The Reading Experience

Telling Your Story

I've just re-read Jim Thompson's The Grifters, and the farther into it I got, the more apparent it became to me that Thompson's novels provide an especially useful illustration of the differences between third- and first-person narration in fiction. I still enjoyed The Grifters, which is narrated in the third person, but reading it a second time made me more aware of its limitations, as well as the virtues of the first-person narratives to be found in novels such as The Killer Inside Me, Pop. 1280, and After Dark, My Sweet.

Here are a few paragraphs near the beginning of After Dark, My Sweet. The story is being told by "Kid" Collins, the novel's protagonist, and he has stopped in at a roadhouse for a glass of beer:

The bartender slopped a beer down in front of me. He scooped up the change I'd laid on the counter, sat down on the stool again, and picked up a newspaper. I said something about it was sure a hot day. He grunted without looking up. I said it was a nice pleasant little place he had there and that he certainly knew how to keep his beer cold. He grunted again.

I looked down at my beer, feeling the short hairs rising on the back of my neck. I guessed--I knew--that I should never have come in here. I should never go in any place where people might not be nice and polite to me. That's all they have to do, you know. Just be as nice to me as I am to them. . . .

We then learn that Kid Collins has spent some time in "institutions" (eventually that he has just escaped from one), but we really don't need that information to know that something's not quite right with the Kid. His very need to elicit a response from the bartender and those short hairs rising tell us what we need to know. And we wouldn't know it in the same way if the Kid himself wasn't telling us. The novel immediately plunges us into the world of Kid Collins as he is able to articulate it, and most of its melodramatic punch comes from being jolted by the Kid's direct verbal flourishes. (And he is, it turns out, an ex-boxer.)

The Grifters starts out pretty well, too:

As Roy Dillon stumbled out of the shop his face was sickish green, and each breath he drew was an incredible agony. A hard blow in the guts can do that to a man, and Dillon had gotten a hard one. Now with a fist, which would have been bad enough, but from the butt-end of a heavy club.

Somehow, he got back to his car and managed to slide into the seat. But that was all he could manage. He moaned as the change in posture cramped his stomach muscles; then, with a strangled gasp, he leaned out the window.

Several cars passed as he spewed vomit into the street, their occupants grinning, frowning sympathetically, or averting their eyes in disgust. . . .

This also steeps us immediately into the world as experienced by Roy Dillon, but in The Grifters he shares our narrative attention with his mother Lilly and his girlfriend, Moira Langry, and so the story involving the three of them will have to be told by a third-person narrator who has access to their thoughts and emotions but filters them through his own more distanced narrative voice. It's not quite full-blown "pyschological realism," but Thompson nevertheless can achieve his signature hard-boiled, scary/depraved effects only by fishing around in the characters' minds for their perceptions of and reactions to the inevitably untoward situations they encounter. The verbally-constructed "voice" of a character like Kid Collins is lost, and we have to pick our way through such vague verbiage as "incredible agony" and be satisfied that just "somehow" Roy Dillon returned to his car.

Thus, while the novel commences with a typical Thompsonesque bang, it's not long before we get a little bogged down in passages like this:

. . .He had looked around extensively and carefully before choosing Los Angeles as a permanent base of operations, and his capital was now reduced to less than a thousand dollars.

That was a lot of money, of course. Unlike the big-con operator, whose elaborate scene-setting may involve as much as a hundred thousand dollars, the short-con grifter can run on peanuts. But Roy Dillon, while remaining loyal to the short con, was abandoning the normal scheme of things.

At twenty-one, he was weary of the hit-and-get. He knew that the constant "getting"--jumpring from one town to another before the heat got too hot--could absorb most of the hits, even of a thrifty man. So that he might work as hard and often as he safely could, and still wind up with the wolf nipping at the seat of his threadbare pants. . . .

