Fiction

Ursula K. Le Guin

The award-winning creator of mythic worlds, and a master of metaphor, writes about people, animals and trees -- "nothing that is alien."

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Ursula K. Le Guin

As a reader, I have a complicated relationship with Ursula Kroeber Le Guin, the writer. It seems she’s always one step ahead of me, reflecting my feelings and passions in her fiction. I read the young-adult “Earthsea” books while grappling with adolescent angst. I found my own deeply held social justice convictions explored in her science fiction of the 1970s and ’80s. Her collections of short stories were required vacation reading, when I had the leisure to admire her lyrical style and glory in how she puts words together. Le Guin once said, “The writer cannot do it alone. The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.”

Given the way her stories have fired my imagination, it’s vaguely disappointing to meet Le Guin. She stands a trim 5-foot-4, with white hair and a ready smile. I expect a literary giant to be bigger somehow, to take up more space and oxygen. I expect erudite conversation, but she peppers her speech with “ums,” run-on sentences, fragments and common phrases like “Oh, golly!” just like the rest of us.

The disappointment fades as I talk to her about the boys throwing snowballs in front of her house and the destruction of Taoism in China. I realize she’s no icon with a muse whispering in her ear; she watches, listens, thinks and feels, then reflects those observations and feelings in her art. “Authors are writing artists,” Le Guin says. “I think people restrict the term ‘artist’ to mean painters and sculptors, but you can practice art in whatever medium you choose. Words are my medium.”

And Le Guin is a master. Over nearly 50 years she’s published 17 novels, 11 children’s books, more than 100 short stories, two collections of essays, five volumes of poetry, two volumes of translation and screenplays of her works. She’s received the National Book Award, five Hugos, five Nebulas, the Kafka Award, a Pushcart Prize and several “lifetime achievement” awards among dozens of other honors.

In contrast to her extraordinary career, Le Guin’s life seems staid and ordinary; she’s been married to historian Charles Le Guin for 47 years, and they have three children and three grandchildren. Le Guin and her husband have lived in the same house in Portland, Ore., for 40 years. She writes on a computer but refuses to “get connected.” She strolls down to the local Minuteman Press to send and receive faxes. When she’s not writing, she teaches it to others, and she serves on the board of her local library.

During our conversation, Le Guin chats easily about literary criticism and her newest work and how exhausting book tours are, but she leaves me to discover her heart and soul in her nonfiction, such as “Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women and Places.” There I trace the roots of her feminism to a disastrous relationship with a “prince” in graduate school, see her patient humor in her description of eating cold mashed potatoes in take after take as an extra on the set of “The Lathe of Heaven” and dissect her feelings about utopias.

Le Guin has accepted a few labels over the years as “approximately accurate”: novelist, radical, feminist, Taoist and, more recently, Western writer. Born in 1929, she is of that misnamed “Silent Generation” — those Americans who were children during World War II — but Le Guin is anything but silent. She was on the leading edge of the civil rights, feminist and antiwar movements of the 1960s. Through her tales and complex characters, she has explored the themes of sexism, racism, nationalism, unchecked technological progress and the flaws in popular utopian visions. Wherever I looked a generation later, she had already blazed the trail.

Le Guin is a product of both her times and her unusual family. Her father was anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, who developed the anthropology department at the University of California at Berkeley and was known for his work among Native American tribes. Today, Kroeber is perhaps most famous for his close association with, and study of, Ishi, the Yahi Indian who wandered out of the Northern California wilderness in 1911 and spent the remaining years of his life residing at the University of California’s anthropology museum — where Kroeber was the curator. (Ishi died of tuberculosis in 1916, though he was in the news again in August when his brain was moved from the Smithsonian Institution and properly buried in his ancestral homeland, the foothills of Mount Lassen.)

Le Guin’s mother, Theodora, trained as a psychologist and wrote the bestselling biography “Ishi in Two Worlds,” as well as a number of children’s works. Observation and analysis, words, myth and storytelling were an integral part of Le Guin’s life from an early age. And given the themes and preoccupations that permeate her fiction, it’s interesting to speculate about the influence the story of Ishi has had on her work.

The facts of Ishi’s life and his intersection with the white man’s world resulted in one of the more remarkable anthropological cases of the 20th century, and its elements seem to echo through many of Le Guin’s stories — from “Planet of Exile” and “City of Illusion” to “The Word for World Is Forest” and “The Dispossessed.” It would be surprising if that weren’t the case — what artists do, among other things, is use the raw material of their own life to make a universal statement that, when most successful, resonates across time and cultures.

