Your mileage will probably vary, but this Colson Whitehead essay mocking the deeply lame critic James Wood is pretty great. A sample:

We each come to literature in our own way. For some, the gift is bestowed by a helpful governess who guides our fingers over the letters in a primer. For others, a private tutor first enlightens us to the majesty of the written word. How you arrive is immaterial. What is important now is that you forget all that and learn to read anew. In my literary criticism, I have become known as a champion of the eternal verities and a scold of the trendy and the fashionable. I have essayed to instruct your writers in how to write correctly. Now I will teach you to read correctly.

When we see a word, we must ask ourselves foremost, What does it mean? This is the first step in comprehension. When we have accomplished this, we can proceed to the next, and so on. In due course, we have read the sentence in toto. By returning to the beginning of the sentence to perform a close reading, we unlock its essence. I learned this skill at university. Although born in the States, I journeyed abroad for my education and underwent my intellectual coming of age at Oxford. I remember when the first dispatches of Dirty Realism made their way across the Atlantic. I pored over each latest issue of Granta as if it contained the Holy Word. And perhaps it did. One of my favorites from that time has always been Raymond Carver, in particular his affecting tale “Leave the Porch Light On, It’ll Be Dark.”

It takes real balls in this day and age to admire Raymond Carver, doncha know.

In all honesty, I was disappointed. I’m a huge fan of Lethem’s Gun with Occasional Music — I’m even teaching it, among several other books, in the fall — in part because it’s one of the most focused, stripped down, fundamental examples of the hard-boiled detective genre I’ve seen. It’s about questions, which is what all detective stories are about, and it’s about people threatening to kill each other, which is also what they’re all about. It’s got one of the most impressive final acts I’ve ever read, because the situation is so dire that literally every sentence the main character survives with mind and body intact is a small miracle. And moreso, with every sentence, because it’s always getting worse. That’s the kind of airtight plotting and structure you’d kill for. It’s the kind you associate with novels that don’t have much else going.

Motherless Brooklyn doesn’t have that. Which is fine — when your protagonist has Tourette’s, I’m expecting to spend a lot of time just soaking in sentences and mood. It’s part of the draw. But, weirdly, the protagonist’s Tourette’s is fairly quickly excised from the narration (which is still good stuff, but not what you’d expect from such a linguistically interesting protagonist) and relegated to the occasional largely inconsequential outburst in dialogue. Because most of the important characters in his life have long known not to pay his outbursts any mind, Lionel’s syndrome turns out not to matter very much. And this is a problem a lot of the characters have. The premise of the novel is that the main character is part of a nominal detective agency (that is also, nominally, a car service) run by a charming small-time criminal who took four boys from an orphanage and groomed them in his own image. They are desperate, hungry for love, pathetic, too close-knit, and yet miles apart. It’s a very interesting group of characters. So you’d think you’d see them interact as adults at some point. It practically never happens.

There’s a romantic interest who seems to show up mainly for the purpose of being a romantic interest. She has some involvement in the mystery of the novel, but only just enough to get her on stage and keep us from asking why we’re reading about her. There’s a seemingly formidable police detective who shows up, waves his gun around, and then drops out of the book completely (until the author seems to remember him at the last minute, and make some references in the narration, none of which matter to the plot). There are supposedly terrifying gangsters that never hurt anyone. There’s a giant assassin we never see assassinating. A major character disappears offscreen and it hardly seems to matter.

Mostly we spend a lot of time with Lionel thinking and talking about his Tourette’s — which, since it doesn’t really seem to get in his way very often, isn’t finally that interesting — and dicking around with being a detective, which I’m not sure he’s actually any good at. The mystery at the heart of the story is simply not very interesting — we know whodunnit from the start, what we’re not sure of is who told him to dunnit or why, and the answers shed no real light on the characters, nor do they really surprise. This might all work very well if it were a novel of character, which it often seems to want to be, but because we rarely get to spend real time with the central characters actually talking to each other (I often found myself yearning for anyone consequential to be in a scene) it can’t possibly work on that level. And yet the mystery is flat enough, and Lionel’s detection spotty enough, that it’s very difficult to invest in that aspect as well.

I did, in spite of all this, enjoy the book much of the time. And it’s one of Lethem’s better-liked books, so I feel as if maybe I’ve missed the point. But there was a lot of frustration toward the end. I wanted a mystery, or I wanted a good story of character, or, ideally, I wanted both. Instead I got neither. Not one subplot concluded in a way I found satisfying. It’s too bad.

