Salon.com > Cormac McCarthy

Rachel Kushner: I am writing for pleasure

Wed, 15 May 2013 21:00:00 +0000

Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers has been widely lauded for its ambition, intensity, and surprising moments of humor. She recently pulled off the rare New York Times trifecta: A Books of the Times review, a Sunday Book Review, and an author profile. In many respects a bildungsroman about a young artist named Reno, The Flamethrowers effortlessly spans a wide range of times and places — a proto-Futurist movement in 1910s Italy, the New York City art scene of the 1970s, and a landspeed trial on the Bonneville Salt Flats, to name a few. I recently emailed with Kushner about initiations and introductions, Clarice Lispector, challenges to the nature and status of work, politics in art, and writing about the American West.

Stop giving war-veteran novelists a free pass

Tue, 11 Dec 2012 18:03:00 +0000

One of the most feted books of the season is a debut novel about the Iraq war, Kevin Powers' “The Yellow Birds.” It has garnered gushing blurbs from famous authors, the cover of the New York Times Book Review, a National Book Award nomination, TV appearances, the Guardian First Book Award, and laudatory reviews from nearly every corner of the literary establishment. And this past weekend it added a New York Times Best Book of 2012 to the list. By general consensus, “The Yellow Birds” is a classic of war literature.

There’s just one little problem: The novel doesn’t measure up to the praise.

Indeed, the book is beset by so many deficiencies you’re tempted to wonder what the critics have been smoking. The answer, in the words of one veteran friend, is Martialuana. Let me define the term I've coined: It's a stimulant, known to effect in its user a long-lasting, sometimes undeserved, high about American armed service members and veterans. Prevalent in establishment circles. Often used to assuage guilt for the burden veterans have borne over the last decade.

When sci-fi went mainstream

Thu, 15 Nov 2012 19:54:00 +0000

THE COVER OF THIS past summer’s special science fiction issue of The New Yorker depicts what, for at least some of the magazine’s loyal subscribers, must have been a horrifying scene. In the tableau, drawn by cartoonist Daniel Clowes, a gap has ripped open in space-time during a genteel cocktail party. A smiling man in a space suit, a robot, and a green alien with tentacles are poised to step through the portal, over a pile of books, knocked from a tall bookshelf, into a room of well-dressed literary intellectuals who, it goes without saying, look less than pleased at the pending invasion.

The trope of invasion is doubly brilliant, first because the invasion plot is a mainstay of SF and second because the trope captures quite neatly what it must feel like for some literary intellectuals to be forced to confront the increasing cultural cachet of SF, to face its meteoric rise over the last thirty years from lowbrow genre to literary respectability. The genre now comfortably occupies university syllabi, best-of lists, and handsome Library of America editions — though some hardened highbrows might suspect its popularity is more a function of marketing than of quality.