But she didn’t spend her youth reading only anthropological texts and high literature, or immersed in her parents’ interests. Le Guin admits she and her brother devoured the pulp science fiction magazines of the ’30s and ’40s. “Kids need to read a lot of dumb stuff,” she says, “roughage in the diet. But there are ethical questions when you’re writing for kids. You have to stand back from the work and say, ‘Could this scare an 8-year-old? Could it do any harm?’” Her own children’s books, such as the “Catwings” series, are beautifully illustrated, gentle fantasies of the Beatrix Potter stripe.

Intellectual refugees from the universities of war-torn Europe, her parents’ extensive library, and storytelling around the campfire at the Kroeber summer home in California’s Napa Valley helped nurture her native talent. At the age of 11, she submitted a piece to Astounding Science Fiction magazine (which later became Analog) that was rejected. In 1947, she left her Berkeley home to attend Radcliffe College. She continued her studies in Romance literature at Columbia University, where she earned an M.A. and a Fulbright scholarship.

On her way to study in France in 1953, she met fellow Queen Mary passenger Charles Le Guin. They married in Paris a few months later. Over the next 10 years, she and her husband, a professor, settled in Portland, and their three children, Elisabeth, Caroline and Theodore, were born.

Le Guin wrote after the children went to bed and, when they got older, during their school hours, but initially her work met with little acceptance. Her poems were regularly published, but she couldn’t find a market for her short stories or fantastical historical novels set in a fictional analogue of Czechoslovakia, a country she named Orsinia. She describes her earliest work as being “just a bit off,” containing some oddity or fantasy element that prevented editors from labeling her work, putting it in a literary or genre box.

She received love letters about her writing skills and style, but literary editors rejected her stories as “not quite right for us.” Le Guin still maintains a dispute with critics and academics who insist only realistic fiction can be literary fiction. She says, “That attitude knocks out about nine-tenths of all American literature. Once we had the South American magical realists you couldn’t say only realism is literary.”

In 1961 her mother’s book “Ishi in Two Worlds” made the bestseller list. (Still in print, it has sold over a million copies.) Theodora Kroeber started writing in her 50s, “after my children left to have children,” and her work struck a chord with the market that surprised her family and her publisher. Le Guin’s turn came the next year, when two of her stories sold. She sold an Orsinian tale to a small literary magazine (with payment in copies of the magazine) and a time-travel story, “April in Paris,” to Fantastic for $30. Looking at the proceeds from both markets, Le Guin decided to focus her writing where it paid. She let loose her formidable imagination on the science fiction world and later earned the acceptance of mainstream readers as well.

In quick succession, Le Guin published “Rocannan’s World” (1966), “Planet of Exile” (1966) and “City of Illusion” (1967). Those early works articulate mythic themes of the journey/quest, combined with the Taoist motif of a balanced and ordered wholeness and the literary convention of a stranger in a strange land. They’re the first in what became known as Le Guin’s “Hainish Universe.” The common background in this set of novels, novellas and short stories, which cover about 2,500 years of future history, is that people from a planet named Hain seeded this part of the galaxy with human life. Under pressure of different environments and some direct genetic intervention, they evolve a diversity of human physical forms and social structures.

In 1969 critics hailed “The Left Hand of Darkness” for its feminist themes and mythic storytelling. In the book, Le Guin conducts “a thought experiment” on the effects of gender (or lack of it) on society by exploring the implications of an androgynous race. In those early days of the feminist movement, she was forcing people to examine the roles of men and women in society. Le Guin wasn’t sure she could sell the book or the idea. She thought men might feel figuratively castrated by the androgynous characters. Yet it became the best known and most honored of her works, winning a Nebula, a Hugo and a James Tiptree Jr. Retrospective Award.

Le Guin admits that in her earlier works she “wrote like an honorary man.” She was initially cautious in her feminism. Even in “The Left Hand of Darkness,” she still used “he” for the androgynous characters and rarely showed them in feminine roles. She told me that she regrets having allowed her characters only heterosexual relationships. But she feels she wrote the best book she could given the times. Le Guin credits reading “The Norton Book of Literature by Women” and her literary inspiration, Virginia Woolf, for allowing her to write like a woman and to feel liberated in doing so.

Leading the life of an academic family, the Le Guins took two sabbaticals in England, because “it’s easier on the kids to go where they speak the same language.” The first, in 1968, was at the height of the Vietnam War. Le Guin, a pacifist and Taoist, was “angry and frustrated.” That year she wrote “The Word for World Is Forest,” a story of brutal Terrans colonizing a planet occupied by a race of peaceful, green-furred natives. She was “a little uneasy that ‘Word’ was a preachy book and it would die with the cause. It is certainly the most overt political statement I have made in fiction.” It won the 1973 Hugo Award.

