Robert Zemeckis' new film "Beowulf" gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "the sublime and the ridiculous." Zemeckis took the oldest and most important text of our ur-language, and turned it into a 3-D Disneyland ride so cheesy he should have called it "Anglo-Saxons of the Caribbean." Of course, there's nothing new or surprising about this. Hollywood has been profaning history and literature since long before Cecil B. DeMille cast Charlton Heston as Moses. If the Bible isn't sacred, why should the oldest poem in our ancestral language be?
But the "Beowulf" travesty is especially glaring, because of the obvious contrast with another work that mined the same ancient field: J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings." "Beowulf" isn't just a bad, although visually spectacular, movie, it's a huge missed opportunity. With enough imaginative audacity, Zemeckis could have created a mythical universe, one that finds the mysterious threads that connect the distant past to our time. Instead, he turned our shared cultural heritage into a cartoon. (This hasn't hurt "Beowulf" at the box office: It was the highest-grossing movie in the country after its first weekend.)
Comparing "Beowulf" to Tolkien's masterpiece is setting the bar high, but Zemeckis' choice of "Beowulf" made that inevitable. There's no real reason to take on "Beowulf" unless you want to go all the way. That's true not just because it's a canonical text, but because there's no way to make a movie out of it. When you're faced with the impossible, you'd better bring some magic to the undertaking. You need more than 3-D special effects -- you need a 3-D imagination.
"Beowulf" is the earliest piece of vernacular European literature, and it remains perhaps the most unfathomable one, an uncanny visitation from a dark lost corner of our history, an era caught between paganism and Christianity. The inscrutability of "Beowulf" has made it contested ground for scholars for over a century. Since even experts cannot agree on what it means, how should a modern artist approach it?
Of course, there is no right or wrong answer to this question. Zemeckis had the right to choose any source material he wanted, and do whatever he wanted with it. And perhaps his high-tech extravanganza will awaken interest not just in one ancient poem, but even our forgotten Germanic heritage -- even, perhaps, history itself. But if it does, it won't be because of his artistic vision.
For those readers who heeded Woody Allen's words in "Annie Hall" and gave a wide berth to all classes that included "Beowulf," here's a crib sheet. "Beowulf" is a 3,183-line poem, written by an unknown poet in Old English (also known as Anglo-Saxon, the Germanic language spoken in England before the Norman Conquest), probably in the 8th century, but possibly as much as several hundred years later. The poem survives only in a single manuscript, a copy made around 1,000 A.D. that is now in the British Museum. The events it relates take place in what is now Denmark around 500 A.D., so the author is already looking back at a distant time. Crucially, he is a Christian, who has a highly ambiguous relation to the pagan hero he celebrates. Scholars continue to debate the exact nature of his, his poem's, and his audience's Christianity and attitude to paganism -- as well as just about everything else about the poem.
The story is stark and strange. A monster named Grendel, a descendant of the biblical Cain, has been terrorizing the kingdom of Denmark for 12 years. A great warrior named Beowulf vows to kill Grendel. He and 14 men sail from their home in Geatland (southern Sweden) to Denmark, where Beowulf kills the monster and then the monster's horrible mother. He receives gifts and honor from the aging Danish king and sails back home, where he rules for 50 years. When a dragon rampages through his kingdom, Beowulf seeks out the monster and kills it, but is himself mortally wounded. After his death he is remembered by his people as the kindest of kings and the most eager for fame.
Whatever its historical and literary virtues, this is not a story that is going to pack them in at the local multiplex. Any faithful film adaptation of "Beowulf" would almost certainly be a commercial failure, because the poem's essence is mythical. Its characters are one-dimensional, and it has only one plot development: The hero gets old and dies. Its greatness lies in its language, not its story. "Beowulf" is a hard and haunted poem, one that evokes what the "Cambridge History of English Literature" called "the dim, palpable unknown." Old English is a foreign language, but if you read a bilingual edition, like Seamus Heaney's fine translation, every now and then a familiar word appears, like a grim rock thrusting out of a turbulent sea. For Tolkien, a philologist who as a child was as preternaturally sensitive to the sound of language as the young Mozart was to music, the very sound of Old English was revelatory. As professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, Tolkien would electrify his classes with his dramatic recitation of "Beowulf's" opening. (In a letter to Tolkien, W.H. Auden wrote reverently, "[Your] voice was the voice of Gandalf.")
There is one film version of "Beowulf" that is literally true to the original: Actor Benjamin Bagby recites the entire poem in the original Old English, accompanying himself on the Anglo-Saxon harp. It's a remarkable performance, but the film seems unlikely to ever be shown in places where they charge money for admission.
Aspiring to a larger audience, Zemeckis' film and the three previous film versions of "Beowulf" have radically altered the story. Two of the earlier films take a demythologizing approach, attempting to imagine what real events might have given rise to the supernatural tale. "Beowulf and Grendel," made in 2005 and shot in Iceland, makes Grendel a sympathetic Bigfoot, a vaguely Neanderthal loner who is taking vengeance on the Danes after they killed his father. "The Thirteenth Warrior" (1999), based on a Michael Crichton novel, also eschews the supernatural: The monsters are humans clad in bearskins. In a further wrinkle, it is told from the perspective of an Arab diplomat who finds himself unwillingly in Beowulf's band. Both are worthy efforts, and the eccentric "Beowulf and Grendel" rises at times to heights of hypnotic intensity, although it's painfully uneven. The 1999 "Beowulf," starring Christopher Lambert, is hilariously dreadful, a fine candidate to be made into a Mystery Science Theater episode. It is set in a post-apocalyptic future, with Beowulf as a dark and obsessed hero. The big plot innovation is Grendel's mother, who becomes a hot babe/horrific monster, played by a blond Playboy model in a net, who previously seduced the old king (from which unholy union Grendel emerged) and tries to work her evil wiles on Beowulf by caressing his nether sword. When that fails, she turns into a multiwinged, Pterodactyl-like harpy.
Zemeckis' "Beowulf" hits upon the same narrative twist, if not quite as ludicrously. Once again, Grendel's mother is a demonic hottie (upgraded from a mere Bunny to Angelina Jolie) who also slept with the old king. Screenwriters Roger Avary and the estimable Neil Gaiman (who must be rueing the day he agreed to do this project) "advance" this plot twist by having Beowulf also succumb to her evil charms. Beowulf's corruption comes back to haunt him 50 years later, when he atones for his sins by fighting the evil dragon in a climactic battle that results in his death.
