Dukla's Polish cover art

Like most readers, I have my momentary fancies. I think it was in 2006 that I sought everything labeled magical realism, which, in my collegiate ineptitude, was relegated to Gabriel García Márquez, José Saramago, and Salman Rushdie. The Nabokov canon was its own phase. Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald went together. Once upon a time it was Dennis Cooper, J. T. LeRoy, Hubert Selby Jr., and Chuck Palahniuk (don’t tell anyone). A reader isn’t that different from a normal person, really. Our passion may be different, but we’re subject to the same system of evolving tastes as anyone else. Even writers.

Readers who happen to be writers generally add another dimension to their infatuations. It shows up in their writing, in those they emulate and echo. Sometimes this is a conscious directive, but more often it’s something latent. Unfortunately for me, I keep a journal, and it serves as a record of my “theories” on literature.

I’m developing some ideas about narrative–or at least I’ve been thinking about narrative lately. There’s a part of me that finds the traditional narrative structure so artificial and unsatisfactory… I don’t know that I’m necessarily tired of artifice, as it does work for some pieces, but it’s just not very engaging for me right now.

That was November 11, 2011, at 3:50 p.m. Throughout last year I consumed fiction after fiction that skirted around what I’d deemed the traditional narrative–everything from Wittgenstein’s Mistress to Beckett’s trilogy to Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, which might not even be fiction–and, as with all fancies, I’d warped my sensibility as writer and reader. The idea of an emotional narrative arc started to take shape in my head–something that moved quietly through these novels and worked itself out in the dark parts of your brain. I think of it now like music. It’s something that takes place whether you understand it or not, and by the time you reach the final pages of The Unnamable, despite drifting through the narrator’s consciousness, it’s like you’ve swallowed too much cold milk. This, to me, was something new, and something worth pursuing.

Dukla by Andrzej Stasiuk

Even though I’m struggling with my own limitations, I’m still enamored with this idea, which is why I fell in love with Andrzej Stasiuk’s Dukla, recently published by the always exciting Dalkey Archive. Originally published to much acclaim in 1997, this is the novel’s first translation into English, and it hurts to know we’ve had to wait fourteen years to read this. Duklais every artifice-fearing reader’s dream.

“For a long time now it’s seemed to me that the only thing worth describing is light, its variations and its eternal nature. Actions interest me to a much lesser degree.” This is the unnamed narrator’s confession, not far into the tri-part novella that comprises the bulk of this volume. “There’ll be no plot,” he warns us in the opening “essay,” with its “promise of a beginning and hope of an end. A plot is the remission of sins, the mother of fools, but it melts away in the rising light of the day.” In this way, Dukla has already canceled out our instinctual expectations as readers. Even now, I’m not sure whether to call it fiction, travelogue, memoir, essay, philosophy, or prose poetry. In truth it would disappoint me if I could. What matters is everything that’s here–the textures, the absence and presence of light, the summer’s heat and the silence of snow. The novel itself is an experience, and it wants you to be as open to its touch as possible.

Dukla is a real place–a small town and summer resort in Poland. Dukla is a series of glances at Dukla, all viewed through different lights and lenses. The novella at the heart of the book ties itself to a single, definable narrator and his repeated visits to the area, from his erotic awakening as a thirteen year old boy to his travels as an adult. “It’s a strange thing,” he says, “that I don’t recall any of my thoughts or feelings from that time. I don’t remember any of the things that actually were dearest to me, so I have to imagine them to myself.” These imaginings are delicately observed, painful reconstructions of life itself, drawn in a prose style so acute, so organic, and so affecting it’s easy to forget the novel is not native to English (this book is, needless to say, a triumph of translation). He takes what’s visible–what’s allowed by light–and deduces from it the logical conclusions any human being would deduce. In this way, fiction is inevitable. Fiction is the truth derived from memory or actuality–the visible world. What’s startling, then, is when Stasiuk takes away the light.

When night falls, the world vanishes. “Without the world, without the variety of forms all around, a person is naught but a mirror in which nothing is reflected… The primal matter of the dark enters the veins and circulates like blood.” Here, in a novel admitting that “the imagination is powerless,” is the denial of that admission. In this sense, Dukla itself is a contradiction. With nothing left to see, the mind reaches inward and creates its own reality, or the basis of fiction. Dukla is not a novel about light at all, but a novel about darkness.

In the darkness is our imagination. While the absence of light eradicates the physical world–the landscape, the animals burrowed in the snow, even your own hand in front of your face–the imagination reaches out into its limitlessness and recreates what was lost. This, Stasiuk admits, is the closest we’ll come to eternity. Even after those landscapes and animals and all of humanity have passed from the earth, in the dark anything is possible. Dukla reminds us to get lost, now and then, in that darkness.

A not-so-recent article in the New York Times raised the question of the writer’s isolation, going so far as to say we all belong behind bars. That, apparently, is the only environment in which we’re capable of creating our masterpieces. Regardless of whether or not we agree with this statement, it goes without saying that there’s something to be said for distraction. In Stephen King’s On Writing, he claims that if there’s anything a writer needs it’s “a door which you are willing to shut.” “The closed door,” he adds, “is your way of telling the world and yourself that you mean business.”

But even behind the safety of that closed door, if you’re taking King literally, is your writing machine. Given that we’re already well into the second decade of the twenty-first century, I’m willing to bet that your writing machine is also an e-mail machine, a blog machine, a magazine and newspaper machine, a Facebook machine, a Twitter machine, and in some cases a pinball machine. Even if the door to your office or bedroom or walk-in closet is shut tight and the cracks have been stuffed with strips of foam, the metaphorical door is still open. The e-mails are still coming. The tweets are still tweeting. Your friends are still unfriending you over all the gay rights stuff you’ve been posting¹.