In my view, we're being given way too much "information" in a passage like this, information that is perhaps important for us to have but that would be less intrusive if it were parceled out gradually by a first-person narrator or if it was at least provided to us dramatically--through showing rather than telling. It would be better, for example, if we saw Roy Dillon "abandoning the normal scheme of things" rather than being told this was the case through an awkward inventory of the contents of Roy's mind. A secondary effect of this third-person technique is the fuzzy, flabby language: "He had looked around extensively"; "can run on peanuts"; "the wolf nipping at the seat of his threadbare pants". Not only does such writing lean heavily on cliche--which again might be more tolerable if it were issuing from a first-person narrator--but it helps to make passages like this themselves seem like just so much perfunctory "scene-setting."

Perhaps this is why I actually prefer the Stephen Frears movie made from The Grifters to the novel, something I would not say of the film adapted from After Dark, My Sweet. Frears's film is able to dispense with the third-person narrator and focus on the characters and their overlapping stories in a direct, unmediated way. We get Thompson's lowlife plot without his narrator's sometimes laborious attempts to move it along. It is also probably why I think Thompson's best novels are those related to us by his sublimely scuzzy first-person narrators. It's impossible to reproduce these novels on screen because their narrators are so inseparably a part of their appeal. Such is undoubtedly true of most well-devised first-person narrators, which is one reason I believe this method of storytelling is almost always more promising as a way of creating distinctive, aesthetically pleasing works of fiction than the kind of close-in third-person narration that has in most literary fiction become more or less the only available alternative (and that is probably often used precisely because it does lend itself more easily to screen adaptation.)

They're All Wasted

John Sheppard's Small Town Punk was originally a self-published book offered through iUniverse, but even though it reportedly sold a respectable 2,000 copies in that format, it has now been republished by Ig Publishing. That a book as well-written and conceived as this one would only find a home with a "real" publisher through so circuitous a route says everything about the current clueless state of publishing in the United States. Small Town Punk is easily as "readable" as any of the story-driven fare that dominates American publishing, and it surpasses most "literary fiction" pumped out by those same publishers in the quality of its prose, the intelligence of its approach, and the soundness of its aesthetic execution.

Which is not to say it is particularly original, either in its form or, especially, in the characters and milieu it portrays. The "punk" of the title is literally one of those natives of the first punk rock generation of the late 1970s/early 1980s, as are his few friends in the "small town" of Sarasota. Florida. The novel depicts a few months in the life of the 17-year-old protagonist as he awaits graduation from high school, works part-time at Pizza Hut, and anticipates (or doesn't) whatever comes next. The episodes related are etched out in a relatively vivid way in this character's first-person account, but ultimately Small Town Punk is a portrayal of "alienated youth" of a kind that has become rather common in contemporary American (and British) fiction. In this case the novel attempts to show us "how it was" in the early Reagan era rather than posing as a sociological expose of present-day Kids In Crisis, but its status as an historical novel of sorts really only deadens its emotional effect. In some ways this is an asset to the book, since it reinforces the sense that for many young people like "Buzz" Pepper this was an emotionally dead time, but for me the alienated youth theme only seems all the more conventionalized and predictable when it's cast as the foundation of an historical re-creation, a glimpse of a previous era's teenage wasteland.

On the other hand, Small Town Punk mostly avoids melodrama, and Buzz Pepper's narration provides it with a compelling voice that raises it above a mere historical survey and allows the novel to avoid the more egregious uses of "psychological realism," which in this kind of historical narrative would no doubt become just a way of prying out "information" about how such characters percieved their situation. Although to describe Small Town Punk as either a "novel" or a "narrative" actually fails to precisely identify its formal/structural characteristics. I found the book most interesting as a kind of "in-between" work, not quite a novel if one's definition of the form requires a traceable story arc, but also not exactly a collection of stories if one expects each episode to be itself a self-contained work capable of standing alone, apart from the larger whole to which it also contributes. A few of the "stories" in Small Town Punk would stand well enough on their own, might even provide a useful condensation of the book's strategies and concerns, but ultimately they seem to be conceived as parts of a whole. They are as likely to move sideways as forward, adding to the novel's generally plotless plot through accretion, a layering effect, rather than becoming dramatic points to be marked off on Freytag's Triangle. There's plenty of "action" to be found in each of the episodes--the sort one could anticipate from titles like "Wasted" and "Hot Cars"--but it's not the kind of action to which other pleasures, pleasures of voice, character, and setting, are required to be subsumed.

