The Reading Experience

Gilbert Sorrentino: An Introduction

All completed chapters of Gilbert Sorrentino: An Introduction can be found here in .pdf, here as a webpage, and here on its own website. More to come.

 

New Sorrentino Chapter

I have completed a new chapter of my short book, Gilbert Sorrentino: An Introduction, which appears below. You can also access a pdf version of this chapter here, as well as a web page version here. The previous chapters of the book can be found here:

 

Sorrentino the Craftsman

 

Aberration of Starlight

            To an extent it is understandable that an inexperienced reader of Gilbert Sorrentino’s fiction might assume that works like Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things and Mulligan Stew, in rejecting the conventional referentiality of realistic fiction, not only question traditional narrative form but also “craft” as the term has come to be associated with the craft of storytelling in particular. However, while both of these books surely do seem to spotlight their apparent formlessness—Mulligan Stew explicitly announces it in its title—Sorrentino’s ultimate purpose is not to dispense with form in fiction, only the ossified form in which conventional verisimilar narrative was confined. These two books represent his most radical exercises in self-reflexivity, but in undermining the assumptions of narrative transparency in fiction, they substitute structures of language that are just as deliberately crafted as the most “well-made” of conventional stories.

            If anything, the disruption in Imaginative Qualities and Mulligan Stew of the presumed aesthetic order of fiction only emphasizes the centrality of both craft and form more emphatically, not because of their absence but because that order is revealed to be nothing but the craftedness of form, that is, not identical with the customary practices of storytelling. This conception of the malleability of fictional form underlies all of Sorrentino’s fiction after Mulligan Stew: each new work seems predicated on the belief that a novel (or, in a few instances, a short story) has no fixed form to the demands of which it must comply, and thus “form” is literally reinvented from work to work. Although readers can certainly disagree about how successful these reinventions turn out to be, that every one of these works is composed with an attention to formal patterns and structures that can only be called rigorous: “craft” may actually evoke a practice that is too routine to adequately describe the care with which Sorrentino assembles his structures.

            In no other book, however, does Sorrentino apply the precepts of craft according to something like the conventional understanding of the term as in the immediate follow-up to Mulligan Stew, Aberration of Starlight. While this novel incorporates many of Sorrentino’s signature strategies and devices—lists, questions-and-answers substituting for exposition, a high degree of fragmentation and the inclusion of fashioned documents (in this case mostly letters)—and presents us with overlapping points of view that do not seem to tell a consistent story, the careful reader soon enough can discern that this lack of consistency is actually the ultimate point of the narrative, while the devices are deployed in a very consistent way that binds the discrete versions of the narrative in a tightly wrought structure.

            Aberration of Starlight does tell a story, however refracted or contingent on perception, but ultimately it is not really a narrative-driven novel. In fact, it seems more recognizably a novel at all than a work like Mulligan Stew not because it has well-defined characters and shows linear development but because finally it attempts—and succeeds—in evoking, more or less visibly and coherently, a time and a place. (Even more directly and palpably than Steelwork.) While both character and event are subject to distortion and uncertainty, due to the novel’s shifting perspectives, its setting—a summer resort and boardinghouse near the New Jersey shore in the late 1930s—emerges whole and distinct. This is achieved not despite the contingencies of character and the artificial expository devices but through these aesthetic manipulations, through Sorrentino’s formal ingenuity.

            The shifts in perspective represent the four residents of the boardinghouse, whose differing perception of essentially the same events over the course of the summer provide the novel with its basic formal structure. Sorrentino does not merely relate his characters’ thinking through conventional psychological realism (“free indirect” narration) but presents the characters both from without (we are introduced to the first character, the boy, Billy, via a carefully described photograph) and through assorted, but ultimately integrated, means, invokes their experience as filtered from within. The expository devices involved are not deployed casually or haphazardly. Indeed, the novel’s structure is strikingly symmetrical: each section is roughly the same length; each contains, in more or less the same order, a brief, objective view of the character, from a neutral narrator’s perspective; an episode rendered in dialogue; a question-and-answer passage; a fantasia of sorts; extended passages devoted to the characters’ memories or direct third-person narration of the character’s current actions.

            If the collage-like form we encounter in Aberration of Starlight seems less radical than what we find in Mulligan Stew, it is more strictly applied, although not necessarily more attentively or deliberately. Mulligan Stew may seem like a miscellaneous collection of odds and ends, shards of discourse and interpolated documents, but this is a constructed illusion, the final effect of Sorrentino’s verbal artistry. The greater restriction of formal and rhetorical strategies in Aberration of Starlight perhaps makes the appearance of craft more evident to more casual readers, and in this way the novel could most plausibly be taken not so much as Sorrentino’s effort to rein in his anarchic impulses (which do exist, but are themselves more purposeful than chaotic), but to make some gesture at being more commercially accessible after the relative success and publicity he gained with Mulligan Stew.

            That Aberration of Starlight is a blatant stab at commercial appeal is probably belied by the fact that Sorrentino had begun writing it before the publication of Mulligan Stew. (Crystal Vision as well.) And of course it would only be expected that the novel’s publisher (Random House) would attempt to capitalize on Sorrentino’s unexpected recent success through more aggressive marketing and publicity. But Aberration of Starlight does seem, fortuitously timed or not, an effort to reach readers without previous exposure to Sorrentino’s work with a novel employing his alternative methods in a more readily comprehensible way, even in the service of relatively traditional literary goals—the creation of character and setting, the evocation of a fictional world that ultimately seems recognizable as a version of ordinary reality. Readers seeking linear narrative might still balk at the effort, but those amenable to something other than the most conventional sort of plot-driven novel indeed ought to find Aberration of Starlight approachable enough.

            Some critics have indeed found the novel rather too approachable, or at least that on the heels of Mulligan Stew it is (or was) a disappointingly restrained exercise, if not exactly conventional in its strategies then venturing to use only the sorts of unorthodox methods Sorrentino had already used in his previous work, methods that, according to one such critic (John Morse) merely suggest the “techniques of modernism” and thus finally “are just as dated as the characters” in the story. Although Aberration of Starlight by no means received uniformly negative reviews, it did not really fulfill hopes that Sorrentino might reach an even wider audience, and the critical response suggested that a significant number of admirers of Mulligan Stew expected Sorrentino not to broaden his appeal by adopting a more conservative manner but to extend the radical formal experiments of Mulligan Stew even more intensively.

            Perhaps the critic expressing the greatest disappointment with Aberration of Starlight was Paul West, who in the Washington Post reproved Sorrentino for essentially writing a realist novel, and who further accused him of being “uninventive” and of lacking the “virtuosity” a truly experimental writer should exhibit. Douglas Messerli partially agreed with West’s criticisms, although as an admirer of Sorrentino’s fiction (later a publisher) Messerli ultimately attempts to redeem the novel from “its sense of ironic nostalgia that Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren—those doyens of modern narrative theory—might applaud.” (I am myself not convinced that Brooks and Warren would necessarily deplore even Sorrentino’s more audacious narrative experiments, nor that satisfying the exigencies of these critics’ “narrative theory” would be undesirable or inappropriate for a writer like Sorrentino.) “It becomes apparent that what was first perceived as a bittersweet presentation of post-World War II America,” Messerli concludes in his review, “is, in the end, an indictment of the modern novel and the vision inherent in its structures” through Sorrentino’s exaggerations and distortions of these structures even as he seems to be using them.

            It is of course only a measure of how thoroughly the formal innovations of Mulligan Stew and Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things had prepared someone like Messerli to anticipate more of the same that he would be almost obliged to find something more radical in Aberration of Starlight that would explain (or explain away) its apparently more modest ambitions. But it seems to me that Messerli (not to mention West) was holding to an overly stringent commitment to literary experimentation of a certain kind—the kind that critics such as Messerli and West would acknowledge—that at best would be difficult for any writer to always satisfy. At worst, such an inherently prescriptive view of the acceptable scope of experimentation in works of literature seems to actually restrict the writer’s creative freedom to pursue fresh approaches to his/her art, even when this effort might seem to be an aesthetic step backward—for the writer such a step might not seem a retrenchment at all but in fact an experiment with an approach that writer has not previously adopted, and therefore quite literally “new.”

            None of this is to say that critics were wrong in noting the less emphatic formal daring of Aberration of Starlight, but the relevant question is whether this scaled-back quality should be attributed to a diminished interest in formal innovation (perhaps in favor of exploring more traditional narrative strategies) or is indeed simply an outright commercial gambit, an attempt at channeling Sorrentino’s iconoclastic impulses for a possibly wider audience. (A less charitable view would be to call it “selling out,” a charge Messerli comes close to making even as he attempts to recuperate the novel as a further expression of Sorrentino’s iconoclasm.) It is most likely that for Sorrentino the answer was something closer to the former, since while a larger audience would no doubt be an appealing prospect for any writer, there is little evidence in Sorrentino’s writing career before or after Aberration of Starlight that he would have been willing to seek such an audience on anything but his own challenging terms.

            That Sorrentino might have adopted a more recognizable form of “novel” only to undermine it as an “indictment” of that form seems a labored analysis of Aberration of Starlight, mostly because all of Sorrentino’s fiction can be seen as a subversion of the traditional novel as an entrenched literary form, and, relative to many of his other novels (and not just Mulligan Stew), Aberration of Starlight is a “normal” enough novel to indeed seem like an aberration in Sorrentino’s work. Perhaps, however, such an impression is inevitable when the writer wishes to emphasize traditional elements of fiction—character, setting—even if using untraditional means of doing so. (In this way, even Mulligan Stew is surely still describable as a novel, one that ultimately builds a compelling representation of the fictional character Antony Lamont.) Aberration of Starlight emphasizes both character and setting, so the impression that it is recognizably a novel becomes even harder to avoid,

            Yet Aberration of Starlight is not just a novel that evokes a time and place through other than conventional methods. Those methods themselves alter our perception of both time and place (as starlight is altered due to the velocity of earth’s orbit): the slippages in memory and attention manifest among the four characters portrayed in the novel attest to the unreliability of both when considering the past, and while the setting itself emerges intact in its historical detail, clearly, for each of the characters it takes on a different aspect. For 10 year-old Billy, the summer resort near Hackettstown is a place where he can temporarily reside in his still innocent hope that the man Tom Thebus, who is keeping company with Billy’s mother this summer, might be the replacement for the absent father for which he clearly longs. For Billy’s mother, Marie, it is an opportunity for love and a late sexual awakening as she responds with increasing favor to Tom’s advances. For Tom, it is the scene of his obviously habitual philandering and self-aggrandizement, although his behavior arguably is less hypocritical than that of Marie’s father, John. For him, the summer vacation is a time when he can fully assert his prerogatives as family patriarch, puritanically controlling his daughter’s life by obstructing her nascent romance (while himself pursuing one of the ladies frequenting the resort after the relatively recent death of his wife).

            Each character is given equal time to reveal and act on these attitudes, but that also further fragments the narrative perspective by reinforcing incommensurate versions of the events and interactions the novel recounts. Our view of each character is modified as one rendition succeeds another, and the ultimate juxtaposition of accounts, while it does provide the general contours of a discernible story, does not finally reconcile the four variants of the story so that the ultimate “truth” is made known. Is Tom Thebus a thwarted suitor, or simply a cad? Has Marie been denied the right to determine her own fate, or is she simply naïve? (Or both?) Should John be condemned as a self-righteous autocrat, or has he also to some extent been damaged by a wife who appears to have been even more monstrous? If the reader is asked to, in effect, hold all of these possibilities in suspension, is this a “creative” suspension whereby we arrive at a more complex awareness of reality, or is reality itself something that is always elusive?

            Perhaps the answer to each of the last two questions is “yes,” so that Aberration of Starlight is a novel that both offers a kind of realism by other means and subjects “reality” to a skepticism that is associated with postmodernism. Those expressing surprise or disappointment with the supposed conventionality of the novel were likely registering their doubts about the value of the former while overlooking the way the latter complicates the representational gesture. (Messerli chooses to cancel out that gesture.) Judging by the fact that Starlight did not sell out its original print run, it seems accurate to say that whatever effort was indeed involved to make Sorrentino more commercially successful did not really succeed (although sales were not disastrous), so that one could conclude—perhaps Sorrentino did—that readers still found the postmodern features in Aberration of Starlight to be more prominent than the realist novel bracketed within. (Even a muted challenge to readers’ expectations is still a challenge.) Arguably the period in Sorrentino’s career encompassing the release of Mulligan Stew and then the publication of his next few books represents the apogee of Sorrentino’s literary “fame,” but given the reluctance of American readers to countenance difference and difficulty in the fiction they read, that fame was inherently limited unless he was willing to even more fully trim his adventurous sails.

            The trajectory of the rest of Sorrentino’s career surely shows how unlikely this was always going to be. Sorrentino was a writer committed to formal invention and alternative orderings of language. To the extent that he would remain first of all a poet, such an orientation seems only proper, but a work like Aberration of Starlight does demonstrate, I would maintain, that Sorrentino is able to realize these aesthetic imperatives just as skillfully in a work of fiction that retains a recognizable structural façade of a novel (a more difficult move to pull off in a novel than it would be through a similar effort in a poem). Sorrentino does this as an exercise in craft, not to nullify the novel, as Messerli would have it, but to reanimate it, to exploit what John Barth called the “used up-ness” of literary form for the writer’s own artful purposes.

 

Crystal Vision

            Crystal Vision resembles a conventional novel less readily than Aberration of Starlight, although it is comparable to a novel such as William Gaddis’s JR (albeit less sweeping in scope), as well as to Sorrentino’s own Steelwork. Indeed, it shares with Steelwork a setting in Bay Ridge and the use of a large cast of characters representative of that neighborhood’s working-class inhabitants during the World War II era. Still, while the neighborhood itself is to some extent a center of attention in Crystal Vision, the focus of this novel is less on setting as a free-standing subject of interest but instead invokes it as an almost mythical place inhabited entirely by voices—not a “real” place at all but one rising from both memory and imagination.

            The characters in Crystal Vision do create a vivid enough impression of their Brooklyn community as they interact with each other, but they are also aware that it is actually their own creation, that they are literally bringing the neighborhood to life through their talk. Thus, unlike either Aberration of Starlight or Steelwork, Crystal Vision could not really be called a novel providing realism by other, nontraditional means. (Which is not to say it lacks authenticity, however.) Its subject is the process of its own representation, not the characters and milieu represented. Both character and setting emerge with the kind of particularity and detail that makes them memorable, but that is finally an incidental effect. Their credibility is the kind of credibility that the artistic imagination bestows, the kind that Sorrentino pursues in all of his work rather than creating the illusion that fictional characters “walk off the page” in their fidelity to life.

            Although the novel is composed almost entirely of talk (“dialogue” doesn’t really seem to accurately describe what the characters are up to), there are no quotation marks to emphasize the tangible presence of their talk. Stripped of the simulated immediacy induced by quotation, the novel’s scenes seem more like emanations from the past, voices finding themselves disembodied from their actual surroundings (although not really quite aware of this) and able to not just ignore the constraints of time and physical space (able to project themselves into manifestations of both), but to in fact summon characters and locations in the course of speaking about them. (Occasionally it is as if they are standing somewhere above and outside the scene that is the object of their observations.)

            The episodes of conversation and repartee are generally brief and self-enclosed, featuring voices that vary from episode to episode, but the scenes are ultimately comprised of a fixed, if extensive, cast of local characters. A few of them establish themselves quickly as distinctive voices—most prominently “the Arab,” who has an opinion about everything and expresses it in his semi-elevated but mostly maladroit English—but inevitably not all of the multiple voices become so individually delineated (although surely they are all singular to Sorrentino). But individuation of character in Crystal Vision is less important than their collective power to bring the neighborhood to life with their assertions and rejoinders, their descriptions of behavior among their friends and acquaintances, their sarcasm, exaggerations, and braggadocio.

            “Isabel and Berta? the drummer says” begins one chapter. “Oh God, a couple of honeys.” But this doesn’t just initiate a conversation about the two girls thus identified. It becomes clear the speaker is “seeing” them, although they are in fact not in the drummer’s presence:

   Restrict and prescribe them from your mind and its fantasies, the Arab says. They are not for you.

   I didn’t say they were. But God, how I hate to see them headed for dopey marriages with cars out on Long Island.

   Maybe Teaneck, Irish Billy says. There’s always a chance they’ll go to Jersey.

   Indeed, the Arab says. If they marry stout hearts whose noble and yearnful eyes glint and flash forever westward!

   Jokes can’t disguise those sour grapes, Arab, Irish Billy says.

   But hearken! And hark! The Arab says. What have we here?

   Willie Wapner dances and struts about in front of Isabel and Berta. Suddenly he executes a brilliant series of cartwheels and comes to rest directly before them.

   What a bore, Berta says.

   And a boor as well, Isabel says.

   Is that Willie Wapner showing off some of his stuff for the luscious lasses? the Arab says.

   It is Willie Wapner, the Drummer says. How he’s grown. The last time I saw him or even thought about him was, I can’t even remember when.

            The episode continues on to depict Willie Wapner’s rather abject attempts to gain the attention of Isabel and Berta, with ongoing remarks on the effort by the Drummer, the Arab, and Irish Billy. If at times it almost seems they are watching a film about which the characters provide a running commentary, at other times the characters simply assert they are “looking into the past” or react to a bit of narrative exposition as if actually hearing or reading it themselves. “Perhaps,” a disembodied narrative voices announces about a subsidiary character, “he is searching for a rare species of the Culex mosquito in Brooklyn and duly reported to the Bureau of Diptera Studies,” responding to which “The bureau of what? Big Duck says, shiny black bits of Nibs flying from his mouth.” It is as if Big Duck is attuned to the narrative discourse as it is created, as are all of the characters, whose role in the novel is not merely to act (or not even to act) but in discoursing about the neighborhood to awaken it into life. Perhaps this is ultimately what Sorrentino himself has to say about the gatherings at the candy stores and taverns in a place like Bay Ridge—that the essential reality of life in such places is given substance there, at least in retrospect. And Crystal Vision is, of course, very much a retrospective novel.

            The only way to represent this phenomenon is thus to enact it. The characters in Crystal Vision are not designed as “colorful” characters themselves but as conduits for the colorful attributes of the neighborhood—which do indeed include some pretty colorful characters who are talked about rather than being sources of the talk. Perhaps at least in this way Crystal Vision is comparable to Aberration of Starlight and Steelwork as an attempt to evoke both character and place via other than traditionally realistic means, but it is a reality that is subject to contingency and mutation, assembled in multiple versions so that it is the process of assembly that becomes the novel’s focus of attention. Some of Sorrentino’s fiction is more explicitly metafictional than others (generally speaking the most metafictional are the earliest works, with progressively fewer directly self-reflexive gestures thereafter), but almost all of his novels are implicitly metafictional in the way they so palpably employ methods of arrangement and assemblage as an alternative formal strategy.

            Crystal Vision employs such a method even more immediately (if not at first altogether noticeably) in its own selection and arrangement of episodes: the scenes in the novel each represent one of the 78 cards in the Tarot deck (both major and minor), giving what might otherwise seem a random assortment of such scenes an underlying formal structure that begins in a semi-Oulipian enactment of restraint that proves less constraining than conventional storytelling in allowing the development of character and situation through metaphorical elaborations that freely break from narrative continuity and surface realism. The reader already familiar with the Tarot deck and its symbology could certainly begin to see the correspondences between that symbology and the characters and situations presented in Crystal Vision quickly enough, but they are often subtle, and a reader could plausibly finish reading the book without really noticing them.

            Once alerted to the presence of this formal device, however, the reader’s appreciation of Sorrentino’s skill—which again seems an expression of craft reconstructed—is surely enhanced, although a danger lurks: the temptation to then inspect each episode for its connection to the relevant Tarot card to extract the secret “meaning” of the novel, to reduce Crystal Vision to an exercise in symbol-hunting verifying its fidelity to the Tarot deck instead of simply allowing Sorrentino  poetic license to creatively adapt Tarot imagery for his own literary purpose. It seems to me that Louis Mackey, author of the most often cited scholarly consideration of the novel, “Representation and Reflection in Crystal Vision,” unfortunately succumbs to this temptation, preferring to register the correspondences between episodes and cards as a substitute for more comprehensive literary analysis, focusing his attention on the interaction of literature and philosophy in a way that really fails to consider Crystal Vision in the context of Sorrentino’s other fiction, in particular the earlier, more conspicuously metafictional works that even more radically destabilize the boundary between fact and fiction that most interests Mackey.

            Like most of Sorrentino’s fiction, Crystal Vision certainly does call attention to its own fictionality, yet this gesture seems less central in and of itself to Sorrentino’s aesthetic goals than it does in, say, Mulligan Stew. Crystal Vision less blatantly challenges readers’ expectations of narrative transparency, even if it does not attempt to disguise its inherent artifice. Crystal Vision is not a crystalline representation of “reality,” but it does develop a surrogate reality that as imaginative projection is a concrete achievement. It does not merely subvert mimetic fidelity (although it does do that); it stands as an aesthetic creation that doesn’t just confuse fact and fiction: by asserting and cultivating its own fictionality, it becomes a new fact in the world, a work of literary art that knows itself as such. Its relevance is first of all to literature, not philosophy.

            Arguably the animating purpose of metafiction as it manifested itself in American fiction during the 1960s and 70s was not simply to expose the ultimate artifice of narrative fiction but in doing so to in effect free the writer (and reader) to the possibility of alternate strategies, to expand the range of possibilities for “art” in the art of fiction. Gilbert Sorrentino’s career could be seen as his effort to redeem these possibilities. In a sense, that fiction is an artificial construction (that narrative itself is an artificial construction) is something that is taken for granted in his work as Sorrentino tries out other devices (some more familiar, others entirely invented) that may renounce the claims to untroubled verisimilitude assumed by narrative realism but at the same time attempt to renew the potential for literary art to provoke and delight.

            The skill and consistency with which Sorrentino is able to continue fulfilling this aspiration surely must be attributed to both inspiration and craft. If Sorrentino’s work, including Crystal Vision, can plausibly be called “well-made,” it is by affirming the “made.” In Sorrentino’s works of fiction, language is not the storytelling medium but the form-producing medium. In some of Sorrentino’s later novels a story develops, but it is a story that emerges from the application of form, a secondary effect of the writer’s primary commitment to language and linguistic ingenuity. Craft of this kind is not the sort of thing to be learned from following guidelines or enrolling in a creative writing class. It requires that we regard fiction as a practice without fixed forms and approach the literary work as an opportunity to re-create form with each performance. What an aspiring writer can learn from reading Gilbert Sorrentino is that “experimental fiction” is not the opposite of craft, the rejection of “skills,” but is in fact the purest embodiment of craft as artistry.

            Sorrentino’s artistry aims not merely for proficiency but for transformation. The first character we encounter in Crystal Vision is a magician who has disguised himself as one of the characters and who returns throughout the novel, both as cloaked character and in his own guise. He is Sorrentino’s surrogate, the emblem of the writer’s role, The writer, like a magician, bends reality, add to it the potential for wonder and surprise. It is an illusion, but at its best is created by the magician-writer’s adept invocation of the tricks of the trade. Sorrentino’s tricks as a writer of fiction are more abundant and more unorthodox that what most writers have to offer, but his facility with them is no less complete

 

Blue Pastoral

            “Craft” in Blue Pastoral manifests itself in Sorrentino’s skills as a parodist. The novel might seem at first to be something like a return to the invoked anarchy of Mulligan Stew, but its apparent formal heterogeneity ultimately reveals a carefully considered purpose. “Pastoral” is not just a loose designation identifying the novel’s atmosphere or setting: Blue Pastoral is a sustained burlesque of the pastoral as literary form and aesthetic ideal. But Sorrentino doesn’t parody any one particular pastoral form or work, instead using the pastoral tradition to create his own hybrid form that transposes the imagery and conventions of pastoral to a very American setting.

