October 29, 2010 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Dickens vs. Balzac, Austen vs. Austin By The Paris Review I’ve gone from one big novel about a vengeful Paris seamstress—A Tale of Two Cities—to another: Cousin Bette. Charles Dickens’s Mme Defarge leaves more blood on the cobblestones, but Bette’s the scarier of the two. Just as Balzac is the scarier writer. No one has more vicious fun writing about sex, aging, and money. It’s all good for a laugh … but that is some seriously dark, Olympian laughter. —Lorin Stein I have just read Love is Like Park Avenue, a collection of stories and vignettes written in the late 1930s and early 40s by Alvin Levin, a Bronx-raised avant-gardist and pamphleteer. The action—most of it cerebral—is set among young lower-middle class Jews, who go to City College, fish on the weekends off City Island, listen to Glen Miller, and think about how to get into each other’s pants. “She was soooo pretty,” one character coos. “Like something out of a 35 cent movie. You didn’t need technicolor. In black and white it was packed full of glamour—in a quiet way. Can you get what we mean?” Along with Richard Price’s early novels, and the next-to-last section of Delillo’s Underworld, this is a Bronx classic. —Robyn Creswell It will probably come as a surprise to no one that The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis are really, exceptionally, almost unbelievably good. I’ve been keeping a notebook with me while I read so I can jot down my favorite phrases. From “Five Signs of Disturbance”: “She knows that if she speaks on the telephone, her voice will communicate something no one will want to listen to. And she will have trouble making herself heard.” From “The Professor”: “I thought if I married a cowboy, I wouldn’t have to leave the West. I liked the West for its difficulties.” —Miranda Popkey Read More
October 22, 2010 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Zoë Heller, Roald Dahl, Wes Anderson By The Paris Review Zoë Heller’s savvy essay on Roald Dahl presents the enduring master of children’s fiction (somewhat less enduring, though still somewhat masterly, in his writing for adults) as a perfect misanthrope: At dinner parties, Dahl’s potent gifts of vituperation regularly sent fellow guests home early. He was once thrown out of a London gambling club for complaining at the top of his voice about the disgusting Jews who were spoiling the place. When his seventeen-year-old daughter Tessa accused him, accurately, of having an affair with Felicity Crosland, the family friend for whom he would later leave Neal, he berated her for being “a nosy little bitch.” He was forever bashing out bitter letters to his publishers and his agents, complaining about perceived slights to his authorial dignity. When he finally threatened to leave Knopf, his editor Robert Gottlieb was only too happy to show him the door. “Let me reverse your threat,” he wrote to Dahl. “Unless you start acting civilly to us, there is no possibility of our agreeing to publish you. Nor will I—or any of us—answer any future letter that we consider to be as rude as those we’ve been receiving.” —David Wallace-Wells Eugène Guillevic called his charming 1967 book, Euclidiennes, a “somewhat peculiar bestiary.” Each short poem is a caption or ekphrasis for a geometrical figure: line, ellipse, cylinder, spiral. Some figures are apostrophized, others speak in their own voice, and the result is as witty as anything in La Fonatine. Here is “Tangent” (you remember, a straight line that touches a curvaceous line at just one point), expertly “Englished” by Richard Sieburth in the recently released Geometries: “I will only touch you once. / And it will only be in passing. // No use calling me back, / No use reminding. // You will have plenty of time / To rehearse and remember / This moment, // To convince yourself / We’ll never part.” —Robyn Creswell Read More
October 15, 2010 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Booker Gossip, Wittgenstein Gags By The Paris Review Two years ago, in honor of the fortieth anniversary of the Booker Prize, The Guardian dredged up a judge from every single year willing to dish on the behind-the-scenes goings-on: Wives promote their husbands’ books; punches are thrown; Salman Rushdie is insulted. Another Booker-related treat: a funny and surprisingly poignant profile of aging table-tennis great Marty Reisman, written in 1999 by this year’s winner, Howard Jacobson (once a ranked junior table-tennis player in England), published for the first time in the U.S. this week by Tablet Magazine. Sample description of Marty: “a leftover Beat poet about to read to a bunch of contemporary kids in a non-English speaking country.” —Miranda Popkey “A typical Wittgenstein gag was drawing an arrow to the ‘W.C.1’ in a London address on a letter he was going to mail and writing, ‘This doesn’t mean ‘Lavatory.’” If the great man finding amusement in such things