is written about with such precision and empathy that I thought Sklenicka must have battled demons of her own on that score.  He would drink for three more years after the episodes with Cheever up until the publication of Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?  Roughly a year after that was published he would become sober and remain sober.  It is quite harrowing to read about his plight during these times, all in the "Celebrated and Homeless" chapter.

One quick side note:  one of his earlier stories is called "Are These Actual Miles?"  This is just an awesome title for a story:

"One of those new stories configured the rock-bottom days of the Carvers' lives in Sacramento when they were forced to sell their convertible.  'Are These Actual Miles?' is about bankruptcy, suspections of infidelity, and suicidal depression.  Ray pushed into new territory with this story, and it proved to be exactly what Lish was waiting for.  Late in November, Lish telephoned to say that Gingrich and Hayes were 'wild' about the story.  Not only that, but Lish planned to include both 'Neighbors' and 'Miles' in an anthology of fiction from Esquire that he was editing for Doubleday."  (214)

But they change to the title to "What is It?"  Worst title change ever!  Ray is upset about it and Maryann calls him a "whore" for selling out, but Esquire gives them another boost in credibility and they accept it.

I really shouldn't give away the whole story--I'll speak in generalities.  It is an impressive story.  You know, people think that writer's lives are boring.  This is anything but a boring life, but I do not think anybody in their right mind would ever want to live it.  It is filled with so much uncertainty and chaos and desperation that no one should set their sights on a literary career unless they are willing to sacrifice almost everything in favor of that pursuit.

***

This is a really hard review to write because there's so much to say.  This is a big book--not quite as big as the Ernest Hemingway biography that holds the record for longest gestation time on FH--but at 496 pages a hefty read.  I tore through it.  It took me less than 2 months.  Maybe a month and a half.  It was a little slow going in the beginning, but within the first 100 pages Carver is publishing his first stories.  It seems that the period up until say, Cathedral, is very tightly documented, and that the last five years of Carver's life, when he finally began to taste the fruits of literary success, pass a bit more quickly.

It is worth telling how I found this book, because it is quite fortuitous.  I live in a very bad apartment building, but we do have a free washer and dryer in the basement.  The machines themselves leave something to be desired.  The room is disgusting.  No one ever cleans it, except for me the one time my landlord took $40 off my rent one month when I agreed to do it.  Despite this atmosphere, it also becomes a kind of dumping ground for unwanted items that could be used for other tenants passing through.  You see, my landlord does not rent out three, 3 BR apartments--he rents out 9 rooms.  Each of them is around $600, so he is making over $5000 per month off us.  But we live in relative squalor.  Some of this is the doing of my roommates, but it is mostly the doing of the 1st and 2nd floor tenants, over the years.

Sometimes though, a treasure appears.  I had noticed a very good book collection laying on the ground.  Sometimes I would flip through the Williams S. Burroughs compilation Word Virus while waiting a few extra minutes for a garment to be dried.  But this one particular day in late October or early November, I saw the Raymond Carver biography and I thought it was such a quirky book to have that I had to seize the opportunity and read it quickly and return it in case the person that owned it moved out.  Finally I talked to two of the basement neighbors and asked whose it was and they said somebody who had moved out had left it and I could keep it.  That took the pressure off, but I read it quickly regardless.  At a certain point I read "Fires" out of Fires (which is the only Carver collection I own) and a description of a scene in a laundromat stands out as imminently moving:

"The dark heart of 'Fires' is a two-page anecdote about doing his family's wash at a laundromat in Iowa City.  The laundromat was on the corner of Burlington and Gilbert, around the corner from the writers' favorite beer joints.  Canadian writer Clark Blaise sometimes chatted with Ray while their clothes spun at this laundromat, as Blaise and his wife, the novelist Bharati Mukherjee, struggled to keep up with their baby's diapers.  But Carver is alone in the laundromat epiphany he reports.  Maryann is at work, the kids are at a birthday party, and Ray is waiting for a dryer.  It's Saturday afternoon and crowded, so he is becoming frantic. Another dryer has stopped, and Carver is moving toward it, ready to replace the other clothes with his own, when the owner of the clothing decides to let it go for another cycle:

     ....I remember thinking at that moment....that nothing could come anywhere close, could possibly be as important to me, could make as much difference, as the fact that I had two children.  And that I would always have them and always find myself in this position of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction.
     Like that it came to me.  Like a sharp breeze when the window is thrown open.  Up to that point in my life I'd gone along thinking...that things would work out somehow--that everything in my life I'd hoped for or wanted to do was possible.