            The novel follows the peregrinations of Serge Gavotte (known as Blue) and his wife, Helene, as they journey across the United States in pursuit of Serge’s dream of becoming a renowned musician by discovering the “perfect musical phrase.” Instead of playing the traditional shepherd’s pipe, however, Serge fancies himself a pianist, and he and Helene haul his piano with them in a pushcart Serge finds and refurbishes (later it has to be repaired by a pushcart repairman who just happens to show up when it breaks down). Unlike the two immediately preceding novels, in Blue Pastoral there seems to be no effort to invoke realism, either unconventionally or otherwise. Indeed, the characters are deliberate caricatures, the plot an extended farce. This novel is artifice all the way down, but while we are just as aware of its ubiquitous presence as in Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things or Mulligan Stew, the artifice of Blue Pastoral includes storytelling as a more central feature of the novel’s aesthetic strategy.

            If Blue Pastoral does want to tell us a story, it is obviously not of the “well-made” variety adapted from Gustav Freytag that has come to be regarded as identical with narrative itself. Sorrentino gives his narrative a picaresque structure, but this doesn’t mean it is simply a loose sequence of adventitious events (The picaresque form is not just a depiction of aimless wandering, although the best examples of the form might provide the illusion of such.) The most persistent pastoral motif in American literature (and American culture in general) is the idealization of the American countryside, its “virgin soil” and “untamed spaces,” an impulse that Sorrentino subjects to merciless mockery in tracking Serge Gavotte’s experiences as he treks across the country. (It’s hard not to think of Kerouac’s On the Road as an additional object of Sorrentino’s parody, this time more explicitly than in The Sky Changes.) One could say the center of interest in a picaresque novel has never actually been the resolution of the picaresque tale, or even the ultimate fate of the ostensible protagonist. The journey itself, and the sorts of people who show up and the kinds of behavior they exhibit, is what makes the work compelling, and Blue Pastoral if anything accentuates this quality.

            Arguably the picaresque form is inherently a satirical form, at least as it has been practiced by mostly comic writers who use the picaresque hero (or antihero) as an opportunity to expose the protagonist to a range of human folly and to the unavoidable contingency of all human affairs. Yet the comedy this produces is not primarily an expression of mockery but an inevitable effect of the protagonist’s encounters with the world he inhabits. Serge Gavotte is perhaps an even more hapless “hero” than most such characters, so that his own actions are hardly less deserving of ridicule than any of the characters he meets—although his desire to find the perfect musical phrase is not in itself an unworthy pursuit—and thus his is not a perspective from which to register a satirical take of American culture more broadly. At best Serge himself is implicated in the novel’s mockery but finally if Blue Pastoral does inevitably lampoon some recognizable attributes of American culture, it is not in an effort to improve or renovate that culture but to nullify it.

            As in most of Sorrentino’s fiction, the comedy he employs in Blue Pastoral is a version of Bakhtin’s “absolute comedy,” which takes nothing seriously, provoking laughter even at its own procedures. Indeed, Blue Pastoral farcically disassembles not just the conventions of the pastoral genre, but the enabling conventions of the novel form in general (even more directly than Mulligan Stew). In deemphasizing plot in favor of the linear succession favored by the picaresque, Sorrentino begins by radically reducing the novel’s narrative structure to its most elemental form, but most of the other expectations we might have of narrative fiction are likewise ostensibly satisfied but ultimately subverted in the comic deflation of the novel’s parody and pastiche. The hero’s journey is neither a rogue’s adventures nor an epic quest but an absurdist exercise in futility. Serge Gavotte as protagonist is mostly a cipher, more acted upon than acting (as when he is cuckolded by Helene), and the Gavottes’ trip across the continent is radically digressive, even by the standards of the picaresque novel (and Sorrentino’s previous novels). Unsurprisingly, Serge does not end his quest with the discovery of the perfect phrase, but instead when he and Helene complete their cross-country journey at the California coastline, they. . .tumble into the Pacific Ocean.

            Probably the most conspicuous challenge to novel-writing and -reading strategies in the novel is literally its language. Serge Gavotte’s story is told in a polyglot, mock-heroic, quasi-Elizabethan pastoralese, while its episodes are interspersed with various exercises in verbal invention that draw attention to such scenes as performances of language, routines that appear to suspend Serge’s quest narrative even as they act as the sort of lateral digressions characteristic of the picaresque novel. A politician’s wife (“Lesbia Glubut”) is profiled in a news feature written in the unctuous, sycophantic tone typical of such “journalism,” while her husband, Rep. “Hal” Glubut, gives a cliché-ridden speech defending himself against charges of “moral turpitude” (having sex with sheep). Several chapters clearly enough signal in their titles the sort of discourse we are going to encounter: “Blarney Spalpeen Gives Speech on St. Patrick’s Day,” “Father Donald Debris, S.J., Gives Talk on Sex.” The most prominent display of linguistic japery is ”La Musique et les mauvaises herbes,” a lightly pornographic book Serge brings along on the journey, but which is actually a translation from French—a literal translation of French into English, preserving the French idioms, word order, etc., producing a hilarious mishmash of translation malaprops: “If I could make a sex act on this gorgeous lady for five moments, I will permit my groinal region to have a bad for a week! She is some tootsie!”

            Although such passages in Blue Pastoral surely convey a kind of mockery, they register very weakly as satirical, since the humor, although abundant, is ultimately so unsparing that its mockery seems especially caustic. All satire comes as an inherent expression of scorn, but the mockery of a novel like Blue Pastoral does not emerge from an underlying impulse of anger or sorrow; Sorrentino in his comedic routines comes as close to expressing sheer, unalloyed contempt as it is possible for a novelist to come and still justify writing novels. If all a novelist has to offer is repetitive exercises in negation, the novel form has been reduced just as much to a vehicle for “saying something” as any conventional literary novel. But of course Sorrentino explicitly rejects this conception of the writer’s task. The objects of Sorrentino’s ridicule are generally already caricatures of themselves, so in choosing such easy targets he takes advantage of their used-upness to call attention instead to the language game itself: Sorrentino has little interest in figures such as Lesbia Glubut or Father Debris (or even Serge Gavotte) as “characters,” but uses them as material for the verbal treatments that are the true measure of Sorrentino’s intentions as an artist, not the “commentary” we might want to find in his unremitting burlesque.

            This may be the most fruitful way to understand Sorrentino’s appropriation of the pastoral form as well. If Blue Pastoral is most immediately a travesty of pastoral motifs and conventions, it does not discredit those conventions themselves but invokes them for the formal and stylistic turns they make possible. Sorrentino’s approach in this novel strongly recalls John Barth’s formulation of the “literature of exhaustion,” as it attempts to create something new out of timeworn practices by conspicuously brandishing these practices so that their very loss of continued relevance can be used to direct the reader’s attention to the adaptation of them for the writer’s own unorthodox purposes. In most of the novels following Blue Pastoral, Sorrentino is more likely to treat the novel form itself as something that is used-up—unlike Barth, who adopted the strategies of “exhaustion” precisely in order to continue writing novels (albeit unconventional ones)—resulting in books still identified as novels but otherwise little resembling conventionally-written novels.

            Blue Pastoral hangs on to the vestiges of literary tradition through its incorporation of pastoral elements and a picaresque narrative structure, but they are merely the pretext for Sorrentino’s transfiguration of such conventional devices into the source of verbal vignettes in which language creates its own self-sufficient effects. Through the way Sorrentino links these vignettes in an extended exercise in parody we can identify the craft of this novel, although some readers might think its verbal display to be too self-consciously performative to be regarded as craft. Indeed it might be said that Sorrentino makes language perform, but the goal is to make language visible, not the author staging the performance. Language must be made visible as the focus of aesthetic attention (not “story” or “character” or “theme”) so that an enhanced variety of formal and stylistic possibilities might present themselves to the adventurous writer (and reader). Sorrentino himself would experiment with such possibilities in all of his fiction subsequent to Blue Pastoral.

            None of this is to deny that Sorrentino’s work, taken as a whole, expresses a jaundiced view of human nature, as well as the customs and institutions human beings create. But his fiction does not exist first of all as the means for Sorrentino to impart this view. If it does communicate a satirical message (to some readers), it is a wholly contingent sort of communication, a “something said” fortuitously produced by the writer’s full commitment to the aesthetic shaping of language. This commitment, along with Sorrentino’s innate comic vision, surely does give Sorrentino’s novels a pervasively irreverent tone (both toward the novel as a form and toward human affairs in general). But this irreverence works to, in effect, clear the ground for a fresh aesthetic space in which Sorrentino the literary artist can exercise his verbal ingenuity without obeisance to the demands of “subject.”

            One could of course say that the subject of most of Sorrentino’s fiction is the nature of fiction itself. Certainly Mulligan Stew is the fullest (and perhaps greatest) realization of this subject in Sorrentino’s career as a writer of fiction, bug after the relative success of Mulligan Stew led Sorrentino to offer modified versions of the subject in an effort to widen his reach among readers, Blue Pastoral marks a return to the more radical exploration of form introduced in the metafictions of both Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things and Mulligan Stew. The novels after Blue Pastoral will be, if anything, even more resolutely unconventional, as if the fairly tepid sales of Aberration of Starlight and Crystal Vision convinced Sorrentino that gesturing to the literary mainstream was a wasted effort and decided to ignore its requirements altogether.

            But this does not mean that Sorrentino would abandon “craft” as redefined in all of the fiction he had written to this point, perhaps most palpably in the three novels succeeding Mulligan Stew. If Blue Pastoral shows Sorrentino to be a skilled parodist able to make from parody a formally intricate and stylistically audacious work of fiction, the work to follow, while it might be called implicitly parodic (of the novel’s formal conventions, of “normal” reading practices), mostly seeks to replace storytelling with the artful arrangement of language as the assumed purpose of fiction. To the reader accustomed to the narrative assumptions controlling most novels, these works likely seem arbitrary, even anarchic, although they are in fact scrupulously composed. Perhaps not all of the “experiments” in form Sorrentino offers in the later novels can be counted as successful, but any failures come from flaws in conception, not lack of discipline.

            Beyond what it might tell us about the direction of Gilbert Sorrentino’s career, Blue Pastoral itself stands as one of his most deftly executed works of fiction. In addition to the dexterity of its craft, however, it is also a greatly entertaining novel, an experimental fiction that finds in its stylistic agility and its outrageous humor a self-adequate substitute for the expected diversions of “plot” and “character.” In its own way, Blue Pastoral is a pleasure to read, although these pleasures cannot simply be passively consumed as a “rollicking tale.” Blue Pastoral is a picaresque novel that takes the reader on a journey into the refashioning of its own telling.

Unbeaten Paths

Issue 5 of Unbeaten Paths now available.

Under Review:

Emily Hall, The Longcut (Dalkey Archive)

Ansgar Allen, Wretch (Scism Neuronics), The Sick List (Boiler House Press), Plague Theatre (Equus Press)

Mark De Silva, The Logos (Splice/Clash Books)

Critic's Progress

New supplementary site: Critic's Progress: Essays in Literature and Criticism collects and arranges  my essays on the elements of literature, literary criticism, and literary study published on The Reading Experience and elsewhere.

Critic's Progress

New supplementary site: Critic's Progress: Readings and Reviews collects and arranges my reviews and critical essays published on The Reading Experience and elsewhere.

The Novel Could Be Dead

Taken together, Mark McGurl's three books, The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James, (2001), The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (2009), and Everything & Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon (2021) read like the author's attempt to perceive the entire "literary field" of the 20th and now 21st centuries in its fully visible totality. If the modern history of literary study in the United States, with the ascension of New Criticism, essentially begins in the close analysis of individual works of literature, the dominant approaches today, in books like McGurl's and the rise of "digital humanities," embrace distance and breadth, not critical rigor but scholarly amplitude, the ability (or at least the attempt) to "see it all."

The notion that to study literature is to contemplate a "literary field" is originally attributable to the French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, who posited that literary activity constituted a dynamic system in which all of the participants--writers, critics, publishers--occupy a "position" in this system relative to each other, each with their own priorities, to some extent in competition with each other but also to some extent sharing the reigning assumptions, both commercial and literary, of their time and place. From the interactions of these players in the system vying for the rewards and prestige the system avails comes the literary work, and to fully understand the meaning represented by the work we have to locate it in the "field of power" from which it emerged. Literary values are not so much subsumed to commercial values as actually pitted against commercial values so that the capital at stake is not financial but artistic--"cultural capital."

I confess I have never been much able to appreciate a sociological theory of literature such as Bourdieu's. Mostly it just seems to recapitulate the obvious (in suitably academic jargon): writers are subject to the prevailing cultural forces of their era. (How could they not be?) Writing is not produced in a self-enclosed aesthetic zone scrubbed of social influences. (How could it be?) Of course Bourdieu himself as a sociologist was perfectly justified in examining the structural processes of what we so loosely call the "literary world," but his work as taken up by literary scholars has been used to ground literary study in "material" concerns and not just to dismiss the aesthetic value of literature as a hopelessly subjective interest but in general to imply that the aesthetic doesn't really exist apart from its determination by material conditions. In some cases this is accessory to (or excuse for) the politicization of literary study that is now a fait accompli, but ultimately marks the mutation of academic criticism into a sub-branch of sociology, a transformation that can only contribute to the final dissolution of academic literary study as a separate discipline. (Who needs a special focus on literature when it can easily be folded into social analysis more generally?)

McGurl does not dismiss the aesthetic value of literature, although he consistently refers to it as an "elite" preoccupation that has as much to do with status as it does with the actual experience or creation of works of art. The first book, The Novel Art, is ostensibly about the "art novel," which McGurl defines as a literary work intended as an object of art, not commerce, but this very ambition is treated with implicit suspicion, as just another form of accumulation, in this case the accumulation of prestige rather than money. In some ways, McGurl's books in fact favor the latter kind of gain over the former (especially in Everything & Less, where the prevailing tone is one of barely concealed admiration for the scale of Amazon's success, a sort of awestruck wonder at the canniness of Jeff Bezos), which at least has the virtue of being undeceived about its aims, unlike the writers and critics, who don't realize how thoroughly they are implicated in the commercial system they think they are resisting.

This attitude toward the aesthetic claims of both writers and "naïve" literary critics is not really peculiar to Mark McGurl, however. He is just participating in the discourse that current academic criticism has developed for establishing the superiority of the scholarly perspective on literary creation to the credulous assumptions of the creators and most readers. While certainly literary scholars have always been willing to display their learning and their "hermeneutic" skills, the first few contingents of academic critics by and large devoted such skills to elucidative interpretation or textual studies that assumed "new knowledge" (the traditional goal of scholarship) meant knowledge of literature as a self-sufficient object of attention, worthwhile in and of itself as a form of human expression. Gradually literature in academe has become instead the means for the scholar to assert other priorities, a convenient instrument through which to engage in various kinds of social, cultural, political, or theoretical analysis but not worth the scholar's time for mere "appreciation."

There are indications throughout McGurl's three books that he does in fact have appreciation for the aesthetic qualities of literature (or at least fiction, since discussions of poetry are completely absent from all three of the books), but even in The Program Era, in which American fiction as produced through the auspices of academic creative writing are accorded various degrees of praise for such qualities, McGurl's real focus of analysis is the creative writing system itself, which, he maintains, is something we should account for if we are to understand postwar American literature in "genuinely historical materialist terms." In his review of The Program Era, Fredric Jameson praises McGurl's account of this system, but cautions that his classification of the modes of fiction most central to the creative writing Program is somewhat unwieldy and that  "unless we somehow identify the aesthetic of production all three classifications share (their ‘autopoiesis’), the system, however useful or satisfying it may be, will risk breaking down into a series of empirical traits and characteristics."

Heaven forbid that literary criticism might retreat to the consideration of "empirical traits and characteristics"! Should it retreat far enough, critics might even find themselves focusing on the palpable traits and characteristics of individual works without regard to the system to which they putatively belong! At its most extreme, such a concession to the integrity of literary value could lead to the mere appreciation of literature, relegating literary scholars to the status of belletristic critics acting as arbiters of taste rather than learned exegetes and theorists rising above such purely subjective judgment. Or perhaps an enhanced respect for the empirical in the consideration of works of literature--the experience of the actual "traits and characteristics" a literary text offers--could begin to persuade academic critics that the interpretive frameworks assembled by most of the succeeding schools of critical thought that have emerged in literary studies over the past 50 years are themselves finally just fabrications, elaborate fictions created by professors not to aid in the interpretation of literature but to supplant it, to substitute the wisdom and insights of scholars for the incorrigibly undisciplined creative imagination.

These frameworks are just as susceptible, in turn, to the same ineluctable forces and unexamined assumptions by which literary scholars contend the expressive autonomy of works of literature is necessarily constrained. McGurl's sociological contemplations reach in Everything & Less perhaps their most intricate elaboration--although The Program Era is complex enough in the web of connections it makes between various postwar literary works and the conditions of creative writing instruction in American universities--and the book as a whole provides us less with an examination of the effect Amazon has had on the writing and distribution of books and more a phantasmagoric excursion through the generic and subgeneric wilderness Amazon has cultivated through its various self-publishing and eBook services. McGurl maintains that in surveying this scene--and no one should exactly envy his no doubt now near-encyclopedic knowledge of the terrain--he is offering the most authentic perspective on the current "literary field," since Amazon has so thoroughly colonized both publishing (through the dominance of the Kindle and through Kindle Direct Publishing) and bookselling. But McGurl as a critic seems as controlled by the prerogatives of capitalism as the fiction he discusses, confining himself to the popular, the commercially successful, the well-publicized. If much of this writing would not be called "mainstream"--either commercially or culturally--nevertheless the measure of its importance is its salience to the marketplace, not its artistic value.

Indeed, most readers whose interest in fiction has its source in the latter are not likely to find much to spark their interest in McGurl's book, aside from its sideshow qualities. It is doubtful that such readers really need to know about Dmitry Rus, author of the Play to Live series of "LitRPG" novels, or the "alpha billionaire" subgenre of romance novels, or that "there is a case to be made for self-published Adult Baby Diaper Lover (ABDL) erotica as the quintessential Amazonian genre of literature." While I'm willing to take McGurl's word for it that these ridiculous genres exist (although I'm less willing to concede they are part of "literature") and that the Kindle platform has both made them possible and amplified their popularity, I am dubious that, absent an effort like his to do such a comprehensive survey of Amazon's book-related services, that McGurl's intended audience (people interested in contemporary literature or in book culture more generally) are likely to regard such works as worthy of the attention of serious readers. From this perspective, the elaborate scrutiny of them and their part in Amazon's annexation of the literary field in effect itself assembles these texts and genres into a coherent account that hardly exists outside of it except as the discontinuous artifacts of Amazon's digital machinery.

McGurl contends that as the visionary demiurge who called this machinery into being, Jeff Bezos could be called the author of the novel that is Amazon--or at least that is Amazon's rewriting of the premises of fiction and the reading of fiction in the electronically networked world. But this conceit is again something McGurl himself invokes, as Bezos becomes the protagonist of the novel McGurl implicitly shadows into being through using the conceit. In this novel Bezos (as represented by his company) is the larger than life figure whose mighty deeds produce both emulation and resistance, with the latter finally only resulting in an unwitting version of the former. Finally no one can evade the reach of this figure's influence, and, while the nature of this influence can't necessarily be fully characterized as benign, most of those subject to it are satisfied with the service done.

Thus the title of McGurl's book: Amazon promises to offer us everything, which in the provision of books results in the proliferation of narrative genres and reading platforms, but when some writers and readers seek alternatives to Amazon's maximalist aesthetic, such efforts are inevitably tied to this system that makes them intelligible in the first place--and are still available on Amazon, of course. Needless to say, McGurl's classification of fiction as either maximalist or minimalist (the category under which he places most "literary fiction"), "epic" and "romance," reduces the current "literary field" to simple binaries that don't remotely capture the actual range of practices to be found in contemporary fiction, especially outside the confines of literary fiction as "just another genre" in McGurl's simplistic scheme. But then neither is this classification meant to be adequate to the needs of literary criticism per se, as opposed to those of literary critics assuming the role of "cultural critic" to contemplate not mere works of literature but the cultural circumstances in which they are embedded--an orientation by which the literary works disappear into generalizations and abstractions. "Maximalism" and "minimalism" as terms employed in McGurls's analysis thus tell us nothing at all about literature, only about the ways in which such terms can be obscured beyond any practical critical value they might have.

McGurl's adaptation of the terms really offers little specific insight into the tangible influence of Amazon on publishing and bookselling, either. Readers expecting from Everything & Less an examination of Amazon's business practices, its effects on the economics of publishing (especially as related to smaller publishers), or its transformation of reading practices beyond the expansion of genre certainly won't get it. At best McGurl takes Amazon's status as a provider of "service" at face value, preferring to look more closely at the peculiar kinds of commodities it has produced rather than the process of commodification itself. Although certainly books have long been treated as commodities in the capitalist system, Amazon has surely gone the farthest in discarding any pretense that they are anything but merchandise (even if they are merchandised as autotherapy). McGurl doesn't seem much perturbed about this: if its approach has amassed for Amazon a fortune in sales, it has also supplied the sociologically inclined literary critic with an overflowing source of material suitable for his scrutiny.

For all the sophisticated critical tools and close reading skills--and McGurl certainly does a sort of critical reading that effectively maps onto the texts he examines the interpretive scheme he employs --the results of his far-flung explorations of the literary wilds Amazon has cultivated seem rather unremarkable: American fiction during the time when Amazon has come to dominate publishing would appear to be very. . .Amazonian. Not only is it unsurprising that such might be the case, but we could also grant McGurl this conclusion, yet find it trivial. That works of fiction display the signs of the circumstances in which they are created is finally banal, even tautological. How could it be otherwise? How could an alteration of circumstances as consequential as the rise of Amazon (and of the internet that made it possible) not be registered, directly or indirectly, in the writing that ensues? Everything and Less provides us with a photograph of a literary culture adapting to a cultural development that directly affects its own means of existence, but the implication the book leaves that Amazon's presence has enacted some sort of permanent transformation of writing and publishing is surely subject to doubt. If it certainly appears that literary culture has for now fully assimilated itself to the internet, its currently hybrid print/online status hardly seems immutable, and Amazon itself scarcely seems immune to further technological shifts that would make it less relevant.

McGurl's account of the sort of fiction Amazon is making possible is useful, however, in showing us what the future of fiction might be like should Amazon continue to dominate bookselling and especially the self-publishing market, or rather the future without fiction, since in this future the novel would indeed be dead. No amount of special pleading on behalf of preposterous popular genres will make them worth taking seriously. Relegating aesthetically serious fiction to its own sickly genre will do nothing but ensure that it remains sickly. Writers still interested in the idea of literature will no doubt stubbornly persist in authoring texts that might represent some synthesis of poetry and what we now call fiction, but the processes delineated by McGurl in Everything and Less if they retain their hold will so thoroughly trivialize fiction as a literary form that all claims for the novel as the predominant incarnation of "literature" will seem passingly absurd, although at that point neither will there be literary critics to contemplate its demise. 

I have released a new issue of my substack reviews newsletter, under a new title, Unbeaten Paths. In this issue I review Begat Who Begat Who Begat, by Marcus Pactor, Mannequin and Wife and Tales the Devil Told Me, by Jen Fawkes, and Grimmish, by Michael Winkler.

Disassembling Empire

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University creative writing programs have proven to be a conservative force in literary culture, for reasons that probably could not have been avoided. Once these programs reached such a level of ubiquity that virtually all aspiring writers enrolled in writing workshops, the most ambitious pursuing an MFA degree as a matter of course (not to mention ultimately teaching in a creative program as well), it was almost inevitable that the collective “Program” would assume the task of regulating practice and enforcing norms among its graduates—who are overwhelmingly the authors of most published literary fiction, at least in the United States. Since most “little magazines”—whose numbers have proliferated at an astonishing rate over the past 20-years, particularly as these journals migrated online--exist primarily to provide a place of publication for Program writers (who need such publications to secure and maintain jobs among creative writing faculty), that “serious fiction” would reflect the assumptions of creative writing instruction should not be surprising.

It is not coincidental that from the time creative writing programs really began to expand in the 1960s and 70s to the present, the “cutting edge” in American fiction has shifted from the formally challenging work of postmodern writers such as Donald Barthelme or Gilbert Sorrentino to fiction featuring previously marginalized or unheard writers or characters, much of which tends to emphasize subject and content and is mostly conventional in form. An increasing aesthetic conservatism among students and instructors in creative writing programs cannot, of course, alone account for this movement from formal innovation toward a greater emphasis on theme. (Nor is this separation between manner and matter necessarily as stark as these generalizations might imply: some postmodernists used formal or stylistic experimentation as the best way to evoke complex subjects, while many current writers are as attentive to form as to content.) However, to the extent that the university writing program increasingly became an instrument of professionalization, the preparation of students for a career in writing and writing instruction, it was destined to exert an increasingly conservative influence.

The varieties of this influence (and they are expressed in discrete ways that seem to go unnoticed because they so integrally inform creative writing practice) can be seen in three books conveniently published at about the same time in 2021: Matthew Salesses’ Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping, Lisa Zeidner’s Who Says?: Mastering Point of View in Fiction, and George Saunders’s A Swim in the Pond in the Rain. These books 2reveal the by now fixed assumptions about both workshop practice and the aesthetics of fiction that have shaped the “disciplinarity” of academic creative writing, and are likely to determine its legacy in whatever future serious fiction might still have remaining—likely outside the academy, moved aside along with all the other humanities disciplines as the university ever more obediently submits to its political and economic overlords.

The most conservative of these books is Salesses’ Craft in the Real World, even as it presents itself as something of a revolutionary manifesto. Salesses wants to transform the notion of “craft” to more properly suit the needs of a changed clientele (and a modernized faculty as well), but his effort merely replaces one set of critical precepts based on abstracted technique with another based on political and sociological doctrines derived from a generalized concept of cultural difference. If anything, the new rules Salesses lays down for the conduct of the writing workshop are even more rigid and uncompromising than the ones they are to replace: Under the old dispensation, the consequences for disobeying the rules are merely the disfavor of one’s peers and the skepticism of the marketplace; under the dominion of the new, one is likely to be regarded as morally derelict and exiled to the land of lost souls—although, given the sort of strictures Salesses’ revamped writing course would impose, it is no doubt the instructor who would be most subject to the sanctions in force.

Salesses wants to bring the writing workshop out of its fixation on mechanical details and a false claim to universality (“‘Pure Craft’ is a Lie” proclaims the title of the first chapter) and instead make it face the concerns of the “real world.” This is, of course, the world as understood by the workshop’s diverse and varied students. To adapt ourselves to this world will require a wholesale transformation of the concept of craft, since craft as we have known it until now “is part of the history of Western empire that goes back even to the Ancient Greek and Empires, upon which American democratic values are based.” Salesses’ ambitions thus are radical indeed, to help literature do its part in disassembling Empire by overturning the reign of “craft” as it has been regarded until now.

But has craft in the definition of the term Salesses wants to use, as an assemblage of well-know guidelines used by “Western” cultural gatekeepers to enforce an insular perspective on the nature of literary writing, actually held dominion over the course of Western literary history? To say that Salesses does not provide much in the way of evidence or illustration of this central assumption of his book would be a lenient way of putting it. Aristotle and E.M. Forster are really the only examples he cites (both on plot) of historical figures formulating or perpetuating the principles of craft, but of course neither of these men would have understood their comments to have anything to do with craft, even if we were to update them on how we currently use the term. We should in fairness likely assume that Salesses is knowingly simplifying, for rhetorical convenience, the relationship of such figures to what he is calling craft, but still it is difficult to imagine Aristotle believing that what he was doing in the Poetics was providing advice to writers about how to do their job.

If there are examples of establishing craft rules in Western literary history, most of them during most of this history would apply to poetry, but Salesses doesn’t discuss poetry or the appropriate conduct of poetry workshops at all. Whether he would acknowledge that poetry does have certain canons of procedure that are more or less consistent across languages and traditions—canons that are necessary for the genre to exist in the first place—is thus uncertain, but it would seem to be a devaluation of fiction as a form to say that it does not call for the same sort of consideration of intended verbal effects as poetry, to deny that some essential features of prose narrative are recognizable to almost all humans. If Salesses is not resisting the salience of the traditional “elements of fiction”—the devices that allow for the full embodiment of narrative—but certain ritualized applications of those elements, almost their fetishization, the solution would seem to be to no longer apply them, to abandon the fetish.

But however much Salesses professes to want a different version of craft than the one putatively dominating creative writing workshops, he does not propose doing without craft as either an approach to the creative writing classroom or to the critical consideration of fiction in general. It is somewhat difficult to see why: Salesses objects to the way craft-talk excludes writers with a different understanding of fiction’s purpose and possibilities that traditional craft does not accommodate, but such writers include not only those with non-Western cultural inheritances but many writers from within the Western cultural tradition who also find the imperatives of craft confining and alienating. Many of these writers deliberately avoid the institutional machinery of the academic creative writing Program (although some are just excluded), but even those holding out for the benefits of a creative writing degree might ask of this book and its author why exchanging one set of restrictions on the writer’s creative judgment and imagination for another is necessarily an improvement.

Most of Salesses’ directives, in fact, have little to do with “technical” matters encompassing style or form. They seem designed primarily to focus the writer’s attention on content—more specifically, on the “world” to which the work points and away from the individualism of either character or author-as-artist. Thus, “whether positive or negative, fiction always says something about how we live, and not in an individual sense but a contextual one. When we write fiction, we write the world.” And, “it’s about time that individual agency stops dominating how we think about plot or even causality.” This is because “being in the world is much more about dealing with effects than with causes.” As a student himself, Salesses tells us, “story arc was always presented to me as something more like plot, something like how the character’s situation changes or fails to change. . .It might be more useful to consider instead how the world is changed or fails to be changed.” Since the purpose of Salesses’ redefinition is clearly to minimize—if not eliminate—attention to the elements of fiction that highlight instrumentalized “method,” it is at first unclear why Salesses retains such a term as “story arc” rather than just dispensing with it.

If what Salesses—and other like-minded critics of current literary education—really wants is a learning environment free of traditional craft conventions, which they believe unduly inhibits some students from fully realizing their artistic visions, he ought to declare that there are no rules the writer must learn to follow, that in fact as long as such rules continue to be assumed, it should be entirely appropriate to break them. He should insist that the very notion of “craft” entails a conception of a unitary “art of fiction” that is bound to exclude any writer who resists the officially approved practices. What better way to ensure that the aesthetic preferences of all student writers be fairly considered than to simply relinquish the idea that to “learn” the art of fiction involves adopting the right assumptions and procedures, developing a suitable facility with whatever approach the currently established authority favors? Artificial distinctions between genres and modes, including the unhelpful distinction between “mainstream” and “experimental” fiction would collapse: all efforts to write a work of fiction would be experimental, attempts to sound out the possibilities of the form without conforming to any one conception of its proper mission.

Something tells me, however, that this is not what Salesses has in mind. Too much of the work would be left to the students to read widely and discover how other writers have redeemed these possibilities. The teacher could no doubt assist in this process of discovery, but that would require suppressing narrow beliefs about the function of literary art. While many creative writing teachers would certainly be able to accomplish such a task, it seems unlikely that Salesses, for one, with his stringent view of developing writers who “think critically about how they are working with and contributing to culture” would be prepared to discard this imperative. Salesses is too committed to the transformation of the fiction workshop into a reflection of the cultural multiplicity of “the real world” to give much attention to the critical multiplicity of fiction’s aesthetic projects.

The strength of Lisa Zeidner’s Who Says? is that she does attempt to account for such multiplicity, at least in the use of point of view. Zeidner covers each of the main types of point of view, differentiating in detail both third-person omniscient and the third-person limited (“central consciousness” or “free indirect”), as well as the issues that emerge in the use of first-person (reliable vs. unreliable, the rise of the self-conscious narrator, etc.). She also devotes space to the less common (although in some cases increasingly common) exercises in point of view (second-person, the communal “we,” “whiplashing” point of view), child as well as non-human narrators, and compares the effects of point of view in fiction and film.

Zeidner also has what is essentially a thesis about the importance of point of view: point of view is the most important consideration in fiction, involving “skillful manipulations in, and motivations of, your alliance with your characters,” manipulations that are “more central and crucial than plot.” She emphasizes the centrality of point of view in an initial chapter that examines the impression created by first lines and paragraphs: “My argument is that point of view in good fiction is embedded in every choice about tone, description, and diction, even about plot and pacing, and furthermore it has to be established very quickly.” One could disagree with Zeidner about the foundational status of point of view in prose fiction (as I do: surely style, the particular way language is ordered for effect, is even more primary) while still acknowledging that Zeidner has identified and explicated more comprehensively an element of the art of fiction that is often treated more cursorily than it deserves.

Who Says? ranges widely in its choice of sample texts, especially across genres and modes. The author clearly also makes the effort to reach across “cultures” in Salesses’ sense of the term (Susan Choi, Percival Everett, Junot Diaz, among others). Point of view is an aspect of craft that Salesses actually does not much discuss at all, and it is hard to know whether it is simply an element of fiction he takes for granted without submitting it to a critique of its real-world relevance, or whether as a purely “technical” issue, it is inherently too far removed from the “real” world to which Salesses wants fiction to be faithful that it simply evades the reach of his critique. If point of view is as crucial to the way fiction works as Zeidner would have it, however, Salesses’ notion that craft in its traditional guise is wholly irrelevant (even destructive) to the present and future direction of both fiction and creative writing instruction is altogether unfounded. The sorts of choices confronting the writer of fiction in achieving the most artful effects that Zeidner surveys in fact seem the craftiest of craft decisions.

Still, because of the relatively comprehensive treatment Zeidner provides, Who Says? would be the sort of book that might be used with students in presenting them a wide spectrum of possibilities relevant not just to point of view but to the creation of effects in fiction that in general expand the writer’s (and ultimately the reader’s) focus of attention beyond plot and character (while also obviously contributing to both). Zeidner does not take any strong position on the advisability of venturing a particular effect, although she does point out how some point of view choices work better than others for producing some particular effects, and thus the book does indeed offer young or inexperienced writers an abundant selection of approaches to point of view for inspiration or emulation. However, this very impression of a kind of exhaustive sampling may actually encourage such writers not so much to perform their own variations on these models but to imitate them. This is surely not Zeidner’s intention, but may in fact accentuate an inherent limitation to the efficacy of academic creative writing instruction.

The widespread establishment of creative writing as an academic field of “study” (by its nature creative writing is really closer to a professional program than a true academic mode of inquiry) quickly enough, if predictably, developed its own hierarchy of programs (perhaps with the Iowa workshop at the top), and from there a relative uniformity of practice—eventually the instructors were usually themselves the products of creative writing programs. In such a setup, it would surprising if the long-term effect was not a substantial degree of conformity among those making their way through this system. Such conformity would indeed arise at the level of craft, since craft is something that presumably can be taught, Under the circumstances, “craft” acquires preeminent importance—so important that a writer like Matthew Salesses sees control of its operating assumptions as a compelling source of cultural power, “rethinking” its definition akin to an act of political revolution. But the successful transformation of the creative writing program in the manner Salesses envisions will change only the terms of compliance with the norms of the Program, not the reality.

Outside of its possible use in a creative writing course, Lisa Zeidner’s book on point of view certainly provides interested readers with a breadth of coverage of the various options available to the writer of fiction when thinking about the enactment of point of view, but it is not really a book that probes very deeply into the potential transmutations of point of view that can make it a source of literary innovation and originality. You can gain a great deal of valuable insight about the application of point of view to the overall configuration of works of fiction from Who Says?, but not about how a writer can disregard the standard approaches taken by the preponderance of professional writers and discover a less-travelled path to follow.

George Saunders’s A Swim in the Pond in the Rain is essentially a craft book, pursuing “craft” more or less in the apolitical inherited understanding of the term Matthew Salesses wants to disown. But Saunders approaches teaching the principles of good writing from an unorthodox angle, offering a course (this book is a version of it) that looks closely at a few stories by the 19^th century Russian masters of the short story—Chekhov, Turgenev, Gogol, Tolstoy. Saunders moves methodically through each story, querying students about how the stories seem to be working on them. Saunders in the book often summarizes their responses, but he is more likely simply to move right to his own explication—done in an affable, humorous tone that perhaps readers expect from him. The overall impression created by Saunders’s leisurely walk through these stories is not of a teacher giving instruction but an enthusiastic reader drawing on his own experience as a writer to help us appreciate the stories’ effects.

The biggest drawback to Saunders’s admittedly engaging pedagogical strategy, at least in its implications for understanding the art of fiction, is of course that for English speakers these works are in another language. Certainly much can be learned about the structural order of fiction from the likes of Chekhov and Gogol, but inevitably the linguistic subtleties of their work remains inaccessible to those who read it only in translation, and such intricacies of structure and style is important not only in recognizing the full artistry of these Russian writers but in appreciating that form at its most fundamental level is realized through style—the writer’s particular way of shaping language. Of course, even Russian readers cannot finally learn to write “like” Chekhov or Tolstoy, but the broader sensitivity to the reverberations of language a writer’s style can provide seems like something a serious writer would want to cultivate.

The strengths and weaknesses of A Swim in the Pond in the Rain are well-displayed in the book’s first two chapters, on Chekhov’s “In the Cart” and Turgenev’s “The Singers.” The chapter on “In the Cart” is the most systematic demonstration of Saunders’s approach to teaching the Russian writers, as he moves page by page through the story, contemplating Chekhov’s technique and speculating about the effects he seems to be after. Saunders also uses the story to draw conclusions about the nature of stories and the writer’s objectives:

    We might think of a story this way: the reader is sitting in the sidecar of a motorcycle the writer is driving. In a well-told story, reader and writer are so close together that they’re one unit. My job as the writer is to keep the distance between motorcycle and sidecar small, so that when I go right, you go right. When I, at the end of the story, take the motorcycle off the cliff, you have no choice but to follow. . . .

Although Saunders is absolutely correct, here and throughout the book, to emphasize the importance of the reader’s experience of a work of fiction, the implication in this motorcycle conceit is that such experience is most intensively directed to plot, an assumption that is sustained throughout the analysis of “In the Cart,” at least insofar as the focus of attention remains on what happens. Indeed, “what happens” is very consequential in Chekhov, since our grasp of character must depend on our alert apprehension of what they say and do, usually in ordinary moments, but a consideration of what a Chekhov story has to offer an aspiring writer might also stress the way Chekhov is able to build such resonance into stories that are so minimalist in both structure and tone. This is something that happens beneath or around the narrated events themselves, not in the story as such.

Saunders’s method works somewhat better in the examination of “The Singers,” since this is a story in which what happens is clearly the focal point—although the reader may be more preoccupied by the story’s lack of action (aside from the singing contest to which the narrator’s account leads and the narrator’s approach to and exit from the scene he describes, what happens is almost literally nothing) than by contemplating the narrative. But in this case Saunders’s effort to understand the singing contest and its ramifications prompts him to compel our attention on the details of the contest (on the details in general), in turn making the story’s aftermath take on increased importance. Saunders ultimately affirms Turgenev’s emphasis on description rather than narrative, characterizing it as Turgenev’s disinclination to accommodate contemporaneous notions of “craft” emphasizing plot. (Noting here that description is a compositional mode about which Matthew Salesses again has very little to say.) He might have gone farther, in the discussions of both Turgenev and Chekhov, and reminded us that each of these writers is considered an important figure in the development of literary realism, which in its classic form is meant to expel all conceptions of craft, leaving only life.

But, as Saunders observes at the beginning of the chapter on Gogol, close reading of stories such as “In the Cart” and “The Singers” shows these ostensibly realistic stories to be “compressed and exaggerated, with crazy levels of selection and omission and shaping going on in them.” If in Turgenev and Chekov these distortions are in the service of a greater fidelity to the “feel” or ordinary life, in Gogol’s “The Nose” the distortion isn’t hidden in “selection and omission” but is a blatant artifice the reader can’t miss. Saunders is perhaps at his best in this book in the analysis of “The Nose,” but this isn’t really surprising, since Saunders as a writer of fiction is closer in spirit to the representational breaches in Gogol than the other writers examined in this book. Saunders maintains that a story such as “The Nose” should not be regarded as absurdism or fantasy, but as a work that depicts “the process of rationality fraying under duress” in a way that reveals a more essential reality going beyond “the way things seem to how they really are,” no doubt similar, Saunders would say, to the way his own fiction incorporates the surreal and absurd.

In this chapter on “The Nose,” Saunders does address the limitations of reading a writer like Gogol in translation, since in particular much of the humor in the story lies in Gogol’s use of the Russian language. But he does perhaps get as close to Gogol’s Russian prose as we are likely to get by focusing on Gogol’s invocation of the “skaz” mode of narration—featuring an unreliable narrator speaking in something closer to an oral than a written idiom—and by emphasizing Gogol’s creation of voice. The instability of the voice (half formal, half awkwardly demotic), Saunders argues, points us to an instability in the human use of language:

    Language, like algebra, usefully only operates within certain limits. It’s a tool for making representations of the world, which, unfortunately, we then go on to mistake for the world. Gogol is not making a ridiculous world; he’s showing us that we ourselves make a ridiculous world in every instant, by our thinking.

This is surely a valuable lesson about the writer’s medium for the apprentice writer to learn, and if in his course Saunders offers the kind of thorough analysis found in this book, students must indeed emerge from it more enlightened about craft as employed by these great Russian writers. A course such as the one Saunders teaches seems to me, at least, a better way of emphasizing “craft” than the entrenched workshop method. That it would not pass muster with Matthew Salesses seems like the most severe judgment on the merits of his “rethinking” of the principles of fiction and the teaching of writing.

I have an essay on the experimental fiction of William Melvin Kelley (especially Dunfords Travels Everywheres) in the new issue of Denver Quarterly. A link to the essay can also be found here.

No doubt the most pressing questions concerning the fiction of William Melvin Kelley are not about its merits, which are considerable and readily enough apparent, but have to be those related to the circumstances of its “rediscovery”: Why did Kelley publish nothing after 1970? (His first novel appeared in 1962, and Kelley died in 2017.) What accounts for the long period of neglect his work endured until recently, when all of his books were brought back into print?. . . . (Continue)

 

On David Ohle

My essay on the fiction of David Ohle is now available at Big Other:

    Readers encountering David Ohle’s work for the first time through his most recent novel, The Death of a Character (2021), will indeed find the depiction promised in its title, but those familiar with Ohle’s previous books, especially his first and eventual cult favorite, Motorman (1972), will know that the character whose dying the narrative chronicles is the protagonist of that novel as well. Called simply Moldenke, he makes additional appearances in the long-delayed follow-up to Motorman, The Age of Sinatra (2004), as well as its successors, The Pisstown Chaos (2008) and The Old Reactor (2013). (In The Pisstown Chaos, Moldenke turns up as a minor character in a story focusing on others, but The Death of a Character marks the fourth time his picaresque existence has been the focus of an Ohle novel.) Moldenke has been the principal conduit to the singularly bizarre and often grotesque world Ohle invokes in his fiction, and thus his demise seems more a consummation of that world’s creation, its full achievement perhaps, than merely the portrayal of a fictional character’s death. Continue

New Review

My review of Dennis Cooper's I Wished is now available at Full Stop:

    Cooper is no doubt one of the most prominent (or notorious) and influential writers of “transgressive” fiction, fiction that deliberately repudiates decorum and restraint in the treatment of subject in fiction. Much transgressive fiction seems to delight in flaunting good taste (or perceived good taste) in its depictions of extreme sexual situations and incipient or actual violence (frequently brutal). In many cases, the transgressions in this fiction are entirely transgressions of content, challenges to reigning assumptions about the acceptable boundaries of a properly “literary” representation of subject. Cooper is somewhat atypical among the current contingent of transgressive writers (putting aside such figures as William Burroughs and Kathy Acker as precursors rather than certified participants in the genre) in that his defiance of the norms of propriety are often accompanied by deviations from conventional form as well.

Calling All Cars

I have most recently been writing reviews and essays focusing on less well-known or neglected experimental writers--Gil Orlovitz, Alta Ifland, Elisabeth Sheffield, Thalia Field. I also have an essay on the African-American experimental writer, William Melvin Kelley, about to appear and am wrapping up a piece on David Ohle. Suffice it to say, not many review/criticism venues are much interested in such writers. If there are any editors out there who would be interested in reviews and critical pieces on worthy (and too often ignored) experimental writing, I would certainly welcome offers to consider my efforts at bringing it more attention. (My Ohle piece could use a home.) Of course, there is this blog, but it doesn't get the traffic it once did. DM or email if willing to talk.

Gil Orlovitz

My essay at The Review of Uncontemporary Fiction on the forgotten poet and experimental novelist Gil Orlovitz:

To even the most well-informed readers of fiction and poetry who reached their age of literary maturity after, say, 1970, Gil Orlovitz is no doubt a mostly obscure, if not totally unknown figure. Orlovitz died in 1973—although he had achieved sufficient obscurity even by then that his body was not actually identified until several months following his passing—after a nearly 30-year career as poet, playwright, screenwriter, and novelist, and while some effort was made in the years just after his death to appreciate and preserve his achievement, in particular through a 1978 special issue of American Poetry Review, in the years since then his books disappeared from sight and his name dropped out from most discussions of postwar American literature.

Continue reading

On Brian Evenson

From my review of Brian Evenson's The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, now available at Full Stop:

. . .At its best, Evenson’s fiction reminds us that our purchase on “the real” is fragile (if not delusory) and that our belief that we are in control of the course of our lives is a foolish fantasy. The tacit social commentary more discernible in Evenson’s recent fiction unfortunately obscures these more radical insights that made Evenson’s horror fiction seem genuinely unsettling.

Uncorrected

Although we are perhaps invited to regard as the novel's protagonist the first character introduced to us in Alta Ifland's The Wife Who Wasn't--Sammy, a Santa Barbara widower whose decision to import a mail-order bride from Moldova does indirectly set off the chain of events the novel chronicles--the character soon enough blends into a much larger cast of characters who in effect vie for our attention in a series of short chapters focusing on one or, in many cases, a group of them. Indeed, Sammy turns out to be one of the less significant characters in the novel, beyond his initial decision to obtain a foreign wife, although the wife herself certainly does assume a central part in the narrative burlesque that ensues when she attempts to adjust to her new surroundings among her upscale California-style bohemian neighbors--and they unsuccessfully try to accommodate to her unexpected presence.

Yet it would not be accurate, either, to say that the wife, Tania, instead takes on the role of protagonist, the novel's title notwithstanding. Not only does she essentially disappear in the novel's final section--her ultimate fate revealed rather anticlimactically--but she really acts more as a catalyst of the increasingly absurd events that transpire than a a lead character in her own right. The introduction of both Sammy and Tania, however, does work to establish the novel's twinned satirical focus: on the pretensions of the prosperous Santa Barbara set and on the still essentially peasant ways of the Moldovans (represented by additional members of Tania's family), during the time depicted in the novel (early 1990s) only recently released from their country's postwar occupation by the Soviet Union. The first section of the novel takes place in Santa Barbara after Tania's arrival, while the second moves to Moldova for a fuller portrait of Tania's family--her mother, brother, and daughter Irina (about whose existence Sammy is initially unaware). Eventually both Irina and the brother, Serioja, manage to obtain visas and travel to America as well, causing even more turmoil in Sammy's neighborhood than did Tania by herself (although she causes quite enough on her own).

The absence of a stable center of reader identification ultimately reflects the fluidity of Ifland's treatment of the two groups and their social and cultural assumptions. Because much of the first part of the novel consists of letters Tania writes home to her mother, we are probably inclined at first to think the force of the novel's satire is directed primarily at Sammy and his cohort, with Tania's more clear-eyed perspective revealing their affectations and artificially induced attitudes. ("I've been asking around about where and how to meet other women here, and everybody advised me to go to "yoga." If you want to meet women in California, they say you have to go to yoga.") But while these characters are certainly insufferable enough, Tania and her plebeian family come to seem mercenary and acquisitive in their own boorish way, when they are not, in the case of Serioja, entirely dissolute. If the Americans are made to seem a self-important, joyless lot when set against the earthier ways of the Moldovans, their sojourn in America suggests that the latter have essentially been stripped of their dignity by the existence they were forced to endure under the Soviet occupation.

Thus, while the escalating sense of calamity this clash of cultures produces makes the story consistently compelling, we are left with a cast of characters who are also consistently unlikable, providing the reader not even the sort of fixed perspective from which to appraise the narrative situation afforded by a more conventional approach. In this decentered narrative space, we are left to drift among its various characters, all of whom can seem equally obnoxious. In its way, however, such an effect is invigorating: We are not presented with the usual of sort of corrective satire with its implicit moral instruction critiquing bad behavior; instead, The Wife Who Wasn't highlights a covetous human nature in general, depending for the sustaining of the reader's engagement not an attachment (however tenuous) to a protagonist character through whom we might get our bearings, but the maintenance of the reader's curiosity about how this culture clash will ultimately sort itself out.

Here Ifland's narrative disappoints somewhat. At the novel's conclusion some time has passed, and the Santa Barbara neighborhood is consumed in a conflagration, leaving only Sammy's house standing. Meanwhile, we have lost track of Tania and her daughter, whose reckless behavior finally goes too far and they are in effect forced to flee. We discover, but only through photos now carried around by Serioja, that the two women are in Reno, Irina a stripper and Tania a hostess in a casino. (Serioja himself has returned to Moldova and moved back in with his mother, splitting his time between drinking and mopping the floors in their apartment building.) Although it is perhaps appropriate that most of these characters are treated to something less than a flourishing future, their fates seem rather arbitrarily determined, the story simply halted and the ramifications of the encounter between the unsophisticated and the "advanced," the poor and the prosperous, muted if not obscured.

One of the novel's characters, however, does seem at the narrative's end to be thriving. Maria is a Moldovan icon artist who is first introduced to us as Irina's teacher. (Irina has artistic talent and hopes to profit from it when she reaches America.) After Irina has left to join her mother, Maria takes up with Serioja, ultimately marrying him so she can accompany him when he too embarks for America. Maria, of course, has no intention of returning home with Serioja when he quickly enough wears out his welcome with Sammy and his neighbors, and so she remains in America, almost immediately finding success both in her personal relations with other men and in her art ("her paintings sold so well that, reluctantly, she had to make some changes to her wardrobe in order to appear somewhat presentable at the numerous receptions held in her honor.") Maria resolutely pursues her own interests, but those are dedicated above all to the practice of her art. To the extent this makes her selfish, heedless of others' feelings, it is a selfishness cultivated on behalf of artistic integrity, not personal gain or social standing. Maria prizes her independence, but this is ultimately to ensure the independence of her art. 

Perhaps we are to identify with Maria. It seems likely that Alta Ifland does (although no doubt there is also some satirical commentary on the American commercial art world and its eagerness to embrace "exotic" art without really understanding it). Like Maria, Ifland is an eastern European immigrant (from Romania) attempting to take advantage of the wider exposure America seems to offer the artist. In Ifland's case this also involves writing in what is essentially a third language--after Romanian and French--a challenge she meets quite impressively. Her efforts presumably resist both the temptation to unbridled opportunism exhibited by the likes of Tania and Irina and the self-satisfied, etherealized hedonism in which the faux Bohemians of Santa Barbara indulge themselves. We might regard Maria as someone capable of redeeming the offer of freedom America is supposed to extend without succumbing to the "sacred commerce" (the official philosophy of a cafe at which Tania tries to find a job) such freedom has too commonly become.

In her previous volumes of short fiction, Elegy for a Fabulous World (2009) and Death-in-a-Box (2011), seems to be a writer of lyrical tales or fables (again set both in Europe and in America). The Wife Who Wasn't certainly seems like departure from the earlier mode, not just in its satirical approach but in its greater emphasis on creating realistic characters and stronger reliance on narrative. This does not exactly make it a conventional novel, however. If the characters are realistic, it is in the sense that the their attitudes and behavior, even though they mostly provoke an unfavorable impression of them as social beings, are believable, not that they are the product of an effort to create characters that are "well-rounded" as an end in itself. The narrative is greatly refracted through the episodic alternation of perspective, putting at least as much stress on the actions related in the individual episodes as on the larger narrative progression of which they are a part. Ifland is not telling a story but several stories that also form a narrative whole.

Most of all, Ifland manages to write a satirical novel that is able to elude the usual limitations of satire. It doesn't reduce the conduct it surveys to an exercise in moral theater, and it offers a depiction of its characters' inveterate egocentrism that does not seem exaggerated but is a constitutive part of their orientation toward the world. These characters aren't so much violating social norms as demonstrating in their own way that their lack of empathy and self-restraint is all too normal.

It seems I wrote quite a bit on experimental fiction over the past year. It's all collected together here. Includes discussions of Gabriel Blackwell, Elisabeth Sheffield, Mauro Javier Cardenas and more.

Attitudes Toward the Locals

Since the election in 2016, and only more and more profoundly as the Trump years progressed, I have come to feel alienated from my rural Missouri roots along the rim of the Ozarks. Although I have not visited there during this time (both of my parents are dead, and I have almost no other family still living in the area), and have spoken to no old friends (a few of those remain), I know from the election results (71% Trump) that however influential the behaviors I observed and the conceptions of the world I assimilated in youth must inescapably have been, I am so far removed from them now my younger self is practically unrecognizable to me.

When I read Steve Wiegenstein's Scattered Lights, however, the perspective on the world, as well as the circumstances supporting it,  encountered in this region of Missouri--which is, as the book itself shows, partly Midwestern and partly Southern--surely does come back to me, even if I can no longer imagine sharing it. Set mostly in the rocky terrain of southeastern Missouri encompassed by the Mark Twain National Forest (the setting most frequently invoked is the town of Piedmont), the characters in these stories live ordinary lives, but generally move (without knowing it) toward a moment of reckoning or revelation--except that this moment mostly only reinforces their enclosure in the ordinary. Some of the stories clearly enough suggest that the characters' fates partly arise from their own bad decisions, but there is little explicit judgment in the stories, no sense that the author seeks to satirize or reprove his characters.

Even a story such as the lead-off, "The End of the World," which features a protagonist who is, on the face of it, quite absurd, does not really mock the character, Larry, a grocery store clerk who lives in the trailer park and believes fervently that the apocalypse is nigh, but simply allows the man's preoccupation to make itself known in the course of his daily duties at the store. That this preoccupation (and Larry's habit of proselytizing on the job) is portrayed mostly as an obstacle to discharging those duties (Larry is ultimately fired, but he doesn't know it yet) and is not simply an excuse for ridiculing Larry's beliefs only reinforces the impression that the author is more interested in a fidelity to the conduct and habits of thought characteristic of small towns in the Ozarks than in seizing on those habits as instruments of some sort of social commentary. Religious fanaticism is certainly not restricted to rural communities, but there it certainly can seem an all-too familiar outlook on the world, shared by some of one's neighbors.

If the approach taken by these stories cannot appropriately be classified as satire, humor, on the other hand, is in plentiful supply. "Why Miss Elizabeth Never Joined the Shakespeare Club" is a small-town comedy of manners of sorts depicting the social rivalry between two local matrons over membership in the titular club, which "meets in a member's home to scrutinize the host's silver patterns and to decide whom to exclude." Miss Elizabeth silently triumphs over her bitter enemy, Mrs. Dotson, when she becomes the agent of the latter's embarrassment over a not-so-furtive sexual liaison. "Late and Soon" chronicles the fiasco that ensues when its protagonist, a slacker named Chester, takes a job selling real estate along the new golf course in a town selling itself as a retirement center (a job procured by his golf-playing father). As he prepares for the interview, he asks his live-in girlfriend (who apparently supports the two of them) to give him a haircut. Afterwards:

Chester took the mirror from her hand. Before, he had looked like an aging hippie, soft from too much beer, partly bald, strings of gray in his red beard. Now he looked like an aging hippie with a haircut.

Some of the stories are much more sober, even melancholy. "Trio Sonata in C" depicts the gradual cognitive decline of an elderly family member as filtered through the perspective of the man's son-in-law. This more oblique viewpoint--as well as the behavior of the man himself, who is not altogether benign--provides the narrative with sufficient distance that, although it is an inescapably sorrowful story, elicits sympathy but cheap emotion. "From Thee to My Sole Self" is a reflective monologue by an older woman looking back at the path her life has taken. Of her now-dead husband she tells us, "My husband loved me, but after the first few years he didn't love me very much. That was the way we were then; the husband went about his business, the wife went about hers, and you didn't talk of love." Thus the woman had a brief but intense affair with a man named Marshall, but he, too, is dead, and now she confesses to living in the past:

Why shouldn't I live in the past? There have been two men that I have loved and hated and come to forgive, but they're dead now, in the past. My hands tremble. My sleep is fitful and light. I wake in the night and listen. My bushes brush against my bedroom window. I live in an empty house.

In both of these stories, the same nonjudgmental bearing manifested toward the extreme characters such as Larry makes the portrayal of these more afflicted characters seem simply truthful, not a bid for pity.

The book's title comes from the story called "Weeds and Wildness," a coming of age story of sorts in which a recent high school graduate, Mark, uncertain about where his future really lies, delays a decision to go to college and takes a temporary job at The Farm and Home Supply store. A subplot involves Charley Blankenship, a local ne'er do well whose son had been Mark's high school classmate and who has himself joined the military. Charley, an ex-con, has apparently turned informant in a drug investigation and is about to flee the area, but before he does entrusts Mark with a secret to pass on to Charley's son. It is in considering this responsibility that Mark looks down from a ridge onto his hometown, with "its scattered lights. . .like someone's Christmas decorations tossed in the yard, still lit."

If Mark is a hometown boy who seems to be considering whether that town will remain his permanent home, two of the stories, "Bill Burkens and Peter Krull" and "Unexplained Aerial Phenomena," feature protagonists who find themselves residing in small southern Missouri towns for professional reasons, but otherwise feel themselves to be apart from the company they are hesitantly keeping. Peter Krull is the reporter for a small-time newspaper who is acutely conscious of the inconsequential "news" he covers (the usual small-town minutiae) but can't quite satisfy his curiosity about a local hermit found dead in a lake. Likely a suicide, the sheriff has it declared an accidental drowning, and Peter attempts to uncover more information about the man, Bill Burkens, a Vietnam vet who apparently simply withdrew from the world to live a subsistence-level life in his trailer in the woods. Yet Peter comes to admire Bill Burkens as "the only truly harmless man he ever knew, the only truly secure, truly free man."

