Dictionary of Fictional Techniques: The Generalized Categorical

I've long admired the formidable Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. When I was studying poetry early in my graduate education, I coveted my poetry studying colleagues' ability to reference this work to identify and articulate poetic devices and always wanted an equivalent for the close study of fiction.

Unfortunately, I've never run across anything up to scratch. So, I am going to write one. Or at least write one entry for one and then try slowly to add more entries over time. (If any readers out there want to suggest future entries, even just point out something that seems like it might be a technique, let me know and I might write about it).

So here's my first entry (with example), inspired by my current read, Jaimy Gordon's NBA-winning Lord of Misrule:

The Generalized Categorical

Definition: a reference to an unknown, abstract category or condition. Primarily used to describe a specific, elusive quality.

Example 1:
"But she sensed a thread  had been dropped somewhere, the route to some secret heart of this business had been lost"

Example 2:
"Was she some sort of born slave herself, a prostitute in a temple, a hierodule?"

Discussion:
The generalized categorical posits the existence of a class to suggest the membership of the described person, behavior, or condition within that class. In first example, the existence of "some secret heart" ratifies the character's sense "that a thread had been lost somewhere." The generalized categorical need not exist for its descriptive function to work, and indeed it often functions with the reader's express knowledge that it does not.

Consider an slight alteration to "the route to a secret heart of this business had been lost": the switch to the indefinite article moves the sentence into the realm of the actual, rather than the realm of the possible. This leveraging of possibility also invokes a sense of indeterminacy and unknowability; in the above examples, this uncertainty seems at least as important as the specific descriptors.
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Any other thoughts on the Generalized Categorical? I'm also thinking about writing a taxonomy of dialogue formats: with and without quotations marks, with dashes, embedded in to paragraphs, etc. So if you can think of a good example of an unusual dialogue format, I'd be really interested to hear about it.

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Bird Cloud by Annie Proulx

It seems that the only thing Annie Proulx cannot write about is herself. Lest you think this is an indictment of her new memoir, Bird Cloud, let me assure you that it is not. Don’t be fooled by the back cover description of the work as “autobiography, history of a place, naturalist’s journal”: this suggests a level of intimacy that just isn’t present here.

No, Bird Cloud is about Annie Proulx in the same way that a dissected frog is about a microscope; only by inference, omission, and distance do we begin to see what it is that Proulx does not want to say plainly.

 The simplest pitch is that Bird Cloud is about the construction of her ideal home on a 640-acre stretch of Wyoming wilderness. And that’s part of it. But the most interesting part for Proulx fans will be the realization of how difficult it must be to live life as Annie Proulx, to be possessed of the desire to know everything about something, even unto the spoiling of it.

Her restless inquisitiveness infects all elements of the book: from her examination of her life-long rootlessness, to her historical digging into the ugly history of the land’s former owners, to the imperfection of all human creations. Her careful mapping of the property unearths faint reminders of its original inhabitants and their fate.
Her reading about the wild-fowl of the area leads her to the story of an infamous eagle-killer, who would roam the Wyoming skies in a helicopter, rifle in hand.

These anecdotes and forgotten histories are the only real path into Proulx's mind; she tells us very little of what she feels or thinks. Her troubled family history gets the slightest brushstroke: the centuries-long genealogy of her “hard to know father” is here, but any sense of what Proulx thinks of him is omitted. She recalls carrying one of a pair of sisters, twins, across the lawn as a child, but they never appear in the text again. She has a couple of children, but their father remains loudly silent.

It’s hard not to see her minute re-enactment of the house’s construction as a metaphor for her own life: beautifully conceived, carefully and painfully crafted, but in the end cold, lonely, and unsatisfying. Her similarities to her most iconic character, Enis del Mar, become distressingly clear: a wounded loner whose temporary retreats into the high country are ultimately upended by the brokenness of this mortal life.

