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.

Jim Thompson in Vermont

If I had never read Jim Thompson, I might think that Dave Zeltserman's Small Crimes (Serpent's Tail) is a neat little book, a provocative narrative of law-enforcement corruption and human depravity with satisfying doses of dark humor and an over-the-top conclusion that almost works.

But I have read Jim Thompson, and thus while reading Small Crimes I could really only register how derivative it is. A first-person narrator relates to us the story of his own dissolution from high school football star to corrupt cop and dual gambling- and drug-addict to ex-con trying to re-establish himself after serving a sentence for disfiguring, and almost killing, the local district attorney. His story includes his relationship with the local crime boss, as well as his former employer, the local sheriff, who if anything is an even bigger criminal than the crime boss himself. The narrator finds himself pursued still by the d.a., who in trying to get the mortally ill boss to implicate the narrator in his criminal operations also threatens to implicate the sheriff, and so the narrator only gets entangled further in the poisonous legacy of his past. That he won't finally escape it seems a pre-established certainty.

In its depiction of ubiquitous criminality and relentlessly sociopathic behavior, Small Crimes is a near-impersonation of such Thompson narratives as The Killer Inside Me and Pop. 1280. Zeltserman does try to outdo Thompson in a couple of ways, most obviously by transferring the Thompson crime narrative to rural Vermont, where the violence and other crimes perpetrated by most of the novel's characters (including a nurse with whom the narrator briefly becomes involved, who seems to be a serial killer) seems outrageously out of place. Unfortunately, so out of place does it seem that ultimately it comes to be rather cartoonish, a flaw Thompson himself almost always avoided. The second flourish on Thompson guignol is that the narrator appears to be narrating the story from hell, his descent to which occupies the novel's final scene. This actually does seem like a device Jim Thompson might have used, but again I couldn't finally accept it here as anything more than an attempt to compete with the master in the exploitation of extremes.

In most other ways, the novel can't compete with Thompson's books. The narrator has little of the creepy understatement characteristic of Thompson's unhinged narrators. He spends way too much time trying to convince himself, and us, that he's not such a bad guy after all, and it's ultimately hard to have much feeling for him one way or another, not even as someone who deserves some sympathy because he's clearly insane, or who should be feared because he's so inherently evil. Although it isn't a paricularly long novel, it still seems padded out with perfunctory and unnecessary dialogue, while the last one-third or so of the story seems very rushed and full of implausible violence, some of it made more implausible by being reported to us indirectly rather than dramatically portrayed. The constant trouble into which the narrator gets himself seems contrived, which isn't helped by the fact that the setting, against which this action ought to be heightened, is depicted cursorily at best.

I'm less disappointed by the limitations of Small Crimes, however, than I am puzzled by the effort to mimic a writer like Jim Thompson in the first place. There is inspiration and then there is imitation. This novel seems to me clearly the latter, although much crime/detective fiction I read seems largely imitative as well. Most hard-boiled detective fiction imitates Chandler, while most "noir" crime fiction imitates Thompson (or perhaps James M. Cain). This must be why I still read Chandler and Thompson with great pleasure and admirration but find most current crime fiction pallid and secondhand. Both of these writers were creating something new. The kinds of characters, plots, and narrative voices they developed were so compelling they came to define the hard-boiled crime genre, but this has become a mixed blessing, as the genre itself struggles to step out of the shadow of these writers' influence.

In her fawning review of Small Crimes, Maureen Corrigan asserts that "Zeltserman takes up all the familiar tropes of the formula -- femmes fatales, frighteningly dysfunctional families, self-destructive drives and the death grip of the past -- and shows how infinite are the combinations that can still be played on them." That Zeltersman "takes up all the familar tropes" of the genre is certainly true, but the novel demonstrates that the "combinations" available are far from infinite. More importantly, it prompts one to ask why recombining these tropes is a worthwhile activity to begin with.

Mindful

Matt Cheney quotes approvingly from this blog post by John Harrison. Some of what John says I wholeheartedly endorse:

Substitute imagination for exhaustiveness, and inventiveness for research. As a reader I’m not interested in a “fully worked out” world. I’m not interested in “self consistency”. I don’t care what kind of underpants Iberian troops wore in 1812, or if I do I can find out about it for myself. I don’t want the facts about the Silk Road or the collapse of the Greenland Colony, sugared up & presented in three-volumes as an imaginary world. I don’t want to be talked through your enthusiasm for costume. I don’t want be talked through anything.

A good deal of my own frustration in reading science fiction comes precisely from a similar impatience with the "exhaustive" treatment of a "fully-worked out world" in which an obsessive focus on picayune detail is substituted for imagination. In such works, "realism" and "fantasy" seem separated by the thinnest line of mere plausibility. In one case the story might have "really" happened, in the other we know it couldn't, but the texture of the "worlds" created and the method of storytelling employed are essentially identical.

I have more trouble with this:

When I read fantasy, I read for the bizarre, the wrenched, the undertone of difference & weirdness that defamiliarises the world I know. I want the taste of the writer’s mind, I want to feel I’m walking about in the edges of the individual personality.

Not because I necessarily disagree with either of these sentences taken alone. Each advances a perfectly coherent expectation of a particular kind of writing. But the two statements aren't really coherent with one another.

I myself like fiction that emphasizes "the bizarre, the wrenched, the undertone of difference & weirdness that defamiliarises the world I know." I also like some realistic fiction that "defamiliarizes the world I know." In each case, however, I'm focused on the aesthetic particulars of the text in question, the strategies it uses in its "world-creation." I'm focused on the text: what it does, what it's like, how its aesthetic qualities are manifested.

I frankly don't really know what it means to get a "taste of the writer's mind" in a work of fiction. The writer's mind belongs to the writer, not the work. Maybe if I'm reading a memoir or other work of nonfiction I might want to think that, figuratively speaking at least, I'm "walking about in the edges of the individual personality," but for me "personality" has nothing to do with my experience of the words on the page in a novel or short story. Looked at long enough with a determination to find "personality" in a work of literature, perhaps the work will offer up such, but in my view this would ulimately be just as much an artifact of the text as any other material feature readers find there. The personality found, in, say, Samuel Beckett's work is not the personality of the actual Beckett but that which a close reading of the texts reveals is a consistent characteristic--when read in a certain way--of the "Beckett text."

