{"id":65188,"date":"2014-01-17T16:59:46","date_gmt":"2014-01-17T21:59:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=65188"},"modified":"2014-02-24T09:18:22","modified_gmt":"2014-02-24T14:18:22","slug":"what-were-loving-gremlin-jokes-spiritual-paths-sundae-ire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/01\/17\/what-were-loving-gremlin-jokes-spiritual-paths-sundae-ire\/","title":{"rendered":"What We\u2019re Loving: Gremlin Jokes, Spiritual Paths, Sundae Ire"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Backgammon<\/a>

Jane Frelicher, Backgammon<\/i>, 1982.<\/p><\/div>\n

It\u2019s been almost fifteen years since Akhil Sharma published his first novel, An Obedient Father<\/a><\/i>. This terrible, improbably funny book\u2014about a single mother forced to share an apartment with the father who raped her as a child\u2014won Sharma a PEN\/Hemingway prize, a Whiting Award, and praise from the likes of Jonathan Franzen and Joyce Carol Oates. (I remember because it was the first novel I had the honor of editing.) Now Sharma is back with Family Life<\/i>, the tale of an Indian American boy coming of age in the shadow of a family disaster. It too is terrible and improbably funny, and is excerpted in this week\u2019s New Yorker<\/i><\/a>. With acid, deceptively artless prose and a faultless ear for dialogue, Sharma strips his characters bare from page one and dares us to love them in their nakedness. I cannot think of a more honest or unsparing novelist in our generation. \u2014Lorin Stein<\/b><\/p>\n

Michael Hofmann is the only translator whose work I would read no matter what he decided to English\u2014if only I could keep up with him! In the excellent new issue of Asymptote<\/i>, he tells a story about interviewing Wolfgang Koeppen in 1992<\/a>, four years before the German novelist\u2019s death. (\u201cWith my English reticence and youth, I met Koeppen halfway: in other words, we were both barely out of our shells.\u201d) He also writes of the Joseph Mitchell\u2013like silence that Koeppen fell into after the publication of Death in Rome <\/i>(1954) and lauds the still-untranslated last book, Youth <\/i>(1976)\u2014giving us reason to hope he might be at work on an English version. The final remarks on Koeppen\u2019s sentences\u2014continually \u201csidestepping into freedom,\u201d \u201cscrupulously managed, supple, cadenced, sumptuously lexical, expressive prose\u201d\u2014double as a description of Hofmann\u2019s own writing. \u2014Robyn Creswell<\/b><\/p>\n

Poetry<\/i>\u2019s January issue<\/a> contains a thirty-page feature on Jane Freilicher: her artwork and her close friendships with a number of poets, among them Frank O\u2019Hara, John Ashbery, and James Schuyler. The section is adapted from Tibor de Nagy Gallery\u2019s wonderful exhibition, last summer, \u201cJane Freilicher: Painter Among Poets<\/a>\u201d (it\u2019s currently on view at the Poetry Foundation, in Chicago<\/a>). I remembered having glimpsed the show\u2019s catalogue in Lorin\u2019s office. I liberated it, and I\u2019m not sure I\u2019ll give it back. It\u2019s like having a scrapbook made by the people whose work you most admire, and it shows that they had as good a time in one another\u2019s company as you\u2019d imagined. \u201cSome little gremlins seemed to have popped loose in my idea factory and I think they may have been sent over from Koch\u2019s brassiere factory,\u201d writes Freilicher to O\u2019Hara. And in what may be my favorite letter in the whole book, from Jane to Frank on a poem of his: \u201cit just don\u2019t seem to have that real low-down smelly sexy everyday Olympian quality your admirers depend upon.\u201d \u2014Nicole Rudick<\/b> <\/p>\n

\u201cA so-called adult sundae is adult only in the sense that all the fun is gone, scoops arrayed stolidly in a row. True, the chocolate ice cream is spiked with Scotch and the cherries soaked with Pimm\u2019s, but these come off as mostly medicinal. Hardly an incentive to grow up.\u201d Ligaya Mishan\u2019s review of the East Pole<\/a> manages to be hilariously caustic without getting nasty: no mean feat. \u2014Sadie O. Stein <\/b><\/p>\n