The problem with Zemeckis' "Beowulf" isn't that it departs from the original story, or that this plot twist is inherently unworkable. In order to generate any kind of narrative tension, Beowulf has to change, be something other than just a brave and virtuous hero. The movie's solution, although too obvious and somewhat anachronistic (the figure of the corrupting, sexually powerful witch-woman is more associated with the later Middle Ages, as in a character like Morgan le Fay, than Anglo-Saxon literature), could theoretically have worked. Moreover, it can even be justified in terms of certain critical readings of the poem: According to a strong Christian interpretation, Beowulf's death is his atonement for the sin of pride, to which he succumbed as king. For example, in his 1989 book "The Condemnation of Heroism in the Tragedy of Beowulf," Fidel Fajardo-Acosta argues that the "battle with Grendel's mother represents the initiation of Beowulf into full-fledged Cain-gianthood, and into the status of demonic being."
"Beowulf" doesn't fail because it changes the story: It fails because it is so busy juicing up the story that it does not create a mythical universe. It has no transfiguring vision. It seizes upon an ancient tale, whose invisible roots run deep into our psyches, and uses it to construct a shiny, plastic entertainment. It takes a wild fable and turns it into a tame story. But "Beowulf" is the kind of story that is meaningless unless it is part of a cosmology. It is, in short, a myth.
J.R.R. Tolkien, the author who created the most powerful mythical universe of our time, was also a renowned "Beowulf" scholar. "The Lord of the Rings" was heavily influenced by the poem, and Tolkien wrote what is still one of the seminal essays about it. Tolkien's analysis of "Beowulf," and more generally of fantasy and myth, illuminate both why he was able to create a modern mythopoeic masterpiece, and why "Beowulf" falls flat.
"Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," published in 1936, marked a turning point in critical studies of the poem. Before Tolkien's essay, most scholars regarded the unknown poet's use of supernatural elements -- the monster Grendel, his equally monstrous mother, and the dragon -- as primitive or childish. Arguing that these "trivial" themes failed to do justice to the poem's exquisite language, they saw "Beowulf" as being primarily of historical, not artistic, interest. As the scholar W.P. Ker wrote in 1904, "The thing itself is cheap; the moral and the spirit of it can only be matched among the noblest authors." Tolkien overturned these assumptions. He argued that the poem should be read as a poem, and recognized as a great one. The fantastic elements in "Beowulf," far from being faintly embarrassing, were inseparable from its majestic artistry.
In a famous allegory, Tolkien compared the author of "Beowulf" to a man who, inheriting a field full of ancient stones, used them to build a tower. His friends, recognizing that the stones had belonged to a more ancient building, tore down the tower "in order to look for hidden carvings and inscriptions." What they did not realize, Tolkien ends, was that "from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea."
Tolkien's point is that the fantastic elements in "Beowulf" are ancient archetypes that have deep roots in human beliefs, fears and wishes -- myths, in other words. And in "Beowulf," he argues, these myths are an essential part of a tragic tale whose theme is "man at war with the hostile world, and his inevitable overthrow in Time." The greatness of Beowulf derives from the fact that it is a poem created in "a pregnant moment of poise": It is balanced between a Christian worldview, in which death and defeat are ultimately themselves defeated by Christ, and a Germanic, pagan one, in which fate rules all and man's courage alone confers nobility. It is, Tolkien writes, not a primitive poem, but a late one. The pagan world is already past, but the poet still celebrates its vanished power. The fact that a poem written more than a thousand years ago was itself looking back at a lost world gives the poem an uncanny double resonance to the modern reader: "If the funeral of Beowulf moved once like the echo of an ancient dirge, far-off and hopeless, it is to us as a memory brought over the hills, an echo of an echo."
Tolkien's brilliant essay can be seen as a ringing defense not just of "Beowulf," but of the work he was soon to embark on, another great tower composed of ancient stones. And the themes of lateness, of heroic loss, being caught between one age and another (his world is not called "Middle-earth" for nothing), are the deepest and most sublime parts of his own epic: They are the haunted metaphysical atmosphere through which his characters -- men, elves and hobbits alike -- must make their way. The coming disappearance of the elves, the hard dawning of the age of men, represent a disenchantment of the world identical to the disenchantment Tolkien found so unbearably moving in "Beowulf." By introducing this dark note, Tolkien gave artistic expression to the doubts that he himself may have felt about the myth he had created -- and so transcended them.
Tolkien was able to use the ancient stones in "Beowulf" to build a modern masterpiece because he recognized that the enduring power of myths derives from their deeper truth. This does not mean he believed that orcs and goblins and elves really existed; rather it derives from his belief that the world was enchanted, illuminated by a sacred light, and that the human sub-creations we call myths -- "living shapes that move from mind to mind," he called them in a poem he wrote for C.S. Lewis -- were splinters of that primordial light. For Tolkien, the ultimate source of enchantment was the Christian God, but it is not necessary to share that faith to feel the power of his creation.
The creators of the movie "Beowulf," however, failed to even recognize that the epic is composed of ancient stones, or that those stones might have something to say to us today. They spent millions of dollars replicating the look of the past, but they forgot that there is something no motion-capture technology can capture: poetry. The essence of "Beowulf," or any poem, cannot be evoked by mere images. It must be imagined. And the translation of that vision into cinematic images is a matter of art: It cannot be run through a computer.
In this regard, Peter Jackson's magnificent film version of "The Lord of the Rings" may mislead filmmakers into thinking that all they have to do to tell a mythical tale is shoot the literal action and let the power of film fill in the poetic blanks. But it isn't that easy. Jackson's film succeeds not simply because it captures the look of Tolkien's world, but because it captures its heart.
It's unfair, and may even seem ludicrous, to single out a trivial entertainment like "Beowulf" for failing to grasp the depths of an ancient masterpiece. There are many mansions in the world of art, and there's room for 3-D spectacles and digitized cleavage as well as for Mahler and Edith Wharton. But we have plenty of bad fairy tales and high-tech kitsch, and very few "Beowulfs." The least we can ask is that those who venture into those dim and distant realms not wear clown suits. They spoil our view of the sea.
When the editors of the trade publication Publisher's Weekly announced their list of the 10 best books of the year on Monday, outrage flared across the Internet: Not a single book by a woman made the cut. Comments on P.W.'s Web site likened the list to "a flier tacked to the wall at a men's club," and the fledging feminist literary organization WILLA (Women in Letters and Literary Arts) set up a wiki page inviting visitors to add titles to a list of "great books by women" published in 2009.
And of course there was a Twitter hashtag (#fembooks) for those who wanted to express their displeasure in real time. Tweeters pointed out that women buy the majority of books sold in the U.S. and usually make up about half of the authors on any given New York Times Bestseller list. Others complained that classic novels by men get trumpeted as "must reads" while those by women are often pooh-poohed by male readers as "not to my taste." Charlotte Abbott, a literary journalist, floated the idea of an American version of Britain's Orange Prize, which goes to the author of the year's "best full-length novel in English." (American novelists are eligible for the Orange Prize; Marilynne Robinson won it last year for "Home.") That suggestion was greeted with a mixture of enthusiasm and worries about "ghettoization."
