Salon.com > literature

Contemporary literature’s obesity epidemic

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 17:00:00 +0000

AT OVER 500 POUNDS, the title character of Michael Kimball’s Big Ray is too big to fit in most chairs so he usually sits on the floor. After he dies, his son remembers that the only way Big Ray could stand up was “in stages”:

He needed to hold on to something he could push or pull — a door, a chair, or another piece of furniture. Then he would roll over onto his side and up onto his knees while pushing or pulling his upper body up. From his knees, he would get one foot flat on the ground and then the other foot. [...] Once his legs were under him, he could raise his upper body until he was standing upright.

Paul Thomas Anderson on upcoming Pynchon adaptation: Screenplay is “more secretarial”

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 20:20:00 +0000

In a profile issued online today by the New York Times, preeminent director Paul Thomas Anderson, who researched Scientology extensively to portray the relationship between the cult leader (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and a veteran (Joaquin Phoenix) in 2012's critically acclaimed "The Master," also elaborated on his upcoming project, an adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's 2009 novel "Inherent Vice." Although news of the project has been around for a while, Anderson revealed new details about its vision and hinted at a possible collaboration with the reclusive author:

Mr. Joan Didion

Tue, 25 Dec 2012 16:00:00 +0000

Joan Didion. The name alone conjures up an ocean of descriptive phrases in which one could drown. Here is but a small helping: In Salon, Kyle Minor called her “the most consistently interesting and quotable essayist in the English language.” InIntelligent Life magazine, Robert Butler echoes that sentiment, labeling her first-person voice “cool” and “incisive.” “The writer who expressed most eloquently the eternal-girl impulse,” Caitlin Flanagan recently dubbed Didion in The Atlantic. A visit to the Amazon page of but one of her fourteen books yields “taut, clear-eyed,” “extraordinarily poignant,” “achingly beautiful,” and, about the book peddled at this particular URL, “a remarkably lucid and ennobling anatomy of grief.”

But goodbye to all that, for now.

Lydia Millet’s “Magnificence” offers anything but

Tue, 25 Dec 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Fifty pages into Lydia Millet’s novel "Magnificence," her heroine Susan Lindley, a recently widowed secretary, inherits an enormous mansion from an uncle she barely knew. The mansion, located in an upscale neighborhood of Pasadena, is filled with a small museum’s worth of stuffed wild animals: gazelles, a full-grown lion, eagles and owls, a pink flamingo, and an entire room full of bears.

The novel, which until this point has been flatlining through page after page of perfunctory-seeming scenes of Susan being angry at herself for not mourning her late husband enough, suddenly perks up as the reader thinks: What a great place to set a novel. Then, for another hundred pages or so, it becomes clear that this weird old house full of dead animals isn’t so much the setting for Millet’s novel as a distressingly accurate metaphor for the experience of reading it.

Red science vs. blue science

Sat, 22 Dec 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Times of intense ideological polarization are always dreary for reasonable people. Consider the Marquis de Condorcet, a brilliant scientist, mathematician, and political philosopher who was forced into hiding during the French Revolution after running afoul of the radical followers of Robespierre. During his months as a fugitive, Condorcet penned a treatise—now considered a major text of the Enlightenment—that envisioned a society founded on the principles of free inquiry, critical thinking, and science. But the nobleman was caught, and his vision for France died with him in a revolutionary prison cell.

Condorcet’s story opens "The Republican Brain," the science writer Chris Mooney’s lament about today’s polarized intellectual climate. Mooney mourns the death of Condorcet’s enlightened vision, and I suspect Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell would as well. Like Mooney’s, their new book, "Science Left Behind," describes a 21st-century American society that is the exact opposite of what Condorcet wanted and predicted. Both books condemn the magical thinking and distorted passions that shape our modern intellectual enterprise and diminish our lives.

Can children’s literature teach us about autism?

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 12:45:00 +0000

Tell me about your first book, Fairy Tales by the Brothers Grimm.

I think that almost all of us have been influenced by Fairy Tales. And that is particularly true in my case. There weren’t that many children’s books when I grew up and they were read to me again and again. Later on when I could first read I had a wonderfully illustrated book of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which I treasured.

