November 15, 2011 Nostalgia In My Father’s Kitchen By Chris Wallace I used to joke that I have daddy issues with Jacques Pépin, because it was he who really raised me. My parents divorced when I was a year old and, until I was thirteen, they split custody in every conceivable way. It was my father’s habit to write in the mornings and watch his favorite cooking shows in the afternoon, with a drink, while preparing dinner. On the days I was with him, I watched too. Usually it was Julia Child, or the Frugal Gourmet; later it was Jacques, and then Jacques and Julia. Recipes and technique were like my nursery rhymes and I grew up—“spoiled rotten,” my dad would say—only ever eating perfect pie crust. By the time I was eleven, my knife skills were impeccable, my Caesar salad the best ever (in my family, hyperbole is hereditary). When my mother invited my high school girlfriend and her parents for dinner I served a traditional osso buco and risotto Milanese. It was a success—my culinary coming out party—and one in which my father, who felt he deserved the credit, took particular pride. As a Depression baby, my father was raised by a generation of people who wouldn’t utter a sound if their hair were on fire. He spent most of his childhood in the kitchen, with the family cook, because he was afraid to go anywhere else in the house. The Wallaces do their suffering in silence. My father’s father, David Frederick Wallace Sr.—Fred, he was called—went off on drinking benders, leaving the family for days at a time. He died of liver failure at just fifty-seven. Fred’s father committed suicide and the family never spoke of it. The thought of my own father having a personal conversation with his mother, or with his grandmother, whom everyone called the Dragonlady, seems impossible—with his Aunt Bess or his uncle, President Harry Truman, outrageous. Read More
November 15, 2011 At Work Umberto Eco on ‘The Prague Cemetery’ By Andrew Martin Umberto Eco’s novels have been widely admired for their blend of erudite scholarship and satisfying, page-turning plots. His latest book, The Prague Cemetery, continues this tradition by placing a fictional character by the name of Simonini in the midst of a real, historical milieu and giving him a significant, sinister place in nineteenth-century history and beyond. Simonini, an equal-opportunity hater of ethnicities, races, and religions, is a master forger and plays an important role in crafting the “conspiracies” of his time, most importantly the document that becomes The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. I spoke to Eco about the novel, just now being published in the US, on the phone from Italy. The Prague Cemetery is your sixth novel. Do you find it becomes easier to write a new book at this point in your career? Does it become harder to find new subjects to interest you? Every time that I write a novel I am convinced for at least two years that it is the last one, because a novel is like a child. It takes two years after its birth. You have to take care of it. It starts walking, and then speaking. In two months I will be eighty years old. Probably I will not write another novel, and so mankind will be safe. Did you enjoy writing this particular book? Less than the others. For me, the process of writing usually takes six years. In those years I collect material, I write, I rewrite. I am in a sort of a private world of myself with my characters. I don’t know what will happen. I discover it step by step. And I become very sad when the novel is finished because there is no more pleasure, no more surprise. Read More
November 14, 2011 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Sadie Stein, Editor By Sadie Stein DAY ONE 4:00 A.M. I can’t sleep. Because I just moved from Brooklyn into Manhattan, my books aren’t unpacked, and so my reading options are limited. The only books I have handy are on decorating—although it’s usually a pretty theoretical study in my case. The pattern of the boards on the floor of this new apartment reminds me of floors I saw in Kraków when I visited there with my father, and I’ve decided rather grandly to do a sort of prewar Eastern European motif. (Again, this is probably theoretical. ) Wonder vaguely where one would find a tiled stove in New York. I read a few chapters of the inimitable Dorothy Draper’s Decorating Is Fun!, which is filled with gems like “It is just as disastrous to have the wrong accessories in your room as it is to wear sport shoes with an evening dress,” as well as the somewhat less helpful “I don’t believe anything can do as much for a room as a glowing fire in an attractive fireplace. Men and dogs love an open fire—they show good sense. It is the heart of any room and should be kindled on the slightest provocation.” (That said, I’m guessing Alexa Chung or someone is wearing sports shoes with an evening dress as we speak, and probably causing a sensation. Imagine a world with rules and dicta. The mind boggles.) 