Sex and science fiction

I am assured on good authority that Justine Larbalestier's The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction provides the necessary context for understanding a recent scandal involving Harlan Ellison. I've been meaning to get hold of this book for a while, it sounds fascinating (especially the work with archival material), but this is a good prompt....

At the TLS

M. John Harrison on J. G. Ballard's new novel:

J. G. Ballard’s early landscapes flickered up off the page, their drowned or desert conditions hinting at the landscapes of global warming to come. His early narcissistic psychiatrists and deranged movie stars glowed against this background – less human beings than messages etched into the brutalist semiotics of arts centre, Hilton hotel and motorway flyover. Whatever else he has been, Ballard began as an imagist. His ideas were welcome because they seemed to be inseparable from his inventiveness, the tone of his voice, the archi-tectonics of Ballardian space. The symptoms of his literary pathology were presented with all the enchantment of a page of Vogue or Architectural Review, while deconstructing both. His eye was cinematic, fractured, relentlessly selective, intermittent as a broken video camera operated by one of Rebecca Horne’s disordered mechanical structures, prefiguring a kind of art accident not yet technologically possible. Now, years later, in Kingdom Come, we encounter the same frozen restlessness, the same obsessive but broken regard, no longer inventing the future, only misappropriating the present. It is difficult to overstate how far ahead of his time Ballard seemed to readers in 1956. But now that history has caught up and passed the old motorist, his late vision – of consumption as Fascism out of uniform, or at least as a precondition for the full-blown, full-dress kind – seems simultaneously unassuming and cranky.

(Ballard is one of many novelists I was initially turned on to by means of Anthony Burgess and the demented99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939.)

Toni Schlesinger on Lord & Taylor

at the New York Observer. It's perfect, it's a great Toni piece and a great Observer piece at one and the same time....

Readability

Of course I feel a bit guilty about it, but I must confess that certain issues of the New York Review of Books go almost completely unread round here--sometimes I just look at the table of contents and my frivolous heart sinks. (The TLS never gives me this feeling of overseriousness but I must also admit that it's a psychic obstacle the way it comes wrapped in plastic, if I'm very busy they just pile up without even being opened and then I have to skim through a whole bunch at once and be highly selective about which pieces I'm actually going to read.) But the fall books issue of the NYRB is full of delightfully good articles, just the kind of thing I like, and I thought I would give a heads-up to other frivolous readers that they should make sure to take a look.

Most of it isn't available for free online, but there's a great piece by Hilary Mantel on Pankaj Mishra, Larry McMurtry on the Texas Rangers, Ian Buruma on the Nanjing Massacre (including some fascinating stuff about manga denials of Japanese atrocities during the war in China), Jonathan Spence on Mao's Great Terror, Alma Guillermoprieto on Bolivian politics and Brian Urquhart on two books about the Middle East (I am actually capable of reading about politics in the Middle East, just not when it's very policyish, Urquhart's piece is superb & includes a very compelling account of Emma Williams' Jerusalem memoir), Lorrie Moore on Eudora Welty and literary biography (that one you can read for free) and Fred Anderson on Gordon Wood's character sketches of the founding fathers. If every issue of the NYRB was like this, I would read it from cover to cover the moment in arrived in my mailbox....

Other than Daniel Mendelsohn's 9/11 essay, which I blogged about late last week, two pieces particularly interested me; a few thoughts follow below. The first is an excellent essay by Allen Orr that to my mind provides a model for how a review may be at once fair and highly critical ("Reject the book wholesale and you reject important truths; embrace it wholeheartedly and you embrace a good deal of nonsense"). On balance, it falls down on the critical side, and yet I suspect that many people who read Orr's piece will be driven to go and buy and read Wade's book and see for themselves, and that quite a few of those readers will be more sympathetic than Orr towards Wade's "adaptive tales."

The other piece that sparked thoughts was Jasper Griffin on Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad, which I am rather curious to read. It too is very beautifully written, but I was especially interested by Griffin's opening thoughts on the Iliad versus the Odyssey. "The Greeks themselves always ranked [the Odyssey] below the Iliad; that was the Great Poem, but later generations have often disagreed with their verdict," he says; and I started to think about how strongly I prefer the Iliad to the Odyssey, and always have.