What's at issue isn't sales or even access to readers; this is an argument about prestige and critical recognition, an argument best articulated by the novelist and critic Francine Prose in a 1998 article for Harper's magazine. Prose detected a greater reverence for books by men among the nation's literary and critical establishment, which includes reviewers, prize committees and the institutions that bestow grants. She blamed this on a widespread if seldom-stated assumption that "women writers will not write about anything important -- anything truly serious or necessary, revelatory or wise."
Explaining P.W.'s list, editor Louisa Ermelino wrote, "We wanted [it] to reflect what we thought were the top 10 books of the year with no other consideration ... We ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz. We gave fair chance to the 'big' books of the year, but made them stand on their own two feet. It disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male." Yet, according to Miami Herald blogger Connie Ogle, Ermelino sounded less apologetic when quoted in a press release, characterizing the list as not "the most politically correct."
Anyone who's ever had to compile such a list -- and admittedly, there aren't many of us -- will feel an awkward sympathy for the P.W. team. Two years ago, while settling on Salon's picks for the year's best works of fiction, we wound up with five novels by men. This dilemma precipitated a lot of soul-searching, only partially soothed by the reminder that most years the majority of the books on our fiction list are by women authors. Should we swap out one of the titles by a man for another we liked less, simply because it was by a woman? The WILLA wiki implies that the editors of P.W. simply didn't bother to read books by Lorrie Moore, Margaret Atwood or Alice Munro when selecting their list, but that's highly unlikely. Chances are that they (like me) didn't think the Lorrie Moore novel and many others posted to the wiki were up to snuff. Something similar happened at Salon when it came to the fiction of 2007. In the end, unable to find books by women that we liked better than those five novels, we opted for honesty, which we consider the critic's first responsibility.
Without tipping our hand, I'll merely say that it's unlikely Salon will suffer the drubbing P.W. has endured when we run our own 10-best list in early December. But every year we do face a ticklish question: Is it the right thing to gerrymander your list in order to counteract real, long-standing cultural biases, even if that means lying to your readers? What is a 10-best list, after all, if not a record of the books we enjoyed most over the past 12 months? If you insist on a list that's ideally representative of gender, race, class, nationality (i.e., including at least one translation), publisher size (small as well as large), fame, length (short story collections as well as novels), region, genre and so on, you can easily wind up with, say, a list of nine books you kinda like and maybe one you truly love. That's a tepid dish to serve up to readers, and not likely to inspire much enthusiasm, either.
On the other hand, few things are more subjective than judgments about how "great" any given book is. Those real, long-standing cultural biases mentioned above live in the heart of every critic to one degree or another, and we'd be shirking our duty if we didn't try to account for them. Writing off such qualms as mere "political correctness" is, in its own way, just as dishonest as exaggerating your admiration for a book simply because its author is female, or dark-skinned, or from a far-off nation. I don't doubt that P.W.'s editors are entirely sincere when they say their list reflects their unvarnished preferences. Still, the fact that those preferences can't encompass one woman author among 10 books (fiction or nonfiction) picked from the 50,000-plus titles they claim to have sifted through suggests that their horizons might need a bit of deliberate widening.
Fortunately, most years bring enough good books that we're able to choose from a fairly diverse array of candidates. If we adore two novels (or histories, or biographies) to about the same degree, we do take factors like an author's gender or the size of the book's publisher into account -- the same way we try to maintain a mix of literary tones and moods, from the slim, intensely personal memoir to the majestic and well-footnoted doorstop. The key question remains, is the quality of our final list diminished by those decisions, or enriched by them? We like to think that, like us, most readers appreciate some variety in their literary diets.
During the early fall, publishers release the highest concentration of books by established writers -- many of which, incidentally, turn out to be disappointing, like this year's offerings from John Irving and Philip Roth. As a result, it's easy to miss fine novels by relative newcomers (who are also less tempted than the big names to phone it in). Tobias Hill's impressive "The Hidden," published last month as a paperback original, is a case in point. Hill, a British poet, novelist and short story writer, likes to take subjects conventionally associated with airport thrillers -- murder mysteries, quests for ancient treasure, conspiracies -- and crack them open to probe for more succulent literary meat. "The Hidden," set on an archaeological dig at the site of ancient Sparta, circles around the suspicious activities of some of the dig's team while dissecting the broken inner life of a young man who wants nothing more than to be let in on their secret.
Ben Mercer, an Oxford scholar, comes to Greece to escape a wrecked marriage; his wife describes him as "a danger to her, body and soul," for reasons not immediately revealed. Running low on money, he gets a job at a greasy spoon in an Athens suburb, where barely submerged resentments between native Greeks and Albanian immigrants seem about to brim over into violence. Then Eberhard, a college acquaintance, turns up at one of his tables and mentions working at an excavation in Laconia, otherwise known as Lacedaemonia, the location of the ancient city-state of Sparta. Although Eberhard tries to discourage him, Ben's imagination has been ignited. The severity of Sparta's ethos has always fascinated him, as has the elusiveness of its material remains. Unlike the Athenians, "the Spartans left nothing behind that reflected their greatness. They had become no more than rumors of rumors in the histories of others ... Each outsider contradicting the next, a chain of Mediterranean whispers."
Archaeologists like to dig stuff up, of course, dragging to the surface of the earth things that have lain beneath it for centuries. Some of those things, Hill suggests, might be better left buried. Having finagled his way into a job at the dig, Ben finds his curiosity further inflamed by a clique among the site's workers, three men (including Eberhard) and two women who form a seemingly impenetrable social unit. Deflecting the friendly overtures of other team members, Ben yearns first to be included and later to know just what this little group is hiding up in the hills.
The story of Ben's gradual insinuation into the clique alternates with the notes he's writing "towards" his thesis. The theme of these notes drifts from the enigma of the Spartans, whose refusal to speak for themselves permitted a thousand stories about them to flourish, to ruminations on the connection between love and ruthlessness (exemplified by the unparalleled unity of the Theban Sacred Band, a military force made up of 150 homosexual couples), to, finally, the riddles posed by his new friends. He begins an affair with one of the women and joins the group on a midnight jackal hunt, but never feels as if he's penetrated to the heart of their mystery.
What's really going on with Eberhard & Co. turns out to be just barely plausible ... well, maybe not quite that, but what Hill does with it and the ancient history it invokes is hypnotic. The policies of the Spartan elite -- who annually declared war against the captive majority of their population (called helots) so that these serflike non-citizens could be murdered at will without any loss of honor -- feeds into questions of modern-day political expedience, extremism and the power of fear. What crimes can be justified in the pursuit of a noble ideal? Odd anecdotes -- about a discarded doll ripped open to reveal a music-box "heart" and a fetal chicken found in a cracked egg -- mirror disturbing discoveries at the site and in a cave, which in turn echo the descent into the underworld made by so many mythical heroes. Do monsters await in the bowels of the earth, or in ourselves?