For most of us, writing is our core interest. It’s our passion, and every day we make more changes to our lives until they’re structured around first drafts, revisions, cover and query letters, class proposals, etc. If this sounds unfamiliar to you, I hope you’re enjoying your brief foray into an entertaining hobby before you move onto something more fanciful, possibly involving toothpicks. If this does sound familiar—excruciatingly so—then you’re also aware of the corollary truth about writers: the act of writing is agony. Of course there’s something exhilarating about it—something riveting—but if it were all roses we wouldn’t be notorious procrastinators. King advises writers to set a goal for themselves—a daily minimum—and to lock yourself in that closed room until you meet that goal. It sounds like punishment, when he says it, and in a way it is punishment, but without a doubt the kind that teaches us a lesson, that helps us grow. If we get one or two thousand words out of that confinement, we can’t hate ourselves for the pain we went through.

The problem, of course, is that metaphorical door left wide open, all manner of Internet blowing in with the leaves.

Over a year ago, I was trolling the basement rooms of an antique shop here in Minneapolis. I have a penchant for buying silver² and was in the market for a butter dish. What I came across instead was a 1940 LC Smith Super-Speed—a behemoth of a machine that weighed a good 45 pounds. The ribbon was completely spent, but otherwise all the keys worked and the little bell rang every time I reached the end of a line. I had a friend with me and she told me buying a typewriter was the stupidest waste of $40 she could imagine. I ignored her, of course, and brought it home with a smile on my face. A few weeks later, after my ribbon had arrived in the mail, I used it to type a letter to my mother.

That’s what it was, primarily, for the first year I owned it—a letter writing machine. I love getting letters in the mail, and part of getting them is to be sure you send them. I had fantasies about using it for fiction. I imagined hauling it up to a cabin somewhere and writing a novel over the winter. I’m a romantic. Fault me for it if you wish. Even with that temptation, I kept writing all my fiction on my laptop.

I’m not sure what exactly triggered the decision to finally try it out for fiction. It was probably around the time when I decided that every single thing I wrote—120,000 word novel or 500 word character vignette—would require a completely rewritten second draft. Everything I did would be retyped, no matter what it was, for the sake of getting the damn thing right. With that thought at the forefront, I decided I’d give the typewriter a shot for my newest short story. It would be a shorter one—that I understood—and I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted it to look like. The results were startling.

I’m not a very fast writer. A first draft of a short story can take me a week or two, depending on how engaged I am. Other writers may find my predicament familiar: you finish a scene—even a short one—and lean back away from your computer like you’ve just run around a lake. The idea of jumping right into the next scene makes you sigh—you literally sigh, there at your desk—and instead you get up and go rummage through the kitchen, because surely there’s some coffee left in the pot.

What happened when I wrote at my typewriter was the exact opposite of this, meaning I didn’t even realize that time was passing. I sat down on a Saturday morning and wrote 3,000 words with a three minute break in the middle to get a glass of water. The whole story—and I’d written the whole story—took 90 minutes. Sure it was rough—sure it had its share of typos and crossed out sentences³—but the first draft was fucking done, almost like writing was something that didn’t require a little sweat, that didn’t feel like punishment. It was even fun, sitting there clacking away and listening to the bell ding every few seconds.

I wrote first drafts for five new stories in July. That’s a pace completely alien to me, meaning I have never worked that fast in my life—not even when I was in college and had no apparent familiarity with any tense but the present4. Four of these five drafts were done on my typewriter, averaging 1,500 to 2,000 words per hour. Again—these are only first drafts, and a good strong rewrite is needed for all of them—but you get the point. For the way I work, I’ve reached an ideal solution, using a machine that lacks not only Wi-Fi but every other use imaginable other than putting words on a page (quite literally, as it turns out). In fact I’m such a convert that I recently acquired another typewriter—a 1933 Royal Portable that’s so impossibly cute than I get all giggly every time I walk by it in the dining room. With the Royal, I’m one step closer to making my dream of writing a novel at that snowed-in cabin a reality. I am, by the way, planning on writing the next novel on a typewriter. If that seems crazy, remember that I wrote my first draft for my first novel in three months, going between a desktop and a laptop. I imagine I can one-up myself with my newfound process. If that’s the case, I’ll be sure to brag about it.

***
1: “Can’t you just chill out and post pictures of cats and Lady Gaga like the rest of us?”

2: ie: trays, teapots, coffee urns, sugar bowls, serving platters, and any other variety of early 20th century paraphernalia that would go a long way in hosting a brunch replete with catty homosexuals, strong coffee, and ouefs en meurette.

3: The keyboard on your run-of-the-mill vintage typewriter is not the same as the keyboard on your run-of-the-mill modern computer. Shift+8 = apostrophe, for example. Shift+2 = quotation marks. Lowercase L = the number 1. Enough said.

4: Just to be clear: I was writing garbage in college. Garbage. But we all have to start somewhere.

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
by Stephen King
Sribner

Show, don’t tell. If you are a writer, you have heard this. If you haven’t, it’s time to emerge from whatever basement you haven’t left since becoming one. At its heart, the idea stems from imagery, in the loosest sense of the term. The writer gives the reader the facts—what was said, what it sounded like, where it was said, when it was said, and what that where and when looked like—and the reader is then expected to reach the same conclusions as the writer. It’s agonizing, listening to writers explain their ideas. This little dictum, traced back through decades of writing workshops, books on craft, and lecture halls, is the first thing a young impressionable and let’s be honest fawn-like writer will hear when he announces his aspiration to make a dent in the literary world. What’s bizarre, of course, is that in the realm of books on writing—you could call them manuals on craft—this advice is altogether ignored.