By the close, I found myself seeing Proulx much as Proulx saw her beautiful, damaged homestead: “Wildlife has cautiously moved onto the property, several elk now spending the winter near Jack Creek. Owls enjoy the busque at the east end. Skunks wander around, eating insect and bothering no one. A sage grouse restoration project is in the talking stage; it would produce water and shade for these birds. The land has generously responded to the slightest care. I wish I had a lifetime to watch it recover.”

Soon though, the realities of this feral fortress of solitude wear on Proulx, and like her beloved pair of Golden Eagles, it is time for her to move on to someplace free of the stain of self.


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Stieg Larsson, The New Yorker, and the "Good Enough" Theory of Culture

Is there a better entertainment than watching The New Yorker try to understand popular culture? It seems to be the last pocket of the universe that can't wrap its head around a de-coupling of aesthetic merit and commercial success.

This has never been more striking than in Joan Acocella's  recent attempt to account for the popularity of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, "Man of Mystery" (sub-heading: "Why do people love Stieg Larsson's novels?"). The piece serves as one-stop shopping for newcomers to the series, those who, presumably, have seen the books on subways and in airport bookstores but have little sense of what the fuss is about. The resulting discussion, I think, tells us more about Acocella's literary sensibilities than sheds the faintest photon on America's taste for these novels.

Her distaste for the series, its success, and perhaps even the story she is writing, suffuses her discussion, right from the first sentence:

"[h]aving got American readers to buy more than fourteen million copies, collectively, of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy books-“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” (2008, American edition), “The Girl Who Played with Fire” (2009), and “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (2010)-the management at Knopf has decided that it would like them to buy some more." 

Let's ignore the stylistic clumsiness of "having got" and instead focus on her view of the matter. Readers haven't wanted to read these books; they have been "got" to buy them. That the content of the books should generate such interest befuddles Acocella, so she looks for forces other than readerly pleasure, up to and including the ability of publisher to manufacture a literary blockbuster. Her project seems to be to catalog her own problems with the series ("The loss of Larsson's style would not be a sacrifice, "the most crippling weakness of the trilogy is its hero," and "[l]ike many mediocre novels, the trilogy is far better on the screen than on the page" among other complaints) more than it is a think-piece on its wild success.

Even as she turns to her conjecture about the phenomenon, she can't help but couch it in condescension: "It is clear that people like these movies, but what accounts for the success of the novels, despite their almost comical faults?"

And what does "account" (notice the weird passivity of that verb) for this success? First, she does concede (not without a dig) that "Larsson may have had a weakness for extraneous detail, but at the same time, paradoxically, he is a very good storyteller." One might expect that this begrudged attribute might be supported by the same kinds of evidence she used to detail the awkwardness of some of the dialogue, but not one specific instance of this story-telling ability is offered.

This, unfortunately, is the high-water mark of her analysis. Acocella's subsequent reasons for the series' popularity are, in order: the popularity of the revenge genre, the supposedly widespread male sexual fantasy of rape, the rise of the "woman warrior," the inclusion of modern technology, and, I kid you not, Larsson's critique of Sweden's social democracy. I find this somewhat less than persuasive.

I suppose the logic for such grasping is something like this: if something is hugely shocking, then the causes of said event must be equally unlikely. Acocella starts from a point of finding Larsson's success confounding, so the contributing factors must be likewise abstruse.

After reading and enjoying the series, I don't find the success all that unexpected, so would take the opposite tack and assume the reasons are relatively familiar. Here's how I would parse the pieces:

Pre-Existing Popular Taste: 45%
This is crime/thriller fiction, arguably the most popular brand of adult literature. Grisham. Patterson. Ludlum. These dudes move trucks and trucks of books, and Larsson, himself a fan of the genre, is operating in this vein. I don't think Larsson is really any better of a writer than these guys, but I don't think he's any worse, at least in English translation, either.

Lisbeth Salander: 20%
This, however, is not a character we've seen much of. Acocella calls her a "punk-fairy": I would describe her more like a "techno she-devil." She is at once vulnerable and fiercely competent, with a serious nasty streak: equal parts Debbie Harry, Bill Gates, and The Punisher.

