The Reading Experience

What's Going On?

It is not really surprising that crime fiction would be a genre appealing to otherwise "serious" novelists attempting to work with the conventions of a popular form adapted to the purposes of their own ostensibly non-genre work. Crime fiction portrays a world perpetually in extremis, and in the detective novel variant it emphasizes a process of discovery and revelation that in some ways models the very structure of narrative itself. (Although perhaps the detective is more like the literary critic, looking for the clues that will provide meaning, filling in the gaps and making the speculative leaps that will add up to a coherent interpretation of things.) It acts as a kind of palimpsest over which the literary writer might inscribe his/her own variations on "criminal" behavior and its sources in unruly human impulses.

Within the last year, both Denis Johnson and Thomas Pynchon, each certifiably qualified to be regarded as serious novelists, have published novels that imitate or burlesque crime fiction, Johnson's Nobody Move and Pynchon's Inherent Vice. Although Johnson's book seems the most thoroughly to be an "imitation" of the genre, if not an outright attempt to produce a plausible crime novel, the inanity of the title suggests we might want to take it instead as burlesque, while Inherent Vice might ultimately be regarded as an affectionate homage to the detective novel, even though it is marked by Pynchon's signature brand of wacky humor and seems to be having fun with the detective novel's propensity to spiral off into episodic pieces that don't always coherently join back up with the narrative whole. Ultimately Pynchon's idiosyncratic appropriation of the "novel of detection" is much more satisfying than Johnson's straight-faced mimicry of the "noir" crime story.

Frankly, if Nobody Move had been written by someone other than a well-respected author like Denis Johnson, I can't see any reason why it would even be published. At best it's a mediocre crime novel that tells a familiar story of hoodlums fighting over a large sum of money, supplemented by a few "colorful" characters including a token female character subsisting in a state of extreme moral degradation. It seems cast in the mold set by the tales of human depravity written by such virtuosos of the genre as Jim Thompson, but no one can sound the depths of degradation quite like Thompson, and Nobody Move comes off as a feeble echo of his achievement. At no point does it rise above or transform the narrative conventions of the hard-boiled crime novel. Indeed, in its reliance on long stretches of perfunctory dialogue, it fosters the impression it was written mostly to become a movie script. 

Judging from his previous work, Johnson actually seems just the sort of writer who might profitably explore the boundary between crime fiction and his own mode of "literary" fiction. Many of his books depict the underside of American life, focusing on marginal characters and self-destructive behavior. His style as well, which is clean and precise and generally without affectation, would seem an appropriate medium for a noir-influenced narrative. Unfortunately, the depiction of the underworld mileu in Nobody Move is rote, the characters too clueless to be interesting, and the style sacrificed to cinematic realism. The novel represents a completely missed opportunity and is altogether dispensable.

That Thomas Pychon would come to draw on the resources of the detective novel seems, if anything, even less surprising than Denis Johnson's foray into the crime fiction genre. As many reviewers of Inherent Vice correctly pointed out, Pynchon's fiction has long incorporated the mystery plot as its essential narrative device, with characters such as Herbert Stencil, Oedipa Maas, and Tyrone Slothrop taking on the role of "detective." What Will Blythe says of Doc Sportello, private eye protagonist of Inherent Vice, is true of these other characters as well: "Doc attempts to solve a mystery that may or may not be solvable, so dense are the thickets of information through which he must hack, so opaque the motives of nearly everyone he comes across."

It might be said that this portrayal of Doc Sportello as a kind of perplexed if intrepid jungle explorer makes Inherent Vice a pastiche of the detective novel, or even a parody, an exercise in genre revisionism that takes the epistemological core of the detective narrative--the search for knowledge--and uses it to mock the the pretensions of such narratives to finally arrive at "truth" and to satirize the very notion that a "search for knowledge" in modern America is even possible. There is some truth to such an interpretation, of course, but I don't finally think that Pynchon's novel is a burlesque of the detective novel and nothing more. The touchstone for Inherent Vice is pretty clearly the fiction of Raymond Chandler in novels such as The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely, and it could equally be said that Chandler's own work evinces a good deal of epistemological skepticism itself, and Philip Marlowe is frequently portrayed as attempting to hack his way through "thickets" of misdirection. Marlowe often seems just as confused by the opaque motives of those he encounters as Doc Sportello.

