A defense of Ben Lerner's The Topeka School and a look at Lydia Davis's mind at work

Kind of surprising to read Jon Baskin's lengthy essay in The Point, much of which criticizes Ben Lerner as anti-literature: Baskin makes a (correct) distinction regarding the history of literary criticism in the 20th century, in which it became old-fashioned and quaint to read (or write) in order to gain access to the consciousness of another (the author) and criticism moved toward distrust of authors/authority and toward deconstruction of the novel. Fair enough - and a good distinction and not necessarily something nefarious (the social consciousness of criticism and the connection between literature ans society is all to the good). Strangely, however, he puts Lerner in the camp of those who hate literature and believe we read (and write) so as to deconstruct, to be smarter, more aware, more worldly than those whom we read. I strongly disagree re Lerner; if anything, he's too immersed in literature, especially in his early works, which are brimming with quotations and allusions and about which I felt, while reading, that he should just get on w/ it and tell his story. Lerner's current novel, The Topeka School, does just that: He tells, in a series of narratives from the perspective of several characters (his mother, father, and youthful self) the story of his family and of his own coming of age - all to the good! Baskin makes much of the conclusion of the novel, in which Lerner, now in his 30s or so, joins his wife and 2 young daughters in a protest at the ICE hq in NYC - and he sees this as Lerner's turning away from writing as personal expression toward the camp of writing as engagement. Actually, I think Lerner carried this novel one chapter too far, and I think the novel would be much better had he stripped it of the NYC protest chapter - which seems to be there only or primarily to show Lerner as a smart and brave and woke father (in one 3rd-wall break, he notes how difficult it is to write about his daughters using made-up names). I really thing the novel should have ended w/ the chapter in which her returns to Topeka for a reading, which would have been a nice echo of the opening in which he is a callow though brilliant young man. I also think he didn't adequately conclude the Darin chapters; we need to see and know more about what he did (striking someone w/ a billiard ball) and how his life course led him to the viciously right-wing Phelps family (maybe this is another novel?), and for that matter perhaps some further explanation of his mother's violent outburst against his father (obviously about infidelity, but how did this play out in the family?). In any event, I admire that Lerner in this novel is committed to plot, character, and point of view - it seems to me that Topeka is a great step forward in his career.

I've also been reading a bit of Lydia Davis's Essays One, her new collection of her 40 or so years of literary criticism. The first section centers reader's versions of two long lectures she gave as part of a fiction-writer's master class, in which she shows examples of some of her earliest work (non-Spoiler: She was always smart!) and how her style grew and matured, sometimes in surprising ways. She also demonstrates how she drew and draws on journal entries - including those by other writers (e.g., Kafka) for story ideas; and she shows all the art and thinking that goes into her composition of extremely short fiction. She bristles at the handle "experimental" - a more appropriate term might be unconventional or original - and her dissection of some of her early short works and their relationship to her reading is a window onto a writer's mind at work. Her work is too idiosyncratic to be a guidepost for other aspiring writers - it's too easy to write short fiction badly (just as it's too easy to write a bad haiku), but there's much to learn from her as well, notably: Keep a journal or notebook, write in it often, look back, review and revise and rewrite.

Excellent story from Mary South in New Yorker and Ben Lerner's ambious novel, The Topeka School

Two notes: First, the Mary South story in the current New Yorker, You Will Never Be Forgotten, apparently the title story in her forthcoming collection, is a really interesting and timely piece, unusual in many ways and powerful throughout. The story closely follows a woman, never named and always referred to only as "the woman," who has been raped - by a somewhat prominent person whom she met on a dating app - and who becomes his increasingly self-destructive stalker. What gives the story its topicality and much of its interest is that that "the woman" works in "content management" for "the world's largest search engine company," obviously Google; MS gives us a real sense of what daily work is like for the minions of the high-tech industry, in particular those in this seemingly innocuous job, which as it happens requires that they spend their working days - they are by the way all "contractors" rather than employees - scouring suspect sites and posts and searches for pornography, terrorist threats, brutality, etc., and we can only imagine how such a profession distorts the lives of so many, then disposes of the: the burnout and turnover rate is exceptionally high, and there's no corporate ladder to climb. They're in the pit.