If this is really all John Harrison himself is suggesting in his reference to "personality" and "the writer's mind," then we're not really substantively disagreeing. These are terms that denote a "sensibility" that seems to pervade an author's work and that provide it with a kind of unity of effect. One might also refer to this as a certain kind of "intelligence" that sets the work apart from other works in which the guiding principle does seem to be an "exhaustiveness" of presentation, a fabricated authenticity that comes from dissociated details rather than a more adventurous literary imagination.

Still, I've never really understood the common enough tendency to speak of literary texts as if they were emanations of "mind" to whose wavelength we might want to tune in. I've never really understood why we should want to have access to these wavelengths in the first place. Are writers' minds more special than everyone else's? More awe-inspiring? I'm interested in what writers as literary artists create, not in what we can perceive of their disembodied "minds."

A Convenient Facade

In a review of John Scalzi's The Android's Dream, Dave Itzkoff asserts that Scalzi might prove himself worthy of comparison with an SF icon such as Robert Heinlien "if he uses [his future] work to articulate a firm position on the political issues that will inevitably define his historical moment, take a stance that considerate readers might potentially disagree with, and even risk the possibility that a half-century later, some petulant, know-nothing critic will dismiss his ideas as dangerous and obsolete".

I haven't read The Android's Dream, but if it does not "take a stance" on issues defining our "historical moment," for me that is in its favor and only makes me more likely to give it a try.

Itzkoff's take on science fiction in general (or at least that branch he calls "military sci-fi") leads me to think I might not clearly understand the ambitions of science fiction, at least among its more serious-minded authors and critics. Although I have only relatively recently begun to sample noteworthy science fiction novels and writers (that is, I am most assuredly a johnny-come-lately), I have done so under the assumption it is a genre that seeks to provide an alternative to "realism" and other conventionally "literary" practices, not just by evoking speculative worlds and looking to the future rather than the past or present but also by creating alternative forms and experimenting with the established elements of fiction (plot, setting, point of view, etc.). That SF is inherently a kind of experimental fiction is a proposition I have been convinced to take seriously by some of the more intelligent critical discussion of the genre, both on SF litblogs and elsewhere.

Unfortunately, I have yet to find this proposition very persuasively confirmed. The novels I have attempted, by among others Philip K. Dick, China Mieville, and Samuel Delaney, while they certainly do engage the imagination well beyond what is offered in most humdrum literary realism, do not seem to me especially preoccupied with formal experiment or stylistic innovation. (Which is not to deny that the latter two, at any rate, do write well.) Traditional plotting prevails, setting is described in the kind of minute detail a Flaubert-inspired realist would almost certainly admire, and point of view (at least in the particular novels I have read) remains transparent and undisturbed. They are, finally, resolutely traditional novels, if anything overloaded with conventional storytelling, marked as "other" only by their deliberately exotic subjects.

And now Dave Itzkoff tells me that SF writers ought to emphasize "stance" and "ideas" in a way that makes even these exotic subjects just a convenient facade behind which to hide the writer's ultimate intent to "articulate a firm position." Indeed, writing science fiction, it turns out, is just another way of conveying a "philosophy": In one of Scalzi's other books, the characters read Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, which "they collectively decide 'had some good action scenes but required too much unpacking of philosophical ideas.'" "Heinlein may have cultivated a philosophy that now seems distasteful bordering on appalling," says Itzkoff, "but it is unfair to criticize him for simply having a philosophy. At a time when endless war is not just a nightmarish fictional scenario but a real and looming possibility, there is still a position less commendable than having dangerous ideas, and that is having no position at all."

Perhaps having "no position at all" on real war isn't very "commendable," but declining to take positions in fiction, even if war is the ostensible subject, brings no moral opprobrium at all. In purely literary terms, refusing to "take a position" by sticking to, well, literature, and leaving the moral or political discourse to other, more suitable forums is as much of a "stance" most fiction writers ought to feel comfortable assuming. If John Scalzi thinks his job is to write engaging works of fiction rather than "cultivate a philosophy" by indirection, it's all to his credit. But is Itzkoff's own position, that the work of the science fiction writer can be reduced to the attempt to stake out a position on this or that, really shared by most writers and readers who lay claim to this genre? Is it the literary "philosophy" of SF?

I have every intention of carrying on with my survey of science fiction, both current and classic. The next writer whose work I've decided to assay is Stanislaw Lem. Perhaps here I will find at least as much art as philosophy, an equal effort to explore the possibilities of fiction as a literary form as to "say something." I continue to expect (hope) that eventually I will find that science fiction truly can be a genre that expands these possibilities, that in my initial forays into SF I just didn't get it because of my own limitations or presuppositions. That critics like Dave Itzkoff themselves underestimate SF's potential to escape the tedious restrictions of polemics and "message."

UPDATE In a response to this post, Niall Harrison at Torque Control suggests I am "under the unfortunate impression that Dave Itzkoff knows what he’s talking about." This may be right. I don't know much about Itzkoff, and I should certainly be wary of taking reviews that appear in the New York Times Book Review as representative or authoritative about anything. Otherwise, Niall says that my attempt to find SF that does "something formally new not found in other kinds of fiction" is probably "doomed to fail" because "sf stories won’t often look like experiments, because the point is the subject." I'm not sure I know exactly what he means by that last statement, but at first glance it doesn't seem that far removed from Itzkoff's "taking a stance" except that the "point" to be made is inherent in the act of imagining alternative worlds.

Incontrovertibly Good

Commenting on the idea that readers of Stephen King's books are at least reading, Steve Mitchelmore questions "the assumption that reading is an incontrovertibly good thing." "What this good is exactly is never addressed," he adds. Further:

. . .those who defend novels on such non-literary grounds are more preoccupied with appealing to "a higher platitude of, supposed, superior existence through Literature or Art". . .than those who want simply to explain why writers like Stephen King cannot be compared with certain other great writers; a purely literary explanation. . . .