I think they are the stories that give you a lasting sense of wonder. They let you experience unexpected events and often terrifying ones. And, fortunately, everything comes out right in the end. They are stark tales and written in very basic language. There are wonderful images to nourish your imagination for life, for example Snow White in the glass case. I see this as an image that chimes in with ideas that were current when we were just becoming aware of autism in the middle of the 20th century: the idea of a beautiful but unreachable child. What might be going on inside her mind? How can she be woken up? In the tale there was a simple cause, a poisoned apple, and a simple and totally accidental cure. The apple was only stuck in the throat and came out again. It is a completely false image, but a very striking one. Sadly, the causes of autism remain unknown and there is no cure.

Do playwrights make good novelists?

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

DEBORAH LEVY’S NEW BOOK "Swimming Home" is constructed like a play — with a central stage and a cast of characters, and it unfolds like a drama in hot short vignettes — but it reads like a novel, and Levy jumps in and out of her character’s heads with such ferocious abandon that the story becomes a sun-splashed psychotic episode, an exploration of desire turned masochistic and lives propelled by the arrhythmic pulse of insanity.

That there is an inherent theatricality to the presentation shouldn’t be surprising. Levy is a noted playwright, the author of Macbeth — False Memories and Honey Baby Middle England, among others. The swimming pool serves as the main stage — a platform for arrivals and departures, bee stings, skinny dipping, misunderstandings, and menstruations — and there is a French country house attached to the pool where more intimate moments unravel.

“The Rise of Ransom City”: Steampunk Western

Sun, 16 Dec 2012 23:00:00 +0000

Compared to British fantasists, American writers have often felt the lack of a deeply rooted national mythos. In place of ancient folklore handed down from generation to generation, we have a shallow, polyglot history imposed over a native culture that was demonized and in many cases eradicated by European settlers. American writers ranging from Stephen King to Michael Chabon have tried to fill this archetype gap, but it isn't always easy to create imagery and ideas that resonate, which is one reason why so much fantasy falls back on Anglo-Saxon and Celtic motifs.

Felix Gilman's two vaguely steampunkish novels, "The Half-Made World" and the just-published "The Rise of Ransom City," come closer than many previous efforts to nailing America's conflicted collective unconscious. The setting is not, of course, called America (any more than Middle-earth is called England). Nevertheless, it's instantly recognizable as a version of the Wild West, a frontier land with towns named Clementine, Gibson or Jasper City, sandwiched between the distant, civilized East and, to the West, a region known only as the Rim. Way out West, as Harry Ransom, the narrator of "The Rise of Ransom City," explains it, are "territories where the future was still open, where laws were still unsettled -- I mean not least what they call the laws of nature, which as everyone knows are different on the Rim."

How Christopher Hitchens proved that nothing is sacred

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 15:25:00 +0000

In the foreword to "The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice," Christopher Hitchens imagined the question he invited by writing the book: “Who would be so base as to pick on her, a wizened, shriveled old lady, well stricken in years, who has consecrated her entire life to the needy and the destitute?”

The short version of Hitchens’s answer: Me.

His longer version: The implied question “Is nothing sacred?” must always be answered “with a stoical ‘No.’”

This fierce stance was central to Hitchens’s work, and now that he has been dead for a year, and Mother Teresa has been dead for 15 years, the reissue of "The Missionary Position" as an audiobook is less an opportunity to revisit the history of their disagreement (his explicit, hers implicit) than it is an opportunity to remember the value of Hitchens’s great pugnacious willingness to examine, in cold detail, the things the culture has enshrined, and to “scorn to use the fear of death to coerce and flatter the poor.”

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.

Lena Dunham gets snippy with Gawker

Tue, 11 Dec 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Last Friday, Gawker published "Girls" creator Lena Dunham's proposal for her $3.7 million book deal. The book, "Not That Kind of Girl," is pitched as a funny lady-advice book about life and relationships. The assumption is that whatever Dunham might lack in experience she makes up for in wit.