Second, nearing the end of Ben Lerner's ambitious and mostly successful novel The Topeka School (2019), in which he grapples with his family history, his home town, and his thoughts and fears and agonies of his teenage self. It's hard not to think of this work as in the vein of autofiction, change of names aside (the protagonist is Adam, for ex.), as most of the key biographical facts check out: Notably, Lerner like Adam is the son of psychologists from a major medical center in Topeka; Lerner was a prodigy and, like his protagonist, won a national forensics prize while en route to Brown; Lerner's mother, like Adam's, wrote a breakout, best-selling book on psychotherapy; and so forth. Lerner's smart gambit is to tell this story through multiple narrators; had the entire story come from Adam's POV he would I think be insufferable, but shifting viewpoints allows him to give us multiple pathways into the story, and probably more info that a single narrator would be able to credibly provide (such as the sections on his parents' courtship and their various infidelities). The danger, however, is that at time the narrative feels confused and fractured or fragmented, particularly those passages about the social misfit Derren, w/ which Lerner teases us at the outset and whose tragic story trails along beside the prodigies and high achievers in the rest of the narrative without really giving full scope to D's life and sufferings. Perhaps Lerner will resolve the Derren material in the final chapters. But at least to this point this novel is rich in material (the excellent first chapter appeared in the New Yorker and I posted on it at that time) and is far less solipsistic than his previous novels.

Doerr's strong collection of Best American Short Stories 2019, and the sense of an ending

Anthony Doerr has put together a particularly strong collection in his The Best Ameican Short Stores - 2019. He selected a wide variety of stories, a good mix of the well known and the unknown, a range of settings and genres (even including some scifi and some historical fiction), stories that well reflect the increasingly diverse group of excellent writers in the American vein. i would say that Doerr's taste veers toward the traditional (as does mine) - though more of that in a second - and definitely he prefers longer and more developed stories than we would typically find in most current publications (he's a novelist, after all). He amusingly sets up a straw man - Rust Hills, former fiction ed at Esquire - who wrote a how-to book with a # of dicta for would-be writers of short fiction; Doerr shows how each of the stories he's selected violates one or more of these dicta - but after all, Hills's prescriptions are really out of date, and Doerr's selections are really not so ground-breaking as he'd like us to think. One aspect of the short story that Doerr does not mention is the creation of an ending; more stories fail on that score, I think, than on any other - either just screeching to a stop or ending with too much ambiguity or on some hollow attempt a Joycean epiphany. Several of the stories in this collection, however, have beautiful endings, and I think these are the best of the group (with the addition Deborah Eisenberg's creepy and imaginative dystopian story The Third Tower, about a woman how has to be "reprogrammed" because she thinks for herself). The story that stays w/ me the most, largely because of its ending that breaks away entirely from the preceding narrative is Alexis Shaitkin's  Natural Disasters. Jenn Ahern Trahan's They Told Us Not to Say This has a gut-punch ending as well, and then there's Wendell Berry's The Great Interruption, which, as Doerr notes, introduces its first-person narrator only in the final few paragraphs - which put the story into a new light and which elucidate the essential life philosophy that has guided Berry (I've just read a review of some of his recent works) across his long writing career.

Dissapointed in Elizabeth Spencer's final work - with the exception of one excellent story

I honestly wish that I'd liked more Elizabeth Spencer's last book, Starting Over - Stories (2014), as hers is such a great story in itself: A long career in writing with I think 9 novels and numerous stories and other publications with her one great success published in 1960 when she was about 40 years old - the terrific short novel Light in the Piazza. But after that, she was never considered among the top American writers of literary fiction, more or less forgotten (hers were the days when many popular magazines published literary fiction and a writer could make some $ from short stories - those days gone). Then, 40 years later, her great novel was rediscovered and made into an excellent Broadway musical - and suddenly people were reading Elizabeth Spencer once again. I assume she continued writing short fiction over all those decades, and Starting Over brings together about a dozen of her final stories, published (and presumably written) when she was in her 80s and early 90s. She died last year in her late 90s. This book comes with megastar jacket blurbs: Richard Ford, Eudora Welty, Alice Munroe - does it get any better than that? It's too bad but these stories collected are seemingly an homage to Spencer and her writing career and not great stories on their own; none is bad in any way, but for the most part they feel perfunctory, undeveloped: Almost all of them hit us immediately with a lot of characters, not well differentiated, and it's really hard to read through without checking back repeatedly to find out, wait, who's Tim again? Which one is Ralph? etc. They're all OK but not groundbreaking, and with little or no connection to the world beyond these characters - they could depict almost any era for the past 100 years, despite an occasional topical reference to, say, a presidential election. They are distinctly Southern in voice, but not as richly developed as Welty's fiction, or O'Connor's - they're very "white," domestic, and almost like sketches for a novel that's never to be written. There is one exception, however: The Everlasting Light (first published in a newspaper!) is a story full of sorrow and subtle emotion - a man pondering the sad prospects for his somewhat awkward daughter - the only story in this collection that reaches the same heights as Light in the Piazza, and it's impossible not to empathize with both the father and the daughter. This one story makes the collection worthwhile and captures Spencer's sensibility at its best in her final work.

