Philip Roth in the Guardian

This profile has just fanned the flames of my already very strong desire to read Roth's new novel, an alternate history called The Plot Against America. Must get hold of a copy ASAP.

The saddest one of all

So I did just now read The Dramatist and it is terribly depressing, especially the ending. Will go and read the stack of other ones soon, but perhaps best to alternate this with something a little less bleak.

Ken Bruen

This man is a total genius! Beautiful, beautiful sentences, weird literary sensibility, sort of like the perfect cross between Dick Francis and Derek Raymond (all right, that's a bit of a joke, but not really--there is something very appealing about this Jack Taylor character). I've just read The Guards, The Killing of the Tinkers and The Magdalen Martyrs; the voice of reason tells me now to go to bed, but I have a strong feeling I'm going to stay up and read the fourth one instead.

Cost of Insuring Workers' Health Increases 11.2%

I don't know that it would really suit me to be a full-time writer as opposed to a teacher-researcher, but the finances of health care are one obstacle to me even contemplating it. I never go to the doctor, but I believe I must have insurance in case of catastrophic accident, and the cost of getting coverage is crazy. (Too lazy to link, but NYTMag had an article in their health issue about two obviously pretty healthy upper-middle-class professionals--journalists who went freelance--who couldn't then get coverage.)

Weapons and funerals, they'll do for you every time

All right, I have heard much about Ken Bruen at Sarah Weinman's website and got a stack of his books from the library and have just read Her Last Call to Louis Macneice. THE MAN IS A GENIUS. I'm adding his name to Chester Himes and Derek Raymond as my two favorite demented comic noir novelists. With beautiful and funny prose styles. I am very excited about now reading a whole bunch more... This is an EXCELLENT book.

Editing!

There's now been some back-and-forth commentary between
Maud Newton and Terry Teachout. About this piece by Gal Beckerman about author Stacy Sullivan. I am more in agreement with TT than with Maud; in fact, I thought he could have been even stronger in his remarks. Here's the thing though (and I hope I am not going to sound disrespectful of the author, because of course it's heartbreaking when you pour your soul into a book & then it doesn't get the huge amount of recognition you dreamed of getting). As far as I can tell from the article, the author should have been more realistic to begin with about what a moderate-sized advance meant for the house's commitment to the book. But it's more than that. The following quotation speaks for itself: this isn't a story about the fact that publishers no longer properly edit, it's a story about an author who must have been quite difficult to work with: she missed her first deadline by a mile, probably missed other deadlines, changed her mind a number of times about what book she was writing, then handed in an inappropriate and overly long manuscript that she thought someone else would just take care of for her. It's hardly surprising that things went as they did--again, I don't say this to disparage Sullivan, just to suggest that it sounds to me like there were serious misunderstandings going BOTH ways. Here are the relevant paragraphs, anyway:

"Sullivan signed her book deal in mid-2001, and her first deadline was September 15 of that year. She realized, a month before the date, that she would have only half ready. Then came September 11. It had taken her time to focus and settle into the writing, but after spending a few weeks transfixed, like most New Yorkers, in front of the television, she began to feel completely incapacitated by the shift in the world’s attention. The book just didn’t feel relevant anymore. When her idea was sold, the war in Kosovo had seemed to be a key for understanding future U.S. foreign policy. Her book was to be a ground-level account of this new era of humanitarian intervention. In a matter of minutes, this storyline had been eclipsed by terrorism and holy war, and all her journalist friends were rushing off to Afghanistan. Adding to Sullivan’s woes, she had also grown disillusioned with her book’s heroes. Once the NATO bombing ended and the Serbian paramilitary was forced to leave Kosovo, the Kosovo Albanians quickly began harassing the small Serbian population. From once being the victims, they had become the perpetrators of the violence. “I felt sort of betrayed and distraught and I started hating all my characters and I just had a hard time writing it,” Sullivan says.

"She sent the first half, waited for feedback, and says all she got back was a note saying, “Excellent work. When can you be finished?” Discouraged by the lack of substantive response, she nevertheless kept working.

"Her new deadline was July 2003. After two more years of work, she managed to turn in a sprawling 600-page draft that she hoped her editor would then slice in half. It was all the material she had amassed, including a long digression in the form of a travelogue of her time on the road with the war photographer Ron Haviv. In short, nothing that was ready for publication.

"A few weeks later, waiting for a call from her editor, Sullivan got a package in the mail containing her 600-page ramble — copyedited and with an attached index. She panicked. “I had turned in what I thought was a draft and I had gotten back this copyedited manuscript,” Sullivan says. “They were just going to print that. And it was so rough. There was no way.” But the book was already on the conveyor belt. It was listed in the next season’s catalogue and the sales representatives had begun pitching it to booksellers. Everyone, including her agent, told her there was really nothing to be done. But Sullivan insisted they pull the plug. “It wreaked such havoc,” she says. “They had to take it off the production train, where it takes on a life of its own.”"

On the whole, more cautionary to publishers buying first books on the basis of a proposal than to authors! However, I really do wish Sullivan the best of luck with her book--which sounds quite interesting.

Mark Billingham

is a must-read, and here's a review at January Magazine that makes the case. Read his first three eagerly (off of copies from the WHSmith at Kings Cross, coming from the British Library to visit my gran in Highgate). But why don't these books come out simultaneously in UK and US? He would have a huge US following if those books had all been available in trade and/or mass market PB in same time frame, surely...

Simon Dumenco's Glossies: Hollywood and Magazines

A fascinating look into the sinister relationship between magazines and Hollywood that makes me extremely glad I have little to do with either; link from tmftml.

It totally lived up to the hype

Here's my review of Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and MR Norrell. It is one of my resolutions for 2005 to write more reviews. Since I read so many novels anyway...

Scottish detectives

I came home exhausted last Friday & lounged about all evening reading Val McDermid's The Distant Echo. It's excellent: her writing has just gotten better and better, the first novels are a bit clunky in retrospect but this and her last are both superb.

Then I read the first two novels in the Enlightenment series by Paul Johnston, Body Politic and The Bone Yard. (Thanks to Donna at Sarah Weinman's site for the Scottish crime recommendations, BTW.) I love the idea of these, but I'm ambivalent about them in actuality. Will read the next two and see what I think. The one thing I really can't stand is the fact that there's an awkward simile on every page! Sample first sentence: "The weather set its trap with all the cunning and skill of a poacher who invites his extended family round for a New Year's banquet thenr ealises his cupboard is bare." It all depends how you feel about this sort of jokey style, I guess...

the Literary Saloon says....

Trying to figure out this Man Booker betting thing for the last paragraph of my Susanna Clarke review. Not sure about this...

I want to be the recipient of this package

This article titled Sorry, E.T., but Parcel Post May Beat Phoning Home rings true to me--I have a fixation on Fed Ex, and send everything important that way because it's so much better than anything else....

Extreme Visions of Fantasy

Just read Flights: Extreme Visions of Fantasy. I got it because I felt that I absolutely HAD to read Neil Gaiman's story "The Problem of Susan." Which did not disappoint; and which also hinged on something from the Narnia books that always perplexed me many years ago. I particularly love the word nylons.

My thoughts in sum: I prefer real-world fantasy to completely made-up (i.e. a story that begins with lots of names that bear no resemblance to names in any known language has to be extra good not to put me off); I prefer novels to stories. So in many ways I'm not the ideal reader for this book. (I'm a few stories into the Michael Chabon
McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales. Both are well worth reading, I think, particularly as a way of finding some new writers to read more extensively. But for me even a quite trashy novel is always more compelling than a high-quality anthology. I do have fond memories of a few story anthologies from childhood, including one "Golden Treasury" or something like that that had all KINDS of stuff in it; but then again the appeal of the "sampler" aspect of it is much stronger when you are quite young. By now I know more about what I like, and what I like is long novels & the sustained development of character and relationships that you get there.

Pathology

Just read Kathy Reichs' latest, Monday Mourning: A Novel. This series isn't bad, though there is something curiously unsatisfactory about the protagonist (particularly compared to the Kay Scarpetta of the early Cornwell novels). And the mannerism of writing in very short paragraphs becomes rather grating! It's a lesson to me, since I always end up breaking up everything I write (fiction, that is) into ridiculously short paragraphs--there is something very artificial and old-fashioned about the long paragraph, I often feel. (The kind that Monica Ali and Alan Hollinghurst write, I mean; they're both wonderful prose stylists but it's as if, oh, Rothko had painted paintings that were indistinguishable in colors and brushstrokes etc from a nineteenth-century painter like Ingres.)

Two bad things and a lot of other good ones

Well, I've just had a really weird day. The good things: some very satisfying and productive meetings at school that reminded me how much I enjoy administrative work; a haircut; the interesting though not-exactly-my-cup-of-tea Slava Snowshow and a pleasant dinner downtown (checked out demonstrators at Union Square but I am afraid extreme dislike of crowds prevents me from demonstrating myself, though I am wholly in support, of course...). Bad thing #1: got to my office this morning & discovered weird power outage had taken down the dehumidifer--introduced in aftermath of second toxic mold infestation; unfortunately the "bucket" fills up in less than twelve hours so it is virtually useless; in this case the office had become so humid that I used up a whole book of matches trying and failing to light the scented candle I bought to remedy the basement smell, they were nothing more than limp cardboard--and also my computer. Everything came back on once I turned on the power strip again, EXCEPT MY COMPUTER. Verdict of tech guy: it's totally defunct, short-circuit inside, and must be thrown in the trash. Hardly could happen at a worse time of year. Will have to obtain a discarded one from the computer graveyard in the English dept., since have no funds to purchase a new one. Bad thing #2: got in a cab about an hour and a half ago at 17th and Park, heading uptown. Caught short in a nasty fender-bender around 30th and Lex--my head slammed into the partition, b/c of course I wasn't wearing a seatbelt... All fine, really, but I hate to think what the bruise is going to look like tomorrow. Fortunately the cop & the driver peacefully let me leave the scene without putting my name in the accident report, and I decided to walk across town and get on the 1/9 for rest of journey home--only of course this took me into the heart of the "weirdly-roped-off-for-the-republicans" part of town, which I'd meant to avoid at all costs. Got the train at Times Square, now safely home. It is a testament to the good mental health induced by my sabbatical that I am not much more upset than I actually am... Lesson for the day: wear a seatbelt in cabs, even if you think the driver will take it as criticism of his driving...