I didn’t know anything about Blake Butler’s stories until he submitted something to Puerto del Sol, where I worked as assistant prose editor last year and will serve as senior editor in the next. (I mean school years, of course.) Evan Lavender-Smith asked me what I thought of a brief story. I think it was seven pages. I got the e-mail coming home late from somethingIdon’tremember, I guess a party. I think I was drunk. The story was about exploding children. I meant to take a glance and go to sleep drunk. Instead I choked it down whole and went to bed sober. It was beautiful and ugly and it made me feel things in my mouth. We took the story, and it’s one of many reasons you should buy our next issue when it comes to press.

I resisted reading other work I think out of the same instincts that keeps me from devouring the works of certain other writers. When I find something I love I often have to keep my distance in order to maintain my independence, to keep writing my own stories. There are people I write when I read them. In moderation that’s useful. In excess it’s shameful, if not really a bad thing. So I wanted to read his novella Ever from the minute I learned of its existence, and I resisted just as hard. I fought it because he is writing things I want to write and can’t write — so there is jealousy, too.

I want to write sentences so gross and uncomfortable and visceral and beautiful they justify themselves. I want to describe a hundred thousand ends of the world without any more pretext than the creeping, lung-burning feeling (knowledge) that’s where we’re headed. I want to pile image on image without a real narrative.

I don’t want to do these things. I would be terrible at them. These urges inflect what I actually do, which sometimes seems ugly to me, sometimes beautiful. Butler does the things I want to do. Like I said: Jealousy.

This is perhaps a long way of working up to the obvious insight that his loyalty is to the sentence. Most writers secretly feel the same way, I think: if not philosophically then in practice. So-and-so may tell you it’s all about the characters or the setting or the themes or what-have-you, and it may even believe what it says, but so-and-so is kidding itself. We only know the characters and the plot and the politics or whatever are working if they compel us to write exciting, surprising sentences, sentences that grant us small, unexpected pleasures. You don’t know if your characters are real. You don’t know if your ideas are coherent. You don’t know if your plot is worth a damn. You only know if it feels good to write what you’re writing here, now.

Even if you mean to prioritize other things, in other words, you likely can’t find them except through the sentence. Or I can’t. Sometimes I read writers who are so awful at sentences I wonder how they go on writing, why they don’t just give up. The fact that they don’t proves me wrong. Maybe they should, though.

Anyway: Ever is all about the sentence, which means that while it lacks certain elements (or more accurately, disguises them) that most people would probably consider fundamental to stories (such as, well, a story — characters with names, consistent logic, a clear time and place, an easily recognized arc, scenes) I suspect most people who spend a lot of their spare time writing perceive it as fundamental, pure, primal. As writing boiled down to nothing but writing. The terminology says a lot: do you think of it as a story, or as writing? As the product, or the act?

Sometimes we imagine writers who live in the sentence as transcending story, I think because they can be so abstracted and floaty. Like the spirit, I guess, like transcendence. There is nothing floating about these sentences. Again: They are fundamental. Your fundament is your asshole, where shit comes from. There is shit in this book, and come, and blood, and mold, menstruation, mucus, fat curtains. I resist intimations of transcendence. Some might call these sentences musical. But not everything pleasure is music (though most of it is) and we should demand recognition of this. There is pleasure in the sentence, in these sentences.

What is it about? It’s about a girl (a woman?) in her house. The world may be ending, but if it is it scarcely matters. The house may be ending. She may be becoming the house. So far when people try to explain it what they say seems wrong to me, but nothing seems right. But it’s not about nothing. Potentially it’s about everything. In practice it’s about the sentence.

I want to type the sentences he typed to make this novella so you can see what they look like. Instead I have to link you to this excerpt because I already loaned my copy out to my friend Robbie. Weirdly (or not weirdly) it seems to make more sense outside the context of the larger work. I guess not weirdly — because the rules of these sentences are always shifting, they are always being discovered. Take any given stretch and the logic is almost within reach. Try to hold it in your head all at once and you can’t hold it in your head all at once. You can only think of moments, sentences, little stretches. But that’s what books are like. That’s how we remember stories. Because Ever is fundamental, we know for once how we are reading and what we are feeling, though we are usually reading this way and feeling these things.

We aren’t stringed instruments but drums.

I guess that if this is being a review I should say who will like this book. I think most people would if they let themselves, as I truly believe about everything I love. Failing that I can say that writers will like it. They will love watching someone so good at sentences at play, at work. They will love the surprises. I often caught myself mouthing the words as I read them, trying to make myself slow down enough to understand. When I get my book back I will study it and copy sentences, and try to learn them, so that I can use them in my writing. I am looking for ways to grow. This is one way to do that.

I guess the best evidence of the power of these sentences that I can offer is the off-balance writing in this post. Like I said: There are people I write when I read them. I am not writing him, of course. But I feel myself straining for some of that energy. Failing. Trying new things, and failing. I love to fail in the face of something I love. I love things that make me grasp at straws, things that make me empty. I don’t know that I love this book, actually, precisely — it’s a different kind of feeling. But I love the feeling.