Spurred by the social optimism of the late ’60s and early ’70s, Le Guin took a crack at utopian fiction. Her Hainish book “The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia” (1974) won both the Hugo and the Nebula, giving Le Guin the distinction of being the only author to twice win both awards in the same year for a novel. “The Dispossessed” is her most densely textured work. Another thought experiment, it plays anarchism against capitalism. By sending a dissatisfied inhabitant from one society to the other, Le Guin examines how both work — or don’t. “They’re imperfect utopias because the people in them are just people.”

Le Guin has studied Laotzu and the Tao Te Ching since age 14, when she discovered her father’s old edition. She has been seeking out and comparing translations ever since, captivated by the book’s practical, nontheistic, easygoing approach. She finds the tenets “endlessly fruitful and nourishing to me as an artist,” and she published her own translation, “Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book About the Way and the Power of the Way,” in 1997. She describes the book as “the most lovable of the great religious texts, funny, keen, kind, modest, indestructibly outrageous and inexhaustibly refreshing.” Her fascination with Taoism shows up early in her writing, most notably in her series “Books of Earthsea.”

In the late ’60s, Herman Schein, her mother’s publisher at Parnassus Press, approached Le Guin about writing a young-adult novel. “A Wizard of Earthsea,” which won the Boston Globe-Hornbook Award, came out in 1968, followed closely by 1970′s “The Tombs of Atuan,” winner of the Newbery Silver Medal, and 1972′s “The Farthest Shore,” which won the National Book Award for Children’s Books. On the surface these are coming-of-age stories, each featuring an adolescent who struggles to learn life’s lessons and set in a fairy tale, pre-industrial, vaguely medieval world. But Le Guin’s artful storytelling and complex underlying themes elevate the works beyond mundane fantasy and the young-adult audience for which they are intended. “To light a candle is to cast a shadow,” one of the wise characters says, and the protagonists spend the rest of their journey learning the need for balance — light/dark, male/female, action/inaction.

At the time I read it, I didn’t notice Earthsea’s distinctly male bias. Nearly all fantasy fiction, from C.S. Lewis’ “Narnia” to J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings,” featured male protagonists. Le Guin acknowledges, “That’s how hero stories worked.” She started on a fourth book in the mid-’70s to correct the imbalance, but put it aside. “Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea” finally appeared in 1990 and won the Nebula. In this story Le Guin shows the underside of Earthsea from the point of view of a mature woman and a battered girl. Although billed as the last book of the series, Le Guin has a collection, “Tales of Earthsea,” coming out in the spring. “I thought after ‘Tehanu’ the story was finished, but I was wrong. I’ve learned never to say ‘never.’”

Le Guin writes a loving homage to Taoism in her most recent Hainish book, 2000′s “The Telling,” again using the future as metaphor. “In China they’ve been practicing Taoism for two or three thousand years and apparently nearly wiped it out in only 20 years under Mao,” she says. “It survives only in Taiwan and a few little exile colonies in North America. This whole thing haunted my imagination. It was a very hard book to write. I was playing with things that sort of scare me about our world.”

The Taoist theory of inaction, that people should take action only when necessary, is shown best in “The Lathe of Heaven” (1972), in which Le Guin creates Everyman George Orr, who can do what we all wish we could — make dreams real. But Orr falls under the control of a do-gooder psychiatrist, Dr. Haber, who realizes that Orr can change reality and tries to control those “effective dreams” to make the world better. These efforts lurch from inconvenience (no rain) to disaster (an alien invasion), an object lesson in unintended consequences for those who want to change the world.

Le Guin consulted on a 1980 PBS made-for-TV movie version of “Lathe” and chronicled her adventure in “Working on ‘The Lathe.’” When David Loxton of the TV lab at WNET called and said he wanted to come to Portland and talk to her about making a TV movie of one of her books, she replied, “No you don’t!” Loxton persevered, overcoming Le Guin’s objections one by one: He could indeed fly all the way to Oregon and, yes, they could “melt” Portland, “especially if we film that bit in Dallas.”

Le Guin admits to a certain amount of calculation in including an interracial relationship in “Lathe.” “If you look at my books, you’ll find that most of my central characters aren’t white. You don’t see it on the cover, because they refuse to put people of color on book jackets. But I’ve always done that deliberately because most people in the world aren’t white. Why in the future would we assume they are?”

Regionalism is the most recent influence on Le Guin’s work. After her second sabbatical in England, she looked around her Oregon home and made a commitment to “my dirt,” shedding the last vestiges of what she calls “Europe-centeredness.” She joyously returned to the anthropology and Native American tales of her childhood in the Napa Valley in her second utopian novel, “Always Coming Home” (1985), winner of the Kafka Prize for Fiction and short-listed for the National Book Award.