Novelists have been attempting this sort of thing since John Fowles' "The Magus"; what distinguishes "The Hidden" is both a clarity of purpose (the resolution is not excessively coy or ambiguous) and radiant prose. Hill's style is the opposite of the description-clogged, obscurantist verbiage that most poets produce when turning to fiction. Instead, he brings to this novel the kind of metaphor so good you don't savor it so much as shiver with instantaneous recognition. "There was a delicacy to his sanity he had never acknowledged before," he writes of Ben at one point. "It was as frail as water tension." How is it, I thought after reading this line, that we don't already compare the stability of a fragile mind to the thin skin of water that keeps a teardrop together?
A pity then, that -- no doubt due to the expediencies of paperback publication -- "The Hidden" shows signs of lax editing (the novel could easily lose 30 pages and be strengthened by the cuts) and sloppy copyediting (multiple typos and unconverted British spellings like "realise"). Still, the same criticisms could be leveled at Irving's interminable "Last Night in Twisted River," a book that evidences far less thought and artistry. In a season of high-profile novels, "The Hidden" is in danger of living up to its name, and that would indeed be a crime.
As Jonathan Lethem grew into what critics like to call one of our most important novelists, he became increasingly difficult to pigeonhole; fluid across genres, Lethem's biggest books ("Motherless Brooklyn," "Fortress of Solitude") can feel like sparkling new works from a new author rather than someone you've enjoyed before. His latest, "Chronic City,"
"Chronic City" features one hapless Chase Insteadman, a former child actor adrift in New York as his fiancée, an astronaut, hovers above, prevented from returning to Earth by an orbital minefield. He soon falls under the mad spell of Perkus Tooth, a writer and inveterate cultural critic-obsessive, who becomes friend and Svengali, sharing with him his love of all things Brando and an increasing paranoia.
Lethem stopped by the Salon New York office to discuss his new novel, his Brooklynite critique of Manhattan, his MacArthur "genius" grant and the dark side of cultural obsession.
Most anyone with a deep love of film, books, movies has had a Perkus Tooth in their lives at some point, sort of tutoring them on the good stuff. I read that Paul Nelson was an inspiration.
Sure, Paul Nelson was part of that image for me. I mean, Paul Nelson was not frantic, actually. And he wasn't a dandy, and he wasn't a pot smoker, so there's a lot of ways in which if you knew Paul Nelson you'd never associate the two. But something about Chase's innocence meeting Perkus' cultural worldliness comes from the fact that as a 20-something -- 21, 22 -- I kind of fell into Paul's sphere for a little while and he gave me this instant education in his version of American vernacular culture. Ross Macdonald, Orson Welles, Howard Hawks, Chet Baker. And it was this flood of references for me to sort out and absorb and he became very important. A lot of the things that Paul taught me to value are still really the center of my sensibility.
But there was also something poignant about the amount that Paul depended on the power of his cultural searches and what they unearthed for his sustenance. It was like they were his oxygen, and I adored it and I think I identified with it at the same time as it can't help but serve as a kind of warning ... just so many people I know who have at some point become voracious about cultural collecting, cultural searching -- their identification tips over. I've done it. And it's, to me, so human and so poignant and so compelling and also terrifying to go into that place. And you know, at the same time it's just finally a metaphor for what anyone does, which is search for meaning, constantly trying to ask yourself if you can find in the environment somewhere, the natural world, your family tree, some version of politics or culture or in this case pop culture, a description that makes you understand why you're here. So in that sense it's not culturally specific at all.
What do you mean by a "warning"?
Well, just as critical theory, critique, tips into paranoia -- finding patterns that don't exist -- collecting can cross that line from being the quest for value into being the quest for the subterranean, impossible artifact that will somehow validate all of your existence ... You know, I used to know, I still do know, a lot of [Bob] Dylan collectors, and he's begun demystifying a lot of the secrets by issuing them himself, but these things used to circulate as talismanic objects. And there was always the myth of the song that was even better, the musician who'd come out of some session and say, "Well, yeah sure, you heard 'Blind Willie McTell' because you've got a tape of it, but there was another song that he debuted in the studio that day that was never written down and we all begged him to play it again and he never did." And it's sort of like, "Well, if that song's even better than 'Blind Willie McTell,' then what about the song that Dylan wrote but didn't play that day, or what about the song that Dylan never even wrote! That might be the best one!" It's a path of madness, and certainly I wanted to portray that terrifying descent to some extent.
What's fascinating about a character like Perkus is there's no echo chamber, it's all in his head. He's coming up with his own fictions, really, without any enablers.
In that way it relates really strongly to a book like "The Fortress of Solitude," which is overtly nostalgic. I mean, Perkus is his own fortress of solitude. He's trying to keep a diorama of the version of New York City that means the most to him alive. And for him the Tompkins Square riots are still fresh news and Tom Verlaine breaking up Television is like a fresh tragedy. It's all at the edge of his nerves, the world that means the most to him, and he's trying to bring other people into that system of values.
Chase Insteadman is such an unformed thinker about culture, the world. Do you think you were like that at 21?
I probably wasn't very like Chase Insteadman when I was 20 -- I might be more like him now in a funny way. Or let's say that the ways in which I identify with Chase as a character have to do with the peculiar fate of being slightly known, and an author is by definition not a famous person. In our culture, where fame is a currency and we see it awarded on television in all sorts of strange ways, authors never register, they're not even a blip. But in a tiny kind of weird, subjective version of my own experience, the world I wander through, in a bookstore or just now going into the offices of the New York Times Book Review, people are like [looking over his shoulder in surprise ] -- and I'm about to be on tour and play this part inevitably. Ian McEwan has a great line where he says, "Book touring is like being an employee of your former self." But it's an acting role, you have to authenticate -- yes, I'm the writer who wrote that book -- nightly for people, and it's kind of silly and I'm not an actor, I'm no good in any sense except that I have backed into by necessity the ability to play myself. And the moment you do that, you develop this very obscure, uncomfortable double sense of self and that can be very haunting. And that's what I wanted to capture when I wrote about Chase's sort of mediocre celebrity. The way he's still remembered for something he himself can barely remember doing is something I feel a strange degree of identification with.
You feel like you're acting?
There are times when someone wants to talk to me about Tourette's syndrome -- well, "Motherless Brooklyn" was published 10 years ago. It means I wrote it 12, 13 years ago, I conceived it longer ago. The person who got excited about that isn't very close to the surface for me anymore. So I have to do this strange, polite kind of acting bit where I reinhabit the role of the author of "Motherless Brooklyn."