But last week Gawker got ahold of the proposal, publishing it and annotating 12 choice lines (one of which mentions that her "vegan dinner party" was featured in the New York Times) with a dose of snark. Dunham's lawyer asked Gawker to take the proposal down (and it did). But now Deadline reports that Dunham wants the 12 lines to be taken down, too.

Deadline notes that "this is hardball":

This is hardball: Harder represented himself to Gawker’s attorney as “litigation counsel for author and actress Lena Dunham [and] Lena Dunham has retained an attorney to demand that Gawker remove 12 quotes from her book propsal from our site,” an insider tells me. (I hear Random House isn’t bitching to Gawker, only Dunham.)

Must-see morning clip

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 14:12:00 +0000

Eighty-four year old "Night" author Elie Wiesel tells Oprah Winfrey that when he won the Nobel Prize, he saw his deceased father in the hall. Though he wanted to join his father on "the other side," Wiesel explains that he had "more things to do," and hasn't "even begun."

How to live well: A handy reading list

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 12:45:00 +0000

Over the New Year, people will be looking at themselves, making resolutions, starting afresh. Do you think that this introspection is a good thing, or are we too full of anxiety when we re-evaluate our lives?

It’s important to keep asking yourself the question, what am I doing with my life? Shall I go in new directions? Throughout history there have always been people who have been interested in this question. Tolstoy, for example, was always asking himself whether he was doing the right thing with his life.

Of course, the New Year is a great peg to hang these questions. The real issue, though, is how we go about making changes in our lives. I like to make a distinction between introspection and outrospection. In the 20th century we were obsessed with introspection – the idea that the way to find meaning in our lives is to look inside us, at our drives, motivations and priorities. That introspective approach really comes out of psychoanalysis and the self-help industry.

Bilbo Baggins says, “Buy this!”

Sat, 08 Dec 2012 23:00:00 +0000

After Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings” ruled the megaplexes for most of the early years of this century, it was inevitable that “The Hobbit” would follow. What was perhaps also inevitable — given the way the film industry and popular culture, in general, operates these days — is that after turning J.R.R. Tolkien’s massive three-book fantasy trilogy into a massive three-film fantasy trilogy, Warner Brothers and New Line Cinema would turn the slender folk-tale prequel into … another massive three-film fantasy trilogy.

That Hollywood is driven more by market forces than by artistic ones is a cliché so old it’s almost become axiomatic. Blame the collapse of the studio system in the 1960s. Hollywood did just fine when all the major studios were in the business of creating, as well as financing, the films bearing their logos; they even went so far as to seek out new talent, nurture it, and develop it over the course of years. Today, studios are just the money men, and projects are developed by independent production companies — every actor and director has his or her own — and then brought to MGM or Fox or Disney in supplication with the hope of a big, fat bankroll.

Dungeons and Dragons: My dorky literary muse

Sat, 08 Dec 2012 16:00:00 +0000

“Writing is all about character.”

That’s what they tell you, right?

By they, of course, I mean the majority of professors in MFA programs in Writing the country over–MFA programs, it might be said, that have propagated in recent years like churches of a new religion, departments filled with spectacled prophets at the pulpit, elating the instantly talented, while leaving the unlucky, or underdeveloped, to recoil from the successes of their peers.

Brooding around classroom tables, graduate writing students are set up to test their might. Their mentors, published authors of various degrees of repute, discuss prose and structure, poetics and politics, honesty and art. Character, however, they tell you–especially in fiction–is the key to a good story. And they tell you this essentially because they are correct. There are many things that novelists have to learn in order to actually turn their scribbles into marketable merchandise, and those things don’t necessarily need to be learned by dishing out the equivalent of a down-payment on a home. But if I walked away with anything from my MFA, it is that character is what makes a book readable. For someone, anyone, to pay tens of dollars to read what someone other than them has decided is worthwhile, they should be able to do so knowing that the imaginary people they’ll be spending the next 20 hours of their life with are at least a little complex (unless superficial husks are your shtick).