Stephen King is one of those writers self-proclaimed literary authors avoid reading. We perceive his books as entertainment rather than art, having long forgotten that art can entertain. He’s all about story—putting characters in tough situations and seeing how they react. He must be doing something right, because as of this moment, King has written 49 novels. Those novels, according to a BBC report, have sold more than 350 million copies. According to Forbes, King made $34 million between June 2009 and June 2010, making him the third highest paid author in the world, behind James Patterson and Stephanie Meyer. The literary sect—we scoff at money. Anyone can sell books, but, as we all know, writing is about art, not sales. Unfortunately, we had nothing to say when King, in 2003, was granted the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation.

Much to our chagrin, Stephen King is a good writer. You can’t get around it.

What can we learn from him? From a man who generally writes horror, realist science fiction, fantasy, and books that are straight out creepy, we wouldn’t think it could be much. But that’s the astonishing thing about him: he’s an extraordinary teacher. When it came out in 2000, King’s On Writing was greeted with rather unfavorable reviews in the mainstream media, even prompting a New York Times Magazine article called, “What is Stephen King Trying to Prove?” “Nothing can disguise the fact,” said Gary Kirst of Salon, “that nearly all of [this book] is stuff we’ve heard a thousand times before.” The truth is that we have heard it before, but that’s not what’s so remarkable about On Writing. The truth is that we haven’t been shown it before.

King’s book is full of straight advice. “If you want to be a writer,” he says, “you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” On adverbs: “The adverb is not your friend.” On the passive voice: “[it makes] me want to scream.” “The paragraph,” he says, “not the sentence, is the basic unit of writing.” Of course a writer couldn’t put together a book like this without that basic advice. On Writing is meant for writers of all skill levels, those just starting to write or ten years at their desks. What separates this book from others like it, however, lies in its subtitle: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.

The first 100 pages of King’s book is a section called “C.V.” Here the book reads like a memoir. “[My friend] and I like just about any horror movie,” he tells us, recounting his days as a pre-adolescent and giving a little insight into his taste. When a hideous, nun-like faculty member asks him why he wants to write “junk like this in the first place,” King remembers:

I was ashamed. I have spent a good many years since—too many, I think—being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction and poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it.

Here’s a book where an extraordinarily successful writer shows his audience how he became a writer. He recounts his years slaving away over a beat up typewriter in his childhood bedroom, pinning rejection letter after rejection letter to a spike above his desk. After his marriage, we’re shown a young couple struggling to pay the bills and raise two children. Meanwhile, King is tucked away in the laundry room, his typewriter on his lap, writing the first draft of Carrie. We’re excited for King when Carrie is accepted for publication, despite the $2,500 advance. “I didn’t know that [it was a small advance],” he tells us. “I had no literary agent to know it for me.” Then King’s life changes forever. Carrie goes to a paperback publisher for $400,000, half of which, according to King’s contract, is his. From there, we learn that writing, despite our perceptions, doesn’t get any easier. By the time we get to the later sections of the book—“What Writing Is”, “Toolbox”, “On Writing”, “On Living”—we trust King to talk to us about the thing we love most. That’s when he reveals his stance on adverbs and the passive voice. That’s when he tells us that “Plot is… the good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice.” Stories, he says, “are found things, like fossils in the ground… The writer’s job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible.” King’s story is a fossil all on its own—a writer who is just as passionate about his work as our most literary authors, only trying to brush the dirt away from the bone. He shows us that fossil, and the result is an inspirational, thrilling book for any writer, one that makes writing seem—though exceedingly difficult—very possible. He doesn’t lie. He doesn’t soliloquize. He gives us the facts—what was said, what it sounded like, where it was said, when it was said, and what that where and when looked like—and we make of them what we will.

Of course a drawback to maintaining a public image while working on your novel is the fact that often you have no idea what you’re saying and therefore often appear to contradict yourself and look foolish. What you have to realize is that there’s nothing you can say with any certainty, especially something like “The novel is finished.”

Because it isn’t finished, the novel. That’s exactly what I’m saying. That, at least, I can be certain about.

The realization came at two separate moments, in two very different stages. Sometime in June I became all too curious and picked up Rebellious Bird—this manuscript I’d queried eight literary agents about early in the year—and read through the first few pages. It was like encountering this friend from high school who’d been tolerable then because you too were a loser, but now, with so much behind you, his presence had become shameful. It didn’t at all seem like a book I could’ve written, but this was all due to very minor things. I started editing the novel and found that only a few alterations could make all the difference in the world, could breathe life into it and make it less formal and stuffy, because it was formal and stuffy, like it was trying to be another writer’s book. So that’s what I started doing, reading through it, picking apart sentences, experimenting with language.

Meanwhile I’d given the book to my significant other. This was back in February or March, I don’t remember. He’s not a literary person, meaning getting him to read fiction is sometimes like convincing compassionate and educated human beings to vote for Michele Bachmann. So he read it slowly—and this was my first warning. By the end of July he’d finished it, and we sat down in the back yard to talk about it.

Taking criticism from a loved one is no easy task. A writer I know has a longstanding friendship overseas. They’ve known one another for over a decade—she’s always recounting fond memories of their apartment in Chicago, years ago—yet when it comes time for them to edit each other’s work, they stop speaking. They stay out of touch for weeks. My first reaction, when my partner and I discussed my novel, was rage. You didn’t read it closely, I was thinking. You missed the underlying themes. You didn’t give it the attention it deserves. Instead of saying any of this I sat there fuming, listening to him tell me that he wasn’t invested in two of the three central characters, that there should be tension where there isn’t, etc. The novel, he said, is stretched out over too long a time span, and it suffers.

An instinct you may have, as a writer, is to try to process criticism as it’s happening. You may hear something and instantly try to think of a solution. What’s terrifying is when you reach the point where everything you’re hearing is overwhelming, when there is no solution—at least no easy one. That’s the point at which you shut down and give yourself over to the moribund arc of the fabled literary bipolar disorder.

When the anger faded, I was crushed.

Here was a book I’d worked on for thirteen months straight. Here were six drafts of varying severity that were torn apart and stitched back together. Here were characters I’d grown to love and admire, and most of them elicited nothing more than apathy. How could I have wasted so much time?

But the time wasn’t wasted—not at all. After we came back inside and I moped for a while I came to the realization that this was only my first attempt at a novel, that while I’d written dozens of short stories I’d never completed anything like a novel before, so how could I expect to have done it without flaw or failure?

I started thinking about it in the shower, the novel. I started coming up with all these solutions—these avenues to explore, these changes. Without any warning I was no longer depressed—not even upset—but invigorated. More than invigorated—you could even call it ecstatic. I had an opportunity again. The novel had more potential. I could be creative again. I could pay attention to all the nagging little voices that had been in the back of my head for months. They’d been there, the voices, and they’d been saying all those same things that Michael said, and I hadn’t listened. I could take the novel and make it cohesive, make it fluid. I could write a better fucking book, and that thought gave me an entirely new outlook on life (as dramatic as that sounds).

Since that day at the end of July I’ve been pecking away at a revised outline for the novel. A lot of the same scenes are there, at their root, but they’ve been altered to better fit into the story as a whole. One character’s sexuality has been flipped, and suddenly he’s sympathetic, while at the same time giving more depth to another character. I feel like I’ve been freed from the confines of the novel I wrote last year, and that now I can use my imagination. There’s nothing like it, imagination. I recommend it.

The next few months are going to be given over to rewriting. I have a six page outline with extensive notes. The first six chapters have already been revised (they didn’t change much), and the twelve chapters after that will all be rewritten. Sometimes you have to realize—you being the amateur novelist—that nothing you put on the page is permanent. Sometimes you have to get over that fear of changing everything, because once you change everything, you understand just how magnificent it is to have that freedom.

I’ve missed writing my novel, and I’ve missed talking about it. Let’s make the last month of summer the most literary month of all.

***
Photo by Casey David

Room
by Emma Donoghue
Back Bay Books, $14.99

Jack’s fifth birthday is an extraordinary one. Being five comes with superpowers, and he gets to choose what to wear and when to have his presents. Five is halfway to ten. “‘When I’m ten I’ll be growed up,’” he tells his Ma. Jack is an outgoing boy with lots of friends—Dora the Explorer, who he knows through TV; Meltedy Spoon, the result of a stove accident, who’s his favorite “because he’s not the same”; Duvet, who protects them from the cold when Old Nick turns down the heat; Baby Jesus and John the Baptist, who play in a drawing above the bed; Spider, who has made a web “between Table’s leg and her flat”; Skylight; Door; Bed; and Wardrobe, where he hides when Old Nick visits after Watch tells them it’s nine o’clock, counting how many times the bed creaks. All Jack’s friends—and many more—are a part of Room, the eleven by eleven foot space where Jack has lived his entire life. He was born in Room, according to Ma: “‘First thing in the morning, you slid out onto the rug with your eyes wide open.’” Rug confirms this story: “I look down at Rug with her red and brown and black all zigging around each other. There’s the stain I spilled by mistake getting born.” To Jack, everything he watches on TV is part of Outside—a made up world that’s there for his entertainment. Then, not long after his fifth birthday, Ma tells him the truth. “‘What we see on TV is… it’s pictures of real things.’”

“That’s the most astonishing thing I ever heard,” Jack says.

It is astonishing, and so is Ma’s process of “unlying”: “‘What I’m doing is the opposite of lying,’” she tells him as she recounts her own history—that she too had a mother, that she was a child, in Outside. Old Nick stole her, she says, and put her in this cell.

“That’s ridiculous, Ma was never in Outside.”

From here on out we understand that Emma Donoghue’s Room comes to us right at the moment when Ma can no longer bear her confinement. “‘We have to get out of here,’” she says. “‘And we have to do it all by ourselves.’” But Jack doesn’t want to leave, having known no other life than Room. From Jack’s perspective we get the sweet side of hell, the joy of having a mother all to ourselves with no chance of separation—a motherhood that seems infinite in its reach in the compressed world they share. At the same time, Jack shows us his mother as she grows desperate, as she seems less and less like Ma and more like a young woman who hasn’t left Room in eight years—a woman abducted on her way to school when she was nineteen, the so-called “best years of her life” gone. Jack doesn’t want to share Ma with anyone, and this is the heart of the novel, along with all its torment unleashed upon the reader.

Room is one of those books that carries cardiac surprises. It’s a novel that makes a reader’s heart scream for mercy as Jack puts himself in harm’s way, if for no other reason than his love for his mother. But that’s not its most arresting moment. When we learn the terrible truth of the novel—what it reveals, brutally, about motherhood—we’re left drained of adrenaline and shaking. Here we learn that motherhood does have its limits. In truth that’s the thing about motherhood—it is finite. We all learn it somewhere between preschool and kindergarten—sometimes later—but in these circumstances, when Jack learns it, it’s never been more harrowing. With an unflinching voice and a startling power of observation, Jack is our guide to a world that seems beyond us, that seems impossible and malicious, but is in fact the same as any relationship between mother and child, nothing more than love to keep us together until love itself is not enough.

***
Photo by tachyondecay

They say, those wizened wise and wondrous published authors, that as writers we’ll get nowhere if we don’t read. Luckily, we all read—at least those of us with common sense enough to get somewhere. As readers we all have our favorites, the books that grabbed hold of us and made us reach out to steady ourselves. There are books that have changed us, that still influence us to this day. There are books, it goes without saying, that we love.

Xenith would like to celebrate reading with a new series of articles. Part of our Reading List community column, we are now looking for any essays—personal or critical—that we can designate “Beloved Books.” Tell us about your favorites. Tell us why they’re your favorites. How have these books impacted your writing? How have these books impacted your life? Where would you be today without having read One Hundred Years of Solitude? What did you learn from reading Atlas Shrugged? It doesn’t matter what books you love. As usual, all that matters to us at Xenith is how you write about it.

That’s what we want—your literary essays, your emotionally charged testimonies, your analytical flowcharts or matrices. Remember—we’re all passionate about reading. All we ask is to see that passion so we can share it with our readers.

Submission should be sent to patrick.nathan@gmail.com with the subject: Submission – Beloved Books. We look forward to reading them.

Photo by chefranden

Kathryn Stockett’s bestselling debut novel hardly needs the help of a small webzine to sings its praises, but that’s not going to stop us from giving it some much deserved attention. Because the most adept of readers loves nothing more than to turn the pages; because we don’t let things like prose style or plausibility creep into our consciousness; because there’s nothing inherently complex about racial discrimination; because one prefers caricatures to characters, The Help is the most remarkable novel we’ve come across in years.

To call a novel a page-turner is to suggest that one can’t or doesn’t want to put it down. This is definitely the case with Stockett’s debut. It’s hard not to jump ahead, to let your eyes skip down a paragraph or two, just to get through it that much faster. One’s almost tempted to skip pages, it’s so exciting. Does it work out for Abilene and Minny and the white savior Miss Skeeter? Or is Stockett the kind of writer who lets the weight of the world crush these impossibly kind, conscious, dedicated women—women who have so few faults that it’s hard to even think of them as human beings? Will the soulless, vicious, inhuman-in-her-own-way Miss Hilly triumph and ruin the lives of everyone in her path (because that’s clearly what motivates all racist individuals)? There’s just no way to see it coming. The pages—you can almost hear them fluttering on airplanes and in waiting rooms.

One of the novels greatest successes is Stockett’s stylistic choice to highlight the drudgery and ignorance of 1960’s Jackson, Mississippi with intentionally dull prose. It’s remarkable, her eye for a forgettable sentence. “I listened wide-eyed, stupid,” Miss Skeeter says of her childhood maid. “Glowing by her voice in the dim light. If chocolate was a sound, it would’ve been Constantine’s voice singing.” When looking at a bloodstain on the bathroom floor, Minny remarks that “A chill blows through the room, like a ghost passing by.” Miss Skeeter, a guest in Abilene’s house, notices that “she stands a little taller in her own house,” after which Abilene looks at her “expectantly.” As if the racial differences aren’t quite highlighted enough, Miss Skeeter thinks to herself, “I wish I hadn’t worn such an expensive-looking dress.” Never before has an author used the ellipsis to such dramatic effect: “I wonder at how frail and inconsequential my mother has become,” Skeeter says. “She used to fill up a room by just breathing and now there seems to be… less of her.” Splendid, that dramatic pause, almost as though it were actually intended to fill us with awe at such insipid wit. That’s the real beauty of this book—it’s so poorly written that it’s almost metatextual, some kind of commentary on the literary qualities of the three women in the book. Perhaps Stockett, who illuminates Skeeter’s loneliness with a hilarious passage about an air conditioner*, is working toward something much darker here. Perhaps there is no literary hope for these three women as they work on their book. Perhaps all of us, as writers, are doomed to the confines of literary tradition, nothing left to explore and all creative outlets closed off. Stockett, it would seem, is a brilliant nihilist.

It’s this nihilism that helps us understand the rest of the book. In its pages, there is a clear divide between good and evil, between right and wrong, and its utter lack of complexity starts to nag at the reader. Then it clicks. Stockett, with her cartoonish vision of 1960s Jackson, is actually working to reveal how implausible it is to think there’s anything as possible as a quick fix, like the aforementioned clear divide. Racism, of course, is a very nuanced and byzantine topic with thousands of years of history. By portraying its complete opposite—a perfect little black and white world with such clean-cut morality—Stockett is aiding in our understanding of that complexity. We are shown a lifeless artifice, an exaggeration in its own way morbid and disrespectful, and on every page it reminds us of the truly devastating thing about racism: that it simply isn’t as simple as she makes it out to be. Stockett, without a doubt, understands the art of subtlety.

So where does that leave us, as readers? In her great nihilistic vision Stockett may one day join the ranks of our most accomplished writers, alongside Melville and Beckett. For that reason, let us hope that she doesn’t succumb to the populist ideals, let us hope that her prose continues down its path of subversive banality, that her characters go on living as lifeless stand-ins for themes, that her plots are so driven by irony that on the surface they appear as nothing more than beach reading, than novels that will be forgotten in five years. “The sun is bright but my eyes is wide open,” Abilene says as she goes off to start her new life at the book’s close. So too are this reader’s eyes, awake and aware of all the brilliant work to come.