You've said "Chronic City" came from your distinctly Brooklyn point of view. What kind of critique, do you think, is it of Manhattan?
Of course I shudder if I think I made a deliberate social critique, because it's not mostly a great path for a storyteller to take. But rather than a social critique or especially one of any particular present moment, I felt what I was doing was exploring some of the ambivalent power of Manhattan. And I think it's always resided there, as long as I've been alive and lived next door to Manhattan -- it is a kind of virtual reality. There's something unreal about Manhattan, it's a creation of will and aspiration and money. And unlike most places on earth it's not rooted in its past, it's rooted in its possibilities and its future, and it's always being remade and revamped.
Now, having said that, what makes Manhattan, what makes NYC, what makes the world more complicated than any description, than the one I've just offered, is that it's also real -- people go on living their lives in buildings, eating food, wearing clothes, trying to pay the rent. And I wanted to find a way to put this doubleness into the book. This fact that a place can be a virtual reality and still be so stuck in our world, our real world, that's what I really cared to say about Manhattan.
When I first moved to Manhattan "Motherless Brooklyn" had just come out. In that book, Brooklyn is grounded in this kind of firmament, whereas Manhattan is much more sketchy, changing, fast-paced ...
The compression you've made, I've offered a similar description a few times, and I always look from the Brooklyn point of view that what I find so nourishing of Brooklyn is that it wants to be the big city, but it falls short -- it's always half-renovated, and half-gentrified. So you see these lumps of the future lying alongside the past, the recalcitrant chunks of the past that won't go. And they're just side by side and everyone has to just live with this kind of awkwardness. And whereas Manhattan often tries to remake itself and succeeds, startlingly this crazy new building will come up or crazy new neighborhood will exist and everyone seems to believe in it and move in right away, and it's like, OK, now TriBeCa is a good place to go for food. What? Yes? Really? OK.
Back to Perkus, I kept thinking that, especially in the current climate, what a dying breed that sort of cultural critic is.
You're right, it's always a dying breed. One of the things I'm very devoted to in Perkus is the joke, seems like just a running joke, "I am not a rock critic." In the end he kind of makes this tormented confession: "I am a rock critic!" I feel like there's something very moving to me about the pioneer generation -- [Robert] Christgau, Lester Bangs, Greil Marcus, Paul Nelson, Greg Shaw -- who by force of will said, "We're going to write seriously about this thing that everyone thinks is a joke." It was like founding a school of criticism on bubblegum wrappers. The culture did not believe that rock 'n' roll could sustain analysis. The records were supposed to blow away and disappear after they fell off the charts, no one was even supposed to care who made them after awhile. They were just pop. And they located the connection between this material and American culture at large, between this material and art. And by doing so they created a language for themselves -- that was an act of bravery. I really think it was as bold a gesture as a lot of art making itself. They made something that now of course can be quite complacent and automatic.
We all feel almost that there's a wearisome familiarity with the inside language of music criticism, at least when it's used in a received way. But that didn't exist, so I think of Perkus as -- of course the dates are off, he couldn't have been one of the founders -- but he conveys some of that spirit of trying to say something that no one thinks you're even allowed to try to say. This book is partly about the emotion that accompanies trying to name unnamable things that you see in sets around you. Whether it's conspiracies or facts about the city that somehow are inexpressible facts. It's tormenting not to have the language to put it across and Perkus is tormented by that. But he's also very dedicated. To look at him very generously he's very dedicated to the idea of secret knowledge, to the mastery of secret knowledge. And the Internet and the reissue age is one that is very humbling to masters of secret knowledge -- everyone's a master of secret knowledge now.
You know, when I met Paul Nelson, this can be very hard I think for someone younger than me to understand anymore -- if you get curious about Howard Hawks, if you hear someone saying "Oh, god, you don't know what you're missing," you can go and see "Red River" tomorrow. You can see 30 Howard Hawks movies tomorrow. When Paul Nelson said to me, "You need to know about this," what he then did was pull out of his apartment, which was an archive, these VHS tapes with his hand-lettered labels on them all recorded off PBS or "The Million Dollar Movie," commercials intact, with him fixing the vertical hold in the middle of the big scene -- all recorded for posterity -- that was how this meaning was transmitted to me. It was something rarefied and almost impossible to explore. He wanted me to see obscure Orson Welles movies -- "F for Fake" or "Mr. Arkadin." There's no Criterion Collection, there's no way to get from here to there unless Paul Nelson was up that night recording it with his television. But that's all gone. We're drowning in archival culture.
Are we richer or poorer for that?
I think it's OK. I'd rather have it around.
Have everything available rather than relying on these kind of guides ...
Yeah, I guess in a way there is that sense in which Perkus Tooth is a commemorative character. I had to make these guys naive about the Internet -- you know, the joke about them not even knowing how to bid on eBay, and still having a dial-up computer -- because a lot of the meaning that is so precious and so fragile for them evaporates in the instantaneity of Internet communication.
So what was it like creating after you got the genius grant?
Well, the first thing to say is that I've been a very lucky writer, a very lucky artist, and the luck began before the MacArthur. The MacArthur didn't arrive in the hands of someone sleeping on couches. I found my way mercifully to very, very -- I have a very, very good editor at a very strong publishing house who supports me brilliantly and has now for more than a decade. So, that's something -- forget the MacArthur -- that's something any writer should dream of. I had a lot of opportunities that came with being capably published, brilliantly published. The MacArthur did free me, especially given that it came at a moment when I was -- you know, I'm 45 now, I'm married now, I have a 2-year-old -- I was starting to not want to live the scrappy, year-to-year, no health insurance kind of life. I needed to outfit myself with a few more middle-class amenities just to be able to look my wife in the eye. So it was kind of a perfect time.
But also I saw it as a kind of vote that I should do more of what I'd already been doing, but do it even better, do it more passionately, do it more deeply. I really do feel that this book is connected to the MacArthur in the sense that it's an ambitious book and a big book, but it's also, I'm not trying to please anyone but myself. It's a very willful, very personal, I would agree if you said very eccentric book in a lot of ways. And that was what the MacArthur told me I should do. I believe I was right to take it as that kind of message.
The book dropped this week, reviews are coming up, the book tour's going to start. Does the money free you from really having to worry about the stuff --
Let's not exaggerate the good fortune. My MacArthur runs out in a year, and the really tragic thing about getting the MacArthur award is that the only person in the entire universe who will never get a MacArthur is someone who already got one. I'm on my own. It made the last few years so much easier, and it's hard to know how I could have gotten this book done without it.
Last week, BBC Audiobooks America announced that it would sponsor the creation of a story via Twitter feed, using a first sentence written by author Neil Gaiman as the seed and inviting the public to collaborate in completing it, one 140-character passage at a time. The experiment was widely pronounced "cool," as such things usually are, then promptly forgotten by everyone but the participants -- again, as such things usually are.
The several dozen people who contributed to the story seemed to have fun, and perhaps that's all that really matters. A Web 2.0 version of the old surrealist parlor game known as "exquisite corpse," the twittered story was intended as a publicity stunt for BBC Audiobooks America's line of "distinctive single-voiced and full-cast dramatized audiobooks," and surely succeeded at that. Yet BBCAA intends to publish an audio-only version of the story, read by Gaiman himself, which makes this as apt an occasion as any to raise some questions about the creative potential of social networking. How is a good story invented? Is it yet another of those decision-based endeavors that can, according to the technotopian, freakonomical wisdom of our time, be performed better en masse than by the hopelessly antiquated individual? Can fiction be crowdsourced?
Although this is far from the first Twitter-generated story, Gaiman may be the ideal writer to preside over such an undertaking. No popular author better demonstrates how openly borrowed material can be transfigured by the force of a powerful imagination. His work combines elements of fairy tale, folklore, classic British children's fiction, comics, horror and hard-boiled mystery. "Coraline" taps into the tradition of countless stories about bored children who find portals to other worlds, partakes of the evil-stepmother motif from the Brothers Grimm, structures it all into a save-your-parents quest reminiscent of "A Wrinkle in Time," and so on, but Gaiman's limpid style and heady imagery (those button eyes!) also make it indisputably original. The Newbery-medal-winning "The Graveyard Book" performs a similar alchemy by combining Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Book" with (improbably enough) the modern-day serial-killer thriller. This method makes Gaiman easy to imitate but -- and here's the rub -- impossible to equal.
Gaiman's kickoff sentence for the the BBCAA story is, "Sam was brushing her hair when the girl in the mirror put down the hairbrush, smiled & said, 'We don't love you anymore.'" What follows, coaxed out of the Twitterverse, is a patchwork of extremely familiar motifs: malicious animated puppets, cuddly talking animal pals, an ominous castle, a sinister music box and spookily chanted rhymes -- all tied to the obligatory chase after objects of obscure magical importance (otherwise known as plot coupons).
The twittered story (which as of this writing has no title) is Gaimanesque, yes, but only really in tone. Much of it is simply lifted -- from "Coraline," from "Alice in Wonderland," from "The Wizard of Oz" and, above all, from the storehouse of shopworn Hollywood clichés -- to form a patchwork that never resolves into anything more that just that, a hodgepodge of random stuff you've seen a zillion times before. The considerably muddled narrative describes the adventures of a girl who is either 1) kidnapped by her mirror reflection and trying to get home or 2) bravely attempting to rescue her little brother from an evil queen, or both (it keeps changing), but Sam's exploits turned out to be far less compelling than the spectacle of their composition. Witnessing this story come together was an object lesson in the trials of collaboration and the limits of the wisdom of crowds.
Here's how it worked: Although anyone could tweet a suggested next sentence, an editor at BBCAA selected which ones would be incorporated into the canonical version of the story. (Gaiman's involvement in the creative phase of the operation seems minimal, which didn't keep one participant from grandiosely claiming to be "writing an audiobook with Neil Gaiman" elsewhere on the Web.) Oddly enough, no one was bothered by this "gatekeeping" role, even when the BBCAA editor repeatedly rebuffed a campaign to give a minor character a bigger role in the plot. (He/she later gave in, though.) Anyone who took a good look at the chaotic selection of potential paths forward could see that somebody had to steer. Yet, even with a skipper, much of the time the tale didn't seem to be sailing anywhere but in circles.
It's tempting to attribute this meandering quality to the lack of a master plan. However, contrary to what people often think, improvisation is a vital part of the fiction-writing process. Remarkably few single-person authors outline their plots in advance of writing. Many, like the science-fiction novelist Samuel Delany, report that they start out with a few images and then see where their intuition leads them. "Among those stories that strike us as perfectly plotted, with those astonishing endings both a complete surprise and a total satisfaction," Delaney once wrote, "it is amazing how many of their writers will confess that the marvelous resolution was as much a surprise for them as it was for the reader."
Nor is the problem always a matter of too many people pulling the story in too many directions. True, if you're only going to get one or two of your own sentences into the end product, you're going to want them to be boffo. Consequently, most of the proposed passages represent bids to initiate a pivotal plot development ("Suddenly" has to be the most popular adverb deployed), attempts at high drama ("'No!' The Queen shrieked, 'this will not be allowed! He is mine!'") or articulations of some grand insight or theme ("You have to face her. She's part of you"). Without much in the way of simple scene-setting or nuance, the story lacks texture, atmosphere and the variety in pacing and intensity that makes fiction dramatically effective. Instead, with the emotional volume knob stuck on high, the result is just one damn thing after another.
Still, most of the participants have a pretty firm sense of what the parameters of "a Neil Gaiman story" ought to be, and even the rejected tweets had more in common than you'd expect. There was the occasional marginally literate non sequitur -- "'Sir, do you know what is this egg?' Asked Sam to the badger. 'Of course, lady. This is an Catoblepas eggs.'" (Huh?) Yet even these fell within the same essential thematic register. There were few contributions that came entirely out of left field -- no Mach-5 race cars, say, or sessions of Parliament.
Instead of being bombarded with too many ideas, what the twittered story really suffered from was too few. The handful of contributors who could come up with interesting motifs or turns of phrase had no idea how to constructively inject these into the whole, while the ones who were good at moving the plot forward tended to write exclusively in clichés. The dialogue is particularly lamentable, imported exclusively from the most formulaic of action movies: "'Events are already in motion,' the Prince said. 'We must act'"; "Sam screamed 'Nooooo'" "'Sam! Listen to me!' the Prince shouted, 'You must go, we will hold them off, now RUN!'" I was thinking they'd managed to hit every overplayed note of the blockbuster pulp factory except for the venerable "Don't die on me, damn it!" -- when, sure enough, Sam sobs to the stricken Prince, "No, you can't die!"
The same tired devices turned up over and over again. Any shift in the action always seemed to be accompanied by a mysterious glowing light, and the heroine was forever being "enveloped" or "engulfed" in this glow, if not in darkness or some other featureless miasma, as a way of getting her from one indistinct setting to another. At one point she even finds herself transported to a featureless, solid blue vacancy -- much like the green-screen backdrops used to film connect-the-dots CGI blockbusters.
Despite an endless series of chase scenes, by the fourth day of tweeting with the projected 1,000th-tweet end point approaching, the plot wasn't especially close to a resolution, and key elements remained unexplained. Who was the evil queen (besides a lift from "Coraline," "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" and "Snow White"), and what did she want? What promise had Sam broken? Who didn't love her anymore? What exactly had happened to her brother? Why had she been sucked into the mirror? What was her reflection doing back in the real world? She'd collected two sidekicks (a badger and a wisecracking puppet, motivations unclear), as well as a green marble egg that intermittently pulsed (pulsing being almost as commonplace as glowing in this story), a gold key, a blue crystal rose, a music box with an evil talking doll inside and a confusing back story involving royal twins, a puppet maker, a magpie with a magic mirror and several doppelgängers, none of which added up to a coherent explanation of what was going on. A lot was happening, and it was all pretty boring.
Consensus began to break down, despite efforts among the contributors to sort out the loose ends while the BBCAA editor was off getting lunch or a little shut-eye. Occasionally a sentence made an obvious plea for answers ("It was that voice again. That voice that had haunted her the first time she reach the castle. And then she realized ..."), but no one took up the challenge, leaving those ellipses sadly unfulfilled. It's so much easier to just introduce another new development! As @Toujours_Diva, the group's self-appointed heckler, wrote sarcastically, "You know what this story needs? A few more extraneous characters." (Some of the collaborators interpreted that as a sincere suggestion.)
Raymond Chandler once offered this piece of advice to his fellow writers: "When in doubt, have a man with a gun come into the room." Yet even the excitement of an armed intruder wears thin by the time you've got 30 of them milling around for no apparent reason. Well past the purported 1,000-tweet limit, Sam was still reviewing the pieces of the puzzle confronting her and wailing, "I don't know how to put it together!" She was not alone. At one point, BBCAA put up a poll asking participants where Sam should end up after yet another engulfment, and the response was evenly divided among several major alternatives. Then they tried literally smooshing all the characters and plot coupons together (because they're all part of Sam!) in a climax that involved yet more glowing and pulsing. And it still wasn't over. People were confused and, it seems, still dissatisfied. Time for another poll! Even the ol' "It was all a dream/the ravings of a lunatic" finish was seriously contemplated.
At some point, every tale needs to stop expanding so it can begin to contract into a coherent whole. People often ask great storytellers, "Where do you get your ideas?" but the real question is "How do you make sense of your ideas?" Delany believed that good writers read so much that they "internalize" certain "literary models" and thereby acquire an instinctual feel for a story's proper shape. As they build on that evocative first image or scene, while they are still venturing further out into the unknown, an unconscious part of their creative intelligence is figuring out how to knit it all back together again. Writers who never develop that instinct tend to keep dragging new gunmen into the room until the story stalls out, which is why a decent ending is so much harder to write than an enticing beginning. The ability to pull it off is one thing that separates the Neil Gaimans of this world from the rest of us saps.
But gather together a hundred people who don't really know how to do this and they're still not going to be able to do it. Even if a handful among them actually do have some aptitude, their efforts will be sabotaged by the well-meaning but misguided inclinations of the rest of the group. Like any art, good fiction requires a combination of talents -- eloquence, inventiveness, pragmatism, decisiveness and taste -- rarely found in a single person, and a prevailing feeling for form that can only be located in a single person.
Most of us do recognize the real thing when we see it in action, but that's another matter. As Delany put it, "While many -- or even most -- people can internalize a range of literary models strongly enough to recognize and enjoy them when they see them in ... new works that they read, very few people internalize them to the extent that they can apply them to new material and use them to create. Lots of people want to. But not many people can." Not many people, and certainly no crowds.
The first glimpse that Michelle Huneven offers of the main character in her new novel, "Blame," comes through the eyes of a dazzled child. Patsy MacLemoore is a blonde with long, tan legs and a perfect smile, and she's dating 12-year-old Joey's dashing uncle, Brice, scion of one of the grand families in the Southern California town of Altadena. She's also a newly minted history professor at a local college. On the surface, Patsy looks great, but in the course of an evening spent with Joey and Brice, she gets drunker and drunker -- also, more desperate: clinging to the elusive Brice and quizzing Joey about her uncle's "other girlfriends." Somewhere in there, she offers to pierce Joey's ears, but the result is lopsided, one hole higher than the other. "Just cock your head to one side," Patsy tells the girl, "and no one will ever notice."
The rest of "Blame" describes the destruction of Patsy MacLemoore, the reconstruction of a new Patsy and then a revelation that sets the reconstructed woman teetering. A year after the opening scene, Patsy wakes up on a concrete shelf, in jail for hitting and killing a mother and daughter, Jehovah's Witnesses, in her own driveway. She remembers nothing. Harrowed by guilt, she shuffles numbly through hearings and trials, then gets sentenced to four years in prison. Although she only ends up serving two of those years, the experience -- depicted with flinty immediacy as a series of "loud, loud, too-bright clanging days" -- becomes the grit at the center of her new identity. The day of her release marks her first, wobbly attempts at a series of commonplace hurdles: learning to be alone again, making it to AA meetings every day, adjusting to Brice's newly unveiled homosexuality, convincing somebody to give her another shot at teaching, and recalibrating a romantic skill set best summarized as, "show her a man who didn't love her and she'd do her damndest to change his mind."
Given the publisher's packaging of "Blame," I'm not spoiling anything by disclosing that, late in the novel, Patsy learns she was not responsible for the deaths that have tormented her after all. Whether or not Huneven's publisher can justly be accused of spoilage is, to my mind, debatable. If "Blame" were a novel wholly reliant on plot and the mechanical execution of a "twist," perhaps it would be. But there's a difference between mere plot and story, the latter of which consists of a sensation of irresistible forward movement created in the mind and emotions of a reader. Surprise is irrelevant. Knowing that Patsy will be exonerated only makes the painful assembling of her post-crash personality more engrossing. The new Patsy is a much better woman, shed of the reckless, insensitive shell she carried before, but if the foundation of this new woman is a lie, if it is constructed from unearned suffering, then how real can she be?
Readers may be attracted to "Blame" by its provocative premise, but they will be seized by the way Huneven lays open the delicate tissues connecting intention and the self. Can we become someone different by dint of concentrated, daily work, as AA suggests? Doesn't sustained effort like that -- rather than the shock of, say, one terrible mistake -- define who we really are? Patsy hated prison, yet she holds the experience of it close, because it transformed her but also simply because it's hers. The events that shape us aren't always of our own choosing, but the person they make us into, however scarred, is the one thing we truly own.
Dear Cary,
Two days ago, my friend sent me the final draft of a novel she's been working on for the past six months. Well, I've read it. I know she's waiting for feedback, but I have no idea what to say to her.
My friend has always identified herself as a writer, even though her output over the past 25 years has been scanty and her work has never been published. She has real talent, but she lacks discipline and is acutely sensitive to criticism. While her latest work contains many passages of exceptional beauty, on the whole it's a dense bramble of twisted, thorny sentences -- impenetrable. And bloodless: The characters never come to life, and the scenes come across as studied, stilted tableaux tricked up with verbal filigree.