I\u2019d had Tracie Egan Morrissey\u2019s \u201cInside the Rainbow Gulag: The Technicolor Rise and Fall of Lisa Frank<\/a>\u201d waiting patiently in a browser tab for more than a month; this week I finally read it. Frank is, as children of the nineties know, a kind of school-supplies doyenne: her company made the most unabashedly treacly notebooks, lunchboxes, and stickers ever to see a first grader\u2019s cubby. As Morrissey writes, \u201cFrank\u2019s name alone conjures up a specter of koala bears clinging to rainbow-flavored ice-cream cones, neon tiger cubs frolicking with surfing penguins, and, of course, majestic unicorns prancing before a swirl of hearts and stars.\u201d It\u2019d never occurred to me that there might be a sordid story behind all this, but then again, how could the creator of such a lurid fantasy-world not<\/i> be completely fucked up? Morrissey\u2019s piece shows us the surreal animosity that ruled Frank\u2019s Tucson, Arizona, headquarters. There\u2019s screaming and cocaine and extramarital affairs, all of them drenched in garish colors. Throw in a couple murders and the story would have all the trappings of one of the more vicious Coen Brothers satires, like Burn After Reading<\/i>. \u2014Dan Piepenbring<\/b><\/p>\n

As I get older and read more criticism and, thus, write less and less, I find myself turning again to Julia Cameron\u2019s bestselling The Artist\u2019s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity<\/a><\/i> (1992). Those for whom chirpy self-helpfulness tends to bring on spiritual and creative nausea will appreciate Cameron\u2019s down-to-business exercises (the \u201cJealousy Map\u201d is particularly illuminating), and perhaps find themselves clearing both physical and mental space for a visit from the Muse.\u00a0\u2014Rachel Abramowitz<\/b><\/p>\n

A few years back, Paris Review<\/i> contributor David Gordon<\/a> published his debut novel, The Serialist<\/i><\/a>. The book was satirical but also true to its crime-fiction roots. It was also really funny. Little did any of us, including Gordon himself, know that it was to become a huge success\u2014in Japan. In the New York Times<\/i> Magazine<\/em><\/a>, Gordon recounts his \u201cdouble life,\u201d where \u201cpeople toasted me and applauded my ability to eat with chopsticks or sign my name really big on a poster.\u201d He adds, \u201cIt was as if I had fallen asleep and had a weird dream about my own book.\u201d And, in a way, it is a dream, as his day-to-day life back in the States has not really changed. The \u201cwonder\u201d of another life also plays into Takashi Hiraide\u2019s The Guest Cat<\/i><\/a>, a novel I just completed in a blur of a few hours. Short and subtle, the book explores the lives of two writers who one day invite a neighbor\u2019s cat into their home. The cat comes and goes as she pleases, but, as Hiraide observes, \u201cwas her coming to our house a return\u2014a homecoming\u2014or was it the other way around? Was home really over there?\u201d \u2014<\/b>Justin Alvarez<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s been almost fifteen years since Akhil Sharma published his first novel, An Obedient Father. This terrible, improbably funny book\u2014about a single mother forced to share an apartment with the father who raped her as a child\u2014won Sharma a PEN\/Hemingway prize, a Whiting Award, and praise from the likes of Jonathan Franzen and Joyce Carol […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[438],"tags":[1627,8581,12023,110,2015,12599,1967,883,12600,12598],"class_list":["post-65188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-akhil-sharma","tag-david-gordon","tag-jane-freilicher","tag-jonathan-franzen","tag-joyce-carol-oates","tag-julia-cameron","tag-michael-hoffman","tag-staff-picks","tag-takashi-hiraide","tag-tracie-egan-morrissey"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhat We\u2019re Loving: Gremlin Jokes, Spiritual Paths, Sundae Ire by The Paris Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"January 17, 2014 \u2013 It\u2019s been almost fifteen years since Akhil Sharma published his first novel, An Obedient Father. 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