Perhaps it is the lack of obvious drama, of "high concept" or the exciting "hook," that accounts for the publishing history of Small Town Punk. Perhaps not even the smaller or more adventurous presses saw much in the way of sales from a book that shows no inclination to bend to the existing commercial winds and that takes "realism" seriously as the attempt to render life as the accumulation of non-events and ordinary frustrations it sometimes (often?) turns out to be. The novel has a mildly optimistic conclusion:

I turned 18, the age of majority. One more semester, and I'd be rid of the whole lot of them. Masturbatory thoughts of the day I'd walk out the door spun in my head.

I applied to the University of Florida, and was accepted. I would put two hundred miles between them and me. Two-fucking-hundred miles.

Until then, I closed the door of my room every afternoon and blasted my music as loud as I could. Then I went to work.

But the feeling evoked in the novel is one of limited opportunity enveloped in an atmosphere of swamp-like gloom. That the novel pulls this off while remaining a more or less "entertaining" read is to me a mark of its accomplishment, and that publishers (before Ig) would stay away from it despite its manifest stylistic and formal virtues hints to me that other similarly skilled works of fiction are being written and duly shunned by our aesthetically-challenged "book business."

What's Already Been Written

The recent very valuable interview with Stephen Dixon in the Baltimore City Paper contains this exchange:

CP: According to a recent National Endowment for the Arts study, "Reading in Risk," [today's students] are worse at reading. They're writing a lot more and reading a lot less.

SD: They're right. They're actually right. When I give stories to undergrads, I'll ask who's read Tolstoy. Nobody's read Tolstoy. Or I mention James Joyce, when we read a story from Dubliners, maybe one or two have read a story in high school. When I first started out, kids were much more serious as readers, and I could actually have literary discussions with them, which I cannot do now. Even the ones who are the most avid writers are not avid readers. They just want to write.

CP: Everyone has a novel inside them, but no one reads anybody else's, then. Is that a problem?

SD: It's a paradox. It hasn't really stopped undergrads from becoming better writers than the readers who were writing before. You would think just the opposite. But then there's a problem. We grew up on Dostoevsky, Conrad, if there was ever a serious name, we read that writer. It also told us what not to write, because if the thing has been taken up already, and you have a history of having read it, you want to go on to something new. So a lot of students are sort of writing what's already been written.

Dixon seems to be suggesting that writing programs are good for raising writing abilities up to a point--the point at which mere "craft" leaves off--but that great writers are produced only through the inspiration of other great writers, and this as much through learning "what not to write" as through imitation. As Dixon says, "if the thing has been taken up already, and you have a history of having read it, you want to go on to something new."

Too much current literary fiction--which certainly is produced in greater bulk than even twenty or thirty years ago, mostly due to the proliferation of writing programs--too obviously bears the influence of being "workshopped." It's competent, tidy, duly serious, but ultimately just another version of "what's already been written." Workshops instill conformity and a respect for the "mastery" of pre-established skills, but if a truly innovative writer emerges from one or another of the MFA programs, it's usually an accident, something that's happened despite the strictures of the workshop or because the writer was gifted to begin with. Conrad or Faulkner would have been laughed out of most "creative writing" programs.

Dixon's own work is a good example of the kind of fiction that would be smacked down in most writing workshops. All those absurd run-on declarative sentences, those characters who sound alike, those circular, stop-start plots! Yikes. Didn't anyone ever teach him what a well-made story is like? Doesn't he know that Hollywood producers would never even pause over such idiosyncratic stuff when scouting out their next "source material"? What's Barnes and Noble going to do with it?

A good argument could be made that if creative writing programs don't produce better readers , they're not worth much. Certainly conventional literary study is no longer focused on perpetuating a culture of reading, on inculcating the reading habit and cultivating a readerly sensibility. If the remaining area of academic study still ostensibly dedicated to literature as literature and to fostering literary talent is now a place where "literary discussions" can't take place because writing has been severed from its roots in reading, the future of "creative writing" is a bleak one indeed.