Setting: 10%
There is something oddly compelling about the atmosphere of Larsson's Sweden, especially in the first book. Its cold austerity has an almost monastic quality, which plays nicely against the twisted passions of the villains.

Packaging: 5%
I'm sure people who work in publishing would be able to describe this better, but the look and feel of the series captures a certain modern urbanity that separates them from your run of the mill gold-embossed trade paperback thriller. Look at GWTDT next to Patterson's latest.

I've seen that Patterson cover 974123469 times. I've never seen one quite like The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo. This matters.


Back-story: 5%
Larsson's biography and death are definitely fascinating. He came out of nowhere and stayed there. I don't discount this sort of thing; I've seen it too many times. Cobain. John Kennedy Toole. Sylvia Plath. That guy who wrote RENT. We can't get enough of a tragic and mysterious success. This could be higher than 5%, actually.

Chaos Theory: 10%
Sometimes, the ingredients bake up in just the right way at the right time—an inscrutable emergent property that is as palpable as it is unknowable. Maybe a tiredness with a popular genre created some room for a variation of it. Maybe everyone has a tattoo and a Mac now. Maybe we all hate flying so much that the page-turning immersion these books provide is especially welcome. Maybe it's all of these, maybe none. How else can you explain the popularity of Hypercolor t-shirts in the mid-1990s or the sudden rise of bacon? I mean, bacon's always been good.

All in all, I’m not sure there’s a great and powerful Oz behind this particular curtain.

One last comment: I think we might find a clue to Acocella incomprehension in the word choice of her sub-heading, “Why do people ‘love’ Stieg Larsson’s novels?” The thinking is that if a bunch of people buy something, then they must love it. My experience, and that of many of the people I know who have read the books, is not really one of love; it was one of “hey, pretty fun read. That made my flight 28% less painful.”

I read somewhere, though I can’t find it now, that the most rated movie among Netflix subscribers is Miss Congeniality: not challenging, a likable lead, familiar, and yet slightly different. Not going to piss too many people off, but also not likely to be named to anyone’s favorite movies of all time. That doesn’t make it bad or worthy of scorn—just hugely popular.
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Previously Undiscovered Portrait of Mark Twain!

Best Books of 2011: Looking Ahead

I’m still working on my best of 2010 list (and still reading a couple of things before the new year), but I also have one eye on the horizon. It’s been a terrific year for fiction (hell, a writer was on the cover of Time. Too bad it didn’t get any coverage), but birds in hand are starting to bore me so it’s time to go beat the bush. Publishers apparently don't schedule the fall and winter releases until later, so these are just what have cropped up thus far; there are sure to be more titles of interest appearing in the next few months.

So, here are five titles I’m looking forward to in 2011, in order of their release:

Update: Here are the titles to look forward to for the last six months of 2011

Bird Cloud by Annie Proulx  (January 4)

UPDATE: Here's our review

If there’s any American that writes place better than Proulx, I’d like to read them. The Shipping News, Bad Dirt, and Open Range are all masterly evocations of setting. Bird Cloud is actually a memoir of Proulx’s years in Montana, and I am fascinated to see her turn her prodigious gifts on her own life, which is somewhat of a mystery (a recent Literary Fact of the Day: she and her four sisters had not been in the same room for forty years before they were reunited for their father’s funeral). I generally avoid memoirs, but I will have to tune in here for the sentences. My god, the sentences.

West of Here by Jonathan Evison (February 15)

I’m succumbing to hype a little bit here. Evison’s last novel, All About Lulu, was pretty good, about par for the kinds of books I read. Normally, this kind of experience would lead me to wait for some post-release chatter before picking up his next one, but I’ve heard some pretty serious superlatives thrown about for West of Here.  This, combined with a setting and plot that scratch one of my itches (frontier narratives), has my active sonar pinging pretty loudly.

All the Time in the World: New and Selected Stories by E.L. Doctorow (March 22, 2011)
I read everything Doctorow writes. I’ve said before that while I love Roth, I do think Doctorow is actually the leading candidate to be the next American to win the Nobel. His historical range is absolutely stunning: The March, Billy Bathgate, Ragtime, and on and on. That said, he is still somehow underrated as a short story writer: I adored Sweet Land Stories and look forward to this collection. (As an aside, Homer & Langley didn’t get a lot of praise, but what an attempt. I actually think it is best thought of as a fantastic short story that is just 150 pages too long).

Curfew by Jesse Ball  (June 14)
UPDATE: Here's my review. (This turned out to be a truly great novel)

Poet Jesse Ball’s debut novel, The Way Through Doors, was one of my favorite books of 2009. Inventive, playful, and vertiginous, the book was part MC Escher, part Italo Calvino. I don’t know much about Curfew at this point, except that it is about a father and a daughter and something happens to the father. It doesn’t matter—I’m already sold.

The Pale King by David Foster Wallace (?)

Does it really matter what the plot is? Actually, here guess (answer at the end of the post):

A) A band of sentient monkeys descends from Mount Kilimanjaro with evidence of extra-terrestrial life. Mistaking a group of Midwesterners on a safari for the leaders of humanity, they impart the secrets of the universe before vanishing into the ether. The tour group, mistaking the encounter for an act of French cultural terrorism, shrug s it off.

B) A character named David Foster Wallace takes a job at the IRS where the work is so mind-numbing that all employees undergo boredom survival training. Wallace finds himself fascinating with his co-workers bizarre psychology and uncovers a plot by the IRS to make working conditions even more onerous.

C) The Pale King is actually the altered text of David Foster Wallace’s favorite book, The Street of Crocodiles. Meticulously cutting words out of every page thereby exposing words on subsequent pages, Wallace transforms a signature work into a textual-sculptural masterpiece of reinvention and homage. The book will only be published in England in limited quantities on archival paper and cost 40 bucks for the paperback.


That's mine---anything else I should be looking forward to?

You should also check out 2011 Anticipated Lists from Greg at The New Dork Review of Books and Michele at Read and Breathe. Thanks to Rachel at A Home Between the Pages for some research help.

And the correct plot for The Pale King is (B). (C) actually describes Jonathan Safran Foer's new book, Tree of Codes.  (A) is a fabricated novel plot. Did the monkeys give it away?
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Funny Probably Would Have Been Better

I couldn't resist: I had to throw my hat into the ring for The Tournament of Books' open call for judges.

Here's my entry, which now seems to me exceedingly square:

I should first be accountable to my own demands of a Rooster-dispensing judge: catholic taste, love of craft, passion, honesty, and a little sense of play.  

A good ToB judge also has to know that people are going to read their evaluations but then immediately forget it, for what separates The Rooster from other awards is transparency. We don't expect a judge to be objective, but we do expect them to dramatize their tastes. 

Of course, there's really no way to prove I'll do the above, but maybe I have shown that I wouldn't be titanically embarrassing. That's something, right? 

If you want to enter, and you should, deadline for submissions is tomorrow. 100 words or less to talk AT themorningnews DOT org.

The 2011 Tournament of Books Longlist: Handicapping the Field

There are many reasons I love following The Morning News’ Tournament of Books every year. 

For one, it is the most inclusive competitive award (meaning not top 10 list or the like), with writers coming from multiple countries. Second, it releases an extensive long list then a longer than average short list: this gives interested spectators a chance to do some pre-game reading and follow along. Third, the round-by-round judging is completely transparent; the judges explain their reasons for choosing the winner in each match. This offers a rare window into how informed, passionate people make decisions about why they like one book better than another. The results are sometimes frustrating, sometimes inspiring, but always revealing. 

There’s another reason I like the ToB: I’m pretty good at picking it. Since I began following it in 2006, I have picked the winner three times, though admittedly at the short list stage: The Road, A Mercy, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Now, if you’ve been paying attention to contemporary literature you’ll realize that these prognostications were not the work of Nostradamus: these winners were all widely read and lauded going into the tournament. 