The most powerful and vivid account of the war in Syria and its cost in ruined lives

Khaled Khalifa's short but intense and demanding novel, Death is Hard Work (2016tr. Leri Price), gives what I imagine to be the most accurate and harrowing account of what it's like to try to live an ordinary life in the midst of war-torn and dysfunctional present-day Syria. The novel in some ways recalls Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, as the plot line is about three siblings transporting the body of their father some 200 miles across the country to be buried, following his deathbed request, next to his sister in their home town. On their journey across the country they encounter numerous obstacles and hindrances - many checkpoints, roads and routes impossible to follow or traverse, passage through the territories controlled by various and often hostile military/political factions, car trouble, attack by wild dogs, red tape, lack of food and supplies - and all the while the corpse rots and falls apart, described in stomach-knotting detail. Unlike Faulkner's novel, however, this novel contains little humor and lots of insight into the ongoing warfare in Syria and how it affects the daily lives and the psychic states of Syrians. Death is everywhere, and what becomes remarkable is the rare case in which someone dies of old age or natural causes; we sense that nobody in the country will ever recover from the trauma of these years. But the novel, though potentially cinematic, is more than a cross-country adventure yarn: Over the course of their journey, which stretches out to 3 or 4 days (they'd though it  would take them just one day) we learn about the sad and damaged lives of each of the main characters, all of whom, it seems, were forced or walked into sad and loveless marriages - and in particular we learn about the late father's sister who self-immolated rather than marry a man she didn't love. The central character is the younger brother, Bolbol, divorced, living alone, taking on responsibility for his father in his last days, sensing that he has wasted his life and that, in the midst of civil war, he has no future - but also no way out. Devoid of politics and ideology in the conventional sense, Khalifa's novel is  a landmark book, the first and best I think to depict the cost in damaged and ruined lives of this ongoing war of terror and oppression.

The evollution of O'Brien's style, and of literary style in general - in the Country Girls trilogy

Reading through Edna O'Brien's Country Girls trilogy - her 1st three novels, each 2 years apart, 1960-64, with an epigraph some 20 years later - we see of course her development in style and in courage, and we also get a glimpse of the evolution of literary style during the tumultuous 1960s. The first volume felt much like a memoir, or today we might call it auto-fiction, quite typical of a novelist's first go at it; the 2nd volume, with her central character (Caithleen, later just Kate) experiencing her first lasting relationship and sexual intercourse, was somewhat more daring, at least for its time. The 3rd volume, Girls in Their Marital Bliss, was a big jump ahead, using two first-person narrators in alternating chapters (smart decision, as the Kate character becomes more of a doormat and her best friend, Baba, by far the more memorable character). This multi-narrative technique was at least a glance toward the narrative exploration that would characterize much of the best fiction writing in the 60s and 70s; most notable, though, is the far more explicit and graphic sexuality, not common in novels by women, especially in Ireland, where sex remained a taboo topic late into the century. In the 3rd volume we see Kate break away from her husband, an insufferable bully and egotist, and her struggle to live on he own in near-poverty; though it's never stated explicitly, this novel is in part an indictment of the marriage and divorce laws of the time, leaving the husband's fortune untouched as the woman (and child) suffer. It's also significant that neither woman is exactly a saint; both have their sexual flings outside of marriage, particularly Baba, so the men are not entirely in the wrong in their outbursts of bitterness and rage - although Bab's husband takes matters too far when he gets violent. Among other topics, we see the horrors of the clandestine abortion clinics and overall a depiction of the woes of marriage; the title of the volume is needlessly ironic. The epilogue, composed when the books were grouped as a trilogy, brings us 20 years forward, narrated by Baba, who at this point is extremely frank about her extra-marital affairs - you can't help but think of this composition as O'Brien's homage and response to Molly Bloom's soliloquy, the epitome of writing banned in Ireland, only decades later to be embraced as part of the cultural heritage.