Marginalizing the Academy

Ron Silliman thinks that

there’s going to be – already is, I suspect – some clashing over whether it’s possible to do serious critical writing in this form [i.e., blogging]. One of the most interesting things about last December’s MLA convention in Philadelphia was listening to one fifteen-minute paper after another & realizing that two-thirds had less in the way of ideas than the average blog note. And this was, by all standards, an excellent MLA convention. Try writing 200 MLA presentations in one year, tho, and your whole idea of what constitutes a critical piece of thinking is going to change. In this sense, the real promise of blogging is the one that it holds for changing what constitutes critical thought, literally marginalizing the academy as a site for such about poetry, returning critical writing instead to the poets themselves, most of whom do not teach, or do so only under the most abject of adjunct circumstances. Perhaps marginalizing is too strong a term – there are, after all, good people in the academy who do serious work – but at least “de-authorizing,” de-legitimating academic critical writing as such, forcing it to compete on an equal basis with the “deep gossip” of poets writing about their own work & that of others. Nothing could be healthier than that.

I mostly agree with this, but I think Ron both exaggerates the extent to which the academy any longer engages in "critical thought" about poetry (especially current poetry) and fails to reserve a place in the critical consideration of poetry for critics other than poet-critics.

University literature departments have long ceased to be (if they ever were, except in the creative writing programs and the literary magazines many such programs sponsored) the centers of serious literary criticism (criticism of literature, not criticism that happens to include literature as a target of theoretical or cultural analysis), especially criticism of poetry. (See Jonathan Mayhew's post on this subject.) The "deep gossip" of poets on blogs and in other non-academic publications already in my opinion vastly exceeds in its utility the pseudo-commentary emanating from academe, although I like to think that in its seriousness of purpose, most of this blogcrit goes well beyond "gossip."

Insofar as blogging about poetry (and fiction as well--academic criticism about current fiction is hardly any more useful than its poetry counterpart) does succeed in "marginalizing the academy" even further, this can only be a good thing, so long as academic criticism continues to view literature simply as a "specimen" to be examined for all but its literary qualities. But I also think there is room in poetry blogging for critics who are not also (or perhaps not primarily) poets themselves. Such critics would have "deep" sympathy for the practices and assumptions of working poets but would also provide a critical perspective (ideally buttressed by a similarly deep familiarity with literary history) that didn't reflexively privilege one or another such practice or assumption and that approached both poetry and fiction from the standpoint of the engaged reader rather than the writer and his/her perhaps partisan inclinations. (Which isn't to say the non-poet blogcritic would have no such inclinations, but they would be anchored at a different angle of approach.)

At a time when literary blogs do indeed show an increasing ability to "deauthorize" academic criticism as it has established itself over the past fifty years, it would be a shame if the cleavage in contemporary literary criticism--between academic critics on the one hand and practicing poets and novelists on the other--were to be permanently hardened with little space in between for critics who want to write about literature but who don't ultimately consider themselves either "scholars" or poets. Both poetry and criticism would suffer from such an unyielding opposition.

Talking About Issues

"Why doesn't 'culture' include 'poetry'?," asks Jonathan Mayhew, while explaining his own practice of sending academic articles on poetry to journals of cultural study, where "they will be seen by people who wouldn't normally read an article on 'poetry.'"

Noting that cultural studies focuses mostly on novels, and that "people who are (otherwise) quite well-read often confess their near total ignorance of poetry," Jonathan further asks:

When did the novel get to be so important?. . .Is it [simply] a matter of the fact that more people read novels? Or is it because novels talk about the "issues" people want to talk about, and therefore can integrated seamlessly into a certain vision of cultural studies?

Jonathan's answers to his own question are surely part of the explanation of why, where "cultural study" is concerned, the novel has gotten "to be so important," but I would add that another reason this brand of inquiry goes on "in near total ignorance of poetry" is that encountering a poem requires an initial acknowledgment of and response to the constructedness of literary works, the formal and ultimately wholly artificial quality that makes them literary to begin with and that renders poetry less than congenial to the bull-in-a-chinashop approach to "content" favored by cultural studies. In other words, poetry requires some literary sensibility on the part of the reader, and that is the one thing that has been bred out of literary "scholars" in the cultural studies camp. That is why they so readily "confess" their ignorance of (that is, contempt for) a kind of writing so "merely literary."