So, if you’re interested in trying to predict the winner, that’s hint number one: you’ve already heard of the winner, and, if you are a reasonably serious reader of new fiction, there’s a good chance you’ve already read it. 

Here are a few other thoughts on this year’s long-list:

1.       The Favorites

So, if the winner is most-likely a big, established book, then who are the candidates? Well, Freedom by Jonathan Franzen has to be the dauphin at this point. Even though there was some relatively significant backlash, Freedom is appearing on virtually every end-of-year list and is the choice of many for book of the year (though some are admitting this somewhat sheepishly).

If Freedom is the number one overall seed, then Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad is a close number two. The darling of independent booksellers and short-story writers everywhere (even though it is called a novel of linked stories), Goon Squad has a more contemporary and experimental feel than Franzen and thus probably the best contender to knock off the Dickens of 21^st Century America

2.      Comic Novels: Always a Bridesmaid

Sam Lipsyte’s Homeland and Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan made it to the championship rounds in their respective years, so a comic novel is a good bet to go far, but not to win. Brief Wondrous Life had the most humor of any of the winners, but I don’t think you could reasonably call it a comedy. Wolf Hall, Cloud Atlas, A Mercy, The Road and The Accidental are all as dour as a meeting of the G8.

3.       Don’t Be Afraid of Picking a Doorstop

Two previous winners, Wolf Hall and Cloud Atlas, are not the quickest reads in the world.  This is good news for the thick, from the longish The Surrendered to the hefty Skippy Dies to the never-ending The Instructions.

4.      Debut Authors Need Not Apply

Every winner had at least one previous book-length publication. Diaz was probably the least established author in terms of backlist, but his short story collection Drown was a major critical success. Bad news here for folk like Adam Levin and Amy Greene, but a flicker of hope for Charles Yu and Julie Orringer, who both followed up terrific short story debuts with fantastic novels. Probably the prime contender who is knocked out by this trend is Karl Marlantes, whose Matterhorn was my favorite book of 2010.

5.     English is the National Language.

No translated works have won. Even Bolano’s 2666 got knocked out in first round. I don’t want to talk about it.

So, Ape, what’s the pick at this point?

Well, I’m going to reserve my official selection for the short-list, but at this point, I’m going with A Visit from the Goon Squad. I think there’s enough reservation about Freedom to keep it from being a runaway train like The Road or Brief Wondrous Life, and Goon Squad’s combination of creativity and sensitivity make it really versatile: both technique-fetishists and emotional readers will find reasons to love it.

That’s something else to remember: the winner has to get through four judges, so it can’t be too specific a flavor *sniff* 2666 *sniff.* This would be a reason to bet against blogger-fav Room; there have been enough people who hate the book to suggest it has a certain something that could turn a judge off. 

There’s my pick, anybody else want to stick their neck out with me?

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The Poor Will Be With Us Always

I saw Gilberto Alvarez almost every day, in summer heat and winter storm. I remember seeing him on my 30th birthday and on the first anniversary of September 11th. I knew something about him; he loved baseball, talking about the MTA, and dogs. Now that I think about it, I probably saw him more often than anyone except my girlfriend. And, until he died, I didn't know his name.

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I suppose most of us have a Gilberto Alvarez in our lives, or perhaps I should say around our lives. Someone who is both oddly present and discomfiting. Someone who is off-putting because of some combination of station, appearance, and behavior. Someone on whom we spend more energy ignoring than acknowledging.

In Jon Clinch's strange and fascinating Kings of the Earth, these are the Proctor brothers: Creed, Vernon and Audie. The bizarre sons of hard and gnomish parents, the Proctors live, work, and sleep together on their scrub farm in central New York. They aren't charming misfits or wizened hermits waiting for someone to discover their hearts of gold. They are illiterate, ignorant, stubborn, and disquieting. Their connection to the world beyond the farm extends only to their sister, who somehow escaped the family, and one interested neighbor.

It should be said that this is not a story of rescue or redemption. Clinch isn't interested in making us feel better about these men, but he is interested in getting us to see them.

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I didn't go out of my way to see Gilberto, and I really don't know if he ever recognized me.