I certainly agree with Steve in regarding skeptically the notion that reading just anything is, ipso facto, a superior use of one's time. There's nothing inherent in the act of confronting words on a page (or a screen) that makes it a more worthwhile focus of attention than, say, watching movies or tv. (And most people who make the "at least they're reading" argument are presumably hoping to wean people away from the modern visual media.) Some films and television shows are indeed better uses of one's time than most books. I'd surely recommend that anyone looking for an hour's worth of non-trivial entertainment watch House before picking up something at random from the New Fiction section at Border's. And Stephen King's own work helps to illustrate the fallacy of the "just anything" argument as well: Film adaptations of King's fiction such as Brian De Palma's Carrie and David Cronenberg's The Dead Zone are infinitely superior to the novels on which they're based, which in my opinion don't rise above the level of poorly written, sub-gothic trash. (There, I've said it.) These directors made cinematic art out of books that are not merely hack work, but hack work of even dubious "entertainment" value. (I, at least, have never been able to see what readers find entertaining in them.) They made films that used the medium in inventive and challenging ways that totally elude Stephen King in relation to his own medium.

Thus, not only is Stephen King inferior to "certain other great writers," his books can't be compared to the work of certain other accomplished filmmakers, who sometimes are using the same "material." And who would guide younger readers/viewers to run-of-the-mill literary fiction before, say, the films of Robert Altman? There are, in fact, only a handful of contemporary novelists whose books I would have turned to before I would go to see the latest Altman film. If the choice for young people is reading a trashy novel or watching a trashy movie or tv show, perhaps the marginally better option is the novel (if only to stretch their attention spans somewhat), but really I can't see it is any kind of intrinsically "good thing" for them to engage in either of these activities.

I'm not sure that those who take the reading-is-good-for-you position are more highly invested in the idea of a "superior existence through Literature or Art" than those who merely critique on literary grounds the individual works of writers like King, as Steve suggests. They probably are invested in "literacy" as a social ideal--and I don't think illiteracy is an acceptable alternative--and from this perspective they really aren't interested in Literature at all: Any port in a storm will do. They are perhaps still holding on to the model of the "general reader" as a paragon of democracy, but I myself don't think it does democracy much good if we settle for schlock simply because it manifests itself in print between two covers.

The Content and Form of American Fiction-Writing

It may be true that, as Michael Blowhard contends, Gold Medal Books, publisher of pulp/noir fiction in the 1950s, "had a greater impact on the content and form [of] American fiction-writing than any other postwar book publisher," although he doesn't really provide much support for this claim beyond citing a few films that were adapted from Gold Medal books, as well as various filmmakers who obviously enough have been influenced by the noir style. To say that "pulp fiction" has influenced storytelling in the movies, or even that some otherwise "serious" writers (Lethem, Chabon) have paid homage to it in their work, is one thing, but to assert it has "had a greater impact on the content and form" of postwar fiction than anything else is quite another. I'm willing to entertain this idea, but I'd really like to have a somewhat more specific idea of what "content and form" means in this context. Does MB really mean to say that Gold Medal-style fiction has so overwhelmingly influenced both the subjects chosen by postwar writers (is this what he means by "content," or is it a looser reference to what might be called "atmosphere" or "ideas"?) and the "form" these writers adopt? What writers does he have in mind? How does their work show this influence?

Perhaps MB clarifies his point just a bit in the sentence following the one I've quoted: "Gold Medal novels were intended as reliable, disposable entertainments: fast, short, and full of action. Noir-ish intrigue, westerns, and adventure tales were the general rule; sensationalism and sleaze were encouraged." It would seem that MB is trying to expand the definition of "American fiction-writing" by insisting we include the practice of those writers aiming for a popular audience. Postwar fiction includes the Mickey Spillanes and the John D. McDonalds as well as "Capote, Cheever, Bellow, Updike, Mailer, Roth, Pynchon," et al. Surely there is some justice in this contention, especially if the measure applied is sales or total books in print or name recognition rather than aesthetic accomplishment as determined by sensible literary standards. (And I would even concede that some of the pulp writers MB identifies--Jim Thompson and Richard Matheson, for example--have some claim to aesthetic accomplishment as well.) Undoubtedly most of the fiction published in the postwar era was meant to provide "entertainment" ("disposable" or not), and no one has ever gone broke overestimating the American taste for "sensationalism and sleaze." If Michael Blowhard thinks pulp fiction should be respected for its capacity to satisfy popular tastes, I'm not going to quarrel with him.

Yet underlying MB's paean to the pulps is a palpable resentment against those in certain "stuffy" literary quarters who just won't grant such fiction its due. And its hard not to conclude that this resentment lies not just against readers and critics who disdain "entertainment" but against those who won't admit such fiction is also just as artistic as "literary fiction," perhaps more so, since it has after all influenced Godard and Truffaut and Tarantino, who must know art when they see it. It has good-old fashioned masculine "raw energy," a better criterion for judging narrative art than that applied by those now in control of American publishing, which has become "feminized and corporate." It gives the people what they want (and makes money too!), and people who won't settle for its "gritty fun" are just "prisses."

As always in populist screeds such as this, the primary target of ire is the "canon-maker-wannabes" in universities. The professors have told an "official story of postwar American fiction [that] recoiled entirely from the Gold Medal writers." They've withheld their markers of "respectable culture." Putting aside the fact that writers who valorized "sensationalism and sleaze" probably were never looking for the approval of "respectable culture," MB really ought to take a closer look at what academic critics are actually up to these days. Contemporary literature has been a substantial part of the literary ccurriculum for only about 30 years, and "scholars" of contemporary literature have long since abandoned a gatekeeping role, anyway. Breaking the canon--in this case before it was even clearly established--is much more popular than making it. And as MB himself admits, "Many colleges now offer a course or three in the history of hardboiled and/or detective fiction." Indeed, it is much more likely for students to find "a course or three" in not just detective fiction but genre fiction of all kinds than a course designed to teach "canonical" postwar writers in the solemn manner MB describes. Genre fiction is much more amenable to the kinds of historical and sociological analyses literary academics now undertake than "merely literary" works by Roth or Pynchon.