I would love to see fiction develop in a direction that also makes it less nutritious fodder for the "issues" people (or continue to develop in that direction--I think much of postwar experimental fiction has indeed moved fiction closer to poetry already.) A kind of fiction that foregrounds language, form, the vicissitudes of "structure," and the very processes of meaning-making and "expression" and that de-emphasizes "character" and "theme" and, indeed, "issues" would be just the thing for separating those who value literature precisely because it is merely literary (that is, verbal art) from those who glom onto it because it seems a convenient means to more conventionally "serious" ends (that is, the study of almost everything except literature itself). I'd like to see fiction become less "important," less "seamless" in its utility to cultural studies and more utterly, blessedly frivolous.

Missing Buttons

In her review of Claire Tomalin's new biography of Thomas Hardy, Julia Keller proclaims that

Life, alas, can't hold a candle to art. Life is ordinary. Life is boring. Life is a stack of day-old dirty dishes in a crusty sink. Life is a pile of soiled laundry. Life is pettiness and tedium. Life is a blouse with a button missing.

Art, though, can be colorful and unexpected and dynamic, and never more so than when it's contrasted with the dreary predictability of life. Thus the biographers of artists must confront a special challenge: How to calibrate the life with the art. How to make the business of living--paying bills, trimming toenails--measure up to the splendid bounty of creativity: novels, plays, poems, paintings.

One would think that, given the general accuracy of that first paragraph, the proper conclusion to draw might be that biographies, especially biographies of artists and writers, and especially biographies of the junk heap variety (if a scrap of information exists, throw it on), are by and large a waste of time. No "calibrating" of life and art is necessary. The dreary reckoning of the "business of living" is never going to equal in its interest value the "dynamic" experience of works of art and literature, and I finally just don't understand why anyone finds it helpful to supplement the experience of art with investigations into the lives of artists. Why would I want to read about "pettiness and tedium," no matter how much they've been gussied up by the biographer's "insight"?

My own latest attempt to read a biography of a writer whose work I admire, Robert Poltito's Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson, predictably enough only met with failure (my own failure to complete it). I knew almost immediately that I probably wouldn't make it through the book when I noticed from the table of contents that only a relatively small portion of it was devoted to Thompson's actual writing life. (His most productive period as a writer, the early/mid 1950s, is given about 60 pages in a 508-page book.) Two-thirds of the book is devoted to Thompson's life before he became a writer, and it is packed with the same kind of eye-glazing detail, about the subject's parents and his parents' parents, about the various places in which he lived, about his adventures as a young man, that fills most such door-stopper biographies. Nothing in the book illuminated Thompson's work, the discussions of which amount to plot summaries and tallies of the money Thompson was paid. If anything, I was left with even less understanding of what Thompson was after in his novels, or how his best ones are as good as they are, than before I read Polito's book.

Keller further asks of a "subject" like Thomas Hardy: ". . .what if the artist was a bit on the drab side? What if he wasn't noisy and rude and randy? What if he simply did his job each day, faithfully and well, with little fuss or fanfare?" It seems to me that these questions answer themselves. If we already know such things about a writer, no biography is needed. What else do we need to know? Exactly how he went about being drab? And even if the writer was "noisy and rude and randy," do we need to know the particulars in order to appreciate the work he managed to produce in his quieter moments? Jim Thompson's life was apparently on the noiser side (although Polito recites the facts of his Communist years, of his drinking and his occasional low-living in such a dry and prosaic manner it's hard to hear it), but learning the known facts about how he lived it still falls far short of the uproariousness of The Killer Inside Me or The Getaway or Pop. 1280. Why do we think the proper way to respond to works of poetry and fiction we have enjoyed is to fixate on the "life" of those who created them?

Life indeed can't hold a candle to art.