***
* “For an hour, I hear Daddy and Jameso throwing switches and clanking tools, boots knocking on the porch. After they’ve fixed it and I sit through a lecture from Daddy to never turn it to “3” again it or will blow the house to pieces, Mother and I watch as an icy mist grows on the windows. Mother dozes in her blue Queen Anne chair, her green blanket pulled to her chest. I wait until she is asleep, listening for the soft snore, the pucker of her forehead. On tiptoe, I turn out all the lamps, the television, every electricity sucker downstairs save the refrigerator. I stand in front of the window and unbutton my blouse. Carefully, I turn the dial to “3.” Because I long to feel nothing. I want to be frozen inside. I want the icy cold to blow directly on my heart.”

Photo by Friar's Balsam[/add_caption_link]

Elsewhere in the news:

You’ll find everyone all over the internet talking about Philip Roth taking the Booker International Prize. The key here, of course, being that one of the three judges immediately resigned from the committee upon hearing the news. Most definitely not a fan of Roth’s fiction, Carmen Callil told journalists, “It’s as though he’s sitting on your face and you can’t breathe.” The Book Bench, over at The New Yorker, tries to give a little background on Callil’s rather eccentric comment.

Callil is a founder of Virago Press, a British imprint which is the largest publisher devoted to women’s writing in the world. In 1996, it published, “Leaving a Doll’s House,” a memoir by Roth’s ex-wife Claire Bloom, which told all about their marriage and then some in scathing tones (here’s a review at the Times). In 1998, Roth published his novel “I Married a Communist,” which concerns a McCarthy-era radio star brought to ruin when his treacherous wife publishes a book exposing him as a Communist. The reaction in the British press was tortured: Roth was a genius, but score-settling didn’t flatter him. Did he hate women? Did he not? Did Bloom deserve it? Had Roth deserved it?

In what has become an immensely popular article, author Jess Row examines the pulse of the contemporary novel. Is it still beating? Find out in the Boston Review.

Today, too, in the literary world, a certain aristocracy sees its sun setting: the aristocracy of critics, editors, publishers, and tastemakers, still overwhelmingly white, if slightly less overwhelmingly male, who may be just beginning to realize that—for simple demographic reasons, if nothing else—the future does not belong to them. And so over the last decade, all the features of “Modern Fiction”—the relentless need to bifurcate; the urgent declaration of the new; the overblown, almost apocalyptic, need for a single definition, a final answer—have returned with a vengeance.

Fancy yourself a prose stylist? Over at Writer Unboxed, guest blogger Keith Cronin offers some helpful advice. Never, ever, consider using the word “verdant.”

My problem with verdant and the other words or phrases I’ve singled out is that they usually don’t ring true when I read them. They feel pretentious, as if they’ve been inserted by somebody who felt obligated to find a word less pedestrian than “green.”

Understandably disgusted at the recent closing of libraries across the country, poet Charles Simic asks us if we could really ever survive as a culture without our libraries. Read his comments in The New York Review of Books.

When you count the families all over this country who don’t have computers or can’t afford Internet connections and rely on the ones in libraries to look for jobs, the consequences will be even more dire. People everywhere are unhappy about these closings, and so are mayors making the hard decisions. But with roads and streets left in disrepair, teachers, policemen and firemen being laid off, and politicians in both parties pledging never to raise taxes, no matter what happens to our quality of life, the outlook is bleak. “The greatest nation on earth,” as we still call ourselves, no longer has the political will to arrest its visible and precipitous decline and save the institutions on which the workings of our democracy depend.

Don’t miss Flavorwire’s list of 10 Novels that Will Disturb Even the Coldest of Hearts.

Ever fallen in love with a phrase or a passage or even a symbol so deeply that you felt to get a tattoo of that very thing? Lisa Jane Persky explores the nature of the literary tattoo in the newly launched Los Angeles Review of Books (which you should follow on Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/lareviewofbooks).

In September of last year, critic Elif Batuman published in the London Review of Books a lengthy indictment of Mark McGurl’s The Programme Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Just last week, having obviously stewed over the matter long enough, McGurl gave his response in a not-quite-as-lengthy essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Jumping to the defense of MFA programs, McGurl labels Batuman’s views as elitist. Then, as a kind of mediator, Laura Miller of Salon offered her opinion on the matter, which is essentially indifference.

To quote McGurl:

This is the other, complementary side of the egalitarianism of the creative writing program and its invitation to the social masses to think of themselves as potential writers. If craft means knowing your business; if it means understanding how stories work, how they are best structured to produce certain effects, what must be put in (including, possibly, lots of research about “real things in the world”) and what left out; if it means spending at least as many hours working on your writing as you expect readers to spend reading it, then there can never be enough concern for craft. Far from simply being an expression of shame, or a call to “workmanlike” mediocrity, craft is how one earns one’s pride in one’s writing.

So let’s not get discouraged. Instead let’s go back to our sentences, read them with all our painstaking care, and tinker with them some more.