In this novel, Le Guin tries to “make a world that is a little less cruel and hard on the people who live in it than our world is.” The book is remarkable for its structure and its content. Le Guin abandons the traditional narrative form and creates a fictional anthropology of a people far in the future, the Kesh, who have adopted a distinctly Native American way of life. Our dysfunctional historical era is referred to as “the time when people lived outside the world.” It’s a remarkably rich collection of short stories, myths, poems and music, held together by a central novella and explained by more traditional anthropological “back matter.” In this work Le Guin brings together all her passions — the balance of Taoism, an anarchic “feminine” style, environmentalism and great storytelling.

While chronicling her life and work, I realized my relationship with Le Guin has shifted through the years. I started as a reader inspired by her stories and her insight into the human condition, and I finish as a writer inspired by her artistry, style and continual innovation. I am not unique in feeling this connection to Le Guin’s work.

“Boy, it makes you feel fairly humble and it’s a little scary when you realize you influence people. But when I’m writing, nothing affects me, I’m just trying to do the story,” Le Guin says. And as she has explained, “These are human stories. I’m using the other worlds and the other races as metaphors. All I know how to write about are people and animals — and trees. Still, nothing that is alien.”

Faith L. Justice is a writer in New York.

“Frankenstein” remixed

This masterful new adaptation of Mary Shelley's classic novel may be the best interactive fiction yet

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This originally appeared on The Chimerist, a site devoted to the intersection of art, stories, and technology.

Whatever interactive fiction is (and we’re still figuring that out) it suffers from all the problems of traditional fiction and then some. The vast majority of novels and short stories aren’t much good, but when a branching fiction — along the lines of the old “Choose Your Own Adventure” children’s books — fails to engage, the first impulse is to blame the form rather than the content. Let “Frankenstein,” just released by Inkle Studios and Profile Books, serve as a reproach to that reflex. The app is a creative, subtle and sensitive adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic novella, and it has singlehandedly renewed this critic’s hopes for interactive fiction.

What this “Frankenstein” isn’t is a replication of the source text with the addition of a lot of digital doohickeys like sound effects and illustrations that animate when tapped. The app is all about the text, even if it is beautifully framed by period art and anatomical illustrations. The reader is presented with a screenful of narration and then offered one or more responses to it. The preferred response, when tapped, delivers up another screen of text. (In an absurdly pleasing visual touch, these appear as sheets of paper fasted together by straight pins.) According to the press materials, the reader’s responses will shape the way the narrative is presented, although not to the degree of substantively changing the plot.

This is an important point. The pleasure of storytelling lies in the dynamic between the surprising and the inevitable. The reader wants to feel the story is going somewhere, that its events follow from each other in meaningful, but not too obvious ways. When a story can go anywhere, it feels meaningless. In Mary Shelley’s novella, which is saturated with the Western tradition of the tragedy, Viktor Frankenstein’s character is such that he must create a monster, and the monster’s body is such that he can never belong among human beings however much he yearns to. A “Frankenstein” that ended with either misfit finding a comfortable place in the world would be a travesty.

But that doesn’t mean the reader doesn’t long for the story to unfold otherwise; that’s the nature of tragedy. The great insight that writer Dave Morris brings to this adaptation of the novel is that while a reader cannot significantly change the outcome of the story, the interactive element can change the shading and flavor of the tale. It can be mournful and reflective or action-packed. The creature and his creator can show greater or lesser ambivalence about their own behaviors. The ambiguity of both figures is baked into Mary Shelley’s novella, and while Morris has nearly doubled the word count of the original, this mostly amounts to playing up or down what’s already there.

Morris — a novelist who has written graphic novels, games and, yes, Choose-Your-Own-Adventure stories for kids — has changed the original text in other ways, as well. (Let’s take a moment here to point out to all future narrative app developers that hiring a real writer who actually knows what he or she is doing is totally worth it.) He’s moved the setting to revolutionary France, a choice that shows shrewd understanding of the idealistic political climate that affected Shelley’s thinking; the new Republic is its own kind of Frankenstein’s monster. He’s also eliminated much of the 19th-century framing of the tale and converted it into two present-tense narrations. One is Frankenstein’s dialogue with either himself or a (possibly imaginary) companion. The other is a second-person account of the monster’s first weeks of life as it spies on a family of dispossessed French nobility and has the chance to observe the loving relationships it can never enjoy itself.

Morris presents the reader with choices I’ve not encountered in other interactive fictions. Is humanity mostly good, or mostly evil? Does the most recent development make you (the monster) feel hope or despair? Is the revolution the dawn of a brave new world or a descent into chaos and barbarity? While I’m usually skeptical that present-tense narration increases the “immediacy” of a story, in this case, it really does work, particularly in the sections concerning the monster. Depending on your own outlook, you may urge him to keep trying to connect with humanity, or promptly forward him on to homicidal rage.