Still, there he was, every morning, outside the subway station. I never saw him arrive or leave, and, judging by the state of his wheelchair, he either didn't go far or had someone help him to wherever he spent nights. Some days his prosthetic leg was with him, some days it wasn't, but I never did see him wearing it. It might be propped up next to wheelchair or laying on one the stairs down to the platform. I once saw him use it as a kind of scepter, waving it emphatically to underscore his more passionate points about the Mets’ lack of pitching.

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Clinch gives us some insight to how the brothers ended up this way, a disquietingly believable combination of poverty, distrust, and pathology. We end up feeling about the Proctors in much the same way as the people around them do—a little curious but mostly repulsed. And the local farmers and businesspeople leave them well enough alone until the middle brother, Vernon, dies in his sleep. The mystery of his death supplies what little plot there is here, but Kings of the Earth isn't a story of these men so much as it is a mediation on difference: not the discourse of diversity or of multiculturalism or of a "rainbow society" but of the difference that makes us scurry past someone or avert our eyes. 

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Over the nine or so years I walked past Gilberto's change cup, I probably gave him less than three dollars.  I'm not even so sure he was really there for the money, though I know he needed it. More than anything, he watched and waited for the few people who would spend a minute talking to him. From what I can tell, most of these were living rough like him, though with varying degrees of wear, and I don't have any idea what they talked about. I try to imagine their conversations now, but I don't come up with much and can only guess at the kinds of things that occupied their minds.

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In the end, Clinch doesn't ask us to like or understand the Proctors. Truth be told, I'm not entirely sure what our attitude toward them is supposed to be. I think most readers will feel sympathy for them, especially Audie, but it's a qualified and awkward sympathy. Even after getting to know them, we wouldn't want to spend time with them. Does that make us callous? Would our better angels have us play cards with them on cold February nights or invite them to our summer barbecues? I doubt it. As we see the Proctor brothers through the eyes of those around them, we don't just see the brothers, we see they way they are seen; they are misunderstood, caricatured, ignored, exploited, and underestimated, and so our own misunderstanding, ignorance, exploitation is cast into the open. 

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One morning a couple of months ago, Gilberto and his wheelchair were missing. Instead, there was a piece of white paper taped to a light pole that read "Gilberto Alvarez, ????-2010" and a plastic tray full of sandwiches on the sidewalk. A couple of men were standing there, talking and eating the sandwiches. It took me a minute to realize that someone had brought them to mark Gilberto's presence and passing.

I don't know if I should have tried talking to Gilberto or gave him a few quarters every couple of weeks. I'm not naive enough to think everyone can be saved, but I'm not so callous that I want to ignore them. And perhaps that's what Kings of the Earth offered me: a way of seeing Gilberto and not flinching, of acknowledging his existence and his death without sentimentalizing or marginalizing him. He was here, and he was one of us. That's not the best I can do, but it's all I can do now. 

  

Literary Fact of the Day Round Up: November 13-December 9, 2010

Here's your tri-weekly Literary Fact of the Day round-up. You can get these delivered hot and fresh daily by following me on Twitter (@readingape). Also, if you have a good LFOTD candidate, shoot me an email (readingape AT gmail DOT com), leave a comment here on the blog, or hit me with a direct message on Twitter. I'm an academic at heart, so I'd like some sort of documentation (re: link) to verify the fact. I'll of course give you credit both in the tweet and here at the round-up when it comes time. 