Inherent Vice is at least as much a homage to the radicalism of writers like Chandler and Ross McDonald, a testament to the adaptability of the detective novel to various settings, styles, and concerns, especially in contexts in which the very possibility of uncovering "truth"  is or ought to be a lingering question. Doc Sportello may seem a sorry excuse for a private eye--a shambolic, laid-back stoner--but he's also dogged and perceptive, and he feels a sense of duty toward those he is enlisted to help. If he is led through some mazes that remain mazy and if the full import of what he discovers is not altogether assimilated, this is only par for the course in Pynchon's fiction, and having gone through the process of seeking the truth has been more enlightening than not, both for Doc and for the reader. Through Doc's peregrinations around Los Angeles, he and we become more fully aware of the historical and cultural forces at work that will transform the hippie haven of Gordita Beach into just a memory of personal and countercultural resistance to the encroaching power of new technologies and an unleashed capitalism that will shut down the brief emergence of a more humane way of life--the way of life associated with "the sixties"--before it could become more than a fragile utopian moment.

What ultimately makes Inherent Vice compelling is that in accepting the narrative protocols of the detective novel--which includes the obligatory visit of the femme fatale who initiates the action, an encounter with goons that leaves Doc unconscious, episodes of verbal sparring between Doc and a cop, etc.--Pynchon also manages to produce a novel that is recognizably Pynchonian. The detective novel is used to his purposes and is thus in this instance transformed into a comic picaresque in which, as with most picaresque narratives, characters are thinly developed beyond a few essential features, their adventures themselves of more importance than what these adventures might add to our sense of the characters as "rounded" individuals. (Thus the frequent enough criticism that Pynchon's characters are "cartoonish" is completely misconceived.) I think I agree with Thomas Jones that

the Anglophone novelist whom Pynchon most closely resembles – with his delight in silly names, scatological jokes, wild digressions and impromptu outbursts of song lyrics, his disregard for distinctions between fact and fiction, his scientific background, his belief in the randomness of the world and fascination with the patterns that appear in the chaos – is Tobias Smollett.

In such novels as The Adventures of Roderick Random, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, and The Expedition of Humphry Clinker--even the names of the protagonists are appropriately Pynchonesque--Smollett helped establish the picaresque as a narrative strategy in the early English novel, but despite Smollett's influence on, for example, Charles Dickens, both he and the kind of picaresque narrative emphasizing "randomness" and digression was superseded by the post-Flaubert novel of realism and the "well-made story." Writers like Pynchon and John Barth partially revived the picaresque strategy in the 1960s, and surely both V and Gravity's Rainbow can usefully be read as picaresque accounts of randomness and incipient chaos.

What really unites Pynchon and Smollett is an essentially comic vision of the world, a world full of mishaps, bad luck, and evil portents, that presents itself not as an orderly arrangement of plot points but as an entirely contingent series of events--one thing leads to another. And it is a comic vision that at its best is also greatly entertaining. Pynchon's best work is above all funny, and the most unfortunate consequence of the scholarly attention Pynchon's fiction has gathered over the years is that too much emphasis has been put on "paranoia" and "entropy" and other weighty matters, obscuring the fundamental fact that Pynchon is in the line of great American literary comedians. His work is "postmodern" to the extent it is comic in a particularly thoroughgoing way, not because it invokes the second law of thermodynamics or posits the existence of global conspiracies. When his fiction becomes bloated and leaden, as I would argue it does in both Mason & Dixon and Against the Day, it is because he has lost this comic facility, or is intentionally disregarding it.

Thus for me Inherent Vice marks a return to the approach he seemingly abandoned after Vineland. It takes us on a comic/picaresque journey around southern California at the turn of the seventies, playing much of what it records for laughs even as it exposes us to acts of murder, brutal violence, drug trafficking, sadism, and economic rapacity--all the "inherent vice" to which humanity inevitably succumbs. The detective novel conventions give the novel a structural spine that helps to focus the novel's comedic energies while also allowing Pynchon the flexibility of form that characterizes his best work. Some might say the kind of pothead humor that arises from his choice of mileu and protagonist sometimes descends to the level of Cheech and Chong, but this is arguably a necessary side effect of the aesthetic strategy Pynchon employs: the world in which Doc Sportello roams is comic precisely because of the perspective the dope-smoking detective provides.

If finally Inherent Vice is somewhat less satisfying than Pynchon's other two California novels, Vineland and The Crying of Lot 49, not to mention V and Gravity's Rainbow, I would identify its most serious flaw as a kind of sentimentality about the vanished hippie world it evokes. It's a sentimentality only reinforced by the novel's conclusion--Doc driving in the inland fog, clearly enough symbolic of the coming cultural fog of the 1970s--although the novel's strongly sympathetic portrayal of the hippie scene has by then long since itself settled in. Perhaps it has been lurking in Pynchon's work all along, but the wistful tone of innocence lost pervades this novel, and a little too obviously for my taste. The characters in Inherent Vice, including Doc Sportello, are subject to a mild degree of comic mockery, but not enough to deprive them of their status as heroes of naivete.

