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.”

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.

We’ve all met one. Ellen Dean. The Turn of the Screw’s tormented governess. Humbert Humbert. Although what we know as the unreliable narrator first appeared in 10th century Islamic philosophical writings and began its full literary ascent in 19th century crime novels, the concept failed to reach its full potential until the middle of the 20th century. With works like The Sound and the Fury, Beckett’s Malone Trilogy, and almost everything ever written by Nabokov, readers discovered the terrible beauty that can be wrought by fiction with narrators you just can’t trust. In 1959 Germany was both scandalized and elated at the appearance of another unreliable narrator, Oskar Matzerath. In his first and most well known novel, Günter Grass pushed the limits of the unreliable narrator, producing a work that—because of Oskar—evades all criticism and in turn criticizes its readers. In retrospect, The Tin Drum is a ballsy and enviable bid for literary immortality.

The prose is terrible. Speaking of himself in the third person (a trick he often employs): “At first Oskar pulled gingerly, taking care not to hurt either the wounded postal clerk or the letters; then he tugged more violently.” Even lovers of a soft and playful style will find Oskar nauseating after the first chapter. But can we fault Grass for this? Indeed everything critical that can be said about syntax and word choice and adverb dependency can be directed toward Oskar who refutes it without pause. As a professed mental patient (even though he denies his insanity) and unrepentant narcissist, Oskar can’t be blamed for his pretentious style. We can hate the style but it’s that awful conundrum of loving to hate because we can’t deny that it’s done so well. It’s intentionally repellent. In the end it serves to characterize what we discover to be one of literature’s most unforgettable protagonists.

The book drags. Oskar isn’t born until page 33. An entire page is devoted to the actions of a card game. “I sacrificed the king of clubs, which Jan took with the jack of spades, but having no diamonds, I recovered the lead by trumping Jan’s ace of diamonds and drew his ten of hearts with my jack,” and on and on. What we have is a catalogue of meticulous detail: “The runner measured twenty-eight feet, but the hallway came to just twenty-five feet and seven inches.” Any other novelist would be held over the coals for this, yet because this is Oskar we’re reading, Grass gets away with it. Eventually we learn that Oskar’s obscene detail in minutiae obscures the more alarming parts of the book. It is only through small hints in the narrative that we understand the marching in the street, the violence, the horrors of the Nazi regime. In the wake of Kristallnacht, Oskar considers the merchant who sells his toy drums: “Before him on the desk stood an empty water glass; the sound of his crashing shop-window had made him thirsty no doubt.”

Even though a reader doesn’t realize it at first, The Tin Drum is a brilliant book. The aforementioned grating prose and the watered-down narrative are in the end great strengths. We only see Nazi Germany and occupied Poland through the very narrow window that Oskar provides, transforming it into a nostalgic and magical world. With his drum Oskar can conjure up the past and with his voice he can carve his name into a pane of glass. His life is not in danger until the city of Danzig is freed from Nazi power. The Reich, in the end, is a time of innocence and wonder. Oskar’s adult life doesn’t begin until the war is long over, and so too his first taste of life’s cruelty. In the end we come to realize that if we can’t trust Oskar, how can we trust our reality? The Tin Drum appeared in Germany at a time of reconstruction in which citizens were encouraged not to reflect on the past but look forward to the future. It was a time of historical distortion and Grass confronted it with this startling, upsetting novel. The beautiful and the terrible—the honest and the false—are fused from the beginning, and in that fusion we realize just how many questions we must ask of the reality before us. Oskar—loved or hated—is the only lens we have.

In public we subject ourselves to coversation. Not as participants, necessarily—more often as witnesses, even eavesdroppers. If you’re anything like me, listening to the conversations of others makes you cringe. There’s always an idiot, always a pseudo-intellectual, always a racist, a homophobe, a misogynist, always an avid quoter of Nietzsche, and so on. You and I are doubtlessly just as annoying. Regardless, every once in a while you hear something that makes you want to stand up and object, to involve yourself in the conversation. Over the summer I was at the beach, relaxing nearby a young man and woman discussing books they’d read recently. The young man, by the look of whom I’d assume was one of those Nietzche quoters, announced that he’d recently read All the Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy. He summed up his feelings by saying that McCarthy was a “writer’s writer,” with no small hint of disdain in his voice. “Oh,” was all the young woman said, understanding completely. I’ve thought a lot about that phrase and all its negative connotations. I view it as a pigeonholing of an author, one insinuating that intricacies like prose style and even metaphor are unimportant. I had long decided that there was no place in my vocabulary for that phrase.