On to the facts:

• In 1840, Margaret Fuller was the first woman allowed to use Harvard's library & was widely considered the best-read person in the US.
• Alice Munro & her husband James opened their own independent bookstore in 1963 in downtown Victoria, Canada. It is still open today.
• Thomas Pynchon dictated Gravity's Rainbow to his college friend Richard Farina.
• Oprah Picks an Underdog Edition: Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities is the best selling novel of all time.
• Isabelle Allande once lost a job translating English romances for changing the heroines' dialogue to make them seem more intelligent.
• Theodore Dreiser's early short story, "Cracker," was based on a lynching he witnessed in 1893.
• John Steinbeck claimed to be audited by the IRS every year of his literary life because of a personal vendetta by J. Edgar Hoover.
• Mark Twain studied 2000 miles of the Mississippi for two years as an apprentice before earning his steamboat pilot's license in 1859.
• Nicole Krauss won a Marshall Scholarship to study at Oxford, eventually earning a masters in art history, writing on Rembrandt.
• Zora Neale Hurston's father was mayor of the first all-black town in America: Eatonville, Florida.
• Nathaniel Hawthorne died while touring the White Mountains with Franklin Pierce. The two had been friends for more than 40 years.
• Dickinson's literary executors edited her work heavily; a complete, nearly unedited collection of her poetry didn't appear until 1955.
• Paul Auster was struck by lightning as a teenager.
• Bill Clinton once said that his favorite novel is Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.
• Between 1971 & 1978, Don DeLillo wrote and published six novels.
• Self publishing success: Ezra Pound's first book of poetry was self published. The 100-copy run sold out, for a price of 6 cents each.
• Only two of Robert Frost's six children outlived him, and one of those two spent the last 20 years of her life in a mental hospital.
• Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm have together sold more copies than any two works by any other 20th Century author.
• Katherine Anne Porter decided to become a writer while in a sanitarium and recovering from tuberculosis.
• When Flannery O'Connor was six, she trained a chicken to walk backward, which gave her a certain local celebrity status.
• Eudora Welty was the first living author to have her collected works published by the Library of America.
• Kurt Vonnegut's mother committed suicide on Mother's Day in 1944.

Philip Roth, Paul Auster, Larry Watson: Recent Reading Round-Up

Sunset Park by Paul Auster
You would be forgiven if you thought, from the cover synopsis and most of the reviews, that Sunset Park is a downer. A quartet of confused, lonely, and otherwise discontented 20-somethings living in an abandoned house on a forlorn street in a forgotten neighborhood does not portend sweetness and light. However, this novel, especially by Auster's standards, is really pretty darn uplifting. Arranged around the reconcilition of a father and son, the various characters all use their time of isolation and exile to regroup (if they ever were "grouped" at all). Friendships are made. Love blossoms. Dissertations get written. Compared to what I was expecting, it's a bleeding Disney movie—albeit one with statutory rape, police brutality, sibling murder, and extended discussions of Chinese political dissidents.

Nemesis by Philip Roth
Man is it interesting to be here for Roth's endtimes. To my mind (and to the minds of many others), he is one of the two or three most interesting American writers of the last half-century, with a scale, scope, and diversity of work that will probably only be recongized in the years to come. It's quite difficult to avoid seeing his last few novel/novellas as the dusk-watching thoughts of an old man. By turns frightened, angry, nostalgic, bitter, and elegaic, they are possessed of the chaos, thrashing, and poignancy of a raged-against mortality. Nemesis is a novel of remembrance, of growing up in Weequahic, New Jersey during the Second World War. Roth's evocation of place is as masterful as it is understated: dress, demeanor, and decorum suffuse this story of the polio scare of 1945. His protagonist, viewed by the narrator some four decades after the main action of the story, seems to stand in for a generation: once vigourous, purposeful, and secularly righteous, but now worn down by fortune's outrageous arrows. This will not, I don't think, find its way into the first, or perhaps even second rank, of Roth's work, but seen in the real-time decrescendo of Roth's life, it is fascinating.

Montana, 1948 by Larry Watson
I've been working by way through Milkweed Prize Winners and this one is my favorite so far. It is a burnished, quietly ferocious story of a boy watching what will be the signal, tragic event of his family's life. His uncle, the doctor both to the white and Native American populations of a small part of Montana, has been abusing some of his patients until one day the boy's father, town sheriff, gets wind of the goings-on. The novel, as you might imagine, gets a little tense at this point, with almost Sophoclean levels of moral tumult. On the punch-per-page scale, Montana, 1948 might be belt-holder for my 2010 reading.