Is Carver writing fiction here?  Could this one moment encompass so much?  The essay dramatizes a situation that had smoldered for years.  Carver admits in the essay that many writers have overcome 'far more serious impediments to their work, including imprisonment, blindness, the threat of torture or death...'" (96-97)

Later, Carver's children come to resent him for "Fires" and a few other stories and poems throughout the years.  Perhaps he should have kept his mouth shut, but you know, we all need little anecdotes about the petty frustrations involved with laundry.  Most strikingly though, Scklenicka adds that, in this scene, Carver is 25 and halfway through his life.

***

This review is getting long as it is.  There are just too many little details that I'd like to reference.  One of the cutest, for me, is Ray's favored non-alcoholic beverage:

Okay unfortunately that's not in the index so I can't find it, but at one point his children notice that he always drinks RC Cola.  He likes it because his initials are R.C.  The image of him sitting around drinking R.C. and presiding, like, "Yep, that's my cola," is hilarious.

There are several details about other writers, but the big gaping hole in this biography that we've left so far is Gordon Lish.  Lish's anecdote about J.D. Salinger is worth excerpting (as is almost any anecdote about that controversial legend).  I also wish Obama/whoever wins in 2016 cared more about people like us:

"No project Lish undertook was too humble to become a vehicle for his prodigious personality.  For the Job Corps, a Kennedy-era program for unemployed young men, he created a box set of reading folders called Why Work.  Instead of gathering already published materials, Lish sent telegrams to thirty writers he admired.  One of these telegrams went to J.D. Salinger, who had been in seclusion for more than a decade.  Lish followed his telegram with letters--numerous letters--to Salinger that show Lish inventing himself as a literary impresario.  A few months later, he received a telephone call at work from Salinger himself.  When he understood who was calling him, Lish reports, 'I was grinning so hard that my brain could not have had any room left over in it for one speck of business.'  As Lish tells it, Salinger said, 'I'm calling because I was worried about you.'  Salinger again refused to write for Why Work.  But Lish was not unhappy: 'I mean, forget that it was animating him all four months later, it worked! had worked!--because there he was, J.D. Salinger, the impeccably reclusive J.D. Salinger, calling me--.'" (151)

It is necessary to take a detour into Lish, and relate one final personal anecdote in two pieces.  First, on the day I finished this biography, the Winter 2016 edition of the The Paris Review (#215) arrived at our apartment (I don't subscribe to it; my roommate does--one of several reasons why I will be sad to see him go).  One of the interviews was of the now 82-year-old Gordon Lish, who is cantankerous as ever.  Lish donated his papers to Indiana University, and he encourages all Carver fanatics to visit this collection to see just how responsible he is for Carver's acclaim.  Now it is very true that Carver is widely imitated and extremely influential, and Lish's labors cannot be diminished.  However, Lish makes it seem like Carver is a stumbling drunk who can barely form a sentence, who spits out a couple dozen pages of gibberish, which Lish then cuts by more than 50% to emerge with a prize-winning story.  Lish is just a very heavy editor, and other writers, such as Barry Hannah, acknowledge how deeply he changed their work for the better.  Carver, on the other hand, was sheepish about this, and fought the accusations that he was really just Lish's puppet.