tickles you—and it really should—you’ll enjoy the rest of Jim Holt’s little book Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes. And oh yes, French children are apparently fond of jokes about the fantastical creature known as the zizi tordu, or “twisted penis.” Now you’ll read the book, won’t you. —Mark de Silva A History of Love, by Nicole Krauss. I was pulled in by the fluid, experimental structure and kept reading because Krauss, like Roth, gets Jewish families exactly right. Elie Wiesel wrote that the ambivalent “and yet” is the most Jewish of phrases; it is also protagonist Leo Gursky’s constant refrain. —Kate Waldman The novelist Douglas Coupland previews his upcoming, five-part Massey Lecture on the culture of our near-future in the Globe and Mail. And Vaughan Bell looks backward, to an era in which murder was among our most social and democratic activities. —David Wallace-Wells Zadie Smith has a short essay in The New Yorker‘s money issue about lending funds to a friend. I appreciate her honesty: “Until this episode, I’d thought of myself as a working-class girl who’d happened upon money, my essential character unchanged. But money is not neutral; it changes everything, including the ability to neutrally judge what people will or will not do for it.” Bonus: Zadie was a young violist, just as I was! —Thessaly La Force
October 8, 2010 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Feckless Frenchmen, Old Philip Roth By The Paris Review The hero of Emmanuel Bove’s My Friends, a wounded WWI pensioner with no friends, is possibly the most pathetic character in French literature. I invite corrections—there are so many feckless Frenchmen!—but first, consider this Seine-side gambit for drawing the attention of strangers: “As soon as a passer-by approached I hid my face in my hands and sniffed like someone who has been crying. People turned as they went past me. Last week I came within a hair’s breadth of throwing myself into the water in order to make it appear I was in earnest.” He never takes the leap, but the ending will wring your heart. —Robyn Creswell J. M. Coetzee writes an elegant review of Philip Roth’s latest (what is it—twenty-sixth?) novel, Nemesis. I like that one heavyweight can address another in the literary ring. Writes Coetzee, “If the intensity of the Roth of old, the ‘major Roth,’ has died down, has anything new come in its place?” But before you click, a warning to all: Coetzee completely spoils the novel. —Thessaly La Force A Google research paper examining how well computers translate poetry is less interesting for its findings—not all that well, just yet—than for its suggestion that our evolving Turing-test standards may be too high for most humans to reach, either. —David Wallace-Wells The NYRB reprint of Frans G. Bengtsson’s The Long Ships is an unrepentantly guilty pleasure that, in its own way, reads like a Viking version of Hustle and Flow (Michael Chabon praised its virtues earlier on this blog). Part of Bengtsson’s charm is the characteristically black Scandinavian humor that seduces you into thinking that maybe the Middle Ages just got a bad rap. Witness the treatment given to unfortunate missionaries: Such priests as did venture into those parts were sold over the border as in the old days; though some of the Göings were of the opinion that it would be better to kill them on the spot and start a good war against the skinflints of Sunnerbo and Albo, for the Smalanders gave such poor prices for priests nowadays … And then there’s the wonderful account of the trials and tribulations of a young raider on the scene, Red Orm, just trying to make a name for himself in a world of sacking and pillaging where problems never end: “The Vikings ransacked the fortress for booty, and disputes broke out concerning the women whom they discovered … for they had been without women for many weeks.” After all, it’s hard out here for a thane. —Peter Conroy
October 1, 2010 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Sleepless in a Sleeper, Murdered Beavers By The Paris Review I have been reading Richard Holmes’s Footsteps. If you’re ever sleepless on a sleeper train at two o’clock in the morning crossing southern Illinois (or shunning breakfast conversation in the diner six hours later), I recommend it. —Lorin Stein George Saunders’s masterful short story “Commcomm” in The New Yorker. An acidic workplace satire that somehow free-falls into a Christian redemption myth. Plus, it features one of fiction’s most memorable headlines: MURDERED BEAVERS SPEAK OF AIR FORCE CRUELTY. —Kate Waldman I reread Mrs. Dalloway last Sunday. Kept coming back to parts of it all week, underlying here, circling there. This line sticks out to me today: “For in marriage a little license, a little independence there must be between people living together day in day out in the same house …” —Thessaly La Force After seeing a selection of Stones, the late-fifties lithographic collaboration