Types of fiction - including "otra-fiction" - the Best American Short Stories 2019

Having read roughly the first half of the Anthony Doerr edited The Best American Short Stories - 2019, we can see that AD has, it seems, selected the stories with diversity in mind, both ethnically and stylistically. Among the for 10 or so stories we see historical fiction (Wendell Berry's stoy in his childhood Kentucky town and a surprising Western-genre piece from the late Ursula LeGuin), scifi/futurism (possibly the best story in the first half of the volume, The Three Towers, from Deborah Eisenberg), a few that seem very much like auto-fiction in that they appear to be extremely close to the lived experiences of the authors (stories fro Jamel Brinkley, unknown to me until now, Jeffrey Eugenides, Nicole Krauss), social realism (a story about immigrants and migrant labor from Manuel Munoz), and a few pieces that seem to me the opposite of auto-fiction: stories told from either first or close-third person that try to present the interior life of characters whom we imagine to be as far as possible from the life and experiences of the author. This genre, let's call it "otra-fiction," can be used to explore the mind set of contemporary youth, obsessed with social media and/or video games (see Ella Martensen Gorham's Protozoa in this collection, or for that matter Jamal Jan Kochal's story in current NYer); to depict the lives of people in extreme poverty and with little or know formal education of aspiration - the people least likely to read contemporary fiction (see Julia Elliott's Hellion); or to depict the life of a disturbed and completely unsympathetic character, notably Sigrid Nunez's The Plan, about a man who is planning to commit murder, specifically to murder his wife - it is impossible to imagine this story being published let alone included in a Best-of anthology were it written by a man - the very distance between the author and her material makes the story palatable, at least to some. Doerr's taste does seem to skew toward the conventional - the Eisenberg story is the only one in the first half of the collection that could be considered experimental in form - and hedoes seem to favor longer narratives (he himself is the author of best-selling novel in that tradition), but overall the collection does seem representative of (some of) the best writing being published today in the U.S. and Canada.

What Naipaul's essay, Grief, reveals

Let's not speak ill of the dead, but can anyone read the late V.S. Naipaul's essay in the current NYer, Grief, and not draw some conclusions about VSN's personality. No doubt there was much spoken and written in his lifetime about his cantankerous, at best, personality - yet for those who knew him only by his writings there was so much to appreciate, enjoy, absorb, and learn from that we could put aside any reservations about what he'd be like as a person/friend/neighbor/mentor. And of all his writings, probably none is as accessible and warm-hearted as his debut work, a tribute to her father who struggled over his lifetime to break out as a writer (he was a successful journalist, but in the smallest of small local newspapers in the Caribbean); he was a comic figure to be sure, but as we read A House for Mr. Biswas we can help but compare his desultory and eccentric career with the hard-earned success of his son VSN, fighting over his lifetime to succeed in England despite the condescension and distrust the established institutions displayed against a young, Caribbean writer. And this was a battle that VSN seemed to fight over his whole lifetime; he was a man who could hold a grudge. So as to this posthumously published essay, the first few pages, as we'd expect, depict VSN's grief at the death of his father, while VSN himself was struggling to make his way in Oxford and London; who are we to judge another's emotions, but we can't help but feel that VSN is confessing that he felt little emotion about his father, or at least expressed little emotion, as if his father's death was an interruption in his own struggle for literary recognition; he makes much of a some ridiculous vase his father had sent him and his visit to family friends in London to retrieve the vase. Some feels terribly displaced here. Then he moves on to describe the death of his younger brother, also a writer, about which he seems to have no kind feeling whatsoever (and in passing he mentions the death of a sister - I guess she doesn't really count, as she was not a writer). BTW - the ritual of mourning plays a much larger role in one of VSN's best novels, The Enigma of Arrival, to which this essay appears to be a counterweight. In the second half of this essay - actually, it probably comprises about 2/3 of the piece, VSN recounts his (or his partner, not wife) rescue of an abandoned kitten, his caring for the kitten over several years, and the ultimate death and burial of the cat - and it's only in this section that VSN comes close to describing what most of us would recognize as grief and sorrow. For a cat! He (or his estate) must have realized that this essay presents VSN as peculiar and unfeeling, in tears about a cat, cold and indifferent about his family members - and perhaps that this essay once and for all draws a demarcation between VSN and his family members. He didn't need them. He didn't need love or friendship, at least unless he could set all the terms. He was a major talent who provided the world with many great books - add to the list A Bend in the River - but he was most likely a miserable person, in both senses of the word "miserable."