In 2005, novelist David Foster Wallace was invited to give a commencement speech to the graduates of Kenyon College. Captivating, inquisitive, and in no way didactic, Wallace unveiled to them the oncoming drudgery of adult life and all its routines—certainly nothing an ambitious twenty-two year old wants to hear. But Wallace offered an alternative to mental and emotional atrophy. The liberal arts degree, he said, not only teaches us how to think but encourages to “exercise some control over how and what we think.” We have the ability to experience the hellish monotony of daily life as “not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars.” “Please,” he added, “don’t think that I’m giving you moral advice.” In truth the most startling thing about Wallace’s lecture was its lack of lecturing, even when pleading for us to be compassionate. We believed that Wallace couldn’t lecture or moralize. He was a novelist, after all, and isn’t it the novelist’s task to show us the world as it is rather than the world as it should be?

The Pale King—Wallace’s unfinished posthumous novel published by Little, Brown last month—has gone on to receive what to any living author would be nerve-damaging attention, and the consensus is unanimous. The novel, says Laura Miller of Salon, “seems intended to plumb the meaning of boredom, a phenomenon usually defined by its meaninglessness.” In The New York Review of Books, Jonathan Raban informs us that Wallace’s “unresolved ambition to find meaning in ordinary, adult lives, to explore boredom and frustration as a necessary and interesting human condition, has great vitality in these pages.” Hopelessly scarce are the reviews that don’t mention the pervasive and almost prayer-like presence of boredom and routine. In the book—itself an undeniable extension of the philosophy unpacked in his Kenyon speech—Wallace’s characters become so entrenched in the tedium of their jobs at the IRS Regional Examination Center that their experiences border on revelation. Lane Dean Jr., at his Tingle table in an enormous room full of other examiners, becomes so bored that for the first time in his life he contemplates suicide, after which he begins to feel the presence of “phantoms”: “hallucinations that can afflict rote examiners at a certain threshold of concentrated boredom.” Dean’s particular phantom launches into an etymological discussion of the word “boredom,” concluding with a quote from Kierkegaard: “Strange that boredom, in itself so staid and solid, should have such power to set in motion.” Here boredom is a transformative process—a moment of awareness. Here our lives are enriched by a strange suffering and self-sacrifice. Coupled with the commencement speech, even the most brilliant of novelists in Wallace’s position would find himself powerless to wash the philosophy from his hands.

Everyone agrees that The Pale King enshrines boredom. What has been glossed over, however, is how fiercely and unrepentantly American these pages are. Yes, the book expounds upon the marvels of boredom and the “heroic” nature of doing a quiet but necessary task without audience or recognition, but juxtaposed are endless descriptions of bureaucracies, American culture at its most dysfunctional, and even extended Platonian dialogues about the decline of American society, complete with terms that never fail to surface in today’s news: “liberal individualism,” “corporations,” “conservatives,” “founding fathers,” “consumer capitalism,” etc. “Americans are crazy,” one character remarks to another: “We infantilize ourselves. We don’t think of ourselves as citizens—parts of something larger to which we have profound responsibilities. We think of ourselves as citizens when it comes to our rights but not our responsibilities.” The selfishness described here again harkens back to Wallace’s speech, in which he revealed that our “natural, hardwired default setting” is to be “deeply and literally self-centered.” This is of course explored much further in The Pale King. Framed within the tax metaphor (and it is a rich, wonderful metaphor), the examiner Chris Fogle reminds us of “basic economic law”: “In taxation, the result is that the taxpayer will always do whatever the law allows him to do in order to minimize his taxes. This is simple human nature.” Elsewhere, recruit David Cusk is concentrating all his energy on trying to prevent an attack of “shattering public sweats.” Ultimately, Cusk realizes that “the hot spotlight he felt on him did not exist,” after which he feels “solid and confident.” Again that strange morality, as though there’s a lesson to be learned or some improvement to be made, trading a solipsistic view for an awareness beyond oneself.

Much has been said about the morality of novels. Lovers of literature, we recoil at the agonizing simplicity of the word: morality. There’s nothing complex about it—nothing nuanced or emblematic of every human heart’s dichotomies. Morals are dangerously equated with messages, and as Nadine Gordimer reminded us in a November interview with The Guardian, “If you are writing with a direct cause in mind, you are writing propaganda. It’s fatal for a fiction writer.” Wallace, Raban states in his review, “loved ambiguity and teasing irony, but when it came to morals he had a deep fundamentalist streak in his makeup, a disconcertingly innocent thirst for the ‘capital-T Truth.’” Since his death in 2008 Wallace has become one of America’s most beloved and respected contemporary authors. The number of books, articles, and even websites dedicated to “Wallace studies” grows tirelessly larger every day. His popularity is beyond doubt and so too is the importance that readers place on his work. Yet there’s something resonant in Raban’s statement that Wallace is some kind of moral fundamentalist. The thematic undercurrents of The Pale King are so simplistic that it’s almost wholesome—and why does this terrify those of us who pride ourselves on “getting” great works of literature? It’s almost as if we renounced morals long ago as something both utopian and fantastic in the way of fairytales.