Getting extremely loud, incredibly close with Hunter Thompson

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 20:30:00 +0000

It is an oft-repeated maxim that the best literary books don’t always make for pleasurable listening when they become audiobooks, and that books that sometimes seemed thin in print can be redeemed by the ear. Perhaps this is because the audiobook, as a form, is better suited to entertainment than to weightiness, to brevity than to length, to raucous event than to expansive reflection.

So it is with Hunter S. Thompson’s “Screwjack,” a brief, loud, sometimes incoherent miscellany in print, which becomes, in the audio edition, a pleasurable way to fritter away an hour.

The audiobook benefits from a strong performance by Scott Sowers, a prolific narrator notable for his ability to change his delivery, and even the quality of his voice, from book to book. In mainstream novels of sensation, such as John Grisham’s “The Confession” or Douglas Preston’s “Impact,” Sowers modulates his cadences up and down to fit the rises and falls of the action, veering from restraint to urgency. In Thomas Wolfe’s “Look Homeward Angel,” his delivery turns stately, to match Wolfe’s elegiac tone.

Mo Yan says censorship is necessary

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 14:00:00 +0000

STOCKHOLM (AP) — Nobel Prize laureate Mo Yan, who has been criticized for his cozy relationship with China's Communist Party, has compared censorship to security checks at airports, suggesting it is unpleasant but necessary.

Mo says he does not believe censorship should stand in the way of truth, but that it can be used, or is sometimes even necessary, to stop rumors and defamation.

China's first writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature is in Stockholm, where he is set to receive the prestigious prize next week.

Mo dodged questions about fellow writer and compatriot Liu Xiaobo, who won the Peace Prize in 2010 but remains in prison. Mo has previously said that he hopes Liu will be free soon, but he refused to elaborate Thursday while meeting with journalists in Stockholm.

My dinner with Philip Roth

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 20:03:00 +0000

As word came over the transom last week (an actual transom, since I don’t have a working computer) that Philip Roth was retiring, I dismissed it as old, dull news. I’d read the report in the original French, and translated it myself into Turkish and then into Swiss-German just for fun. Then, along with the rest of the literate world, I’d read about it in the Times, which described Roth as a mentally healthy gentleman, happy with his lot.

I knew he was putting on an act, because I’d already heard the opposite from the horse’s mouth. “The Horse” is what I’d called Roth when he and I shared an office space in the late 60s while he was working on Portnoy’s Complaint and I was working on a similar but superior work, Feldman’s Penis. Roth had earned his nickname because he ate a lot of apples and oats, and also because he loved to saddle up with the shiksas. No one knows a writer as well as his contemporaries. Roth and I are as contemporary as they get.

One morning a few months ago, as I sat in my third-floor study in my chateau near the summit of Mount Winchester, my rotary phone rang downstairs. My beleaguered manservant Roger answered it, and came knocking at my door a minute later.

Winfrey picks Ayana Mathis’ debut novel for book club

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 16:28:00 +0000

NEW YORK (AP) — Add another book for possible holiday gifts: Oprah Winfrey’s latest “2.0″ selection.

Winfrey announced Wednesday that she has chosen a debut novel for her book club, “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie,” by Ayana Mathis. An author interview will be aired Feb. 3 on Winfrey’s OWN network. In a statement, Winfrey likened Mathis’ book to the fiction of Toni Morrison. Published this week by Alfred A. Knopf, “Twelve Tribes” tells of a teenager’s journey from Mississippi to Philadelphia in the 1920s and the large family she ends up raising.

Winfrey revived her club, now called Oprah’s Book Club 2.0, earlier this year with Cheryl Strayed’s memoir “Wild.” Dozens of books over the past 20 years have become bestsellers thanks to the talk show host’s endorsements.

E.L. James named publishing person of the year

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 20:02:00 +0000

Publishers Weekly has pronounced "Fifty Shades of Grey" novelist E.L. James the publishing person of the year, a decision about as shocking as her books' brand of light bondage. Still, it wouldn't be publishing if there wasn't a bit of righteous indignation. Fortunately the Washington Post's "totally hip book reviewer" Ron Charles wears his lightly. Still, if he had a grave he'd be spinning in it.

Watch: