The Reading Experience

2020 at TRE and Elsewhere

 

Here is a round-up of the reviews and essays that I published/posted in 2020.

At Full Stop, my review of The Unauthorized Biography of Ezra Maas:

Postmodernism on Steroids  

    For readers only nominally familiar with postmodern fiction, Daniel James’s The Unauthorized Biography of Ezra Mass might indeed seem offbeat, even “difficult.” With its extreme self-reflexivity — the protagonist’s name is “Daniel James,” and he is trying to write a book — its rhetorical layers — sections about Daniel James in his authorial quest, sections about the titular Ezra Maas, taken from the vestiges of the book Daniel did manage to write, commentary (in footnotes) from the unnamed “editor” who claims to have assembled the book we are actually reading, along with other inserted documents — and its hall of mirrors play with illusion and identity, the novel emphatically shouts “unconventional.” And the novel certainly avoids conventional storytelling, although it ultimately does offer a more or less linear narrative — if side trips are allowed. Read More

At Cleveland Review of Books, on Michael Martone: 

The Backward Part

    Although he is a well-known figure among other writers, widely published in literary magazines both prestigious and more obscure, and popular on what might be called the “reading circuit,” Michael Martone has during his now rather lengthy career received few reviews in the mainstream literary press. This cannot be due to the quality of his fiction—which is very high indeed—but that he is primarily a writer of novellas and shorter fictions might partly explain his absence from the most-read book pages, where novels are rewarded the majority of review coverage. Read More

At Heavy Feather Review, my review of Lance Olsen's My Red Heaven:

Graphical Variations

    In a career that now includes 14 novels and four collections of short fiction (as well as seven works of nonfiction), Lance Olsen has produced an admirable variety of experimental fictions, no one of which seems merely a repetition of any of the others. There are identifiable tendencies and gestures in his work, to be sure, all of which are designed to redirect our attention to the page itself, to the graphic embodiment of language, rather than to the “story” or “content” to which language is presumed to be pointing by many (if not most) readers of fiction, even so-called literary fiction. But the strategies by which Olsen accomplishes this larger goal are multifarious, especially in the context of such an abundant and still-accumulating body of work. Read More

At Full Stop, on Carole Maso's Ghost Dance:

Unlocked

    Carole Maso has never tried to avoid the label, “experimental writer.” Indeed, in interviews and essays she has often advocated on behalf of experimental fiction, lamenting the lack of critical attention it receives and excoriating big publishers for their commercial fixations at the expense of the literary. In her essay, “Notes of a Lyric Artist Working in Prose," she critiques the conditions that prevail in contemporary writing:

    "Together, many novelists, now commodity makers, have agreed on a recognizable reality, which they are all too happy to impart as if it were true. Filled with hackneyed ways of perceiving, cliched, old sensibilities, they and the publishing houses create traditions which have gradually been locked into place. They take for granted: the line, the paragraph, the chapter, the story, the storyteller, character." Read More

At Music and Literature, on the writings of Roberto Bazlen:

The Residue of Achievement

    Since I came to Notes Without a Text unfamiliar with its author, Roberto Bazlan—like, presumably, most readers of this book, which marks the first translation of his writing into English—I first sought out what information I could about Bazlen (known to his friends and colleagues, I discovered, as “Bobi”). Little criticism of his writing exists—at least not in English—but that is unsurprising, since not only have Bazlen’s writings long remained untranslated, but were in fact never published at all during his lifetime. Bazlen didn’t merely choose to keep his work out of circulation (a version of Kafka, say), but actually left almost no tangible work at all. Indeed, Bazlen seems to have approached his one major creative effort, a novel called The Sea Captain, in a way that deliberately ensured it could not be completed. “It is,” writes Roberto Calasso in his introduction to Notes Without a Text, “a part—and a decisive part—of Bazlen’s work not to have produced any work.” Read More

At Splice, my review of Nicolette Polek's Imaginary Museums: 

Outbursts of the Irreal

    It may turn out that the two most influential American writers in the first two decades of the twenty-first century will be George Saunders and Aimee Bender. (The former published his first book in 1996, the latter her first in 1998.) After a prolonged period during which realism was once more the default mode in American fiction — whether in the form of the minimalist neorealism that arose in the immediate aftermath of postmodernism or just the more general kind of realism associated with writing workshop-style “craft” — Saunders and Bender again posed a challenge to its dominion. In their work, however, the challenge was expressed not through formal experiment, stylistic excess, or a broadly comic worldview, but by adopting a version of surrealism, directly posing against the presumption of lifelike representation in fiction its literal antithesis in fantasia and distortion. Read More

At TRE, on Evan Dara:

Giving Voice: On the Work of Evan Dara

    Although the term “postmodern” is still used often enough by critics as a convenient label for certain works of fiction that are considered out of the “mainstream” of current literary fiction, and descriptions of new books ladled with adjectives such as “unconventional,” “original,” or “innovative” are quite common, the era of “experimental” postmodern American fiction—when experimental fiction could be said to have any kind of real cultural salience—was in fact relatively short-lived: 10-15 years, from the mid-1960s to about 1980. This is not to say there were no formally or stylistically adventurous writers of fiction before this period, nor necessarily that no comparably adventurous writers at all have appeared in the years since. But writers willing to jettison all assumptions about the formal properties of novels and attempt building something entirely new in their place have been relatively few and far between in the last two decades of the twentieth century and the first two of the twenty-first. Read More

At Splice, on Jack Cox's Dodge Rose:

The Haunting

    Reading James Cox’s Dodge Rose, I was most immediately reminded of the work of Evan Dara, although the scale on which the writers work is (for now, at least) much different. Dara’s The Lost Scrapbook (1995) and The Easy Chain (2008) are meganovels, employing an episodic, loosely picaresque formal strategy — even if neither could exactly be called narratives of any kind — while Dodge Rose is much more compact and intricately constructed. Still, each writer doesn’t merely introduce some innovative formal variation but in effect ignores fictional form as it is conventionally rendered and puts in its place something that can seem like formal anarchy, if only because the novels convey the impression they are building form as they go, out of the materials at hand. Read More

At TRE, on Guillermo Stitch's Lake of Urine:

Just Weird

    Guillermo Stitch is not the sort of writer who is going to get a lot of mainstream press coverage--the very title of his novel Lake of Urine (Sagging Meniscus Press) seems an immediate thumb to the nose where the mainstream is concerned--but such discussions of his work that can be found (mostly on blogs) use such terms as "bizarro," "new weird," and "absurdist" to characterize his fiction. It is easy enough to see why such terms would suggest themselves as appropriate to a novel like Lake of Urine, but while they might apply up to a point, this novel finally doesn't very comfortably fit into any of these categories. Read More

At TRE, on S.D. Chrostowska's The Eyelid:

The Temporal Compression of Daydream Experience

    A brief synopsis of S.D. Chrostowska's The Eyelid (Coach House Books) certainly makes it sound like a work of science fiction or fantasy, or perhaps a futuristic dystopia: a man given to idleness and daydreaming, recently unemployed and occupied mostly with sleeping, meets a man who claims to be the "Ambassador of the Free Republic of Onirica," literally the land of dreams. This man, Chevauchet, recruits our narrator, after leading him on visits into other people's dreams, to join him in his mission to combat the modern plague of sleeplessness and to restore the value of reverie and dreams. Eventually the narrator begins to recruit people to go underground with him (literally) and symbolically resist society's increasing intolerance of sleep and dreams (they impede productivity, of course) by, well, sleeping. Unsurprisingly, the mission doesn't end well. Read More

At TRE, on Lee Klein's Neutral Evil))):

Based on Real Life

    The description on the back cover of Lee Klein's Neutral Evil))) (Sagging Meniscus) explicitly labels it an "autofiction." Whether the publisher intends by this to directly associate this novel (or perhaps, more accurately, novella) with the mode of fiction most prominently represented by, say, Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgard, or simply to signal that the book loosely originates in autobiographical experience (but in the process capitalizing on the current fascination with autofiction) is not altogether certain, but presumably the author consented to this characterization of his work, so inevitably our response to Neutral Evil ))) will be influenced by what we think this relatively new, (some might say trendy) conception of the relationship between art and life has to offer in reckoning with works of fiction. Read More 

At TRE, on the reprinting of Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism:

Fierce Politicalness

    You won’t learn a lot about communism from Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism, but you will learn a good deal about the emotional and psychological needs that in the first half of the twentieth century brought many people to join the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) and that, to judge by the testimony given by those profiled in the book, were satisfied to a remarkable extent by membership in the Party. Gornick’s title might suggest that such people were merely infatuated with the idea of communism, but the often fervent insistence that life in the CPUSA actually was their life offered by most of Gornick’s subjects belies the notion that their commitments were so tenuous. Even those voicing some regrets about their years in the Party—and this would be a majority of them—do not seem to regret having joined the Communist Party in the first place, precisely because it was belonging to it that initially awakened in them a sense of purpose in their lives. Read More

At TRE, on William Atlas, by Joshua Rothes, and Directory, by Christopher Linforth:

Brief Encounters

    It seems safe to say that more writers have access to more book publishers than at any other time in literary history. While "mainstream" publishing is still dominated by only a few big publishers, copious numbers of independent presses make available the work of writers who in previous eras likely would not have been published. Although some of this increase can be attributed to the concurrent development (at least in the United States) of university creative writing programs and their need for publication credits, surprisingly little of the work to be found through independent presses seems merely perfunctory, without discernible literary merit. Indeed, the existence of these presses has almost certainly made available to readers works of fiction (and poetry as well) that in their departures from the more constrained practices reinforced by most "literary fiction" have expanded the horizon of possibility for more venturesome writers. Read More

At Splice, my review of Catherine Lacey's Pew:

The View from Nowhere

    This might not seem to be the most pressing question to ask of Catherine Lacey’s Pew, but finally I found it to be one I couldn’t avoid asking: exactly how is this story getting told? It seems to be a straightforward enough first-person narrative, but first of all such a narrative must presumably be written (or perhaps, in some cases, spoken). While literary convention has long allowed for narratives originating in a disembodied third-person voice — either presuming the story is told from the tacitly privileged perspective of the author or has also been written down (as history or ethnography of sorts) — first-person narratives are usually framed as the product of the narrator writing: a journal, a diary, a memory. Otherwise, the ostensibly embodied voice of the narrator comes from — where? If we say that it is simply an artifact of the narrator’s consciousness, then we are pretending to believe that human consciousness unfolds in complete, grammatically-ordered sentences, that it manifests an already composed discourse. (Read More)

At TRE, on Christian TeBordo's Ghost Engine: 

Enacting the Problems of Language

    Since the mid-1990s, after the waning of postmodernism, as well as the minimalist neo-realism that succeeded it, no comparable practice has really emerged that aims to revise and reconfigure wholesale the formal and stylistic moves with which writers have been working. There has certainly been increasing emphasis on diversity and inclusion in recent American fiction, but generally this is a diversity of themes or perspective that does not privilege formal or stylistic variation, at least not for their own sake.

    Still, there continue to be writers who challenge expectations and deviate from established norms, writers who risk confounding readers by seeking out less familiar methods and unaccustomed arrangements, whether of language or form. If there has been an approach that more than any other identifies such writers, without quite acquiring a particular nomenclature to unite a fairly disparate group of writers, it is a broad tendency to fantasia or surrealism, although in some cases the writer indeed favors outright fantasy through something close to fairy tales, as in, say, some of the stories of Aimee Bender, while in others the ultimate effect might more accurately called surrealist, or perhaps absurdist, more reminiscent of the fiction of George Saunders. Read More

At TRE, on Andrew Farkas's Big Red Herring:

Baring the Contrivance

    Whether or not readers in fact find Andrew Farkas's Big Red Herring (Kernpunkt Press) to be entertaining, there would seem to be little question that it is a novel intended to entertain. Its plot, if such a pastiche of the very concept of pastiche could be said to have one, is so blatantly silly, so undisguised in its celebration of artifice and contrivance, that we know it is all an invitation to the reader to enjoy the silliness and to take the usual narrative machinery of fiction altogether less seriously (at least this once). Moreover, the contrivances are so shamelessly deployed, so extravagant, that the novel's very excess provokes a kind of fascination in itself. Read More

At TRE, on Lincoln Michel's essay, "Let’s Stop with the Realism Versus Science Fiction and Fantasy Debate":

Where Our Stories Chart

    Lincoln Michel makes some very good points in his recent essay about the limitations of our loose way of referring to "realism" in fiction, usually when thinking about the alternatives to this practice, in particular the genres of science fiction and fantasy. Indeed,  Michel's argument is framed specifically as an effort to deconstruct the binary opposition of realism and science fiction/fantasy that so often obtains in discussions of the artistic value of the latter. (In my experience, the distinction is upheld most vehemently by the science fiction writers themselves, usually in denigration of realism as compared to the greater imagination shown in their own genre.) Read More

At Full Stop, my review of Blake Butler's Alice Knott:

The Glass of Endless Windows

    It is probably accurate to call Blake Butler a “stylist,” although what his fiction offers is not “style” of the kind usually signified in discussions of literary writing: we find little evocative sensory description, few flourishes of figurative language, not much careful balancing of sentence types and lengths to achieve a “poetic” rhythm. Although his new novel, Alice Knott, at first seems somewhat more straightforwardly expository, soon enough we begin to get the kind of serpentine prose we have come to expect in a Butler novel, as when Alice seems to overhear her own thoughts in a synesthetic rush:

    "And when I looked in search of any world that might remain, I saw the sound of all time become broken, open everywhere around, the glass of endless windows, mirrors sight on sight, which through its rupture of my perspective I could then begin to hear another kind of speaking, the loudest, thickest voice I’d ever felt, comprised from all the people I’d ever known, each of them speaking at the same time, their choir brutal and unrehearsed, spreading through me with its sick yearning. . . ." Read More

At TRE, on the Philip Guston controversy:

Going Where There's No Interpretation

    Sebastian Smee is quite right that the recent cancellation of a Philip Guston exhibition is an act of abject cowardice on the part of the four museum directors responsible for it. Apparently, a cultural institution's "responsibility to meet the very real urgencies of the moment" (as the museum directors put it in their joint statement) is to protect people from art that might offend or disturb. Most likely, the cancellation actually represents the directors' attempt to protect themselves from even the possibility of controversy, controversy that exposes them to the pitchforks of the social media mob. Read More

At TRE, on Mary Jane Jacob's Dewey for Artists:

The Experience of Experience Itself

    In her book, Dewey for Artists (University of Chicago Press, 2018) Mary Jane Jacob admirably attempts to explicate the philosophy of John Dewey--not just Art as Experience--as a useful guide for artists (and also curators and art teachers) in considering the implications of their own practices, as well as the social and cultural role of art in a democratic society. The book effectively explicates the main ideas of Art as Experience  and also provides a generally reliable (if brief) synoptic survey of Dewey's thought as a whole. However, in correctly emphasizing Dewey's abiding commitment to democracy, both political and cultural, and his equally abiding dedication to upholding human rights and achieving social justice, Jacobs misrepresents Dewey's conception of "aesthetic experience" and leaves the misleading impression that Dewey believed art was most beneficial as an aid in effecting social and political change. Read More

At Splice, my review of Hugh Fulham-McQuillan's Notes on Jackson and His Dead:

Grotesque Physicalities

    The publisher of Hugh Fulham-McQuillan’s Notes on Jackson and His Dead (Dalkey Archive) cites Jorge Luis Borges, Donald Barthelme, and Edgar Allan Poe as touchstones in considering the influences on the stories collected in the book. But while Borges and Poe are plausible candidates, Barthelme doesn’t seem quite right. There are elements of the fantastic and uncanny in some of Fulham-McQuillan’s stories, yet they don’t have the casual surrealism of Barthelme’s fiction, nor his stylistic lightness of touch and colloquial directness. The prose is more ruminative, almost scholarly, and in this way indeed more reminiscent of Poe’s first-person narrators. Read More

At TRE, on Sarah Rose Etter's The Book of X:

These Are the Days of Nothing

    It could be argued that the strongest rival to autofiction as the most noteworthy tendency in current American fiction is its effective opposite: non-genre fiction that distorts reality through fantasy devices that create fabulous worlds--"fabulous" as in suggestive of fables. Some of this fiction is indeed reminiscent of fables and fairy tales, while other such works make less use of allegorical narrative while still creating worlds that are essentially surreal. If the former renews a kind of story as venerable as storytelling itself, it perhaps is most immediately rooted in the fiction of a writer like Angela Carter, who performed arresting variations on recognizable motifs and themes drawn from the fabulist tradition. The latter are essentially a recent permutation, less tied to narrative conventions, more freely imagistic and amorphous. The fiction of Blake Butler might be put into this category. Read More

At TRE, on Jess Row's critique of Gordon Lish in White Flights:

What They Refer To

    If any of the writers Jess Row cites in White Flights: Race, Fiction and the American Imagination for their enactments of "whiteness" comes close to being judged as explicitly racist (performatively in his practice, not his personal conduct), it is the editor/teacher/writer Gordon Lish. In his efforts as editor and teacher in particular (Row doesn't have much to say about Lish's own writing), Lish, in Row's analysis, embodies assumptions about style and form that have enabled white writers to avoid reckoning with the cultural legacies of whiteness in American fiction, further allowing them to presume an "innocence" in regard to these legacies that perpetuates an evasion of the responsibility to interrogate whiteness as the default perspective in American literature. Lish is not the only writer to do this--White Flights is an extended rumination on how contemporary writers find ways to carry out the mission--but Row seems to find him a particularly objectionable case. Read More

Also, a new critical compilation, Literary Pragmatism:

    Preface

    The following essays do not make a sustained argument on behalf of the efficacy of an approach to literature and literary criticism I am calling “literary pragmatism.” They do attempt to show how such an approach can be grounded in the aesthetic philosophy propounded by John Dewey and can be developed in a more particular way by focusing specifically on literature than Dewey’s own synoptic focus on all the manifestations of art in Art as Experience allows. Perhaps this entails taking the pragmatic view of art in a different direction than Dewey himself might  have done, or questioning the views expressed by others influenced by Dewey, but I believe that my explication of a pragmatic form of criticism remains true to the underlying principle Dewey wanted to advance—that art is indeed a singular human activity, valuable for its own sake beyond the multifarious uses to which it might be put, but that its value is to be found not in the particularity of the art object—its tangible “beauty”—but in the existential event of expanded consciousness by which the work of art makes itself known. Read More

What They Refer To

If any of the writers Jess Row cites in White Flights: Race, Fiction and the American Imagination for their enactments of "whiteness" comes close to being judged as explicitly racist (performatively in his practice, not his personal conduct), it is the editor/teacher/writer Gordon Lish. In his efforts as editor and teacher in particular (Row doesn't have much to say about Lish's own writing), Lish, in Row's analysis, embodies assumptions about style and form that have enabled white writers to avoid reckoning with the cultural legacies of whiteness in American fiction, further allowing them to presume an "innocence" in regard to these legacies that perpetuates an evasion of the responsibility to interrogate whiteness as the default perspective in American literature. Lish is not the only writer to do this--White Flights is an extended rumination on how contemporary writers find ways to carry out the mission--but Row seems to find him a particularly objectionable case.

Row sees Lish as an inheritor of modernism's antagonism to "ordinary language," which finds its expression in Lish's by now familiar formulation of an approach to style that has come to be called "consecution." This style is best known in the work of acolytes such as Gary Lutz, Diane Williams, and Sam Lipsyte, but Row extends it to cover other writers not necessarily associated with the practice as most memorably described by Lutz in "The Sentence is a Lonely Place": Ben Marcus, Don DeLillo, and even Raymond Carver, all of whom have had some association with Lish. Indeed, the chapter in White Flights devoted to Lish's influence is framed by a consideration of Lish's editing of Carver's story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" (originally titled "Beginners"), in which Row examines one particular excision (out of many, we now know) of a brief passage in the original relating an anecdote told by a character whose role is much diminished in the final, published version.

The anecdote is related to one of the characters, a doctor, by a patient named Henry Gates who, along with his wife, is in the hospital after a car accident (it is part of a more extended episode about these characters, which Lish cut from the story). It is a somewhat sentimental reminiscence of the patient's experience dancing with his wife on wintry evenings in their home in Oregon, presumably meant to add "color" to the portrayal of this character. Row interprets Lish's act of removing such color as an effort to erase this character's social status as poor white (a status shared by Carver while growing up in Yakima, Washington), and thus to eliminate the markers of whiteness in the character. Lish himself, of course, would presumably contest this interpretation vociferously, attributing the cut to the same impulse that led him to so severely pare down so many of Carver's drafts in the first place, an attempt to gain more forceful impact through subtraction of extraneous details, to achieve a kind of bleak objectivity by following the principle that less is more.

But we can't really know from Row's account what Lish hoped to accomplish in his editing of Carver because Row does not allow Lish--or anyone else who might offer a form or style-based assessment of the effect of his editorial judgment--to explain his choices. Instead he asserts the "violence" of Lish's amputation of Henry Gates from "Beginners" with little analysis of Lish's (or Carver's) motives beyond bad faith and quickly moves on to discussions of Roman Jakobson's examination of aphasia, of the genealogy of "white trash," and of other writers contemporaneous with Carver, some associated with Lish, some not; occasionally he returns to Lish and his pernicious effect on Carver (on American fiction in general), where he amplifies his original contention that Lish's editing of "Beginners" impeded Carver's development as a writer engaged in interrogating whiteness. "What was Lish doing when he struck the story of Henry and Anna Gates from 'What We Talk About When We Talk About Love?'" Row asks during one of these detours back to the ostensible subject of the chapter. "He was erasing, or policing, in part, a gesture toward the particularity of Carver's own whiteness." But again this claim goes mostly unsupported, as he immediately (in the very next sentence) begins a lengthy survey of Raymond Carver's background and the turn in 1980s fiction to "a new kind of American regional writing."

Row's procedure in this chapter ostensibly on Raymond Carver and Gordon Lish is representative of his method in White Flights as a whole. It is a frustrating blend of criticism, autobiography (in this chapter Row also ponders his own background, as well as his enthusiasm for certain indie rock bands), and digressions on various writers, theorists, and scholars that perhaps provides some rhetorical variation, but also ultimately muddles the book's focus and makes tracking its argument (if if does indeed have an argument) a challenging task. This approach is especially disconcerting in the chapter on Carver and Lish, since Row makes generalizations about both writers that are entirely disputable--and in Lish's case, arguably question his integrity--but offers so little evidence the dispute can't extend beyond bald assertions. (He does this. No, he doesn't.) No doubt such an approach well serves Row's impressionistic purposes, but criticism needs more than cursory impressions.

Thus the case Row makes for the baleful influence of Gordon Lish unfolds mostly through insinuation. He does not say that Lish has dubious racial attitudes, but certainly implies as much: 

While the past four decades have seen the emergence of "multicultural literature"--that ambivalent phrase, full of coded resentment--as a significant, even dominant, element of the American literary scene, Lish has operated in a parallel aesthetic universe that deals neither in culture nor multiplicity.

"Whether Lish deliberately avoided working with nonwhite writers is a significant question for his biographers," Row additionally avers, but, conveniently enough, claims this is not the question he wants to pursue. (Presumably just the intimation will do--again without any evidence to suggest such a charge might be true.) Lish's baneful influence resides in the way his aesthetic permeated writing workshops, where white writers (including Row himself) learned to absorb "a radical practice of shame."

I confess that this is the element of Row's critique of whiteness in contemporary fiction that I find hardest to understand. It seems to be rooted primarily in Lish's editing of Carver's fiction, but Row also draws on Mark McGurl's analysis in The Program Era, which applies the concept of inherent shame to minimalism more broadly: "If the modern world is a world of risk, a 'Risk Society.'" according to McGurl, "then minimalism is an aesthetic of risk management, a way of being beautifully careful." Presumably this hyper-carefulness represents a reluctance to indulge in emotion, which is prompted less by an aesthetic preference for understatement (resulting in a "beautiful" surface) than a fear of emotional exposure, which in this context is interpreted (by McGurl) as "shame." 

Although it seems just as likely that such emotional reticence reveals a desire to avoid sentimentality in art rather than emotion per se, it is at least possible to construe the restrained "cool" of minimalist fiction as a fear of emotional disclosure (although in most cases it is really a fear expressed by the characters in the fiction rather than by the author). But Row wants to transform this restraint more broadly into a kind of embarrassment about "identity," using Don DeLillo (whose association with minimalism is, to, say the least, rather obscure) as his quite puzzling example. While it has been claimed that DeLillo's work shows few signs of his Italian-American heritage, Row claims to the contrary that Underworld, for one, "vibrates with an ethnic consciousness that may be suppressed by historical and cultural forces, but is not extinguished and is all the more powerful for being so powerfully repressed, not only in one narrative, but throughout DeLillo's early career. Yet to say so surrounds the book, its characters, and DeLillo himself with radiating waves of shame."

I find this interpretation literally unfathomable. Is this shame about being Italian-American? About being white? I must say I find the first possibility extremely implausible, and I don't understand how the second would have any bearing on our reading of Underworld. Further, what possible connection could any of this have to the initial kind of shame attributed to Raymond Carver? Row seems to be positing an extraordinarily dispersed "shame" among white writers, so dispersed it becomes a shame without an object--or at least without a purpose that would explain why we should consider it in interpreting their work. When Row also invokes the concept to describe the "shaming voice" of critics who once warned him off of overly tendentious or sentimental writers, the term has been extended beyond any useful meaning as a tool of analysis.

Even if we accepted that something like shame subliminally influences some writers' choice of subject or representational strategy, by the time we have gotten to the end of this chapter and its summative conclusion about shame--"White writing is a covenant, a shared understanding, about what is sayable and what is unsayable and not allowed"--we have come a long way from the opening gambit adducing Gordon Lish's editing of Raymond Carver as an episode in need of explication. Along the way, much mischief has been attributed to Lish, an outsize authority bestowed upon him, with very little in the way of credible evidence to support either. To be sure, anyone not previously much familiar with Lish's career would probably from Row's account adjudge him to be a nefarious figure nevertheless, responsible for perpetuating very retrograde attitudes among American writers.

It is likely, however, that the real object of Row's disdain is not Gordon Lish himself but what he represents, that antipathy for "ordinary language," his belief in the literary as artifice. As Row also puts it:

The faith Lish professes--and it's clearly a faith--has to do with an immanent quality of words and sentences, a kind of radical non-instrumentalism, which insists on treating words not as dependent on what they refer to but as entirely self-sufficient and beautiful in themselves.

While I would not go so far as to say that Row presents Lish as a postmodernist, a proponent of the formally unorthodox in fiction, he does here cast him as an aesthete, someone more interested in the beauty to be made of language when cultivated for its own sake in literary works than in its objects of representation. Aestheticism is highly out of favor in today's literary/critical climate, its self-imposed detachment from social realities possible only as a move unavailable to writers and readers entangled in those realities. Lish is someone indifferent to such readers (and writers who want to reach them), who doesn't appreciate that sentences are not self-sufficient but need to be sent "out of their loneliness and back into the world where they belong."

Is a concern for the aesthetic qualities of literature--the belief that literary art is first of all art--inherently an insular, protected outlook that allows indifference to "the world" and its injustices--and therefore available only to white writers? Aren't Gordon Lish's attempts to transform "ordinary language" actually the same attempts, in principle if not in their particulars, made by all writers, fiction writers and poets alike, in their shaping and figuration of language beyond the straightforward effort to "communicate"? Aren't these sorts of transformations the very essence of literature? If Jess Row wants American fiction in the future to be "reparative," I can't see at all how asking writers to abandon literature contributes to the cause.

These Are the Days of Nothing

It could be argued that the strongest rival to autofiction as the most noteworthy tendency in current American fiction is its effective opposite: non-genre fiction that distorts reality through fantasy devices that create fabulous worlds--"fabulous" as in suggestive of fables. Some of this fiction is indeed reminiscent of fables and fairy tales, while other such works make less use of allegorical narrative while still creating worlds that are essentially surreal. If the former renews a kind of story as venerable as storytelling itself, it perhaps is most immediately rooted in the fiction of a writer like Angela Carter, who performed arresting variations on recognizable motifs and themes drawn from the fabulist tradition. The latter are essentially a recent permutation, less tied to narrative conventions, more freely imagistic and amorphous. The fiction of Blake Butler might be put into this category.

Sarah Rose Etter's The Book of X more appropriately belongs to the first category. It takes place in a make-believe world (although retaining enough similarity to our own that it doesn't cross over into a purely hallucinatory surrealism) in which it is possible for a girl to be born with a torso tied in a knot (as had her mother and grandmother) and for her family to be in the meat business--meat they harvest from underground chambers where it grows on the wall. The narrative seems to follow a trajectory by which the girl, Cassie, after a life spent struggling with the hardships her condition unavoidably imposes, seems ultimately to face the possibility of redemption, of a happy ending to her story, but even after undergoing an operation that undoes her knot and offers her the possibility of a more "normal" life, contentment continues to elude her, and the novel ends with Cassie's apparent suicide. Thus while we are perhaps led to expect the sort of happy ending that usually concludes a fairy tale, The Book of X  subverts those expectations, to the extent that some readers might find it shocking (certainly distressing).

But this deviation from presumed narrative direction is actually the novel's most important move. Not only does it work to avoid the sentimentality that might accompany an unqualified fidelity to the conventions of the fairy tale narrative--indeed acting instead as a useful corrective to those conventions--a happy ending would likely diminish the book's thematic resonance, suggesting that the  hardships and suffering experienced by the protagonist can be mitigated easily enough, that the harm done to her is ephemeral and not a necessary source of her identity. Because of her circumstances, Cassie can be seen as emblematic in several different ways, most obviously as a disabled person but also as a young girl struggling with socially imposed "body issues," as a young woman succumbing to depression, and a "fairy tale ending" to her story would seem to rob her character of its evocative associations, if not actually defeat the purpose behind the plot and character devices employed for most of the novel.

Although the method by which Cassie tells her story is unorthodox--highly fragmented (with attention given to the spatial arrangement of the fragments), interspersed with "visions" in which, generally speaking, Cassie imagines an alternative to the life she is actually living--the story itself proceeds (in the present tense) chronologically through Cassie's life. In its broadest outlines, her life is relatively uneventful, if often melancholy and full of disappointment--most of the narrative's interest lies in Cassie's psychological turmoil and in the vividness of the surreal fantasia of many of the visions. (In one episode, she visits a "Man Store," where she buys half of a man (top half) because it is all she can afford, hoping to buy the other half later.) The first third of the book chronicles Cassie's youth, the second her attempt to build a life for herself after moving to the city, and the final third her relocation to an isolated cabin in the mountains in the aftermath of her operation.

Cassie's parents are depicted as more or less familiar sorts of parental figures, despite their ostensibly bizarre circumstances. Her mother suffers the same affliction as the daughter, but seems to have accepted her lot and raises Cassie to do so as well, although Cassie frequently expresses frustration with her exacting expectations. Her father at first seems distant and damaged, but it is the father to whom Cassie ultimately seems most strongly connected, and it is his death near the novel's conclusion that leads her to what seems her final unhappy act. While seeking out her independence in the city, Cassie as well maintains a basically ordinary existence working a routine office job, although she does acquire the habit of picking up men in bars. While some of them are indeed taken aback by Cassie's knot (one leaves her apartment immediately), nothing particularly untoward happens, just more discouragement and disappointment. After moving to the cabin she does fall in love with a married man named Henry, but her passion dissipates when her father dies.

Thus Cassie's apparent suicide--she takes some "white pills," and in the novel's concluding sentence tells us that "My eyes fail and my eyes widen, all pain finally gone" as she confronts "the wide bright mouth of death"--for the attentive reader does not exactly come from nowhere. Her experiences have left her vulnerable to despair after her father dies, and it is as if she recognizes that  the apparent realization of her quest for conventional happiness is inauthentic, romanticized wish fulfillment, in comparison to the grief she feels, a grief that is all too real. She falls into what is quite clearly an incapacitating depression:

These are the days of nothing: slow motion, under water, distant from other bodies, other thoughts, other humans. I stop wanting and become very still. I want to cut my life off at the legs.

That Cassie succumbs to this depression is surely disturbing, but it seems clear enough throughout the novel that she is, in the words of David Foster Wallace, a "depressed person."

It would seem, then, that Etter refuses to conclude a chronicle of depression with a happy outcome even more than the story about overcoming adversity the novel superficially evokes. Yet in most ways The Book of X still performs the same sort of signifying function we associate with fables and  fairy tales. To ultimately subvert narrative conventions is not to dispense with them entirely--they still condition our response to the story's development. And the surreal elements, particularly the fantastic transfiguration of the protagonist's body, are quite clearly designed more for their metaphorical  than for their tonal effect or creation of character (although Cassie is nevertheless a memorable and convincing character). We might even say there is a "moral" to Cassie's story, if a sobering one: things don't always work out.

I must say that of the two kinds of non-realist fiction described above, I am usually more impressed with works of the second kind, as the narrative-driven fabulist fiction often veers closely to didacticism, of using fiction as a means to "say something." This is unavoidably the case with The Book of X as well, although I would not say that it is overtly didactic. The impression it leaves most firmly is that of a skillfully directed act of imagination that is itself still the most important point.

New Review

My review of Hugh Fulham-McQuillan's Notes on Jackson and his Dead is now available at Splice: 

Ultimately, Notes on Jackson and His Dead doesn’t quite fit readily into prevailing dichotomous categories — conventional vs. experimental, realist vs. fabulist — but this is a strength, as the book pushes against convention by reinvigorating aesthetic strategies that remain recognisable.