Considering our nation’s love for Wallace there is an important question that we must ask ourselves: What does it mean for us to have an affinity for a moral novelist? Do the people of the United States have some lesson to be learned from his fiction? Are we, even in our rebellious godless and let’s say nihilistic adolescence as a culture, still yearning for meaning in our lives? Do we, as the unnamed character in The Pale King states, have “profound responsibilities?” In the first of the Federalist Papers (mentioned multiple times in this novel), Alexander Hamilton informs us of our moment to decide “whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice.” In Wallace’s view, that reflection and choice was the key to living a successful life not only on a personal level but a societal level, insisting that choosing to consider the lives of others—the world beyond oneself—would lead us all to live more compassionate lives. The same character goes on to say that “We abdicate our civic responsibilities to the government and expect the government, in effect, to legislate morality.” If The Pale King, alongside the Kenyon speech, was Wallace’s plea to take that morality back from the automated bureaucracy that governs us, how can our most passionate and high-minded readers stay so hopelessly in love with his work, no matter how repellant the term “moral novelist” sounds to us? In its abstract idea there’s nothing literary about asking people to be selfless, but Wallace has made it literary. Is that what it ultimately took—for it to be literary? Do we as complex and even jaded readers need to encounter our moral lessons in something overwhelming like Wallace’s fiction? Did it really take a byzantine, monolithic, and even maximalist novel for us to think about what it means to have empathy for one another? On the precipice of our nation’s financial bankruptcy, do we need characters like Chris Fogle to instill in us a hunger for faith in altruism—for a choice to think beyond the self and perhaps stop doing everything we can to minimize our individual tax contributions? Amongst all this dispassion and almost crippling apathy, is it possible for us to choose to think about how legislation affects the other Americans around us? Was Wallace foolishly optimistic or exceptionally humanistic? Are morals still a myth?

Wallace, to the chagrin of his admirers, is not here to defend any vicious accusations of morality, nor answer any philosophical questions. All we have left is his work, the value of which depends entirely on how we choose to view it.

In Plato’s Symposium, the poet Aristophanes proposes his theory on the origin of love. Man, he explains, was not always divided into two sexes. In the beginning we had four legs, four arms, and two sets of eyes, and we rolled about on the surface of the earth perfectly happy. Knowing nothing of suffering, we soon grew restless and over-confident. It wasn’t long before we made an attack on the gods themselves. In response, Zeus cut us in two “as you might divide an egg with a hair” and we were left two halves of one perfect being, constantly in search of our other half.

Since then love has been our obsession. Why do we fall in love? Why does love bring so much pain? What can we do to prevent love from destroying us? Unfortunately, as Anne Carson outlines in her philosphical essay, Eros the Bittersweet, we will never understand it. It is something beyond us—something just within our fingertips but always taking that one extra step to elude us. In the end we begin to realize that this is perhaps for the best—that it is maybe more fortunate than we realize. In terms of desire, the wanter and the wanted never come together. “To catch beauty,” Carson explains in the preface:

would be to understand how that impertinent stability in vertigo is possible. But no, delight need not reach so far. To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.

Eros is a stunning book. Carson delves through literatures both ancient and modern, both literary and philosophical, to underscore what she believes to be the primary characteristic of desire: its contradictory impossibility. The lyric poet Sappho, she explains, summed it up in one word: γλυκόπικρος, or “sweetbitter”—an experience of simultaneous pleasure and pain. From there, Carson leaves no facet of love left unexamined, unpacking ancient theories of desire with crisp and cutting translations, an overwhelming knowledge of classical literature, and an insatiable thirst to define what love means to us. The result is an endlessly fascinating treatise that feels very much like the act of falling in love itself.

“The word eros,” Carson states, “denotes ‘want,’ ‘lack,’ ‘desire for that which is missing.’ The lover wants what he does not have.” Who can dispute this? Going back to Aristophanes’ origin of love, she says of the lover, “The presence of want awakens in him nostalgia for wholeness.” Again—we are searching for that other half. When we find what we seek, all curiosity—all desire—ceases, and there’s nothing left for us to do. The act of love in the ancient world was an act of pursuit. “Desire moves,” Carson says. “Love ‘puts the heart in my chest on wings.’” In this sense, we understand that something within us changes when we fall in love. We go through a transformation, and this is why love is so irrefutably important.

Carson broadens the sense of desire beyond sexuality: “A mood of knowledge is emitted by the spark that leaps in the lover’s soul. He feels on the verge of grasping something not grasped before.” And so desire—the pursuit of something adored—extends to the process of coming to know, or reaching out for knowledge. Knowledge is desirable. Our attitude toward love is that if we could only have our beloved—if we could only come to control him or her—we would be at peace. The same is true with knowledge: we are always on the cusp of understanding but we never quite understand. Before desire—and before knowledge—the self is whole, complete, and safe from external force. The self is invulnerable. When struck by desire, by the god Eros—the “limb-loosener,” of “sweet tears” and “bitter honey”—our self is suddenly changed, and as Carson reminds us, “Change of self is loss of self.” The metaphors for falling in love “are metaphors of war, disease, and bodily dissolution.” With exquisite clarity Carson shows us just how brutal desire can be and before long we sympathize with these ancient poets, wanting nothing more than to shut ourselves up from love forever and live on invulnerable and apathetic. We are wary of change and wary of love.

Of course it cannot be that simple. In an extended examination of Plato’s Phaedrus, Carson reveals Sokrates’ position on the matter of love—a truly radical stance at the time. Love brings madness—that goes without saying—but Sokrates believed that “erotic mania is a valuable thing in private life. It puts wings on your soul.” And what are wings but transformative elements—elements of motion? Without the placement of our soul on wings, how are we to move? Again: “Desire moves.” Things like falling in love and coming to know are maddening but necessary, are painful but key to our survival as human beings. This favored description of the poets and philosophers is central to our understanding of the importance of love, finding themselves “describing Eros in images of wings and metaphors of flying, for desire is a movement that carries yearning hearts from over here to over there, launching the mind on a story.” Love is a triangulation of now, then, and the space between—of lover, beloved, and the distance between them—of student, knowledge, and the potential journey of coming to know. Even if we never truly understand love, Carson helps us understand its necessity. Without it we would go nowhere.