I can't tell her what I really think of her work -- it would hurt her too much. In the past, I have responded with vague praise ("wonderful!", "remarkable!"), and have cited particular passages that I liked. But when I do that, I know I'm not taking her seriously as a writer, and she wants to be taken seriously. Her ego is protected by a thick layer of arrogance (teachers, mentors and editors have nothing to offer her), and I'm afraid that if I give her an honest assessment she would push me away for good.
What is my duty here? I am not a writer, Cary, but you are -- how can I help my friend without hurting her? And what should I say about her novel? I would be grateful for any insights you can provide.
A Writer's Friend
Dear Writer's Friend,
I was walking on the beach this morning thinking about your question and I wrote the following. I offer it as a sacrifice.
Johnny Hardmuth walked up the steps/ threw down the novel he was reading/ shut off the light and closed his eyes/ put the gun to his head/ started the car/ slammed the door/ stormed out of the room. The house/ floor/ wall/ car/ narrative shook/ quavered/ rattled as he walked/ stomped/ fell/ pulled the trigger.
"I'm a writer," he said to himself, "not a surgeon/ general practitioner/ gun slinger/ opera singer/ private detective/ Saab mechanic/ literary critic/ psychotherapist!"
The letter had come that morning/ evening/ afternoon/ same day. It said she was desperate. She needed help. It was her gambling debts again. It was her mother's back. It was cancer. It was her tab at 7-Eleven. It was her editor at Scribner's. It was the mob. It was her tough boyfriend who wore the eye patch. It was her eczema. It was Poets & Writers Magazine. It was the IRS. It was Salon.com. It was her health insurance. It was Harvard. It was her sister. It was her attitude.
He crumpled up the letter. He threw the letter into the fire. He read the letter again. He tore the letter into little pieces and dropped them on the floor. He made the letter into a paper airplane and sailed it across the room. He balled up the paper and threw it at his guest. He balled it up and ate it. He stuffed it down his pants. He uncrumpled it and spread it out across his desk and wrote three words on it.
The three words were "I can't write." The three words were "I need money." The three words were "Suck my dick." The three words were "Say that again?" The three words were "I can't remember." The three words were "She needs help."
She needed help. That was right. She needed help and fast. No, that wasn't true. She needed help like the Indians needed blankets. No, it was true. She needed help. She needed help like Custer needed help only she wouldn't ask for it. No, she didn't. Yes, she did. No, maybe she needed help. Maybe she didn't. That was the way the world was.
He strapped on his dental tools. He switched on the fuel pump. He opened the window and jumped. He got out his hedge clippers. He made a phone call. He found her address where she had scribbled it on a piece of paper at that chain restaurant whose name he could never remember. Why couldn't he remember?
He started the engine of his small plane. His butler, Servio, was passed out in the luggage compartment. His goggles, made by Avionics, Inc., were foggy. His head, already damaged by a night of drinking, was aching. His feet, tired from walking, hurt. His sweater vest, open at the top, was drooping. His beard, not yet shaven, began to itch. His belt, cinched but not buckled, chafed. His eyes, not yet accustomed to daylight on planet Earth, burned. His cock, tumescent and bulbous, throbbed. The engine, 40-plus cylinders in all, whined. His pocket protector, a gift from the mayor, stiffened at the sound. His expectations, piqued by the latest evidence, sharpened. His eyes, burning, scanned the horizon. His cock, now emitting discharge, whined. His sweater vest, hurt by last night's comments, sulked. His hands, ready and able, clenched.
The runway fell away. He was aloft.
Her house was only a short way down the coast. He could see her in the backyard from this altitude, waving her manuscript. He set the plane down right in her backyard. He was an expert pilot, trained in Afghanistan during the war, hardened to a diamond finish, seasoned, wizened, burnished, filigreed, determined, eager, Sansabelt, whimsical but unshaven, dirty-minded when needed. She loved him. She would always love him. He brought her the paper.
She waved the manuscript in his face. "Where's my goddamned money?!" she shouted, and threw her drink in his face. He tore off his aviator's helmet and threw it at the dog. It bounced off the dog and landed on the statue of Edgar Allan Poe that she had bought at a garage sale back in 1983 when it looked like she had a shot at the big time. He didn't give a fuck. All he wanted was her cock. He had lost all his illusions in the war. He couldn't see straight anymore. He didn't know if she was male or female but she was all woman to him. He took her in his arms.
"It's gorgeous," he said. "It's the best thing you've ever written."
"Take me," she said. "I'm ripe."
"What else can I say?" he asked. "All I know is, you're peaches."
"I'm peaches," she said. "Fly me."
We can write well or badly, we can write quickly, we can write in ridiculous fashion, we can say things that make no sense at all, we can have fun and we can be ready for the most withering of criticism, all in the interest of letting go of our attachment to the idea of a fixed literary standard and a fixed idea of good and bad prose. If we look at literature as a kind of music, we can accept the proposition that each of us has at his disposal an infinite number of sounds, and we are free to use them any way we like. We can let sounds and words occur without judgment.
So let's consider your questions. You ask what is your duty, and how you can help your friend without hurting her, and what you should say about her novel.
If I were you I would politely refuse to say anything about her novel. I would refuse to comment on it. For years I have had a policy that I mostly do not comment on people's work. I just don't. The medium of "commenting" is too freighted with meaning. It's a rigged system. It's a trick question. There is too much hunger associated with the act of writing. You never know what you're walking into.
On the other hand, I have found a way of interacting with writers that I dearly love. I do conduct writing workshops that follow a clear method that allows people to develop their style in their own way. It is the Amherst Writers and Artists method, and there are many workshops around the world that use it.
I do not see why we should not have the freedom to simply encounter work, take from it what we want, have an experience of it, and be done with it. Why do we have to "comment"?
What is wrong with saying that? She might say, But I just want to know what you thought. To which you might say, Well, as I said, I do not comment on people's work, especially the work of my friends.
After a while I think she will give up asking and grant you the freedom you are asking for. And that is what you are doing, really: You are asking to be released from a troubling, unspoken obligation.
Your refusal may actually open up dialogue. Oddly enough, it creates a safe space. By refusing to comment on the work you show the work some respect; you allow the work to just be. This is a powerful thing. Sometimes the one thing a writer cannot do is let his or her work just be. If the work is too tied to unresolved ego needs, one can sense that in the work: One senses that the work is petitioning unseen judges. But it is not good to say these things because she is not asking for therapy.
Refusing to comment on the work opens up other areas that may be present for her today. She might begin talking about what she wants. She may be frustrated in her work and looking for direction. She may just need to talk. So I think we often do people a favor when we refuse to "comment on their work."
Try that. See how that goes.
What? You want more advice?
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