Afterthoughts

On February 7, Mark Athitakis published both a review of Don DeLillo's Point Omega and a blog post supplementing that review. The review (printed in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune) is a perfectly good review of its kind--the kind limited by the newspaper's imposed limitations of space and the need to address a perceived "general" audience--but what struck  me the most is how superior to the review, and ultimately more useful to readers, is the blog post.

The review does an effective job in its first paragraph of locating the new DeLillo novel in the context of his other recent work, and immediately lets the reader know it is a book worth his/her attention. What follows is three paragraphs (out of six total paragraphs) of plot summary, which succinctly enough encapsulate the "story" of Point Omega (succinct plot summaries not being something I normally anticipate in most newspaper reviews, it must be said) and a concluding paragraph that states the reviewer's judgment that the novel manifests an "elegance" and "an artfulness to the prose" that make it more satisfying than DeLillo's previous book.

In the blog post, Athitakis quotes the conclusion of his review, but then moves well beyond the kind of compressed commentary he is able to provide there. The first thing he does is to refer to other critical reaction to Point Omega, a move that is apparently forbidden in most print book reviews. The assumption seems to be that a review must be free-standing, shorn of the useful context consideration of existing commentary on a book might offer. This is a practice that only reinforces the impression of book reviewing as "lifestyle reporting" rather than actual literary criticism, and it's a shame reviewers like Athitakis are not able to engage in real critical dialogue in the reviews they write. In this case, the quotes from the other reviews he includes in his post allow him to express his dissent from prevailing views and to emphasize what he thinks is a misperception of Point Omega.

Athitakis then goes more deeply into what he considers the "timelessness" of DeLillo's concerns, contrary to the notion he's become preoccupied with "abstracted musings on geopolitics" since the events of 9/11/01. He suggests that "the novel’s central tension isn’t between war and peace or American empire and the rapidly approaching apocalypse (though DeLillo hasn’t neglected those concerns), but between differing notions of what it means to be patient. How soon do you perceive somebody’s disappearance as a loss? How long does it take to come around to somebody else’s way of thinking? How much time is required to shift from being concerned about humanity to being concerned about a single human being?" This analysis reflects a level of critical contemplation for which the editors of newspaper book reviews have little patience, but which this blog post presents very cogently.

It isn't that Athitakis's post is much longer than the review, but that it doesn't have to observe the numbing conventions of literary journalism as imposed on the book review. At first it seems like an afterthought to the main business represented by the review, but to me it finally comes to embody the critic's thoughts much more fully. Increasingly, blog-published reviews and criticism in general are more satisfying in this way than what can be found in print publications, especially newspapers.

The Event of Truth

It is often enough asserted that aesthetic values are "really" ethical ones, or that the aesthetic is "always already" political, or that aesthetic taste and judgment are necessarily secondary to some other consideration in a move that essentially amounts to claiming that we shouldn't ask works of art, maybe especially literary art, to be too, well, artistic. The latest such assertion I have seen is from Alec Niedenthal in a post at HTMLGIANT:

[I want to ask w]hy we do not, by and large, see aesthetics as ethics, as an ethical act, a metapolitics, for which we, as writers with the power and duty to transform, are deeply and inescapably responsible. And how we get from ethics to moral literature: literature with deep conviction and passion toward the event of truth.

More succinctly:

When we talk about style, language, form, we are already talking about ethics, about politics. There is no such thing as a work of art for-itself.

My immediate response to this is to suggest that those of us with an interest in aesthetic values do not see aesthetics as ethics because they can't possibly be the same thing. If they were, we'd need only one of the terms to discuss what's going on in works of art, and the whole debate about how much emphasis should be placed on the aesthetic in the creation and reception of art would be moot. I can understand the belief that in addition to considering aesthetic value one might further reflect on ethical questions one thinks a work might raise, but to in effect make the aesthetic disappear as an element in our experience of art just seems to me a denial of art altogether.

By what metaphysical operation has Niedenthal determined that "There is no such thing as a work of art for-itself"? Perhaps in his own response to art he doesn't apprehend a "for itself," but does he assume that what he takes from the experience of art is perforce true of everyone? If I am able in my initial response to a work of art or literature to brackett off other considerations (historical, political, ethical) and to focus my attention on what I can discern as the aesthetic strategies at work and on the effects of these strategies, does Neidenthal say that what I am doing is invalid? Am I not really doing what I think I'm doing? How would he know? I don't contend that "art for-itself" is the only way to approach works of art, only that it should be the first way to approach them and that subsequent consideration of ethical or historical or political implications that doesn't take into account a work's origin in aesthetic forms will inevitably distort perception of the work. I don't say there is no such thing as ethical implication, while Niedenthal is quite absolute in his rejection of aesthetic autonomy.

Niedenthan quotes a passage from David Foster Wallace's "Good Old Neon" as an example of Wallace's "love" for his readers:

His style is all there: the rhythm, the breathless voice, the perfect syllabic stretches. But it’s not like you could listen to this voice talk about anything. Because, the point is, it wouldn’t talk about anything. The voice inscribes what is said with the urgency of its very saying. One gets the sense that this voice lives at all for the sake of these select sentences, that it has self-sacrificed for them.

The problem with this analysis is that it posits the "voice" as existing prior to its incarnation in this passage, or this story. The reason it could not "talk about anything" is that it was invoked to "talk about" this scene, not as a "gift" bestowed by the author (presumably the source of the voice). That the "voice inscribes what is said with the urgency of its very saying" is a nice way to describe the effect of the passage, but this doesn't seem to me a statement about its ethical urgency but rather an insight into the aesthetic success of "Good Old Neon." The voice does indeed exist "for the sake of these select sentences," but to say "it has self-sacrificed for them" seems unnecessarily mystical, even as a metaphor. No "self" has been sacrificed; words have been arranged on the page such that, in context, they have an impact on the reader. This impact must first of all be due to the arfulness of their arrangement and the cumulative force of the context.

I'm sure that Alec Niedenthal is sincerely expressing his reading response to a writer like Wallace. Perhaps DFW even felt a concern about the "ethical" content of his fiction. But what he has left us with are precisely the various artful arrangements to be found there, and to become preoccupied with the ethics his work purportedly embodies is at best to get ahead of the critical task of assessing that work and at worst to engage in ungrounded speculation.

Rabbit's Run

Although I have read Rabbit, Run at least four times, I have read the other Rabbit books by John Updike only once. While I thought Rabbit is Rich was worth reading, the other two were tepid and lackluster, period pieces at best that existed to show Rabbit Angstrom as a "representative" American of his time and place and to document American culture at the turn of each decade from 1960 to 1990. Rabbit is Rich shared these characteristics as well, although in this book Updike was able to mirror Rabbit's own predicament in Rabbit, Run in the situation in which Rabbit's son, Nelson, finds himself, which gives it a structural and thematic association with the first novel that allows it to be a plausible continuation of that novel rather than just another installment in a loosely-jointed chronicle of the life of a guy in Pennsylvania.

To a limited extent, Rabbit, Run itself is a "documentary" novel that gives us a portrait of small-town life (we sometimes forget that the Rabbit novels are set not in Brewer, the modestly sized city the characters often enough visit, but in Mt. Judge, which really doesn't take on the attributes of suburbia until later in the series) circa 1960. But much of its documentary value is retrospective, illuminated by the additional light cast by the subsequent novels in the series. It has a role in this series due only to the fact that Updike chose to write another novel featuring Rabbit Angstrom ten years later, its social realism partly an artifact of the later creation and our perception of "the Rabbit books" as a unified set. Further, I don't think that documentary realism was really Updike's primary ambition in Rabbit, Run, although it was and is a secondary effect of his anchoring of the story in a fictionalized version of his hometown and of his commitment to specificity and detail.

I recently re-read both Rabbit, Run and Rabbit is Rich, and my perception that Rabbit, Run is a qualitatively different kind of novel was only reinforced. Of the four books, it is by far the slimmest, and its relative brevity and more concentrated focus reflects its different purpose: it is more nearly pure narrative, almost allegorical, a fable about disillusion edging into desperation. Its present-tense narration gives it an immediacy that still seems immediate, while the same strategy in the other, more bloated novels seems increasingly perfunctory (although perhaps this impression is heightened because the present-tense strategy itself eventually came to seem somewhat unexceptional--an outcome made possible by Updike's prominent use of the strategy in Rabbit, Run). Rabbit, Run is a novel centered on its protagonist's existential crisis, the dramatization of which is its dominant concern.