For Christmas, I got my mother a copy of Beginners, which is the manuscript Carver sent Lish of the stories that would comprise his second book, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, which is certainly one of the most famous short stories he wrote.  I haven't read it yet, but it's one of those gifts where you are really getting something for yourself--though I know my mother loves literature and I was just trying to turn her on to Carver.  Maybe it will be weak, though.  I am afraid.  I looked at the opening of "What Is It?" from Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?  in the Barnes & Noble and it starts off like a rocket--"First thing, we have to sell the car," or some other such opening.  Lish would remove characters, remove names from characters, cut out whole scenes, remove neat conclusions and leave stories to end on an ambiguous or dark note.  Carver is often defined as a minimalist, but I think it is quite clear that Lish is responsible for that reputation.  Reading this biography reignited my interest in his work, and I hope to read the Lish-edited books and then perhaps Beginners once my mother is finished with it.  Really one would need to read them side-by-side--or at least focus on the story "Beginners" itself--to determine if that 2009 volume, positioned by Tess Gallagher as truer versions of the stories, is responsible in the least for Birdman, which I feel like put Carver back into the national consciousness.   To be sure, Birdman is an achievement all on its own--but would it really have been the kind of Best Picture type film it was without the Carver motif?  I'm sure plenty of people watching didn't know a thing about "WWTAWWTAL," but those that did understand why the film is such a powerful statement on artistry and fame.

Carver never became "famous" until he stopped drinking, though it was his many drunken misadventures that became the stories of "Bad Ray" which "Good Ray" would then write in his sober years.  There are so many little things in this book that are just hilarious; there are just as many that will break your heart.

A brief word on domestic violence: Ray beat Maryann, and Sklenicka does not shy away from describing it, though she does perhaps whitewash it a bit--but understandably so!  Because Maryann would beat him back, too, and often drank as much as he did.  There is one shocking incident though, where Maryann is nearly killed by a bottle of wine broken on her neck, which opens an artery.  They have a volatile, tempestuous relationship, and it nearly kills them.  One does not get the sense that Ray is the typical abuser and Maryann is the typical victim.  It never seems like she is "scared" of him, though she is remarkably loyal to him.  I will not spoil what happens when they finally divorce, and the alimony arrangement they reach, but let's just say, as I've intimated above already, that Carver owes his career to Maryann.  He owes a debt to Lish as well, but Maryann most of all--because she nourished and cared for him and supported him through the worst times most human beings are ever made to suffer.

Amidst all the messiness of life, Carver eventually succeeds.  Really, here we have someone--in the generation of the "post-Beats" or the New Journalism (or "the New Fiction" Lish curated)--who grew up wanting to be a writer, who did all the things that people still do nowadays (like go to Iowa, submit to journals, etc.) and who made it, but not without extreme difficulty.  It's just such a true story that it has to be one of the Best Books.  Even with a few weird moments--I admit that a few of Sklenicka's rare exclamation points are quirky--this is an incredibly valuable tome for anyone that wants to be a writer.  You cannot help but smile at certain passages.

Okay I had a good one to end with, but we have to keep Thomas alive, too:

"In Zurich, a friend secured them entry to Thomas Mann's archives and Mann's large study with its fine mahogany desk, parquet floor, couch, and easy chairs.  They opened Mann's books and handled his fountain pens and Asian figurines.  'Who couldn't work well with a study like this?' Ray wrote on a postcard, before grumbling that Zurich had 'more Japs than Swiss' and more gays than straight people.  Tess's journal indicates that Ray felt anxious about getting meals at specific times and taking a nap in the afternoon.  Those difficulties were somewhat offset for him by the availability of Swiss chocolate.  After making their third visit to the cemetery where James Joyce is buried and studying several funerary sculptures there, they dined at Kronenhalle, which Joyce had frequented.  Lectures and meetings with publishers in Rome and Milan closed the trip at the end of April.  Weary of media attention and foreign food and foreign languages, Ray gratefully returned to Port Angeles."  (456)

But it's a scene from Syracuse with his son, Vance, that may have touched me more than anything else:

"When Vance took Tobias Wolff's survey course in the short story, he said to Wolff, 'My dad's really good, isn't he?'  Wolff said, 'Vance, your dad is one of the greatest short story writers who ever lived!'  And that had some meaning for him because he was learning about this art form that his father pursued so single-mindedly.  He could see him in this landscape of art." (365-366)

Biographies can be tedious and disappointing.  They can also make you love their subject even more.  Raymond Carver was far from a perfect human being.  In fact, he is downright dastardly at times, but it's the humanity peaking through such moments that give this book its heart.  Not everyone will love it--it seems targeted at Carver's fans, of which there are many--and though there are many writers one might care to emulate if they hope to "make it" in short fiction (Joy Williams comes to mind as she pops up throughout the book as a sort of contemporary female counterpart to Carver), one ultimately must find greatness within themselves.  This book portrays that process beautifully.

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.

Hiatus #3

Recently a friend of mine wrote me a message saying, "No Flying Houses in 2 months? What gives?"

Actually, it's only been about 45 days, but yeah, nothing since the big news about Mr. Salinger. In a sense, I have not added anything because I believe he deserved to be the top story on this blog for a long time.

But there is a more obvious reason--after The Magic Mountain hiatus, and then the Ulysses hiatus, we now have the Ada hiatus. Ada is about 600 pages long, shorter than the other two, but there have been other elements causing this delay: a 5 day trip to L.A., a 5 day trip to New York (occurring in 8 days), a 5 day stint of playing independent homeowner, an upcoming 9 day stint of playing independent homeowner, and law school research/decision-making--so almost half the time I have been busy (though it's not like I don't read on the airplane)--and besides that, I've been at work, and behaving in all sorts of ill-advised ways in my free time.

I am also working on novel #3 (book #5)--we are 9,000 words into it--and I hope to finish the majority by August.

I did pick up Kafka's Amerika while in L.A. and briefly considered reviewing that before Ada, but I only got through 20 pages and feel that the first review of Kafka on Flying Houses should be a more momentous occasion (i.e. not quickly thrown together while another half-finished book lies in state).

In summary, please forgive this lack of activity. One day maybe someone will pay me to blog and they can collect all the posts and put them in a book like "Stuff White People Like" and then I won't have to go on hiatus because this will be my primary means of income, not restaurant work. (cue Wayne's World line: cccchhhyeah! and monkeys might start flying out of my butt!)

J.D. Salinger - 1919 - 2010

I have heard a couple people remark upon this event today and felt that since I posted about Studs Terkel and David Foster Wallace upon their passing, it would be appropriate to say a few words.

Just two nights ago I was at my friend's apartment and saw his copy of The Catcher in the Rye. This friend has said that he does not like to read that much, but he did enjoy this volume. I made the proposition that we enjoyed this book so much because we both went to prep school and no other book could so perfectly encapsulate the experience. I've read it at least five times, though not in the last few years.

Of course, I have commented at length upon Franny and Zooey http://flyinghouses.blogspot.com/2009/09/franny-and-zooey-jd-salinger.html

Nine Stories is also a masterpiece, as is Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour: an Introduction. Hapworth 16, 1924 is not a masterpiece and perhaps Salinger knew best what to publish in book form. This may cast doubt upon his unpublished work. I remember a friend, some eight or nine years ago now, mention how her high school class Religion class read Franny and Zooey, and how she had become fascinated with Salinger's oeuvre, and how there was a whole slew of things in his vault that would be published after his death. Unlike Nabokov's recent The Original of Laura, reviewed here http://flyinghouses.blogspot.com/2010/01/original-of-laura-vladimir-nabokov.html, Salinger may have more work in his vault because he lived for so long and never published for so long.

It is a sad day, but not an entirely surprising one. He lived a very long time, and must have lived one of the most interesting American lives of the past century, the extraordinarily popular artist who retired from public life at the height of his talents. He has left behind a handful of classics and will be remembered as one of the finest writers this country has ever produced.

Franny and Zooey - J.D. Salinger

What can you really say about Franny and Zooey that is profound, important? Only that, if you haven't read it, and you have read that other more famous book by the same author, you will be caught unaware.

Recently I read it for the second time. The first time was in the summer of 2002, over seven years ago. Has my experience of being alive changed since then? Yes. Am I in a very different personal situation than the time of the previous reading? Yes. Did my experience of actually reading the book differ at all? No.

This book is about nervous breakdowns and praying. During one particular day last week (last Tuesday, six days ago), I read the majority of Zooey, the much longer second part of the two prose pieces that comprise the volume, in between a lunch and dinner shift of my current stint of waiting tables at a restaurant. I was very depressed this day, and the book made me feel it even more so.

The crux of the entire work is Franny's dilemma--what is she supposed to do with her life?:

"'All right,' Franny said wearily. 'France.' She took a cigarette out of the pack on the table. 'It isn't just Wally. It could be a girl, for goodness' sake. I mean if he were a girl--somebody in my dorm, for example--he'd have been painting scenery in some stock company all summer. Or bicycled through Wales. Or taken an apartment in New York and worked for a magazine or an advertising company. It's everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so--I don't know--not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and--sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much as everybody else, only in a different way.' She stopped. She shook her head briefly, her face quite white, and for just a fractional moment she felt her forehead with her hand--less, it seemed, to find out whether she was perspiring than to check to see, as if she were her own parent, whether she had a fever. 'I feel so funny,' she said. 'I think I'm going crazy. Maybe I'm already crazy.' (26)

Franny takes place almost entirely in a restaurant. It is the beginning of a weekend she will be spending with her college boyfriend Lane. Franny counters practically everything that is said to her in conversation with a depressing, fatalistic rejoinder. Then she goes into the bathroom and cries. Then she holds up her book, "The Way of a Pilgrim," and is able to stabilize. Then she tells Lane about the book, which is based around the idea of "praying without ceasing." If you repeat the phrase 'Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me,' over and over, it will eventually be worked in the natural rhythm of your heartbeat and will open you up to a spiritual experience. Then she compares this basic prayer notion with that of several different Eastern religions and claims that the exact same thing is described in various texts by them. Then she faints. Lane, who has been rather curt and dismissive of her throughout the entire story, finally shows some tenderness and the ending has him vowing to help her get some rest and recover.

Zooey probably takes place a few weeks or months after the incident described in Franny. It is here that the Glass family is introduced. It would be tedious to get into all of the details that explain the authorship of Zooey, but basically, the story is written by Salinger's most frequent literary stand-in--Buddy, who is also born in 1919, the oldest living child in the Glass family, in his mid 30's and a writing teacher at a college in a rural part of the Northeast. Zooey is about 25 and an actor and taking a bath and reading a long letter from Buddy as the story opens, and his mother comes into the bathroom and has a long conversation with him about Franny. How are they supposed to make her feel better? Zooey concerns itself with this notion for its entire duration, but it also contains the synthesis of the religious inquiry of its predecessor.

Basically, Zooey is much longer, and solves the problem, or question, that Franny poses. And yet it still does not really reach a satisfying conclusion. What is most touching about the work are the lengths that Zooey goes to in order to help his sister. Eventually he tells her what she should be doing with her life, and that everything she is going through is "normal" because they, the two youngest Glass children, are "freaks."

Anybody between the ages of 18 and 26 may benefit most from reading this volume, but for its analysis of religious devotion, this should be required for anyone with strong opinions about that phenomenon--which, okay, is just about everybody in the world. Catcher in the Rye may be regarded as Salinger's most important contribution to literature, but I think it is fair to say that Franny and Zooey is a more polished and precise work--and while it may not be as titillating, it is certainly reaching for a higher echelon.

In Palm Sunday, Kurt Vonnegut wrote that J.D. Salinger was probably the most influential writer of his generation. Along with Vonnegut himself, I feel that Kerouac rounds out the trifecta of the most influential novelists of the 20th century--and all were born within a three year span. Kerouac died forty years ago, Vonnegut died a couple years ago, and Salinger has not published anything in 44 years. Salinger is certainly the most selective of the three when it comes to the total number of books that he felt he needed to publish. It would be interesting to compare the religious philosophies espoused by Kerouac and him, but it is fair to say that he is the more abstinent of the two. My only point in writing this final paragraph is to say, Vonnegut was right. As a writer, he is the only one in our lifetime to have achieved a mythic status--that of a literary god. While it may not be 100% true, it's basically safe to say that every single young writer has been influenced, whether they realize it or not, by the predominant literary style that Salinger has helped to create. All four of his books are excellent, and while Franny and Zooey may not be the most "entertaining," it does offer the most profundity of all his works and may therefore be considered his true masterpiece. One could also say that his oeuvre as a whole is the true masterpiece.

The Professor of Desire - Philip Roth

The Professor of Desire by Philip Roth was published in 1977, when Roth was 44. Now 75, Roth is arguably the most celebrated living novelist in America (excepting J.D. Salinger, who published his last book around the time Roth was publishing his first, and who has remained one of the greatest literary mysteries of all time). Last year Exit Ghost won many favorable reviews, and the year before last Everyman proved that he could write as effectively about aging as anyone before him. He has won very many awards which are listed in the flaps of any of his books. He is extremely prolific. He is the last "youngest" great. But, as a professor of mine once stated, "Even Homer nods," and likewise, even Roth can be deemed "average" when it seems like he's doing his best not to repeat himself.

The novel (like several others apparently) features David Kepesh, who has not been turned into a breast, but who does dream of meeting the whore that Kafka used to visit, introduced to her by his childhood hero and muse invoked to open the novel, Herbie Bratasky, a young entertainer who works at the hotel David's parents own and maintain. David goes to school at Syracuse for undergrad, goes abroad to London and meets two girls/whores who have a threesome with him and then leave him always feeling as if adventure seeped out of his sexual life thereafter, then goes to Stanford for graduate study, and meets Helen. Helen is beautiful, but crazy, and still loves a man who once took her to Hong Kong and asked if she would be an accomplice in his wife's murder, so that they could be together without any troubles. Helen often wishes she went along with him, later, and starts doing lots of cocaine, and does annoying things that make David want to divorce her, and finally they do, and then he is alone in New York, subletting from an actor, seeing a psychiatrist named Dr. Klinger, somehow corresponding with the Schonbrunns, fellow professor and wife at Stanford, and eventually meeting Claire, somewhat more simple than Helen, but much more sane, and much better for David, and eventually everything ends rather happily.

There are good moments in this book. The beginning is pretty good, the middle is pretty good, but once all the action shifts to David flying to Hong Kong to find Helen and then divorce afterwards, it begins to seem more tepid. However, David's first-person-narration never really cuts himself any slack, and he constantly doubts whether or not he will be able to love Claire forever without wanting something more, and towards the end, these are the most eye-opening segments, whereas in the beginning the novel discusses nearly every sexual whim one could expect to come across in a textbook. That is the problem of the book for me. The beginning is very dirty and the ending is very nice. It goes from XXX to PG in 250 pages. It is an inconsistent tone, but I suppose, David is also growing up, is he not? And with maturity comes family, and with family comes family films, the second half of which, Professor of Desire could pass itself off as.

As previously mentioned in the Doctor Faustus post, oeuvre is an important consideration in reviews. I have only read "Goodbye, Columbus," Portnoy's Complaint, and Everyman. Where does POD rank? At the bottom of those, unfortunately! But it is still a very good book. A light read, a vaguely guilty pleasure, but meritorious nonetheless. I believe, at heart, POD is an attempt at classifying desire which cannot be realistically aligned with a long life of monogamy and temperance. For attempting to intimate the myriad complexities of the allure of crazy sex, POD earns an above-average review. Certain moments in the novel (between two and four, perhaps) approach a fragile sort of poetry which occassionally made me think it was about to kick into high gear. As previously stated though, this novel starts high and ends low, though not without its charms. Even the PG ending is rather charming. David's father is probably the most ebullient character in the novel, but it is his poverty of education that mirrors the suffocated structure of the novel, not the offbeat humor or old fashioned common sense.

Where Portnoy's Complaint may be no-holds-barred, Professor of Desire attempts a sweeter veneer, and ends sounding just a tiny bit fake (but, importantly, true to life) . "Goodbye, Columbus" is probably a more entertaining PG read and Everyman certainly contains more life lessons than Kepesh Sr. can hope to elucidate for all these crazy young people, such as the ones who turn his hotel into a ski lodge after he retires. All things considered, POD is a quality book, but little more than that. It is light, it might make you laugh, and it might be fun for you to compare the crazy things that have happened in your past relationships with Kepesh's odd experiences. And of course, any novel that has a character cry because she wants more than anything to be penetrated from behind can't be all bad.