In either case, the narrative is shaped not by the reader deciding to turn left or right, to go down into the cellar or to get out of the house — the usual actions offered on the choose-your-own menu. Instead, the options have more to do with personality and interpretation, beliefs and ideas. As a result of the reader’s choices, the characters seem more like him- or herself, with a concurrent ratcheting up of emotional investment. To my surprise, I found myself more moved by this adaptation of the Shelley novel than I have been by the source text. (Although the app does include the original if you want to compare and contrast.) This is the only interactive fiction I’ve ever read with that quintessential, old-fashioned readerly avidity: the hunger to know what happens next. Of course, I already knew, but that didn’t matter at all.

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Laura Miller

Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com.

“The Cove”: A mysterious skull

A new novel begins with a shocking discovery that takes us back to love and life in the South during World War I

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This article appears courtesy of The Barnes & Noble Review.

Ron Rash’s atmospheric, strangely uncomplicated novel, “The Cove,” begins with a scene of melancholy and abandonment, the promise of obliteration, and a shocking discovery. It is 1953 and a man called Parton, a scout for the Tennessee Valley Authority, is investigating a remote parcel of land in North Carolina’s Appalachia for inhabitants who will have to be evicted in advance of the valley’s inundation. In a small notch — from which the book takes its title — over which looms a light-exterminating, anvil-shaped cliff, he finds a deserted farm. Pasture fenced by sagging barbed wire, a collapsed barn, a cabin and two wells are the desolate relicts of past life and labor. The general doominess of the setting is further enhanced by an ash tree decked in charms against evil forces, dead American chestnut trees (victims of the plague that wiped them out across the land), and the memory of the now extinct Carolina parakeet. Parton, thirsty, manages to winch up a bucket of water from one of the wells — and with it a human skull.

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I give little away in revealing this, as it occurs on page 4; it takes another 243 pages and a step back to the late summer and autumn of 1918 to discover the skull’s owner. It is then, during the last months of World War I, that the story takes place. At its heart is Laurel, a young woman afflicted with a large birthmark. She is shunned by the residents of the nearest town, Mars Hill, who believe that the cove is cursed and that she herself is a witch. Both her parents are dead, and with occasional help from a neighbor, she survived the previous summer alone on the farm while her brother, Hank, was away fighting in France. He has returned, absent a hand but resolutely capable and preparing for marriage.

In passage after passage, Rash describes life and work on the farm in its dailiness — the preparation of meals, tending to chores, mending clothes, setting fence poles, pulling wire — creating a sense of order and industry that would seem to promise future happiness and prosperity. But as the initial scene of desolation and death promises the reverse, an air of menace and foreboding pervades the story. And, indeed, like the waters that will inundate the farm decades later, powerful, destructive forces are gathering outside the cove.

On one of her forays to do her laundry in a stream away from the farm, Laurel hears and secretly observes a young man resting in a makeshift camp, playing a flute; days later she finds him near death, stung by a swarm of wasps. She brings him home; he recovers and produces a piece of paper saying that his name is Walter and that he cannot speak or read or write. As we — unlike Laurel or Hank — have already learned that a man has escaped from what turns out to be an internment camp for Germans, we get the picture. Walter won’t speak, but he will help with the farm, and this he does handily, capturing Hank’s admiration and gratitude — and Laurel’s heart.

All the while, anti-German hysteria is escalating in Mars Hill, a volatile temper encouraged by one Sgt. Chauncey Feith, a preposterous character ripped from a handbook of one-dimensional villains. Vainglorious, opportunistic and cowardly, he is a jingo, a sneak and a bully. The son of a politically connected banker, he has been deployed as the town’s recruitment officer, thus avoiding the perils of the battlefield. He has gone about this zealously, congratulating himself at every turn for sending young men off to the war and priding himself on being an “unsung hero, because you couldn’t go around telling people that any man can hold a rifle and stand in a trench but only a select few could do what a general or commodore or recruiter did.” That’s Chauncey Feith for you — believe it or not.

If Walter were to show up at Mars Hill and be recognized, there is no question that he would be strung up as a Hun. Meanwhile life and love go on at the farm. Walter helps Hank in sinking a second well, and the description of digging and lining it deep, deep in the earth is wonderfully potent. Indeed, Rash’s material detail, depiction of work and evocation of place — of nature, woods and stream, the play of light and the oppressive dark of the monstrous cliff — are truly splendid. Still, between the threat of a lynching and scenes from the cove, a vacuum yawns, and into it flows one simple question stripped of complexity: Whose skull? Or, put another way, happy ending or sad? The answer, when it comes, seems perfectly arbitrary.

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“Kingdom Come”: Terror in the London suburbs

A new novel traces an advertising executive's search for his father's murderer in a menacingly bland town

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This article appears courtesy of The Barnes & Noble Review.