Unfortunately, after reading The New York Trilogy, by Paul Auster, I’ve found occasion to use it. Auster is certainly a writer’s writer—though not because his prose is too delicate or his themes too complex for a reader that, let’s be honest, is not acquainted with the niceties of reading. No—Auster is a writer’s writer because he is essentially concerned with writing. Auster’s protagonists are writers, aspiring writers, or characters that should have been writers. He goes into great detail to surround these characters with admirable writing lifestyles—as paid columnists with apartments full of books, writing spaces tucked away in small New York apartments, and above all an obsessive and consuming drive to discern meaning, to understand.

Disguising itself as a reinvention of the pulp detective novel from the middle of the twentieth century, The New York Trilogy is the written manifestation of a writer’s existentialist crisis. In each of the trilogy’s three short novels, the inactive hero is called into service by some mysterious person who gives as little information as possible. As the stories go on and become more complex the hero begins to fall apart, overturning one meaning after another until ultimately there is no meaning whatsoever. Yes he plays with the detective genre (with delicious lines like “Why do I feel she is not to be trusted?”), yes his characters delve deep into mysteries, but this is not the world of the detective novel. Auster’s world is reality, is New York—peppered with nihilism. Auster shows us the allure of adventure, the charm of order and a controlled existence, and reveals its impossibilty with failure. The quest for meaning is an act of self destruction. The act of writing is destructive. Unfortunately—for Auster’s protagonists and indeed for us writers—the quest is necessary. Writing is necessary. The only glimmer of hope that Auster offers us is that even though his heroes fail they aren’t left unhappy.

So, in the face of self-destruction and failure, let’s write anyway.

Not long ago, at the onset of National Novel Writing Month, Salon’s Laura Miller received a lot of flak for her article, “Better yet, don’t write that NaNo.” In a response posted in The Los Angeles Times, columnist Carolyn Kellogg called Miller’s argument “at best wrongheaded, and at worst, smallhearted.” A multitude of comments followed Kellogg’s article, labeling Miller as “mean-spirited” and “an insecure whiner.” Miller herself posted a reply, defending her position:

My point is not that NaNoWriMo contestants are bad people who do bad things and should be condemned. I don’t think that, and never wrote that. Let me reiterate: I have nothing against people wanting to write. (I will confess to being disgusted by people who want to write but don’t read, but again, I never said this was true of all NaNoWriMo contestants, only that it is often reported by writing teachers and other professionals who come into frequent contact with aspiring writers. Are there stats on this? No — neither are there stats to prove that aspiring writers read a lot. To me, it’s amazing that ANY aspiring writers admit to not reading. Yet I have met quite a few of them myself.)

What I see here is an unfortunate and age-old quagmire. Miller, like all critics, appears to have approached her article with genuine intentions. Like all of us she’s passionate about reading and wants to share that. However, like most critics, in writing her indictment of writers who don’t read she resorted to the critic’s most dexterous talent: venom. It makes for entertaining reading but unfortunately it nearly always fails to reach the addressed party, in this case the 160,000+ writers who attempted NaNo this year.

As editor of this growing literary webzine I want to use Miller’s article as a springboard. In no way do I want to inhibit a writer from writing. Write to your heart’s content. Write whatever comes to your fingertips. I do, however, want to echo the spirit of Miller’s call for readers. We all know that the best writers read. We all know that without reading there would be no writing—at least no writing worth a damn. What I’m concerned about is the passive way in which today’s readers go about reading. Literature—although elusive when it comes to defining characteristics—is not a static process. One does not create a book from nothing and cast it out back into that nothing. Literature is an interconnected network of writers and of course readers. It’s not a straight line from writer to reader but a tensile and trembling web on which all of us are flies. A writer’s task is to twitch his wings and send a vibration all throughout that web. What often goes overlooked is the task of the reader: to send that vibration back with his own shuddering wingbeat.