Of course the Odyssey is the great narrative of storytelling and embedded narratives and so forth, and I love the role the scar episode plays in Auerbach's book on mimesis, but I think the only part of it that really falls on my own short list of most essential literary things is the voyage to the underworld in book 6, and the reappearance of Agamemnon and Achilles.

It's the Iliad that really gets me; somehow everything about the mood and the issues and that amazing character stuff going on with Agamemnon and Achilles is just exactly what I love, and the ending is unbelievably moving. If I am a retired old lady with time on my hands I am going to learn Greek and read a lot of this stuff in the original, it is really inexplicable how that couple hundred years of Greek culture produced the most amazing stuff.

(The Greek play I most want to adapt for a modern audience is Euripides, The Bacchae. I am determined to do it, just not quite yet.)

Anyway, my question is this: do you think that everyone is either an Iliad or an Odyssey person, and if so, which are you?

More Jonesing

Our Girl in Chicago has a great post about Edward P. Jones (and she manages to squeeze into her review a funny and mouth-watering detail that I wanted to squeeze into my review but couldn't: in one story, the devil appears to a woman in a supermarket, and we learn that "his tie was held in place against his white shirt with a ruby tie clip, about the size of a candy fireball"). Go and read it; and then buy the book, I really think it is his best one yet, I have been completely unable to get some of those characters out of my head, especially (of course) the one in "The Root Worker"....

Fate and imaginary animals and running and being a teenager

are the subjects of Meg Rosoff's new novel Just In Case, it's somewhat indescribable (I guess I would call it a fable) but I liked it very much indeed. I was a tiny bit reminded of Francesca Lia Block (about whom Alice posted the other day), and I also had in my head John Cusack in Better Off Dead; it's got a very nice mix, though, of the real and the fantastic. Definitely recommended (and here was what I thought about her first novel).

Snuff makes your navel perk like a whelk

I try and wait to read the New Yorker in the actual paper edition, much more enjoyable than reading online, but I could not resist a great piece about Britain's Mass Observation movement by Caleb Crain. I've always been interested in the mass-observation thing (it fits with that very literary atmosphere of just-pre-WWII British crime fiction, Sayers and Allingham and such), but I became more acutely interested when I read (it was obliquely part of the research for Dynamite No. 1) Naomi Mitchison's wartime mass observation diary (Mitchison was the sister of the geneticist J. B. S. Haldane, and also an interesting figure in her own right).

The World After 9/11

At the New Yorker website, Amy Davidson (no relation, but Amy and I have pretty much been best friends since we met during the first week of college in--oh, it's a long time ago now!--September 1988, and during those years we were often known as the Davidson twins) talks to Seymour M. Hersh, Jon Lee Anderson, and George Packer about Iraq, Afghanistan, the war on terror, and whether America is stronger now. It's a fascinating conversation, go and take a look....

It is a red-letter day

here at Light Reading because this week's Digested Read at the Guardian is--Dick Francis's new novel! ("It was good that people no longer stared at my prosthetic arm, even though I still felt the need to mention it every 10 pages.") (Here were my thoughts in July.)

I am always interested in the style aspect of these things (that John Crace is pretty much a genius), but I note here as in the case of his Jilly Cooper one in the spring that the novels in question are written in something almost like self-parody already, and that there's not much he can do to make the style either more ludicrous or less appealing than it actually is. If you like this kind of book, which I do (I love Jilly Cooper and Dick Francis), reading one of these will not at all stop you from wanting to devour the exemplar. The books that respond really well to this treatment are the ones with pretension or where the author has some character flaw (usually self-absorption or narcissism) that mars an otherwise more or less intelligent narrative.

(Thank goodness for overseas book news, August is always a wretchedly slow month for interesting literary news and I hate the way the Labor Day holiday basically makes there be nothing interesting to read in the papers. When I looked at the New York Times this morning the main story with the picture on the front page was Australia's 'Crocodile Hunter' Killed by Stingray. Which is a sad tale, but still....)

Another very charming essay by Andrew O'Hagan

at the Observer Sport Monthly:

My mother must have known I was trouble when I asked for a poster of Margot Fonteyn for my side of the bedroom. (I fancy she was secretly delighted: all is fair in love and perversity.) I don't remember the exact moment I realised I wouldn't be Kenny Dalglish, but I know it coincided with the realisation that I might be Mikhail Baryshnikov instead. Put it down to daddy-baiting or one of the other domestic arts, but I got a lot of pre-teen pleasure out of watching my parents suffer at the idea that I might be the only male pupil at the Jacqueline Thompson School of Dance. I joined the class and attended them with ceaseless application. Perhaps I wanted the very opposite of football - well, I got that, and a place for a year or two at the Scottish Ballet school, but I also got the reverse of the typical football hero's admiring glances. I can't have been very normal, for I liked those as well.

But my father wasn't giving up without a fight and everything came to a head at Christmas 1978. The Smurfs appeared for the first time, songs from Grease were in the charts, Jim Callaghan's government was on its last legs and Elizabeth Watt, the girl at number 27, had just announced she was joining the majorettes. My father seemed to spend a lot of time in the car park at the head of our square and there, from the seat of his green Corsair, he must have seen me eyeing up Elizabeth's twirling silver baton. When my mother told him of my wish-list for Santa, he was having none of it.

And so it was that on Christmas morning my brothers and I woke up in the usual state of consumer delirium, groping above our heads for the fat orange at the bottom of the football sock/stocking, knowing it was time for The Presents. We tumbled out of our beds, ran along the hall and landed in a jumbled heap at the bottom of the stairs, only to jump up immediately and head for the living room, where it was traditional for each of us to have a separate chair on which our Christmas presents were laid out.

I can see it now - the four chairs, each bedecked with a new Celtic strip and a pair of brand new boots sitting on top. We also had socks, a football each, and a Christmas annual about the recent exploits of the Bhoys. My brothers, crazed with joy, wasted no time in stripping off their pyjamas and pulling on their shorts. But I stood there like Jennifer Jones in The Song of Bernadette, weeping into the middle distance as if confronted with a strange vision in the grotto. My vision was anything but ecstatic: failing the longed-for silver baton, I had wanted a soap-making set, a desk and chair and a jumbo writing pad from Woolworths. With my father seething in his armchair, my softer-hearted mother promised to get the other things for me as soon as the shops opened. And then she reached down behind the sofa and lifted out a secretly purchased Post Office set. My tears dried instantly. My father poured himself a drink. He took a deep breath - and didn't breathe out again until I had my first girlfriend.

The soap-making set is a rather adorable detail....

September 11 at the Movies

An absolutely wonderful essay by Daniel Mendelsohn at the New York Review of Books, in contemplation of the recent September 11 movies in relation to ancient Greek history and the literary genre of tragedy. Here's a bit, but it's really worth going and reading the whole thing--highly intelligent criticism, beautifully well-written:

Using the real-life people in the movie [United 93] is a showy but ultimately hollow gesture; it advertises a certain kind of solemnity, even piety, about 'authenticity' that has great currency in an era in which, in so many popular entertainments, a great premium is placed on getting as close as possible to 'reality'-although in such entertainments the reality, of course, is an artfully constructed one. (An apparently growing confusion in mass culture about the differences among reality, truth, 'truthiness,' and fiction has, as we know, had effects beyond the world of entertainment. An artful admixing of reality and invention, never acknowledged as such, has characterized the government's attempt to 'sell' its response to the events of September 11.)

There can, therefore, be no useful aesthetic value in the decision to use real people, only a symbolic and perhaps sentimental one: by emphasizing such authenticity and realism, the film reassures its audience-which may well be anxious about its motives for paying to see a film about real-life violence and horror-that what they're seeing is not, in fact, 'drama' (and therefore presumably mere 'entertainment'), but 'real life,' and hence in some way edifying.

The problem with all this realness is that the film itself-like reality-has no structure: and without structure, without shaping, the events can have no large meaning. When United 93 first came out, I was struck by one enthusiastic critic's glowing comment, in a review entitled 'Brilliant, Brutal and Utterly Real,' that Greengrass's movie was 'gripping from first to last, partly because, like a Greek tragedy, we are only too aware of where everything is heading....'[2] But what makes Greek tragedy significant as art is precisely the way in which the foreordained trajectory of the events that take place on stage is made to seem part of a larger moral scheme; when (for instance) we see the horrible spectacle of the humbled king at the end of Persians, we know why he has been humbled (his greedy overreaching) and who has humbled him (the gods, the moral order that obtains in the cosmos).