Rabbit is Rich is, like its now forty-something protagonist, much less frenetic, more leisurely paced than Rabbit Run but also somewhat more expansive in the account it provides both of Rabbit's domestic life (now that he's settled into one) and of Brewer and Mt. Judge, the latter of which has now truly become an upwardly mobile suburb that provides Rabbit and his wife the comforts they enjoy due to the circumstances indicated in the novel's title. Rabbit has outgrown his existential crisis, although his son Nelson is depicted as just entering into his. Rabbit is Rich lacks the intensity and the structural economy of Rabbit is Rich, making it a less urgent, more diffuse reading experience, but it also offers a breadth of detail and observation not to be found so much in the first novel.

Both Rabbit Redux and Rabbit is Rich seem clearly enough designed to transform the approach taken in Rabbit, Run into a strategy by which the story of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom becomes not just the story of an isolated American trying to figure out what he wants but a story about the social development of America in the second half of the twentieth century. Rabbit, Run takes on "social" implications if we regard it as the story of a high school athlete confronting the world after stardom and finding ordinary life unsatisfying, but neither the American preoccupation with athletic success nor the effects of fame and glory could really be said to be the focus of the novel's attention. And while very little reference is made to current events or objects of popular culture in Rabbit, Run, Rabbit is Rich is saturated with such references, the chronicle of a few months in the life of the Angstrom family unfolding within the cultural currents of such developments as the ongoing energy crisis and the taking of the hostages in Iran. This "embedding" of narrative in social context does provide some parallel to the circumstances of Rabbit's life--he seems himself to be experiencing an energy crisis of sorts--but for the most part it seems designed to add to the novel some "texture" that Rabbit, Run doesn't need.

I think that this strategy in Rabbit is Rich mostly works--it's still a pretty good book that manages to make Harry Angstrom a more sympathetic figure than he is in either Rabbit, Run or Rabbit Redux but doesn't sentimentalize him in the process. Given that Updike portrays Harry in this novel as someone who has become comfortable with his place in the world--certainly much more comfortable than in the previous two novels--it is probably necessary for him to provide a fuller portrait of that larger world as well. Nelson, who comes off as at least as obnoxious as Rabbit himself was in the first novel, introduces some of the tension that animated Rabbit, Run through his own discomfort with the world in which he has been placed and through his increasingly brittle relationship with his father. (That Rabbit is impatient with his son, to the point it seems he really doesn't like him, perhaps suggests that Rabbit perceives Nelson as a little too close to the immature young man he once was.) But, although I can imagine wanting to read Rabbit, Run a fifth time some years hence, I don't think I'll ever want to pick up Rabbit is Rich again. It has reminded me of the era in which it is set, but in the future if I want to be so reminded, I'll consult history books.

Secondary Sources

I have posted to Secondary Sources a bibliography of interviews with contemporary writers available online. This list complements the previous list of online critical essays already posted to this "scholarly" sideblog.

I have concentrated on substantial interviews that were conducted to be read, leaving out oral and video interviews on the grounds that the latter are more difficult to use as sources for critical discussion, which these lists are intended to help facilitate. This means that prominent interviews such as those to be found on Ed Champion's Bat Segundo are not included, but since those interviews in particular are readily accessible by going to Ed's own site, such an omission seems only moderately serious.

I myself have found well-conducted interviews helpful if limited for gaining further insight into a writer's work--what the writer has to say needs to be heard, but it is by no means the final word in the critical consideration of that work. Unfortunately, most interviews, especially in the popular press, are not well-conducted and amount to no more than chitchat. The webosphere has made more interviews available than ever before, but many of them are also rather superficial. There are important exceptions: Robert Birnbaum and Dave Weigel (of Powells.com) have especially done admirable work in the interview form, and the interviews available at Bomb Magazine are also valuable. Ultimately I have included interviews that range fairly widely over a writer's career or that provide especially provocative comments. I have not included the many brief interviews conducted on the publication of a new book that are essentially just publicity pieces.

Gratuitous

Adam Kirsch means this to be a criticism of J.D. Salinger:

The obsessive inventory of the family's apartment in "Franny and Zooey"—there are page-long lists, one of which includes "three radios (a 1927 Freshman, a 1932 Stromberg-Carlson, and a 1941 R.C.A.)"—is not the kind of detail novelists use to capture social or psychological truth. It is more like the gratuitous, self-delighting detail children use when inventing fantasy worlds.

Kirsch thinks that on the evidence of the later published work, Salinger was moving toward a fiction that was "not a way of exploring reality, but a substitute for it." If it turns out that additional work by Salinger exists and that it further extends this emphasis on "inventing fantasy worlds" and eschews the futile gesturing after "social or psychological truth," I'll actually be much more likely to read it.