J.G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai, China, and returned to England in 1946, having been interned with his family in a Japanese prison camp, an experience that inspired his most popular novel, “Empire of the Sun.” Ballard’s astonishing fiction ranges across continents and galaxies, but a quiet London suburb was his home until his death in 2009, and it is to the suburbs that he returned in his last novel, “Kingdom Come.” In its opening pages, the narrator, a London advertising executive named Richard Pearson, travels to one of the “perimeter towns dozing against the protective shoulder of the M25″ to find out who murdered his father.  It sounds like the setup for a cosy English mystery.  But this is Ballard.  It will not be cosy.

Barnes & Noble Review“The suburbs dream of violence,” Ballard declares as we enter the blandly menacing town of Brooklands. Among this “placid sea of brickly gables” Richard searches his father’s flat for clues to the life — and violent death — of a parent he barely knew, a pilot who had “flown millions of miles … and then died in a bizarre shooting incident in a suburban shopping mall.” Three others died, and the suspected gunman, a mentally unstable local, is arrested but then released. The police, the family lawyer, the doctor who treated Richard’s father — all appear to be hiding something, while many respectable Brooklands residents seem to have formed a fascist militia.

When Richard first witnesses a racist attack, he concludes that “a new kind of hate had emerged”; its hub is the Metro-Centre, the mega-mall in which his father was killed. During one visit, Richard sits beside the mall’s manmade beach, where Julia Goodwin, his father’s doctor, has arranged to meet him. “The wave machine had been turned to its lowest setting,” he notices, “and a vaguely gastric swell, like a suppressed vomit reflex, flowed across the colorized water.” This languid, sickly image could only be Ballard’s. No other writer so effectively alienates his readers — and his protagonists — from an everyday reality that he reveals to be shifting, often nightmarish terrain.

At the same time, he soothes us. In “Kingdom Come,” as in Ballard’s short stories and in novels like “Crash,” the rhythmical balance of the sentences has a tranquilizing effect, like the shushing roar of the ceaseless traffic on the motorway outside Brooklands. Richard, too, seems oddly numbed as he probes his father’s involvement with local thugs, falls in love with Julia Goodwin, and is increasingly drawn to the Metro-Centre and to the figure of David Cruise, the mall’s TV celebrity.

The novel’s pace quickens as violence spreads and the Metro-Centre comes under attack. “Fights broke out, fists flailing through the workmanlike rise and fall of police truncheons” as screams are drowned out “by the blades of army helicopters cuffing the night air.” Soon the mall becomes a fortress, hostages are taken, and the wave machine churns up a corpse. Emerging from the wreckage, Richard predicts that “In time … an even fiercer republic would open the doors and spin the turnstiles of its beckoning paradise.” In his final, elegiac vision of suburban apocalypse, Ballard once again allows us to imagine the unthinkable.

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Gay literature’s new wrinkle

Nobel-winner Herta Müller has written a dazzling new gay novel. Does it matter that she's heterosexual?

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Gay literature's new wrinkle (Credit: iStockphoto/RapidEye)

This week sees the publication of “The Hunger Angel,” by the Romanian-born German author Herta Müller. It’s her first novel to appear in English since she won the Nobel Prize three years ago, and the book, set in a Soviet labor camp in the years after World War II, arrives in America trailing behind it a passel of rave reviews in the European press: a masterpiece, they say, to be put next to Solzhenitsyn or Primo Levi.

But, more quietly, “The Hunger Angel” is something else – a major addition to the tradition of gay literature, and a rare evocation of gay life in the war years and after. Leo, the narrator, is just a teenager when he’s deported from Romania to the Ukraine, but he has already had his first “strange, filthy, shameless and beautiful” assignations in the town park and the local bathhouse. At first he sees his deportation as a welcome escape from his Nazi-supporting father, and a mercy for the mother he truly loves, for in his own eyes he is a double disgrace: not just gay, but an ethnic German who sleeps with Romanians. In the camp, hunger becomes all-consuming, and he longs for home, but he also watches fellow skin-and-bones detainees sneak off to an industrial wreck for sex and knows, “If I’d been caught in the camp I’d be dead.” “The Hunger Angel” lets a gay man embody universal themes of suffering and endurance but also captures the unique contradictions of gay desire – a substantial accomplishment, and one that’s even more impressive because Herta Müller is a straight woman.

Müller is part of a small but growing number of heterosexual writers publishing novels that not only include gay characters as central parts of their narrative, but are largely about gayness itself. It’s a trend that suggests that homosexuality may no longer be the taboo it once was, for writers — and for readers.

These days, in American and British fiction, at least, it’s no longer uncommon for straight writers to feature gay characters in a novel. Think of Claire Messud, whose “The Emperor’s Children” examines a young gay writer’s friendship with his two best friends, both straight women. Or read Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” which features a young gay kid experimenting first with drugs, then with sex. More recently, Chad Harbach in “The Art of Fielding” didn’t just feature a gay and decidedly not butch baseball player, but a 60-something, theretofore straight college president who falls in love with him. (These examples all feature gay men, obviously: Straight writers’ interest in lesbians is usually less edifying, as any gay person who endured Philip Roth’s “The Humbling” will remind you.)

Yet while straight writers now include gay characters as a matter of course, putting gay people at the center of a book remains all too rare. Gay characters can help straight writers write a book of larger scope, but a novel that concentrates on gay characters is automatically “gay fiction” – and that, sadly, still puts readers off. Gay novelists know all too well that without the right promotion, their books can end up relegated to the “LGBT interest” section of the bookshop, somewhere between the Spartacus travel guide and “Homosex: 60 Years of Gay Erotica.” (If, that is, the bookshop even stocks gay books; if, moreover, the bookshop hasn’t gone out of business.)

For straight writers, taking on gay subjects isn’t just an imaginative risk, it’s a commercial one. And therefore the list of examples is brief, but even so, they suggest that reader opposition to gay-themed books is on the wane. Although fantasy and science-fiction writers may have taken earlier steps, it wasn’t until the 1990s, with Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, that a straight writer saw major success with gay literary fiction on both commercial and critical terms. The Regeneration trilogy,  with its cast of both real and fictional characters during World War I, had a built-in audience among British readers who grew up reading poets like Siegfried Sassoon or Wilfred Owen. Yet on the first pages of “The Eye in the Door,” the middle book, they were plunged into a rough (and fantastically hot) sex scene between two officers of different class backgrounds, complete with war wounds from Passchendaele and bedside Vaseline. “The Eye in the Door” goes on to detail the horrible persecution of gays in the British civil service, sometimes even by closeted gay men themselves, while in “The Ghost Road,” the last novel of the series and the one for which Barker won the Booker Prize, Sassoon, Owen and fictitious soldiers spend page after page thinking about their desire for men, and about the gaps between the military’s sometimes surprising tolerance and the cruelties of civilian life.

You see similar contrasts of confidence and doubt, narcissism and self-loathing, in Annie Proulx’s short stories, most famously “Brokeback Mountain.” The subsequent film was anxiously promoted as a “universal” love story, but Proulx insists that her two ranchers aren’t any old star-crossed lovers, and that gay desire has a special character. Ennis and Jack aren’t just incapable of having their love accepted by society; much more fundamentally, they hate themselves for loving who they love. Proulx told the Paris Review that she now gets fan mail from readers who have rewritten “Brokeback Mountain” with a happy ending, like the stale 18th-century tradition of letting a victorious Hamlet marry a not-drowned Ophelia. “They can’t understand that the story isn’t about Jack and Ennis,” Proulx lamented. “It’s about homophobia; it’s about a social situation.”

Homophobia is naturally a major theme in straight-written gay fiction, but it’s not all about tears and the law. In “Call Me By Your Name,” from 2007, the straight writer André Aciman looked at the enduring power of first love through a teenager’s overwhelming desire for another man, complete with lashings of sex in the forest, at the sea, and in the streets of Rome. (You will never eat a peach again without thinking about what those two guys do to a piece of fruit.) Straight novelists are even beginning to write about gay history, and in particular HIV/AIDS. Tristan Garcia’s “Hate: A Romance,” co-translated by the Paris Review editor Lorin Stein, examined not only the devastation of the first years of the disease, but the virulent debates between proponents of safe sex and more radical gay activists who see barebacking as a political act. That is the sort of thing even many gay writers are not yet ready to discuss.

It can only be a good thing that the terms of gay fiction are expanding to include not only more readers but more writers. Yet gays have been writing about straight people for hundreds of years, and while straight writers who write gay fiction are celebrated for taking a risk and for imagining something beyond their own experience, gay and lesbian writers who do the opposite, such as Colm Tóibín in “Brooklyn” or Sarah Waters in “The Little Stranger,” don’t really get the same credit. Perhaps this is because straight love and desire is omnipresent; perhaps, more homophobically, it’s because we still think gay writers “naturally” have such powers of imagination. Either way, while the situation has improved, gay fiction still suffers from ghettoization, and while straight writers may be mindful of the risks they take in depicting a minority to which they don’t belong, gays who turn to straight subjects can find the new, larger audience for their books bewildering. Michael Cunningham observed as much back in 2000, when he was asked about the success of “The Hours.” “I can’t help but notice,” said Cunningham, “that when I finally write a book in which there are no men sucking each other’s dicks, I suddenly win the Pulitzer Prize.”