Novella? Long story? Short Novel? Whatever its genre, it's a nice piece of fiction by John Jeremiah Sullivan

Friend David B. led me to the "novella" Mother Nut, by John Jeremiah Sullivan, that appeared recently in the New Yorker - well, not exactly, as it was published only in the NYer online edition; a petty annoyance, but I often get notices of NYer online publications and sometimes they later appear in print - which I prefer to read and so I wait for the mag to arrive on Thursday - and sometimes not, in which case I miss the story altogether. That said, OK, what is a "novella," a term in dislike by the way (I think it was Katherine Ann Porter who railed against this neologism); to me, this is a long story or let's just call it a story, rather than a short novel, which in my view entails a somewhat less unified action - perhaps different POVs or time/place settings or multiple story lines? In any event, call it what you will, Mother Nut is a good piece of fiction - a first-person narrative in the vein of a somewhat older - not clear how much older - man looking back at some of the malfeasance and love lost in his youth, i.e., in his 20s or so. We don't learn about his childhood, college education, all that, but it begins w/ his recollection of his work as part of a research team on the demise of the American Chestnut; a highlight - a top-secret nocturnal visit to see one of the rare surviving chestnut trees; the lowlight, his being snubbed by the project leader - following which he left the team and went to live w/ his girlfriend on an agricultural commune. Her recollects her leaving him for another commune member and then his daring and somewhat incomprehensible effort to win back her love; I won't divulge too much of the plot, but suffice to say that he embarks on a mission to harvest some rare chestnut wood. No doubt JJS manipulates some of the events in this story - would anyone in his right mind have embarked on any such mission? Or perhaps the narrator was not in his right mind at the time? - and I think he owes us a little more info about the narrator in the present, but he does a nice job establishing the narrator's voice, sometimes as puzzled about his past antics as are we, and unlike many other young writers he still believes in plot, character, and narrative arc, so let's see more - in print! - from this writer.

Feminism, autofiction, and Edna O'Brien's Country Girls trilogy volume 2

The second volume of Edna O'Brien's Country Girls trilogy, The Lonely Girl (1962, at one time published as The Girl with Green Eyes) follows up on the life of Caithleen Brady as she and her best friend, the more loquacious Baba, are kicked out of the convent school and w/ their parents' OK head off from small-village central Ireland to find work in Dublin. The time is probably early 1950s, though it's not made clear, and at the outset CB is 21 years old; when we saw her last she had been ditched by her first lover, whom she calls Mr. Gentleman (much older than she, married, obviously exploiting a young teenage girl who lives with no protection from her alcoholic, disengaged father). In the 2nd volume, the pattern of her life continues, as she meets a man - a documentary filmmaker - at least twice her age, far more sophisticated and well educated, recently divorced - at least he's not married - and a father of a child whom he never mentions (that's a warning sign in itself), a wealthy squire living in the beautiful countryside on the outskirts of Dublin. So once again she falls for a man, Eugene, who has a sort of Pygmalian fantasy - he'll educate her and show her the ways of the world - but who obviously has no interest in her except for the sex - her first sexual intercourse, as we learn. The crisis point in this volume occurs when CB's father arrives at E's house with a bunch of village thugs, threatening E and eventually beating him up. From CB's POV (and E's as well of course) they are invading his privacy and the daughter is an emancipated adult and they should leave her alone; from our POV, however, the daughter is in a horrible and exploitative relationship that will come to no good end (for her) and we sympathize with the father's goal, if not w/ his brutal threats and actions. The character CB has little self-awareness, and EO'B doesn't impose her own reflective judgement on CB, who narrates the story of her life with a cool dispassion. Today, mostly likely, EO'B would have written this trilogy as a memoir (we have to believe that she is one and the same, a few details aside, as her narrator) or a work of auto-fiction. She seems quite aware of her youthful attractiveness, especially to older men, but she's strangely unaware of the imbalance in these relationships and in the degree to which the men she falls for will love her and discard her, like a used Kleenex. Today, this might have been written from more of a feminist vantage, but as it stands I for one can't help but think that the narrator has it all wrong: These men are poison.