All that United 93 can tell us, by contrast, is that many people are brave and some people are dastardly. (Well, many American people are brave: we're treated to a scene in which one of the passengers, who has a Central European accent of some kind, urges the others to cooperate with the hijackers.) If United 93 brings to mind any genre, it's not Greek tragedy, with its artfully wrought moral conundrums, but something much tinier: the innumerable made-for-television programs available on cable TV that are dedicated to reenactments of real-life crimes, complete with phony "realism." The stylistic hallmark of these shows is the same jittery hand-held camerawork that Greengrass uses to represent the violence in the cabin of Flight 93.

This isn't to say that the emotions evoked by United 93 aren't strong. But your feelings of horror while watching the hand-to-hand violence in United 93 don't derive from the way in which the action has been treated by the writer and the director, but rather from the prior historical knowledge you already bring to the occasion—it's only awful to watch because you know something like it happened to real people. If United 93 were a fictional TV movie of the week, you might watch it with friends, and then go out for pizza without thinking about it ever again, except perhaps to wonder why there was no real ending, or why you never really knew anything about the characters (and hence wondered why they act the way they do). As I left the theater after seeing it, it occurred to me that what I was feeling—the sorrow for the real people of whom the show's characters reminded me—was probably very much like what the audience felt as they left the first, and only, performance of The Capture of Miletus.

It's a funny thing about that Greek stuff: I was teaching the Iliad those weeks of September 2001, and indeed the description of Priam entreating Achilles for the return of Hector's body seemed to speak more deeply to the questions on my mind than almost anything else I read or saw in the months that followed.

Mendelsohn's book The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million will be published later this month, I must make sure to get hold of it; I liked The Elusive Embrace a great deal.

Adolescence and the language of the grown man

Writing at the LRB about Andrew Motion's memoir, Frank Kermode touches on some questions about language and experience that have been recently very much on my mind:

Its structure is determined by a fatal accident [the poet's mother] suffers while hunting, when Andrew is 17. We begin and end there: the first chapter concerns the day of the disaster, and the misery of the days that followed as she lay in a coma. We return to that scene at the end. Between these poles the main part of the book is a flashback to earlier youth, which in the course of its telling takes us round to the beginning again.

This design is well executed, and the opening chapter is brilliantly written. Andrew goes off, mildly excited, for an overnight stay at some girl’s house, where he gets news of his mother’s fall. Later he hears about it in more detail from his younger brother. The cause and nature of the accident are very exactly rendered, and this record of a personal loss that might seem too profound to allow artful description is in fact a work of art. Here and elsewhere it might be complained that the writing seems too calculated. There is dialogue, apt, convincing in its way, yet always tempting the reader to think its detail improbable to the point of falsity:

I keep expecting Ruby to say everything will soon be back to normal, but she doesn’t. She goes on crying, making odd quivery whimpers, and then Kit’s crying too, and then I am. The light from outside, flicking off the bare branches of the chestnut tree, swings over us in pale yellow waves. The mattress on my bed gives a muffled creak as it recovers from our weight.

The commonplace opening sentence here may make the rest of the quotation sound a bit too researched, the tree too splendid and the bed’s creak likely to have occurred rather at the moment of composition than at the time described.

Why be suspicious of what is so moving? Why is it slightly embarrassing that at a critical moment a pan of potatoes boils dry on the Aga, or Kit glances at his brother and ‘rolls his eyes’? The blurb says the book is written ‘from a teenage child’s point of view, and without the benefit of hindsight’, but of course it is a work of maturity, a work of hindsight. In fact Motion sets himself a virtually impossible task: an adult writer is setting down what he imagines to be the thoughts and observations of a teenage boy who is, in turn, remembering and reflecting on his earlier life. This complicates a problem that would exist even if there were only two, not three, Motions involved in the business. It is impossible to imagine what an account of childhood ‘without benefit of hindsight’ might be like, unless it resembled Joyce’s attempts in the opening pages of Portrait of the Artist.

The imagined speaker in this book reflects soberly that whereas the childhood of others ends slowly, in fits and starts, his has ended ‘suddenly. In a day.’ Not, surely, a child’s observation; and neither is this: ‘I don’t want to talk about it in grown-up language I haven’t learned yet.’ Of course that is what he does and has to do, with some effect of falsity. The voice is inevitably the voice of the artist: someone ‘made a face’ or ‘lit another cigarette and dotted the ash into the blue glass ashtray’ or clasped and unclasped her hands. When a lamp ‘buzzes’, or the boy kicks aside a mistletoe berry or a yew berry (feared as poisonous), we must assume the adult writer’s imagination is pretending to be the teenager’s memory. Perhaps there are moments when the man has remembered his childish language, betrayed by his fondness for such words as ‘wriggle’, ‘slither’ and ‘squish’. But mostly I think we understand that the grown man is doing the talking and thinking, sometimes with slightly uncomfortable results.

The Last of Her Kind

I have just read a most extraordinarily good novel, certainly one for my best-of-the-year list but really far more than that, a really exceptional book: The Last of Her Kind by Sigrid Nunez.

The book came into my possession during a purchasing frenzy this spring, but I didn't even open it then (it was book-buying substituting for book-reading, I had too much work to do and also had to read all those Cambridge library books before I moved back to New York). Then late last night I was moping around the apartment looking for something good to read, in that mood where nothing seems at all appealing (which given the extent to which my apartment is simply bursting with books is obviously ludicrous, I was probably just tired after a week of what was presumably pre-school-starting-jitters-induced insomnia), picked this up and entered the world of the novel with something approaching delight.

I've just finished it this evening--I realize I have been suffering serious novel-deprivation, reading one seemed suddenly more important than getting any work done although of course that might be self-deluding rationalization--and I am simply overwhelmed with its moral and stylistic excellence. Two girls meet as first-year roommates at Barnard College in 1968; one of them narrates the intervening years (including the incidents surrounding the other woman's trial and conviction for shooting a cop to death) in a first-person voice that's one of the best things I've seen in ages (I'm putting it conjecturally with Lionel Shriver's We Need To Talk About Kevin and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go in the category of most-interesting recent first-person novels).

I really can't be bothered to describe to you what happens, it's grippingly readable in a way that a lot of literary fiction isn't but it's also serious about ideas and ethics and politics in a way that very few novels manage to be. I was reminded of some of my favorites: there's a bit of a Joyce Carol Oates feel, and the Rebecca West/James Baldwin thing that always gets to me; Susan Choi's also very good novel American Woman explored some of the same themes and material, and so have any number of other books I suppose, but this one really is special.

(Not to mention the narrator--enchanting in her prickliness and complicated honesty--writes a college essay, the only one she gets an A for, on why The Great Gatsby is not the great American novel--this book could and surely will be taught as a companion piece to Gatsby, an antidote/riposte to what is pretty much my least favorite of Fitzgerald's fictions--I still haven't recovered from that awful green light and the wretched thing of learning about symbolism in English class, I hate that stuff.)

Anyway, there is so much in this book that's wonderful that really everyone should just read it for themselves, but here is one passage that particularly struck me (this is a topic that's come up now and again here, obviously I have taken sides on the question and generally prefer not to write negative reviews myself, though lest I sound annoyingly high-minded and saintly I will say that you can expect at some point during the next week or so some scathing remarks from me about a major recent work of American fiction that I have just read and that struck me as one of the most gut-turningly offensive and overrated books I have read in, oh, my whole life).

But back to the matter at hand, here is Nunez's narrator speaking about her second husband, the editor of a literary journal:

Long before he'd published a word, he was poring over reviews (his desire one day to edit his own journal supposedly also went as far back as high school) and, with few exceptions, not liking what he saw. Most reviews were badly written, often by people who didn't seem to know or care much about their subject. A lot of critics were lazy; they wrote the same damn review over and over. They made stupid mistakes. They took far too many of their ideas from one another. They were overawed by Names. They opened wide for pablum and pap, but whatever was truly original and brave and strange set their teeth on edge. They swallowed the false and choked on the real. All this he told me the first time we met. He was on the rise then, a cultural critic at large, writing for a number of different publications. He wrote about books and movies and the theater, but also about painting or photography, and occasionally about restaurants or about some cultural trend or fad. The best of his essays would be collected and published, and then it was his turn to be reviewed, and though largely praised he was also faulted--for being too harsh.