Things I Know:
1: The vast majority of Xenith’s contributors are or have been enrolled in some kind of higher education
2: Students read
3: Students react

Xenith could be called many things, not the least of which being an ongoing conversation. What we need from you are your nonfictions—your presence as readers. We’d love to see your book reviews, your analysis, your aspirations, your personal growth from a lifetime of reading. What are your ten most influential books and how have they affected you? What did you think of Franzen’s Freedom? Literature has always been a discourse. Too often it’s easy to think of something as final once it’s published. What we’ve forgotten is that print and web are only the beginning of a long conversation. Today we invite you to come over and chat. Xenith is not just a magazine for writers—but also dedicated to the boisterous art of reading. We all love books. If we didn’t love books we wouldn’t be here. It’s time to start talking about them.

Send articles, essays, reviews—any nonfictions—to: patrick.nathan@gmail.com.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Fifty-eight days. It really doesn’t seem like a lot of time. Because it isn’t. I’ve fallen back into a fairly steady pattern with Rebellious Bird. I read a chapter several times. I mark it all up. I go back and make those changes. I go on to the next chapter. There’s something about it that seems rather lackluster—the process, not the novel. My journal entries lately are full of fire and promise, a pledge on each page to ascend into that familiar state of fury. Yet when that time arrives I sigh at the work in front of me and make those changes so mechanically. Where’s the amateur novelist’s passion that I felt not long ago? What I’m feeling is almost akin to weariness. At once there’s a murmuring in my heart that tells me to push myself to the absolute limits and with it a dull indifference. This might be a new emotion in the spectrum of emotions I’ve felt since beginning this entire process in January. I write and the changes are made. There’s nothing truly joyous in it. Nothing ecstatic.

What we in the chemical industry call 'raw materials'

In truth that’s what’s missing from Rebellious Bird at this stage. Creativity has become distillation and analysis. It has become decision making. Calculations. I haven’t created a fresh, vibrant sentence in what feels like months. Instead I spend all my time reading and reviewing and refining. The only thing I really look forward to now is having a completed book. The process itself is rather tedious.

November and December. These will be the most difficult months of writing, especially with two major holidays looming at the end of each. Looming because they’re both making me anxious. Each will cause a rift in my process, so in reality that fifty-eight days is more like forty-five. And there’s so much work to be done. The goal I’ve set may seem arbitrary but in truth it’s very important to me. I want to know I can do this and more importantly I want to know that I’m capable of declaring it finished. Without a deadline I’ll write forever.

I’m taking Friday off from work. Friday is my day to be valorous and maybe a little mad. Even though I’ve lost the aforementioned passion that doesn’t mean it’s permanent. I know myself. I know that I’m capable of instilling within myself the same ardor and obsession that almost consumed me a month ago. All it takes is the right set of circumstances. A fresh start on a fresh day where writing is the only task laid out in front of me. I will forget about that other project. I will be up at dawn with a cup of coffee. At the end of the day one of us will be bruised and beaten and put back in his place and for the love of all that is written I hope it’s the novel.

Due to the reasonable success of Xenith’s first ever Less Generalized Prose Contest and the ongoing interest in breathing life into its book club, this month’s facilitator has chosen to read and vivisect the submissions that were received for said contest. This won’t simply be a large scale critique. Participants are encouraged to look at large scale significance and fluid themes running through all of the pieces, which were all inspired from the same prompt, pictured above.

If you’re feeling particularly adamant in sharing your thoughts on these submissions, or are just looking for a place to discuss writing on a more general scale (ie: not getting hung up on semi-colons), stop by and make your presence known. We are open Sunday through Saturday between the hours of 12:00 a.m. and 11:59 p.m., 365.25 days per year. We look forward to hearing what you have to say.

Forum announcement | Read the submissions