In "Unexplained Aerial Phenomena" the protagonist, Janine, is a sociology professor at a small college in Springfield. As a research project she decides to "study" a series of UFO sightings in a small town in the area, where she goes to interview a man named Woodrow Bird, the first person to report the UFOs. Although she is clearly prepared to condescend to Woodrow (while assuring him and others she has a merely scholarly interest in the phenomenon), she finds herself won over by his sincerity and at the story's conclusion joins him and some of his friends in an attempted sighting, where she might or might not witness extraterrestrial event (or an "Aquatic Phenomenon," since it takes the form of a mysterious green light moving through the waters of a lake). Janine seems shaken by the experience, but more importantly gives up her patronizing attitude toward the locals.

It is with these two stories in particular that I myself find it most difficult to overcome my own acquired condescension toward the locals among whom I was raised--who are certainly reflected clearly enough in the characters of Scattered Lights--and to fully appreciate Janine's or Peter Krull's at least momentary solidarity with those people they have otherwise largely failed even to notice. If I find these moments of recognition somehow falling flat, I must conclude that, since, within the dramatic development of the stories themselves, they are perfectly well-justified, the problem no doubt lies in my own churlish disaffection, not in the execution of the narratives, which is skillfully done.

With "Signs and Wonders," Scattered Lights begins where it started, with another story about Larry the religious fanatic, who is now in an evangelical encampment awaiting The Rapture, foretold by Brother Moore, the encampment's leader. If anything, Larry is portrayed even more sympathetically in this story, as his commitment to Brother Moore's ministry is clearly wavering (The Rapture doesn't come). By the story's end, after Brother Moore tries and fails to rally the congregation through some snake-handling, Larry is left to contemplate his discontent with the world as it is, a sentiment we indeed might all acknowledge, even if we can't finally comprehend the choices Larry himself has made.

On Thalia Field

Experimental fiction (or poetry) ought to be predictable only in being unpredictable. Most of Thalia Field’s books have indeed been characterized by their aesthetic ingenuity and variety. She is, in fact a writer about whom it is justified to say that her work so blurs the distinction between forms and genres that it could be regarded simply as an integrated practice of “writing.” But Personhood suggests that her audacious verbal imagination has started to become merely the available instrument for promulgating an increasingly familiar message.

From my review of Thalia Field's latest.

Book 'em, Danno

Anyone looking over my curriculum vitae will see that, while there are a fair number of items listed in the "Publications" section (currently around 140 or so), all but one of them are essays, articles, or reviews, leaving only Beyond the Blurb: On Critics and Criticism (published by Cow Eye Press) as the sole entry declaring itself a book--and even it is a collection of shorter pieces originally published elsewhere, including here on the blog. To anyone asking me if I am a frustrated writer of books who has settled for writing in the shorter forms, I would have to say no. Although shortly after graduate school I did send around a book proposal (not my dissertation) to various university presses, and was offered from one of them a contract of sorts for the exclusive rights, should I actually finish writing the thing, this project never really got off the ground and I eventually just dropped it. Otherwise, I have never actually begun a writing day thinking, "Today I will work on my book."

Occasionally what seems a pretty good idea for a book comes to me, but quickly enough I'm no longer enamored by the idea and nothing further comes of it. I don't believe this inaction is caused by some kind of a block or a lack of initiative (I'm always writing, just not books). Instead, I think my abilities as a critic--such as they are--are most fruitfully applied to the shorter form, a more circumscribed but also more concentrated space for close reading and succinct analysis. I have always believed that too many full-length works of literary criticism--especially academic books--are padded out with superfluous information and ritualized citations of authorities, although this may just be a reflection of my bias toward text-based explication and analysis rather than theory, biography, or historical critique. Good critics are able to avoid these problems in the best critical books--although many such books are also comprised of previously published essays and articles--but I'm not sure I could be one of those critics, at least while also writing something familiar enough in its form or with a wide enough appeal that it could get published.

Most of what I want to say about literature (and I do like to think that even in a 1500 word review I am reaching beyond the work at hand to connect it to a literary "issue" or to literary history), I have found I can say in the shorter forms. This does not mean that any such issue can be exhaustively examined or the history fully surveyed in 1500 (or 3,000, or 5,000) words). I have often in fact, addressed the same or similar concerns across multiple reviews or essays, hoping to sound out the topic as fully as possible from different angles. Here the advantages of a book become more apparent. However, I have ventured to collect many of the pieces on common themes in a series of free e-books available through the blog--after concluding no actual publisher would give my collected ruminations on current experimental fiction, for example, even a cursory glimpse--but I'm certain they all gained more readers in their original incarnation as individual items than they have managed to attract through these facsimiles of books. If I'd ventured to write a book about experimental fiction from scratch, it likely would have turned out to be structured much like the e-book, anyway, and surely no publisher would touch this pristine tome, either.

A propensity for the shorter form was part of my motivation for creating The Reading Experience back in 2004, although I believe this blog actually garnered a reputation for posts a little longer than those on most other blogs, at least back in the antediluvian days of literary blogging. If I had stayed strictly an academic critic, I no doubt would have inaugurated whatever book projects might have been necessary for promotion or to get a better job, or just to stay in the game, but without a game to play, I now envision writing a critical book mostly as something that might happen only when an essay suddenly gets out of hand. Then it would seem a work whose length was an organic development of an idea or analysis that simply required greater amplification.

Yet an idea for a book has been rattling around in my head for a while, nevertheless, one that would justify its length first by taking the form of an historical narrative--indeed, a history of all of American fiction, from colonial times to the present. But it would also center more narrowly on a progression of works that illustrate the book's argument that American fiction, at least as exemplified by its most accomplished writers, has always been essentially a subversive force, both culturally and formally: American writers have always subjected the country's putative democratic ideals to often harsh scrutiny, and, even more vigorously, have always transgressed against the formal conventions of fiction as those were established by the rise of the European novel (a disposition additionally manifested in the American development of the short story). It would unite my focus on experimental fiction and my longstanding interest in American literary history.

I would go ahead and write this book if I thought it could be published, but unfortunately.

Don't Take It Personally

I have sometimes considered writing "personal" criticism--the sort of criticism that embeds discussion of a book or writer in subjective circumstances (the year of reading Whitman!) or connects the work to one's own "life experiences." However, I have always hesitated after reflecting on how little I usually admire such criticism when I do occasionally venture to read it: I really don't care what you were doing the morning you read "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," and if I wanted to learn about your college years I would seek out your own memoir and not the book you are otherwise supposed to be reviewing.

(Plus, whenever I have begun a review or critical essay with autobiographical reflections, I quickly rediscover how utterly tedious most of my life has been and that I thus have little to say about it. I can sometimes muster interesting things to say about a book I've read, but not about my life.)

Arguably the turn to personal or autobiographical criticism became more evident first in academic criticism, as part of the generalized revolt over the past 50 years or so against the academic practices of the previous 50 years (among them "objectivity" and "analysis"), almost all of them ultimately consigned to the dustbin of academic and literary history. (As eventually will be, of course, the practices that came to replace to them--although whether the notion of dispassionate analysis will ever make a comeback is probably more dubious.) The increasing frequency of personal reflection in more general-interest criticism is no doubt less purposeful, the result of some combination of the rise of "creative nonfiction," the domination of reviewing by novelists and poets themselves rather than professional critics, and, of course, the internet.

It is tempting to say that the latter is the chief culprit, as it is in so many of the other appraisals of the social and cultural upheavals we are currently experiencing, but it seems to me that its primary contribution to this trend has been to provide a great increase in the number of publication sites (including journals meant to replicate print literary magazines and book reviews but also blogs and online reading diaries) for both creative and critical writing, which in turn created the conditions making it possible for more personal essays to be published and creating a need for reputable reviewers. But of course the rise of creative nonfiction, both as a category of publishing and an area of concentration in the creative writing curriculum, was a phenomenon largely independent of the development of the internet and seems explicable mostly as a phenomenon within literary culture, personal expression becoming the predominant aesthetic value. Moreover, the prevalence of creative writers themselves as authors of book reviews surely predates the absorption of book discussion by the internet, and the notion that criticism by practitioners is somehow more authoritative than criticism by those more fully oriented toward, well, criticism, is a failure of judgment by book review editors more than it is a surfeit of qualified critics.

I would not contend that critical objectivity is always fully possible, nor that literary criticism has no use for subjective impressions. It is possible, however, to describe a literary work under review or analysis with conscientious accuracy, and providing such description has always seemed to me to be one of the pressing--if not the most pressing--obligations of the critic. If evaluation is part of the task in a particular critical piece (a review, presumably), such a judgment cannot credibly be made unless the critic has shown a keen enough comprehension of the relevant features of the text at hand. This sort of attention to the tangible features of the text is what is most often missing from personal/autobiographical criticism, since evaluation still remains, just made more nebulous and subjective than usual. Conventional reviews too often settle for plot summary in place of deeper formal and stylistic explication; personal essays impersonating reviews frequently substitute strings of figurative language expressing the reviewer's readerly sensibility for even cursory plot summary. 

If readers want some sense of the personality of the reviewer--and I'm not entirely convinced they do: most readers of reviews seem to want a more thought-out kind of reading recommendation--there are ways to convey this without resorting to literal autobiography and personal confession. The reviewer should provide some sense of the standards being used to reach a critical judgment, and this can be done while acknowledging their subjective selectivity--in effect disclosing the reviewer's own aesthetic sensibility as manifested in the assumptions those standards imply. Neither the criteria used nor the application of them to the particulars of the work need to be articulated in a literal, unduly mechanical way--here are the criteria, now watch me apply them--but can be suggested more subtly and indirectly, and executed with a verbal flair and judicious insight that surely draws attention to the critic's individual quality of mind.

But perhaps the more frequent kind of recourse to the personal or autobiographical in works of ostensible literary criticism is to be found in articles and essays less standardized than reviews, more discursive or exploratory, reflective or ruminative pieces in the form of an "appreciation," reconsideration, or extended critique. Here the temptation to underscore one's response to a writer's work by literally invoking personal reactions and experiences seems greatest, and I do not avow that such a move is wholly illegitimate. If you believe literature can make a difference in people's lives, the evidence from one's own life seems an obvious place to turn. But at some point such exercises become simply personal essays rather than literary criticism, and again my own history of  both writing and reading critical essays tells me it is entirely possible to convey personality and perspective without crossing this line. Close reading or analysis does not require a turgid prose style, nor does it necessarily entail endless quotations and an eye-glazing analytic detachment. The goal should be to be communicate the critic's most concentrated experience of the work, and this ought to motivate his/her most discerning and dynamic writing, not the most pedantic.

Nonfiction that includes reflections on other writers and writing but is otherwise simply an autobiographical narrative is certainly not encompassed here in my skepticism about autobiographical criticism. I am focusing on literary criticism that incorporates the personal and autobiographical as a strategy for carrying out acts of criticism, often self-reflexively acknowledging the strategy within the piece itself as if to underscore the critical intent. Sometimes the author is simply venturing an experiment with this device, but at other times it seems as though the critic is assuming an implicit assent to such a practice, on the reader's part, but also presumably editors, who may even prefer the personal approach, which is seen in turn as more appealing to readers. The phenomenon seems especially noticeable online (even if its roots lie elsewhere), and to the extent that literary criticism eventually migrates entirely online, traditional exegetical literary criticism may be increasingly shoved aside.

Since academic criticism has long since abandoned disinterested literary analysis, general-interest publications are really the only venues available (aside from personal blogs) for critics who favor this approach. Without it, we could ask whether literary criticism still exists.