August 23, 2010 Arts & Culture We’ve Got Freedom On Our Minds By Thessaly La Force Lorin will be guest blogging this week over at The Atlantic for Ta-Nehisi Coates. We’ll be reading, and hope you will too. Today, in his first post, he tackles the hubbub surrounding Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom, and the magic of discovery for literary fiction: But already, in the first mini-backlash against the book—or really, against the all the attention it’s received—we hear it implied that fiction should restrict itself to entertainment or fade into obscurity: that critics should spend more time celebrating mass-market novels because they’re what the people “actually” want. This fake populism pretends to speak for women (as if women weren’t the overwhelming consumers of serious fiction, whether written by women or men). Really it’s the logic of the Hollywood blockbuster machine. Unfortunately, you find the same logic at work all over publishing today. Without a complex network of local bookstores and local reviewers, more and more houses see the blockbuster as their only viable business plan. They spend vast amounts signing up and promoting books that seem written to spec. That model is great if you’re publishing mysteries, or vampire books, or chick lit, or books about Founding Fathers. A good formula, well executed, can be a beautiful (and profitable) thing. But for literary fiction, the fiction of discovery, formulas are death. In my 12 years at FSG, we saw publishers lose millions every season trying to corner the market on the Big New (preferably Young) Literary Sensation. Meanwhile really tricky, idiosyncratic writers—Lydia Davis, Denis Johnson, Elif Batuman, Richard Price, Sam Lipsyte, Roberto Bolano, James Wood, Hans Keilson—confounded even the most charitable expectations of the chains, and went through one printing after another. Now Franzen seems poised to do the same thing on a much, much bigger scale. I name these particular authors, all published by FSG, only because I was there when it happened: I know for a fact no magic was involved. The books succeeded because critics kept yelling eureka (and because some resilient booksellers, like that clerk at Cluster of Grapes, kept putting them in customers’ hands). These books may never have cornered any market. That wasn’t the point. They found the readers who needed them. Each became a few thousand people’s favorite book.
August 23, 2010 On Television Mad Men Unbuttoned By Patrick Loughran In Mad Men Unbuttoned, Natasha Vargas-Cooper sheds light on the reality that inspired everyone’s favorite TV show. Drawing on references from John Cheever, Mary McCarthy, Coco Chanel, and Draper Daniels (the real-life Don Draper), she illustrates the challenges of making another cultural period come to life. She recently answered my questions via e-mail from her home in L.A. How did this book come about? Last year I had quit my job in labor politics, left my boyfriend of five years, fled from Brooklyn and moved back in with my parents. Then my dog ran away. After a bout of some well earned wallowing, I sprang up at 4 A.M. and decided I’d rewatch the show. I popped in the DVDs, started a blog for kicks, figuring I’d be putting my degree in history to work. I got a call from HarperCollins about a month later. Can you talk about the themes that give the book its structure? I think the show depicts the social fissures that began to appear during the late 1950s and eventually entered the counter-cultural movement of the 1960s. The show has three main prisms through which it examines these changes: advertising, domestic life, sex. (I’m specifically interested in Peggy’s sex life since she is at the mercy of all the shifts in sexual mores given her age.) So the main themesof the book are the anxieties and exuberance that come with such accelerated change. Why are people so delightfully geeky about the details and cultural theory behind Mad Men? We’re watching the foundation of out modern taste come together—that’s fascinating! The show lends itself to a gleeful analysis. Its use of culture is deliberate. References to pop culture or politics aren’t thrown in to be cute or suggestive, but to enhance the themes of the show or our understanding of the characters. I think the audience appreciates not being treated like a mope so they get jazzed about it. In the chapter on the books of Mad Men, you use original artwork as stand-in covers for classic literature (see below). Did you commission these specifically? Yes I did. I saw Christina Perry’s Mad Men posters floating around online and I instantly fell in love with them. When we were trying to get the rights to reprint the covers like Atlas Shrugged and The Group and I thought, “These aren’t really in line with the mood of the show. I’d like to have some original art work, so why not get the poster lady?” Have you ever tried to sneak onto the set of the show? Hunt down Matt Weiner in one of the coffee shops near the studio? Nope, I’m big on dignity. Do you dress up or throw Mad Men parties? Read More
August 20, 2010 Ask The Paris Review Cougar Lit, Gender Confusion By Lorin Stein Is there a story or book that can shed light on whether a woman should sleep with men she doesn’t love or know very well? Younger men, specifically? —A. Chesterfield You’re in luck! This is pretty much the animating question behind French literature of the last two hundred years, starting with Adolphe (no) and ending with The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (yes). No book puts the question more starkly than Colette’s masterpiece, Cheri (yes and no: sex is tragic). Non-French novels have reached some memorable conclusions of their own. Good Morning, Midnight, for instance (sex is tragic: get me a drink), or The Piano Teacher (hell no). (But skip it and see the movie.) Most novels, it has to be said, fall into the no column. The stories of Maupassant give one long resounding yes. You might begin with “A Country Excursion.” This story shocked Tolstoy, with good reason—it is a cannon-blast against the nos. The movie version, Jean Renoir’s A Day in the Country, is lighter hearted. And if light-hearted is what you want, check out the Hungarian Stephen Vizincey’s 1965 novel In Praise of Older Women or Mario Vargas Llosa’s linked bagatelles In Praise of the Stepmother and The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto (yes, yes, yes, yes, YES). Read More