Mindsets

In explaining why he did not finish Richard Powers's The Echo Maker, Patrick at Litblog.com (no permalink available; scroll down to Jan. 18) writes of Powers's "inability to sympathetically portray characters whose mindsets are very different from his own." He cites the following passage from the novel:

As next of kin, she qualified for the shelter house a block from the hospital, a hostel subsidized with the pocket change of the world’s largest global fast-food cartel. The Clown House, she and Mark called it, back when their father was dying of fatal insomnia four years before.

and then comments:

Actually, the Ronald McDonald House is about the last thing that Powers, in his smug inability to think outside of his own limited imaginative box, should have attacked in such an off-hand manner. The cheap shot is the mark of the cheap artist.

He concludes that passages such as the one quoted represent "the pronouncement of our omniscient narrator-in-chief."

I have already posted on my own disappointment with The Echo Maker, but I have to say I think Patrick is badly misunderstanding what Powers is up to in this novel. Far from employing an "ominiscient narrator" (which arguably he does use in some of his previous novels), Powers in The Echo Maker is deliberately reporting on the "mindsets" of his three main characters, resulting in a form of narration that could be called, after Henry James, "central consciousness," the most intensive form of "pyschological realism" short of pure stream-of counsciousness (as in Joyce or Woolf). Powers himself says of his approach that his "technique was what some scholars of narrative have called double voicing. Every section of the book (until a few passages at the end) is so closely focalized through Mark, Karin, or Weber that even the narration of material event is voiced entirely through their cognitive process." The reference to the "Clown House," is precisely Karin's language, the name for the Ronald McDonald House that emerges from her own "cognitive process." It is not "Richard Powers" taking a "cheap shot."

This is not quite like assuming that when Satan in Paradise Lost declares "Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n" he's speaking for Milton, but it's not that far removed. A character's words don't literally need to be enclosed in quotation marks for them to be taken as such. Milton isn't advocating rebellion against God, and Richard Powers isn't mocking good works.

I have to think that Patrick's response to Powers's mode of narration flows from one of two unexamined assumptions about third-person narrators. One is that such narrators are always ominiscient, "point of view" per se being restricted to portrayed characters who also act as narrators. If the narrative voice doesn't belong to such a character, the temptation is to attribute the voice to the author, but of course sometimes this voice is merely tracking the characters' own perceptions. A true omniscient narrator in effect becomes a character in the story he/she is relating (as in the novels of Dickens or Henry Fielding); the third-person restricted or central-consciousness narrator is attempting to substitute for the character's voice, sinking into the "sensibility" of the character (as Powers also puts it) and attempting, at least, to erase his/her own traces.

The other assumptions is that in depicting the "consciousness" of characters, the narrator (as the author's stand-in) is projecting the consciousness of the writer, the characters becoming merely convenient excuses for the writer to engage in commentary and speculation about a whole range of "ideas." (This seems to be Patrick's major complaint about Powers, that he is unable to conjure up a "mindset" separate from his own.) Such a misapprehension is perhaps especially acute when the character in question is presumed to be more or less autobiographical, but even characters not immediately associated with the writer him/herself are, if Zadie Smith is to be believed, mostly an opportunity for the author to indulge in "the attempted revelation of [an] elusive, multifaceted self"--that is, his or her own "selfhood," the "development" of which is central to the act of writing. Thus, in third-person narratives, it becomes easier to take the characters as either mouthpieces for the author's rhetoric or the "expression" of the author's inmost being.

In either case, the aesthetic rationale for the development of modernist-era "psychological realism"--to extend realism to the reality of consciousness, to explore the way perception of reality shapes our understanding of it--essentially drops out. The merging of narration with consciousness has become invisible, now just the default approach of any narrative not related in the first-person, just the currently established strategy allowing the author/narrator to "say something." In my opinion, Richard Powers in The Echo Maker is attempting to retain something of the experimentation of modernist psychological realism--or at least its goal--but as I indicated in my post on the novel, its lackluster execution in this book is for me another signal that the technique has become increasingly shopworn.