5:30 A.M. Finally manage to drift off for a few hours, until a handyman unexpectedly knocks at the door at 7:45 to wash the windows. It occurs to me that this is just the sort of dubious ruse a murderer or thief might use to gain entrance to someone’s apartment; let him in anyway. 9:00 A.M. I pass an angry-looking gentleman on the way to the subway.“Hello,” I say.“Bloomingdales, Bloomingdales!” he shouts. 3:53 P.M. I get some sad family news. Internet is in and out here, but in a good moment, I find my favorite Barbara Pym quote: “The small things of life were often so much bigger than the great things … the trivial pleasure like cooking, one’s home, little poems especially sad ones, solitary walks, funny things seen and overheard.” 4:45 P.M. My old boyfriend e-mails me about a recent fight he got into at a dinner party, over collective nouns. “I was quite put out, let me tell you,” he says. Read More
November 14, 2011 Fiction Green Car, Nightfall By Margaret Weatherford Photograph by Boosbob50. One day when my father’s car overheated down in Chula Vista, he came home with beans in a can the size of an oil drum. “This is what the real Mexicans eat,” he announced. That sounded suspicious. We ate beans our mom cooked on the stove and supposed real Mexicans did the same. We gathered skeptically as my dad opened the can. “Look at these beans!” he beamed. He was ready to dig in without even heating them up. We stared into the murky depths. Nobody else wanted to try them. One day as we headed north on Interstate 5, a radiator hose burst right by the big, hollow globe, tilting on its axis in El Toro. Two hippies hitchhiking on the on-ramp kept offering us their ten-gallon bottle of water. “Water won’t do it,” my father said. “It’ll run right through.” There was an Episcopal church there across the street, and the priest took us in for the afternoon. It was 103 degrees that day, but cool in the church. My brothers and I walked up and down the adobe halls for hours. We drank chocolate milk from cartons. The hippies and their dog and their baby and their ten-gallon bottle of water got a ride in a Volkswagen heading for Oregon, but we were there in El Toro till nightfall. I don’t know how my father fixed the car. Read More
November 11, 2011 Ask The Paris Review Work Frustrations; Social Climbing By Lorin Stein Okay, I have a question about the ideal sort of job for a young writer. If not ideal, then certainly better. I am a gallery manager in Manhattan. It is an exhausting, constantly detail-oriented job that does not pay especially well. Work frustrations and a first novel that is still in progress but progressing despite the less than ideal amount of time I can devote. I am wondering whether I should quit this “career” and become a bartender. I would have more hours to write, and my hands wouldn’t be typing for eleven to twelve hours a day. So what jobs do you recommend? You mention bartending. I’ve known several writer-bartenders over the years. The job, they tell me, comes with perils of its own. In the good old days, the easiest thing was to get a gig proofreading at night for some giant consultancy or law firm (like the title character of Mary Gaitskill’s Veronica). The pay was good, and when you punched out, you punched out. Those jobs are hard to find now (proofreading’s the first thing to go), but since you’re in New York, it’s worth signing up with a temp agency. I temped once, for a business-to-business advertising firm, and on my very first afternoon found myself writing slogans for a revolutionary new water-efficient toilet. At least, I tried. (It was also my last afternoon.) I have always thought dog walking would be a good job for a writer, if you’re the sort of person who thinks while you walk. But perhaps one of our readers will have a better suggestion … or a position to fill? I’m enjoying The Way of All Flesh. Can you suggest some novels about social climbing by cultural or racial outsiders? If Ernest Pontifex counts as a cultural outsider—or a social climber—then who among us is safe from either charge? Not Becky Sharpe, in Vanity Fair, or Lucien de Rubempré, in Lost Illusions. And certainly not Georges Duroy, the gutter-bred antihero of Bel Ami, or David Copperfield or Gatsby or Tim Ripley or—to choose a more recent example—slick Nick Guest in The Line of Beauty. But neither, I suppose, is Lucy, the title character of Jamaica Kincaid’s first novel, an Antiguan making her way in New York, or Pronek, the immigrant hero of Aleksandar Hemon’s Nowhere Man, lost in Chicago. After all, if you’re not from around here, there is a fine line between climbing and getting by. (Is Ellison’s Invisible Man a climber?) Leonard Bast tries to better himself, disastrously enough, in Howard’s End, and who can blame him? Creepy Jasper Milvain does a much better job in New Grub Street. The black shipbuilder Bob Jones doesn’t climb, exactly—but he gets promoted, and all hell breaks loose among his white coworkers, whom he secretly loathes—in Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go. There is always, of course, Augie March, taking goyish America by storm. And—my own favorite—the reckless, charming Irish hero of Phineas Finn and Phineas Redux, cutting a swathe through Disraeli-era London. Speaking of outsiders who make it. Read More
November 11, 2011 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: “Hadji Murat,” A Version of the Afterlife By The Paris Review Leo Tolstoy. “There are two basic motives living within all readers. They want to spend time in the presence of a great mind. And they want their hearts awakened.” That’s Steve Almond in Ecotone on the early novels of Don DeLillo. Two other pieces kept me up late with the new issue: Jonathan Lethem on the perils of self-regard, plus a swinging little poem by Jaswinder Bolina, “In Another Version of the Afterlife,” which begins, “I regret some of the aftermath but none of the choices I made / during my tenure among the living, which must be / what the villain feels after being villainous.” Two lines later we’re lying beside matadors and pornographers “groggy and unsleeping in ornate haciendas.” I don’t know if my heart was awakened, but Bolina did keep me awake. —Lorin Stein The Hare with Amber Eyes is a family saga, a study in art history, and an overview of the European Jewish experience all in one. Edmund de Waal uses an inherited collection of netsuke carvings to explore the legacy of the Ephrussis, once one of Europe’s most prominent Jewish families. The family stuff is great, but what I’m enjoying particularly is the way the author, a prominent ceramicist, conveys the tactile. (And, incidentally, how skillfully he describes all these tiny things with a minimum of diminutives—a skill in itself!) —Sadie Stein In an interesting juxtaposition of writing styles, I began reading Bertrand Russell’s amazing Autobiography only to stop partway when I picked up Atlanta-based rapper T. I.’s debut novel, Power & Beauty. I can’t read either of them quickly enough, and, needless to say, my heart is divided. —Natalie Jacoby Though I’m not writing a novel, I’ve been vaguely following The Guardian’s How to Write Fiction series. But were I writing a novel, I’d surely tack Geoff Dyer’s sublimely simple lesson—that limitations, yours and everyone else’s, can prove as enriching as your strengths—above my work desk. —Nicole Rudick In the Presence of Absence, by Mahmoud Darwish, is a moving reflection—part autobiography, part lyrical elegy—on the question that has always been at the center of his work: “What does it mean for a Palestinian to be a poet and what does it mean for a poet to be a Palestinian?” This is one of Darwish’s last writings, and it bears the hallmarks of his late style: uncompromising difficulty, surprise, and summation. —Robyn Creswell Here are the sentences I can’t get out of my head from “Hadji Murat.” This is about ten pages from the end. Three quarters through. Just at a moment when you believe that Hadji Murat is about to do an heroic thing, he’s about to wake up his men, before dawn, to prepare them for an escape by horseback. He’s living among the Russians, to whom he has lately sworn loyalty. He has even fallen in love with one of their women. He doesn’t actually want to betray them, he just can’t let the fucking Shamil hold his family captive any longer. He has to rescue them or die trying. It’s his only way to keep his whole idea of himself and the honor of his people from shattering. Politics are irrelevant. And everything that’s happened so far in the story leads you to suspect that he’ll do it, that he knows how to do it. But in fact within hours he’ll be shot down like a dog. And this is what Tolstoy does, to signal the pivot. Two sentences. Nightingales are singing. Hadji Murat was so deep in thought that he did not notice he had tipped the jug and water was spilling from it. He shook his head at himself and went into his room. [Gasp!] It’s so perfect, you hear it only stethoscopically, but you do hear it. He walks away from the water jug to his death.—John Jeremiah Sullivan