between Larry Rivers and Frank O’Hara, in a sneak preview of MoMA’s new “Abstract Expressionist New York” exhibition, I’ve been perusing my much-thumbed copy of O’Hara’s Collected Poems and the wonderful In Memory of My Feelings, a collection of poem-paintings (originally created in 1967) that pairs O’Hara’s verse with works of art by more than two dozen of his contemporaries. O’Hara worked as a staff member and curator at the Museum of Modern Art during much of the fifties and early sixties, when many of the works in this show were being created. It’s perfect that his art is there among them. —Nicole Rudick In lower moments, I have also been relishing David Rakoff’s essay collection Half Empty. Tough, suave, dry, and very funny. —L. S. This week, two articles have been helping me think through the dreary and troubling sameness at the core of today’s “diverse,” “multicultural” literary community: Tim Parks’s cogent piece in The New York Review of Books and Evert Cilliers’s flawed but stimulating polemic at 3quarksdaily. —Mark de Silva I revisited Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, which explores the repercussions of pain’s inexpressibility. It dredged up memories of emergency-room visits past, when the doctor entreats you to describe your pain on a scale of one to ten. “A three?” I would say, unconvincingly. As Scarry points out, pain (sadly) can only be expressed by its agents— the hammer, the burning flame, the wrenching wrench. —Alexandra Zukerman My friend gave me When You Reach Me because the main character and I have the same first name, but that’s by no means the only reason to read this excellent novel. Sure, it’s a children’s book, but its themes—the fumbling processes by which we attempt to assert independence; the challenges of expressing affection; that moment when you begin to understand how things work—remain resonant. Bonus: It’s also about time travel, and the chapters are very short—perfect for brief subway rides and five-minute waits. —Miranda Popkey Hurry! The Naipauls are coming to dinner. —David Wallace-Wells
September 24, 2010 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Nathanael West, Pavement, Eliza Griswold By The Paris Review I’ve just finished Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts and am halfway through The Day of the Locust (New Directions not long ago issued them together in a single paperback volume). The undercurrent of violence in the two novels, the way in which nearly every act and thought is awash in it, is startling. The characters in Miss Lonelyhearts are drowning in Prohibition booze; how else to manage the crushing disappointment and despair of early thirties America? But the illusion of Hollywood hope that masks alienation and desperation in Day of the Locust feels like a much longer hangover. —Nicole Rudick If you fell in love with Stephen Malkmus’s dead eyes in the “Major Leagues” music video, or appreciate apathy raised to the level of art, or just really like the sound of 1994, then read Chuck Klosterman’s GQ profile of Pavement from earlier this year. New York Magazine also has a sharp—and more recent—analysis of the band’s resurgent appeal. —Miranda Popkey The Tenth Parallel, Eliza Griswold’s account of years traveling through regions of Africa and Asia crossed by the latitudinal line that—owing to centuries of historical accidents and decades of misguided Western intervention—marks where Christian and Muslim cultures meet, or rather collide. What’s particularly striking is the restraint of the writing, given the violence—both physical and spiritual—she chronicles in a series of stories. There are clearly no simple answers to the conflict, and Griswold, to her credit, avoids reductive solutions or comforting interpretations. The stories themselves are enough. —Peter Conroy The GQ oral history of GoodFellas is a reminder that the best pulp culture is invariably produced by insurgent campaigns. It’s also made me wonder whether the enduring power of “Then He Kissed Me” owes more to the Steadicam shot to which Scorsese set it, or vice versa. —David Wallace-Wells I heard David Bezmozgis read from his forthcoming novel, The Free World, at the FSG Reading Series last Tuesday. And I pocketed a galley that’s been keeping me up past my bedtime. The book isn’t out until April of next year, but in the meantime, you can tide yourself over with “The Train of Their Departure” in The New Yorker. —Thessaly La Force I watched eagerly the first installment of “Grand Openings,” a video essay on director David Fincher—and especially his credit sequences—by Matt Zoller Seitz and Aaron Aradillas. Nobody else seems to have figured out how to make use of the possibilities of video criticism beyond the DVD-commentary model, and though the series Seitz has produced for the Museum of the Moving Image’s Moving Image Source over the past year or two might not be all masterpieces, he is truly miles ahead of the competition. —D. W.-W.