August 20, 2010 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Sinner Semester, Tony Judt By The Paris Review Raced through a great book this week, The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University by Kevin Roose. He took a semester off from Brown and went undercover at Falwell’s Liberty University. The portrait he paints of the place is nuanced and fascinating. —Caitlin Roper I was amazed to learn, from the strangers at Wolfram Research, that the best hangman word is not “syzygy” but “jazz.” And by the inimitable Jed Perl on Salvador Dali and his “cosmic junkyards,” and what one presumes will be Tony Judt’s last published essay. And, finally, anyone caught up in the resurgent moralistic fuss over steroids and baseball should read Eric Walker’s definitive and dismissive “Steroids, Other ‘Drugs,’ and Baseball.” —David Wallace-Wells “The Burdens of Manliness,” an article in the summer 2010 Harvard Journal of Law and Gender. John M. Klang makes an amusing disclaimer: “I am sure to provoke disbelieving groans from some of the thoughtful readers of this Journal … I should add at the outset, however, that mine is neither a contrived joke borne of some middle-aged fraternity dare nor a stale plea left over from the sensitive troglodyte yearnings of the 1980s Men’s Movement.” —Daisy Atterbury Seeing as Tom McCarthy’s new novel, C, is coming out in a few weeks, I thought it might be worth re-reading his last, Remainder. It was. In contrast to many recent “novels of ideas,” McCarthy doesn’t discuss concepts and theories: he sets them in motion, in a way only the narrative arts can—leaving the discussion for his readers. A beautifully rendered work. —Mark de Silva Finally picked up Paul Harding’s Tinkers, the tiny book from Bellevue Literary Press that won the Pulitzer last year. I recommend it. —Thessaly La Force I’ve been slowly making my way through The Magic Mountain. For the length of an entire subway ride, I can escape to a European sanatorium, where six-course meals are served by dwarves, young ladies whistle with their nitrogen-inflated lungs, and naps on reclining deck chairs are mandatory. —Miranda Popkey Rereading The Beautiful and Damned. Why? Because there it was at St. Mark’s Books, and there I was late for a haircut with nothing to read—and because, really, what could be better? —Lorin Stein
August 19, 2010 Poetry Poem: The Golden Bowl By Michael Snediker An insidious little poem for today by Michael Snediker. We liked the confrontational flirtation here, the crispness of its Jamesian distinctions, and the uncanny feeling of being caught holding a missing puzzle piece. —Dan Chiasson Read More
August 19, 2010 At Work Vendela Vida By Patrick Loughran Vendela Vida’s new novel, The Lovers, follows a middle-aged Vermont woman, recently widowed, as she vacations in the unfamiliar territory of Turkey in an attempt to re-examine her life. Among these new surroundings, her initial numbness about her bereavement gives way to doubt over whether her marriage was even happy, and she has to face up to a pain she never anticipated. Vendela Vida recently answered my questions over lunch during her book tour’s stop-over in New York City. What drew you to set this novel in Turkey? It was completely an accident. I went there for a month in June of 2005 when I was trying to finish my second novel, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, and wanted to be far away from the Arctic Circle in winter—the setting of that novel—and free from the day-to-day distractions of my life in San Francisco. I found a rental house by typing “Turkey,” “rental,” “cheap,” and “beach” into a search engine. I had no intention of setting a novel there, but a year later, this house and this town I stayed in kept appearing in my mind. I couldn’t get rid of the idea of writing about Turkey, so I did. Did the house you stayed in have any of the unusual contents of the vacation house in the book? Yes. I usually don’t like to take details from life, but, in this case, I couldn’t resist. The owners left out things that people typically wouldn’t leave out—sex swings, pornographic photos of the wife, books on sexual positions. My husband and I would leave the house to swim, or eat, or explore, and when we returned we would want to be in a neutral, uncomplicated place to relax and absorb everything new we’d seen and experienced beyond the walls of the house, but we were continually affronted by some new and intimate discovery about the owners’ lives. I wanted to put Yvonne, the protagonist of The Lovers, in a discomfiting situation like that. Lionel Shriver has said she writes partly as catharsis-in-advance. So she wrote about death to experience bereavement. Was this a motive for you in exploring the character of Yvonne? I write a lot from a place of fear. My friend, the writer Amanda Davis, who was killed in a plane crash in 2003, said that every day you should write about something that scares you. I was finishing this book just after the birth of my second child and the notion that this newborn could one day be estranged and the source of pain for me was also something I feared—and so I made Yvonne’s relationship with her daughter an especially fraught and challenging one. Even the vague idea of my husband dying is something that devastates me. So I was tapping into that fear when creating Yvonne, who’s fifty-three and a widow, and trying to imagine what it would be like to lose someone after spending half your life with them. Read More