"Because I care. These are matters of life and death to me": his justification when he was accused of brutality. (But then, when has it not been the justification? No one ever says, Because I was feeling mean, because my wife had just dumped me, because my own book had just flopped, because I'm a misogynist, because I know the author he is a fucking prick I have always hated his arrogant guts. I couldn't stop myself.)

But--here we go again--I do not trust myself, writing about husbands. I fear I am making Val out to be too flat and cartooonish. Why did I not begin by saying that he was very good, since that is the truth? He did care, he was serious, and he wrote very, very well. He wrote about things that mattered, and he wrote about them deeply, itneligently, and bravely. He always said exactly what he thought, regardless of what people would think of him--and wasn't that his job? And yet, and yet. Why were the majority of the reviews he wrote pans?

The narrator goes on to describe herself reading C. S. Lewis aloud to her daughter and finding herself thinking of her husband when they come to the passage about Edmund's addiction to the enchanted Turkish Delight: "It could not be good for the soul, I thought, to be constantly attacking other people, to be making fresh enemies daily..." (I seriously just the other day was saying how writing negative reviews isn't good for the soul! I love this character, and I love her voice as Nunez has made it work.)

Anyway, Here's Joy Press's review at the Voice--it's funny, I want you to go and read that review, it's a very thoughtful & well-written one and I completely agree with the first four paragraphs, but I dissent from what I take to be Press's conclusion that the novel loses its way in its latter sections and that the narrator Georgette is left in the shadows in contrast to her saint/martyr of a roommate Ann. It seems to me that this is a novel about transcendence, and that Georgette and Ann are equally transformed by the novel's conclusion. (And here's a roundup of all the major reviews.) I hope this book gets a lot of prizes and finds huge numbers of readers, I found it quite magical.

Unreliable witness

Barry Unsworth has an excellent essay at the Guardian about Robert Graves's Claudius books. I must say that I loved, loved, loved those books as a child, I think the peak of my Claudius addiction was at age eleven or so when I read them again and again (I think I had seen some of the Masterpiece Theater television episodes, but it was the voice of the books that really captured my imagination), and throughout my adolescence I was obsessed with Graves and read pretty much everything of his, even the really peculiar ones. (And he featured on an orals topic later in my life, a funny topic on the historical novel that included Anthony Burgess, John Fowles, Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal--the last great grad-school gasp of my teenage reading years, that's one way of looking at it. All my other topics were much more suitably British-literature oriented, on the Chaucer-Shakespeare-Milton-Pope-Wordsworth kind of lines.) I, Claudius is really a remarkably good novel, though; pity I have spoiled it for rereading by having already read it about twenty times....

And another Roman-themed one I want to read: Tom Holland praises Robert Harris's new novel Imperium, it sounds wonderfully appealing.

A terrible piece of news

Not on the scale of Iraq or Lebanon, of course, but it's pretty much incredibly depressing: as Motoko Rich now officially reports at the Times, Village Voice Dismisses 8, Including Senior Arts Editors.

One of those editors is Ed Park, who is quite simply the best editor I've ever worked with. Writing for him has been a pure luxury, pure & simple in the most decadent way (M. F. K. Fisher has a famous passage about eating bread and chocolate and it being the perfect meal, if you see what I mean)--he assigns books with great imaginative flair and wit, he's an immensely well-read and stylish writer himself (a writer with a real sensibility, too, which is the thing I most care about), he's got an incredibly delicate hand as an editor and a sure sense of ethics and literary tact and all that sort of thing, in short he has made the Voice books section into something quite exceptional--unique, I'd say, and altogether wonderful in my opinion--in American literary & cultural commentary.

(He's also just now finishing a novel that is one of the most delightful things I've read in quite a while. Future readers have a great treat in store for them. It's a bit Nicholson Bakeresque but it is also like nothing but itself, in the best possible way.)

I have surely now embarrassed Ed almost to death, since he is also one of the more unassuming and modest literary geniuses in this town, but I wanted to register my dismay and disappointment at this latest development at the Voice.