MB imagines a critical-literary establishment that disdains popular and pulp fiction. (It's hard for me to believe that much of this establishment resides in "the New York City trade publishing biz." As far as I can tell, popularity now means everything to this "biz.") When Gold Medal Books was founded in 1949, it probably could be said that "respectable" literary opinion" was appalled. But it seems to me that genres like detective fiction and SF, "noir" fiction in general, has been embraced by many if not most readers and critics whose most immediate preference is simply for challenging and aesthetically credible work. It is just as likely that accomplished writers are going to emerge from these genres as from "literary fiction," a designation that has now become just another marketing category. A lot of dull, formulaic genre fiction gets published these days, but the same thing is also decidedly true of literary fiction.

It is also true, at least in my opinion, that most of the Gold Medal fiction was indeed "reliable, disposable entertainment." The serious writers (and also filmmakers such as David Lynch) who were subsequently "inspired" by this fiction have not settled for the disposable and the sensationalized. They have in some ways transcended the original limitations of the pulp fiction form by filtering the conventions and images of this fiction through a more developed aesthetic sensibility. They write better than Mickey Spillane. To make a case for these pathbreaking pulp fictions as art seems to me on a par with the attempts by creationists to make "intelligent design" acceptable as "science." (They want the approval of scientists, whose domain they otherwise reject.) You can believe in intelligent design if you like, but it isn't science. Have all the fun you want with fiction that is "fast, short, and full of action," but, in most cases, it isn't art.

The Concerns of Socialists

In his introduction to an issue of Socialism and Democracy devoted to science fiction, editor Victor Wallis endorses those works of SF that embody "the experience incisively identified by Darko Suvin, more than thirty years ago, as cognitive estrangement":

Works conceived in this tradition are the ones in which we find promise. The character of such works, as Carl Freedman has written, “lies neither in chronology nor in technological hardware but in the cognitive presentation of alternatives to actuality and the status quo.” Insofar as we focus on this dimension of science fiction, we encounter a body of work with obvious relevance to the concerns of socialists.

I guess it is true that works of science fiction that present "alternatives to actuality and the status quo" would be of interest to socialists, but only insofar as socialism is one political ideology among others whose adherents would like to see things change. However, to the extent socialism entails a specific vision of how things should change, what society should look like after such change has taken place, I can't see why socialists should have any particular use for science fiction. More importantly, I can't see why science fiction should have any particular use for socialists. Would not socialism only create another, albeit perhaps a more humane, status quo? Shouldn't science fiction writers, if they are truly committed to the idea of SF as a way of exploring "alternatives to actuality," be just as interested in questioning the new status quo as they were the old? Would science fiction--indeed, literature as a whole, which to my mind is, at its best, just as committed to presenting "alternatives" as science fiction in particular--cease to exist because political Nirvana had been established?

A few paragraphs later, Wallis writes:

. . .Science fiction that is produced within the tradition of cognitive estrangement constitutes what might be understood as an intersection – with the potential for mutual reinforcement – between two streams of thought and practice that have too often remained separate: social-scientific critique (analysis and proposals) on the one hand, and cultural expression (nurturing resistance and personal transformation) on the other. The dimension of social-scientific critique focuses on issues of universal resonance and impact; to the extent that it is well-grounded, its message can eventually cut across all lines of division among people except those of class interest. The cultural dimension, by contrast, draws importantly (though not exclusively) on the particularities of experience of each community – whatever its mark(s) of identity might be. Any hope of developing a popular movement that can overcome the march to destruction rests vitally on the symbiosis of these two dimensions of struggle.

First of all, I just can't accept that "social-scientific critique" and "cultural expression" have "too often remained separate." Political ideologues and social-science types have been trying to appropriate "cultural expressions" (i.e., works of art) to their own agendas for as long as art (more particularly literature, and most particularly fiction) has asserted its own autonomous status apart from "analysis and proposals." Literary study in the academy has now been overtaken almost exclusively by various hybrid forms of "social-science critique" (when it's not just outright political agitation), and to continue to assert that literature still retains too much of its autonomy in such circumstances seems to me either willful blindness or plain dishonesty.

Second, equating "cultural expression" with "nurturing resistance" and "personal transformation" seems a peculiar way to get science fiction writers and readers to join up with a program of "mutual reinforcement." Since the goal has been set by the social scientists, and since they are doing the head work (analyzing and proposing), the fiction writers and their fans have clearly been assigned a secondary and less substantial role--they get to provide "the particularities of experience of each community." Is this what science fiction writers consider themselves to be doing? Representing their "community" and asserting its "identity"? Don't some of them think they're creating works of literary art that go well beyond recommending "personal transformation"? Would they be willing to accept this secondary status as handmaidens to "social-scientific critique"?

Like most political ideologues when considering "cultural expressions," Wallis ultimately wants to glom onto science fiction because it seems expedient to his political goals: A "symbiosis" of socialism and science fiction will "provide new sources of strength for resisting oppression, while at the same time (thanks to [SF's] wide diffusion) bringing social consciousness and political awareness to constituencies unresponsive to overtly political messages." Science fiction can be a tool of consciousness-raising. Maybe it can be, but I'd hate to think that SF writers would settle for that. While I agree that, as Wallis puts it at the beginning of his essay, some mass-market science fiction (including science fiction films) is often "heavily overlaid with explicit or tacit links to Washington’s global military agenda, with the particular incarnations of evil evolving to meet the needs of the moment" and that "An important subsidiary message is that an all-powerful technology has the answer to everything, including what to do if the earth’s ecosphere is destroyed," I can't see the purpose (the literary purpose, at least) in exchanging one set of tacit assumptions (technology good) with another (technology bad). Science fiction under socialism would be just as formulaic and fraught with questionable presuppostions as it is (if it is) under capitalism.

Deep Inside

Recently Matt Cheney (and later Miriam Burstein) discussed the kind of narrative exposition pejoratively called the "infodump," in which "an author needs to convey a lot of information and does so by coming out and stating it. Telling vs. showing. Choosing efficiency over subtlety."

To me, Matt's most interesting musing on this point is this:

Does a foregrounding of psychology rather than action in a story reduce the challenges of exposition? If we're deep inside, for instance, Mrs. Dalloway's mind are we less concerned about expository lumps than if we're reading about Mrs. Dalloway's adventures in time and space? It could be that the tangential and associational writing associated with the representation of a mind undercuts the need or desire for straightforward exposition. But probably only if the setting and situation are ones that a general audience can be assumed to have some familiarity with. If Mrs. Dalloway were thinking about buying flowers on the planet Xsgha, where the riuGsj splort the frunktiplut, the need for some sort of exposition would increase. But would it look different as exposition because we're so deep inside Mrs. D's brain than it would were we following her from a more objective viewpoint?

Although Virginia Woolf's version of "psychological realism" needs to be taken as a special case--it's so pure an attempt to stay within the flow of her character's stream of thought--I would argue that most expository passages in modern fiction do in fact take place as part of the "foregrounding of psychology." We may not always be as "deep" into a character's consciousness as we are in Mrs. Dalloway, but in most ordinary "literary fiction" (by which I mean literary fiction that adopts established strategies and techniques as the markers of "craft") we are certainly at the very least being oriented to the world in which the characters move as it is inflected through their awareness of it. If anything, this makes information-laden passages of exposition, however brief, even more conspicuous and artificial: fiction in which external rather than internal realism is the goal surely has a good excuse for resorting to the infodump, since providing information is a large part of its job, but psychological realism, in theory at least, is restricted to the kind of "information" a character him/herself would regard as such. In this context, the infodump seems like the author's intrusion on what has otherwise been set up as the character's "space."

Matt is certainly correct in maintaining that "If Mrs. Dalloway were thinking about buying flowers on the planet Xsgha, where the riuGsj splort the frunktiplut, the need for some sort of exposition would increase." In fact, this very feature of much science fiction has made it difficult for me to enjoy it as much as I'd like, given my admiration for the intelligent commentary on the genre provided by critics such as Matt Cheney. I've found that the problem extends even to what are generally considered the greatest SF writers. Take, for example, this brief passage from Philip K. Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch:

In the miserably high-number conapt building 492 on the outskirts of Marilyn Monroe, New Jersey, Richard Hnatt ate breakfast indifferently while, with something greater than indifference, he glanced over the morning's homeopape's weather-syndrome readings of the previous day.

The key glacier, Ol' Skintop, had retreated 4.62 Grables during the last twenty-four-hour period. And the temperature, at noon in New York, had exceeded the previous day's by 1.46 Wagners. In addition the humidity, as the oceans evaporated, had increased by 16 Selkirks. So things were hotter and wetter; the great procession of nature clanked on, and toward what? Hnatt pushed the 'pape away, and picked up the mail which had been delivered before dawn. . .it had been some time since mailmen had crept out in daylight hours.

This bit of exposition doesn't necessarily originate from "deep inside" Richard Knatt's mind, but it does arise from his specific consideration of the "homeopape" and the information it conveys--information that is surely intended for the reader's edification as much as Richard's. We need to know that he lives in a world of homeopapes and Grables and Selkirks, and that the oceans are evaporating. And when Richard pushes the 'pape aside and takes up his mail, we are clearly to accept as his own rumination that "it had been some time since mailmen crept out in daylight hours."

Unfortunately, I am unable to read this whole passage, providing such specific details about a wholly nonexistent world, without finding it just a little bit silly. I don't think it's because I can't accept such imaginary worlds per se, as I frequently like SF movies, including some made from Dick novels, perfectly well. There's something about evoking such worlds in prose, burdening that prose with exotic information, that makes reading this kind of SF a chore. Indeed, a passage such as this one more or less defeats me:

Shortly, he was aboard a thermosealed interbuilding commute car, on his way to downtown New York City and P. P. Layouts, the great synthetic-cement building from which Perky Pat and all the units of her miniature world originated. The doll, he reflected, which had conquered man as man at the same time had conquered the planets of the Sol system. Perky Pat, the obsession of the colonists. What a commentary on colonial life. . .what more did one need to know about those unfortunates who, under the selective service laws of the UN, had been kicked off Earth, required to begin new, alien lives on Mars or Venus, or Ganymede or wherever else the UN bureaucrats happened to imagine they could be deposited. . .and after a fashion survive.

Probably even partisans of Philip Dick's work would concede that he is not a particularly notable stylist. From what I can tell, story in a Dick novel is more or less all. I don't necessarily have a problem with that approach (and there are SF novelists--China Mieville, for example--who could be called stylists), but the stories he tells are indeed crammed with "information," and relating this information in such an otherwise unadorned prose style only makes the limitations of this style more evident. Dick's approach also underscores the extent to which even pulp or genre fiction has absorbed the conventions of what I'm calling psychological realism. One might say that Dick attempts to portray an unreal world by realistically depicting his characters' response to living in that world. The "infodump" remains a perhaps unavoidable limitation of such an effort, one that may even call into question the aesthetic integrity of the effort in the first place.

Transformations

I agree with Olen Steinhauer that "capital-L Literature could be created from the tools of the thriller." (Perhaps we could just drop the "capital-L" and say instead that the thriller, or any any genre, is perfectly able to achieve "literary" status when in the hands of a good writer.) I also admire his honesty in admitting that "the subject of literary ambition, or more specifically, literary quality, is a hot-button topic, particularly in the world of genre writing. There's a deep-seated insecurity among genre writers, an insecurity I share."

It is surely the case that in the periodic skirmishes between the partisans of genre fiction and those of literary fiction the former are at least as likely to fire the first shots, attacking the former for their snobbery, their failure to recognize that so-called literary fiction is just as dependent on convention as any form of genre writing. As Steinhauer suggests, such defensiveness does seem to reveal a certain insecurity, however "deep-seated." It should be clear enough by now that "literary" writers have long abandoned a similar disdain for the conventions of genre fiction. Elements of SF and detective fiction abound in much contemporary fiction, especially among writers thought of as "experimental." (Writers like Thomas Berger or Robert Coover love to play around with these conventions, and who would consider Jonathem Lethem or Michael Chabon to be hostile to genre?)

But if Steinhauer and other genre writers really want to produce "great art," they're going to have to get beyond the assumptions about what makes great art not just great but "art" to begin with that are revealed in this post. "Bad art is distracting without being provocative," he writes. "It tells us things we already know, and know consciously." Presumably "good art" would do the opposite. It would "provoke" by telling us what we don't know. But only bad art "tells us things" in the first place. Good art does indeed provoke, but it does so by providing us with a disinctive kind of experience, not by "telling," by "saying something." And what art offers is not knowledge--either direct or implict--but an enhanced appreciation of what it means to be aesthetically "provoked."

Steinhauer continues in this line of thinking when he asserts that "Art that reinforces what's already fully accepted by the mainstream of our society is either bad art or propaganda. . .Sometimes the distinction is confusing, because bad art can be masked in wonderful prose, great acting or cinematography (see Leni Riefenstahl). But we have to see beyond this and ask what it's revealing to us." Again, one can only presume that, in Steinhauer's view, "wonderful prose, great acting or cinematography" becomes "art" only when it does not reinscribe "what's already fully accepted by the mainstream of our society." Art has to do not with a superior use of the medium in question--written language, film--but with the "message" the medium might convey in its own particular way.

Steinhauer is on firmer ground when he concludes that "Power is what it's about. Good and great art have the power to transform in some way." I would agree that an aesthetic experience involves sensing the "power" of good/great art, and even that a form of transformation is involved. No doubt for many, such transformation does mean "transforming how you look at existence, how you look at your life." But no art is going to provoke this kind of change if it simply seeks to affect beliefs and attitudes through making "statements." The power of the aesthetic, at its most compelling, strengthens our powers of perception, enriches our sense of what it means to be alive.

Genre fiction ought to be just as capable of expressing such power as literary fiction. But it doesn't come from any particular sort of plot or any specific way of creating character or through pursuing the right kind of important theme. It occurs when the artist disregards the imperative to "communicate" altogether and focuses instead on the ways in which his/her medium and its formal possibilities can be explored and expanded. When the integrity of the artist's creation is more highly prized than whatever it might be supposed to "tell" us. Ultimately, powerful art communicates nothing, but it is a "nothing" that is also everything.

Teaching Science Fiction

James Sallis informs us that:

When teaching science fiction, I always suggest that to fully understand a story, one must know the period in which it was written. A story written in the 1940s, for instance, may well come from a different mind-set and from wholly different conventions-- effectively from another world -- than our own. One has little trouble getting the story of ''Invasion of the Body Snatchers," or even understanding in large part the sources of its power: fear of being taken over, the threat of loss of self and identity, the primal fear of sleep and what it may steal from us. But how greatly is that understanding enhanced by the knowledge that, written and first filmed in the heyday of the Cold War, ''Body Snatchers" is as much as anything about the great Communist takeover?

Sallis seems to be suggesting that science fiction in particular requires from later readers a knowledge of "the period in which it was written" because it more intensively reflects the social anxieties and concerns prevalent during that period (although this does clash with Sallis's further contention, in the next paragraph, that SF often "taps into grand themes and archetypes"). Presumably, Invasion of the Body Snatchers might still reach current readers because it examines "the threat of loss of self and identity," a "universal" theme, but our "understanding" of the novel will be deepened if we are aware of the way it also embodied the local and contemporaneous fear of "the great Communist takeover."

Doesn't Sallis have it exactly backward? Isn't it our appreciation of something like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the cultural codedness of which is by now surpassingly obvious, and was probably apparent enough even at the time, strengthened when we realize it is also--indeed, mostly--about such things as "the primal fear of sleep," etc.? Sallis himself seems to indicate as much later in his essay when he writes of the way in which the "art of the thing takes over" in good fiction, but why does he then also insist that calling attention to the codednes, returning us to the "period in which it was written," is such a revelatory act? That a work of fiction might have contingent ties to the social realities of its time is surely not surprising. How does an acknowledgment of those realities "enhance" our reading in any important way? Unless you think the social context is likely to be more interesting than the book itself?

The problem here probably lies in the extreme vagueness of Sallis's use of the word "understanding." Does he mean simply that we "understand" that the social context exists? This seems more a matter of fact than of interpretation. Knowing this fact surely doesn't help us much in deciding whether something like Invasion of the Body Snatchers is worth our attention. Does he mean that considering the social context is a means of "understanding" in a more concrete sense, that it is an act of literary criticism per se that illuminates a feature of the work otherwise only dimly perceived? But wouldn't identifying such a work as primarily a political allegory only diminish its appeal, affix it to its historical "period" so firmly as to make reading it mostly superfluous, literally an "academic" question? To me, James Sallis makes reading science fiction seem more like an effort to uncover "mind-set" and debate "conventions" than a potentially satisfying reading experience.

SF/Fantasy

What follows is the third in a series of "dueling reviews" to appear on this site--although readers may conclude that in this case, as in the previous reviews of Gilbert Sorrentino's The Moon in Its Flight, there's not that much dueling going on. Nevertheless, Matt Cheney (The Mumpsimus) and I have teamed up to review a recent science fiction/fantasy anthology entitled Polyphony 4, published by Wheatland Press. Since much of what I discuss in this weblog would generally be described as "literary fiction," I wanted to extend my horizons to a consideration of genre fiction as well. And I would like to do more. (Hint to any bloggers or writers who might want to join up with me in a future such set of paired reviews.)

FROM POLYPHONY 4 TO POLYPHONY 4.1: A BETA-TEST IN THE SLIPSTREAM MAKES THE MEDIOCRITY GO DOWN

By Matthew Cheney

Within the cosy ghetto of serious science fiction and fantasy readers, the term "slipstream" is sometimes used as a label for stories that linger in the liminal borderlands between die-hard genre definitions. The fourth volume in the Polyphony anthology series, edited by Deborah Layne and Jay Lake, offers just over 400 pages of such stories, but only a quarter of those pages are of a particularly high quality, causing me, at least, to feel that reading the book was more akin to slipping into a swamp than a stream.

I have positive things to say about the good writing in the book, but first I need let some negative waves crash to shore. Before I can even comment on the content, I have to note that Polyphony 4's pages are pocked with typos, making the whole thing appear to be thrown together before it was ready for prime time. It's asking a lot for readers to take a book seriously when the publishers apparently didn't care enough to make sure the authors' words were presented clearly. I've read uncorrected proofs that have fewer errors per page than Polyphony 4. There may be good excuses -- Wheatland Press is a small and honorable operation -- but there is no way to excuse the fact that typographical errors are disrespectful to the authors whose work the book presents.

Speaking of the authors' work... Well, people often call anthologies "a mixed bag", and this bag is so mixed it's muddled. There are a few ways to view this. We could say that the editorial vision is eclectic and that the editors tried to provide something for nearly every taste. Or we could be less charitable and say that there seems to be no editorial vision. I suspect the truth is somewhere in the middle, but the effect is clear: Only a few of these stories truly deserve a reader's attention. Many of the stories could have been effective with some revision and the guidance of an editor. Not every anthology editor considers it their job to help writers revise promising stories, but editors who don't should then issue rejection slips with utter abandon and keep their anthologies short.

There is a good book buried in Polyphony 4, though, and it is that book I want to celebrate. It begins with "Down in the Fog-Shrouded City" by Alex Irvine, though to get in touch with the inner anthology we will dispense with the last page or so of that story, because the ending is so pat and sentimental that it threatens to destroy every good word Irvine wrote. And he wrote some great ones -- the story is marvelously weird, a tale of amnesia and love and monkeys with typewriters.

Next, we skip to page 169 and Gavin Grant's "A Storyteller's Story". This would be a good piece to start the anthology with, because it is carefully written, it explores ideas of fiction and dreaming and reality, and it treats its audience as if they are intelligent and capable of both thought and honest feeling. It's fairly innocuous fare, but that's not necessarily bad. Save the fireworks for later.

Polyphony 4 gets better in its second half, and there we've got a few more pieces to choose from. "The Eye" by Eliot Fintushel is prototypical Fintushel, which means that it's hilariously strange and a bit disturbing. "The Eye" is about a very small man who is a voyeur, and his quest for love and friendship in a world of powerful plastic surgery. It's romantic absurdism with fangs, and I suspect it's the sort of thing you either love or hate. I've yet to meet a Fintushel story I hate.

We have to do to "The Train There's No Getting Off" (a collaboration between Bruce Holland Rogers, Ray Vukcevich, and Holly Arrow) what we did to "Down in the Fog-Shrouded City" and save the best parts while tossing out a lot of the rest. The story is at least twice as long as is justified by its concept or execution, but the first parts offer a compellingly confusing study of fertility and sterility. Dr. Frankenstein recommends that for his version of Polyphony 4 we sever the healthy first thirteen of the story's thirty-five pages from the rot of the rest.

The next story to keep is Tim Pratt's "Hart and Boot", the kind of story you might get if a schizophrenic fabulist decided to recount the plot of a spaghetti western. Like the two previous stories we've decided to keep, "Hart and Boot" is full of odd and amusing details, which may signal a bias on the part of the first-person-plural guiding you through this book at the moment. On the other hand, the similar narrative and tonal strategies of "The Eye" and the good parts of "The Train There's No Getting Off" may indicate that certain strategies work better than others at piercing the membrane between specific styles of fiction. Absurdism (in this context at least) doesn't seem to lead to earnest mediocrity as easily as other techniques.

Other techniques are available, though, in the remaining four stories that deserve attention: "Ataxia, the Wooden Continent" by Stepan Chapman, "Tales from the City of Seams" by Greg van Eekhout, "The Wings of Meister Wilhelm" by Theodora Goss, and "Three Days in a Border Town" by Jeff VanderMeer.

"Ataxia, the Wooden Continent" continues the absurdism, but does so with entries from an encyclopedia of a floating continent full of sentient wood. Consider: "EYE KNOBS: These organs provide vision for the clans of the Ebony Dressers, the Acacia Tallboys, and the Sectional Cabinets. Eye knobs are still collected illegally by the Cannibal Pantries of the Off-True Archipelago and used in their hideous cork gumbos." The story ends with a beautiful, funny, sad creation myth, a nice capstone after so much wit.

I hesitated about whether to keep "Tales from the City of Seams", because on a first reading the various little stories it includes didn't seem to add up to anything. On reflection, though, I realized I didn't care. Let mathematicians do sums; I'm content with pieces of unarithematized words. Each piece captured my imagination, and in the end the universe coalesces in a restroom. It is unseemly to ask more from a story!

"The Wings of Meister Wilhelm" is one of the most traditional stories in the book, a story that would even be appropriate for children, but it is captivating and feels fresh because it is all told so well. The young narrator, unhappy at home, takes lessons from a nomadic German violinist who happens to believe in a flying city and wants to build a glider to fly there. It is the kind of story that a book like Polyphony 4 exists to publish -- a story that doesn't fit easily into any marketing category (is it a fantasy? historical fiction? young adult?), but which is written with skill and sensitivity and will delight most readers.

"Three Days in a Border Town" is the masterpiece of the anthology, and the editors have quite rightly placed it last -- it must be saved for last, because it makes just about everything else in the book seem pedestrian. It is dense, thick, rich with imagery and, by the end, emotion (though it is not at all sentimental). The prose is sharp and rhythmic, and it makes the second-person narration (which in most writers' hands is cloying) feel natural and intimate. It has some of the elements of an adventure story, but it's an adventure story as filtered through the sensibility of Samuel Beckett, a post-adventure story, a story of the dry, nasty purgatory between adventures. We're thrown into the hangover of lost love, the numbing pain of remembered mysteries. Fantasy and reality confuse each other, history and storytelling don't solve anything, and in the end all you can do is keep walking, and that is enough.

Other readers might prefer other stories to the ones I have chosen -- plenty of readers will be entertained by Lucius Shepard's "The Blackpool Ascensions", for instance, which I thought was a mess -- and so the book's size and variety might be justified. The anthology I assembled above from the raw materials of Polyphony 4 (call it Polyphony 4.1) would only contain about 160 pages of fiction. For me, the other pages were a distraction, because I'm a slow reader and prefer to read a book that has been scrupulously, even ruthlessly, edited.

Kelly Link proved with her anthology Trampoline that it is possible to assemble a rich and consistently interesting collection of stories that defy labels. Polyphony 4 proves just how difficult that task can be.

MONOPHONY

By Daniel Green

Polyphony 4 makes it clear enough that a spirit of experimentation exists among those writers who have chosen to work within the uber-genre of science fiction/fantasy, much more so, if this anthology is at all representative, than among those who still aspire to the putative respectability of "literary fiction." The latter category encompasses a small subset of writers who are in effect granted a license to call themselves "experimental," but the degree to which these writers are truly willing to reconsider the ultimate purposes and unexamined proprieties of fiction is really quite limited. And while occasionally this or that ostensibly unconventional approach manages to create a modest stir or even for a time to catch on as the latest in literary fashion, my impression after monitoring the wandering course innovative fiction has followed over the past twenty years or so is that only a few experimental writers are able or willing to stick to that course very firmly in the face of both complete commerical irrelevance and a general lack of informed critical attention.

SF/Fantasy of all the genres presumably offers through its fundamental enabling conventions the most explicit alternative to mainstream literary fiction, which, even at its most experimental, mostly aims, in one way or another, directly or indirectly, to capture present circumstances, things as they are, or at least as they can be seen to represent abiding concerns in human existence more generally. Science fiction deliberately foregoes a direct engagement with the world literary fiction confronts more squarely, preferring instead imaginative extrapolations from existing conditions in that world; fantastic fiction ignores the restraints of realism in coming to terms with that world altogether. But the stories in Polyphony 4 don't just exemplify the alternative strategies embodied in their genres. They manifest an obvious effort to question inherited assumptions about storytelling, the basic principles of fiction-making.

And yet my most immediate response to this anthology was disappointment, even boredom. While the ambitions motivating most of these stories are entirely admirable, the realization of these worthy ambitions is not often equal to the potential for "making it new" the anthology itself represents. Too frequently the stories seem to settle for, at worst, an indulgence in superficial whimsy, at best, a cultivation of the bizarre in situation and event that, at least as I read them, can't bear the weight they're asked to bear when left to provide the primary source of dramatic interest. Somtimes, the piling-up of bizarre details and frankly silly conceits simply substitutes for any further attempt to additionally develop the work into something more aesthetically compelling, as in "Ataxia, the Wooden Continent":

ATAXIA: A floating continent, entirely composed of wood. Populated by various races of arboids, celluloids, and laminates. Ruled by the priest cult of the Great Lectern at Shellac-Veneer. This magnifcent city surrounds the sacred lectern's base. The cupolas and minarets of Shellac-Veneer rise from the Plain of Lath, Ataxia's central plateau. The Lectern's high priest administers the Holy Ataxic Empire from the Shrine of the Thrones of Nails. Defended by armies of Drillers under the command of the Walking Barn Roof. . .Major Cities: Shellac-Veneer, Cambium, Silo, and Wharftown. Main rivers: The Timber, the Pellet, and the Tanbark. Chief imports: screws, bolts, and brackets. Chief exports: Shovelers and toothpick hay.

Moreover, the editors have not made it easier to appreciate the worthwhile stories that are included in Polyphony 4 by arranging it so that the most tiresomely whimsical and/or hackneyed stories are the ones at the front of the book (the very best story, in fact, is literally saved until last), thus only increasing the possibility that a casual or curious reader will give up on the anthology and conclude that sf/fantasy may not reward further sampling. By my count, the first really good story doesn't come along until page 169 ("The Storyteller's Story"), althought at least four of the following eight stories ("Memree," "Baby Love," "Hart and Boot," and "Bagging the Peak") are also quite good. Of the remaining 100 pages, readers might disagree about the quality of such stories as "The Journal of Philip Schuyler," and "The Wings of Meister Wilhelm" (historical fantasies of a sort), while "Tales from the City of Seams, and "Three Days in a Border Town" are two of the best stories to be found in Polyphony 4, almost (not quite) redeeming the tedium one must unfortunately endure through the largest part of this anthology.

Perhaps the most significant contributing factor to the general lassitude Polyphony 4 induces is that, with exceptions, the writing itself in most of these stories is really quite lackluster, not at all commensurate with the colorful concepts from which the stories seem to emerge. The very first paragraph of the very first story sets the tone for the mostly flat and stale style of writing one encounters in too many of the stories:

Emelia's home is in a city where only children are allowed to draw graffiti on the crumbling walls. The old bricks and stones are covered in crude pictographs and stick figures, smoking chimney houses and bicycles with four wheels and two seats. Chalk is a penny a piece, any color to be had. A little old lady with gnarled fingers and crooked eyes sells the sticks out of cigar boxes on street corners, even in the rain.

The open-eyed wonderment conveyed by this passage cannot, for me, mitigate the otherwise bland prose and the cloying and cliched effect it produces. Overall, the most lasting impression the writing in many of these stories left with me is the sense that all too often their authors were so enamored of the "idea" being pursued they couldn't really bother with composing satisfying prose to go along with it. In the most extreme cases, I could only conclude that the sensibilty informing the stories was finally more cinematic than literary, more concerned with narrative immediacy than with the opportunity to do something interesting with words, at least where style is concerned.

Nevertheless, if I were to point interested readers to stories in Polyphony 4 that would reward the effort to locate a copy of the anthology, regardless of one's interest in genre, there would be two: Michael Bishop's "Baby Love" and Jeff VanderMeer's "Three Days in a Border Town." I would be hard put to classify the former story as science fiction or fantasy at all: It tells in a more or less straightforwardly realistic but effectively understated way the story of a man who loses his wife in an auto accident and must care for his infant daughter by himself. It is an engaging story that concludes in a quiet but really very emotionally crushing way. "Three Days in a Border Town" is to some extent a fairly familiar tale of the postapocalypse, but its central conceit is executed very effectively (it is thematically integrated in a manner that succeeds in purely literary terms and is not merely clever or fanciful) and the writing is evocative and assured: "When you come out of the desert into the border town, you feel like a wisp of smoke rising into the cloudless sky. You're two eyes and a dry tongue. But you can't burn up; you've already passed through flame on your way to ash. Even the sweat between your breasts is ethereal, otherwordly. Not all the blue in the sky could moisten you." If VanderMeer's story is a good example of what current sf/fantasy is capable of achieving, I would definitely like to read more.