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Jason Farago is a regular contributor to the Guardian and writes criticism for the London Review of Books, n+1, Frieze and other publications. He is also editor of Art in Common, a blog on art and urban life.

Pulitzers snub fiction

No novel won the coveted prize this year, but does that mean nothing good was published?

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Pulitzers snub fictionDetails from the covers of "Train Dreams," "Swamplandia!" and "The Pale King"

The news that no Pulitzer Prize for fiction would be awarded this year came like a slap across the face to a book world still reeling from a Department of Justice suit filed against publishers trying to forestall an Amazon e-book monopoly. Double ouch! But does the Pulitzer snub mean that no good fiction was published in America last year?

I would (and have) argued otherwise, most strenuously; 2011 was an exceptional year for fiction, American and otherwise. I also suspect that the Pulitzer Board itself has not turned up its collective nose at every book produced by American novelists and short story writers in 2011. The Pulitzer Prize may wield far more clout with book buyers than any other American prize for fiction. It can turn an obscure title into a success and a modestly successful title into a bestseller. Readers take it seriously and snap up the books it honors by the thousands. But that doesn’t mean that the Pulitzer Prize for fiction doesn’t suffer from the same problems that afflict every literary prize, no matter its size or influence.

I have some insight into those problems because I served on the Pulitzer fiction jury two years ago. I can’t talk about my jury’s deliberations, however — that was part of the deal. I can tell you that choosing the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction is a two-tier process, a fact that even people well-versed in the literary world tend to forget.

The first tier is the jury’s selection. Three jurors (usually an academic, a critic and a fiction writer) are responsible for wading through huge boxfuls of books. Anyone can submit his or her book to the Pulitzer competition for a small fee, and believe me: anyone does. We got hundreds and hundreds of them, including many self-published novels with titles like “The Bikinis of Alpha Centauri,” most of which read as if they’d been run through Google Translate into Farsi and then run back again into English before being committed to print.

From the many submissions, the jury picks three titles to recommend to the Pulitzer Board, and the board picks the actual winner, as well as selecting the winners of all the other Pulitzer Prizes. The board does have the option to select a title not on the jury’s list, but it rarely does so nowadays.

The heyday for picking no book at all was the 1970s, a time of considerable cultural upheaval and conflict. In 1971, the board rejected titles from Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow and Joyce Carol Oates. In 1974, a stellar jury consisting of Benjamin DeMott, Elizabeth Hardwick and Alfred Kazin (three titans of literary criticism) unanimously recommended that the prize go to Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow.” The Pulitzer Board dug in its heels and said no. In 1977, the last time the prize was not awarded, the jury favored ”A River Runs Through It” by Norman Maclean and the board shut them down.

Why? According to the critic and experimental novelist William Gass, who wrote a notorious diatribe on the subject, the Pulitzer Board’s taste is hopelessly mainstream, middlebrow and unadventurous. (In 1941, most of the board did pick Ernest Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” but one member — who happened to be the president of Columbia University — put the kibosh on that because he considered the book immoral.) However, Gass’ complaint seems an absurd cavil to level against an institution whose power and influence resides precisely in the fact that it speaks to a broad audience.

The Pulitzer Board consists of working journalists and journalism professors, most with a deep respect for literature but relatively little familiarity with the literary world. This can be a strength and a weakness. The Pulitzer’s excellent record at singling out literary works that also appeal to a lot of readers is one reason why it has so much more influence than “insider” prizes like the National Book Award.

However, because the Pulitzer Board is fairly representative of educated Americans, it surely includes a lot of people who don’t really have time to read fiction — or, at least, literary fiction — anymore. Past boards might have been able to settle on a title that most of them had read even if it wasn’t offered as a finalist by the jury; reading at least a few of the “big” novels published during the year was something a lot more people did before the Internet and cable TV came along. In 21st-century America, the novel has become a marginalized and Balkanized art form, and even when avid fiction fans compare notes, they often find they’ve read nothing in common.

Chances are good that the three novels recommended by this year’s Pulitzer jury — “Swamplandia!” by Karen Russell, “Train Dreams” by Denis Johnson, and “The Pale King” by David Foster Wallace — are the only three serious new novels many of the board members read last year, apart, perhaps, from one or two others. These people are, after all, pretty busy doing things like editing the Denver Post and running the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, jobs that are a lot more time-consuming than they used to be, as well as selecting the winners in the other Pulitzer categories.

By all accounts, the group could not reach a majority on any of the three titles recommended by the jury. It’s certainly unlikely that enough of them read fiction widely enough to agree on an alternate choice. In that, they truly are representative of American readers, and that bodes worse for our national literature than a year without a Pulitzer winner.

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Laura Miller

Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com.

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