Among other things, the reflexive use of the central consciousness narrator has made it more difficult to cultivate and identify style in the writing of fiction. Powers is still a sufficiently distinctive stylist that he is able to overcome to some extent the limitations of the strategy, but even in The Echo Maker the signature Powers style with its alliterations and startling figures and achieved rhythms is more restrained than usual. And in most ordinary literary fiction the strategy has become simply mind-numbing. (For a more thorough discussion of this problem, see this post.)

Although he is increasingly reviled these days for his purported stylistic preciosity, John Updike remains a writer I am able to read with pleasure because he successfully avoids inflicting such damage. Most of his novels are conventionally related in the third-person, but his language typically exeeds that which his characters are capable of summoning, as in this passage from Villages (2004):

After Owen had left it behind, his original village seemed an innocent, precious place, but it did not strike him as that while he lived there. It was the world, with a fathomless past and boundaries that were over the horizon. There were snakes in the grass and in piles of rocks warmed by the sun. Sex and religion had distinct, ancient odors, familes perched like shaky nests on tangled twigs of previous history; and death could pounce in the middle of the night. . . .

Regular readers of Updike's work would no doubt find this recognizably Updikean. It draws on Owen's mental storehouse of memories and images, but does not dwell in his immediate awareness. It creates writing out of that storehouse. It moves in and out of Owen's awareness, weaving a style out of the character's thought processes plus a something else the writer brings in addition to plumbing those processes. A way with words that is a more worthy focus of our attention than what the writer allegedly thinks of the Ronald McDonald House.

Seasonal

In the first paragraph of his review of Peter Ho Davies's The Welsh Girl, Alan Cheuse declares that "Sentence by sentence, character by character, scene by scene, it's one of the best of the winter so far."

I haven't read the novel, so I can't comment on the accuracy of this statement. I am more interested in Cheuse's choice of critical measuring-stick: The Welsh Girl is "one of the best of the winter so far."

When did book reviewers start conceptualizing their jobs as akin to that of fashion writers, that is, to track the latest developments of "the season"? Is announcing that a given book is "one of the best of the winter so far" to say that it's actually a good book--judged by the perennial standards applicable to all seasons--or merely that it will do to while away an evening before the fire? Does it tell us that the winter book season is going gangbusters, as evidenced by this swell new book, or that it's afflicting us with a variation on Seasonal Affective Disorder and that this new book will have to do? What does the fact that it was published in a winter month have to do with anything relevant to the book's merit?

One might reply that Cheuse's statement is merely an offhand comment, a handy way to indicate the book has just been published, but it does seem to me that the critical discussion of books has become fixated on "season". Each fall and spring brings newspaper articles and blog posts on what's likely to be hot for that "quarter," and if it's not literally the "season" that drives book publishing and reviewing, it's the year-end prizes and awards and "best-of" lists that seem to channel book discussion into the "seasonal" rut. Everyone has a top ten list, and others chime in with the "top ten overlooked books" or the "top ten books about adultery" or the "top ten books with red covers." The book business has already become distressingly like the movie business--a new book needs to do boffo business "over the weekend," it needs to gain the attention of the judges at the (Fill-in-the-Blank) Awards--and these December lists don't do anything to temper this trend.

(I have to say that litblogs have only brought more attention to the compiling of such lists, some blogs breathless reporting on the appearance of each new one. This is one of the few instances in which the litblogosphere has had a more deleterious effect than otherwise. These lists are mindnumbing and eventually become meaningless, as almost every book published manages to get on some list or another.)

I would not bother to kvetch about this topic at all, except that book review pages and literary weblogs have become about the only available venues for anything resembling literary criticism in this country. Academic criticism has only pinched its nose harder at the idea of considering general literary merit in the books it examines, and there's a huge gap between the books of the season and those destined for the canon. Some general literary criticsm ought to be filling this gap. I want to know if this or that new book will be around in the longer run, whether it transcends the season of its appearance. I want to know if it's worth reading and rereading, whether it can compete for my attention among all the best books that have been written period (which I could be reading instead), not whether I might find it enjoyable after raking the leaves or planting the garden.