So there you have it. You could buy it, I guess.

Here are two videos of Blake Butler reading from his book. I don’t remember how or why I found them. I like the way he always sounds surprised to be saying what he’s saying:

You should go read my friend Carrie Murphy’s poem at Everyday Genius. It’s good.

Had a bit of a heartbreak Thursday as I realized the novel I’ve been working on and planning for half a year now is not going to work. I was at about 17,000 words — I’d only been able to steal a few days to work on it over the semester — and I had three chapters, which, as it turns out, is exactly the number of functional chapters that I was able to create from that premise. After that it was a mess, mainly because my main characters turned out to get along way too well. I had them lying to each other about stuff that didn’t really matter to the story, just to plant the seeds for fights later in the book — fights that also wouldn’t matter.

The whole thing was predicated on my fascination with the SCUM Manifesto, which is indeed a really weird, amazing document produced by a sick, weird, sort of brilliant woman. But it’s not the basis for a post-apocalyptic sci-fi epic.

Which brings me to my other disappointment. It seems increasingly clear that I am not much of a pure genre writer. Whenever I try to do a real world-building exercise, the resulting work feels really thin to me and unconvincing. I’m not sure if I’m actually that bad at it — I love Phillip K. Dick’s pure genre stuff, and his world-building is hardly encyclopedic or really persuasive — but I can’t convince myself. And if you don’t believe your own stories, your own characters and world, it’s time to stop and write something else.

Which is what I’ve done. I had originally planned to write my MFA thesis after finishing the (now-failed) novel, culminating in a final drafting process next summer, which sounds like madness but is actually about the speed at which I have produced my previous novels. But it is my thesis. And this one will be long, and need a lot of research. So I’ve started reading for it, and written a little, and am generally going to work my ass off sanding this block of granite down to something readable.

It’s about the atomic bombs we dropped on Japan. It’s about guilt and shame, I guess, and pain. And I hope it turns out to be a towering work of genius, etc. Wish me luck. And if anyone wants to read this one as I write it, I’m sure I’d like that a lot.

Relatedly: Can anyone suggest good books about life in Europe, especially France, after WWII?

I finished reading the former yesterday, and am now neck-deep in the latter.

My thoughts on Barnes’ novel are still congealing, but I think I will say that I found it enjoyable but, past a certain point, far less exciting. The story’s centerpiece is a maddening trial that serves to horrify and enrage the reader, especially as it seems to be fairly close to the historical trial. George Edalji is unjustly accused, unjustly prosecuted, and unjustly imprisoned. Later — spoiler alert! — George is released thanks to a campaign on his behalf, and later still, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle comes to help him further clear his name. And while the trial is gripping (at least for me: I also enjoy Law & Order, so your mileage may vary, but I think the gross injustice of it should be at least somewhat entertaining) Arthur’s sections are, well, less interesting.

First, though, I would like to address a technical problem reminiscent of Chabon’s The Final Solution. As long-time readers may recall, I was frustrated by that novella’s shifting point of view, which culminated in a chapter written from the perspective of a parrot. It’s not that I can’t deal with a parrot’s perspective so much as that I can’t manage the questions it raises: if I could see from the parrot’s perspective, then why not the villain’s? Because the villain would know the answer to the mystery, of course. But then, for that matter, so did the parrot; the parrot was the mystery. And so if I could see through the parrot’s eyes then, as the mystery was being solved, why not let me see through his eyes earlier? Again, because it would spoil the surprise. And, as a reader of mysteries, naturally this is reason enough — I want the author to contrive to hide the solution from me, because the pleasure lies in wanting to know it, and trying to work it out for myself. But if I become too aware of that contrivance, the pleasure is sapped from it. If the terms of the story allow for me to be in any pair of eyes at any time, then I should be allowed to see through the eyes that will let me know what’s at the heart of the mystery. Not because I actually do want to know, but because the whole premise of the story — a sort of lie that the author and I agree on in advance — is that I want to know desperately. If you see what I mean. The point is that if he gives me the tools that would theoretically allow me to know the answer instantly, it reveals the central lie of the exercise, which is that I want to know the answer. And if we’re not pretending I want the answer, the whole thing falls apart, because why are we doing any of this?

Barnes runs into similar problems because he gives us the perspective of the lead detective in Edalji’s case. The mystery in this novel is an interesting one because it’s not so much about who committed the crime (although that does come up later) as it is about why George is framed and accused in the first place. We never really find out precisely what happened, but we do get a seemingly helpful perspective early on in the sections concerning this detective, which are from his point of view. His name is Campbell. Campbell seems a solid man, trustworthy, somewhat prejudiced by George’s race but no moreso than other sympathetic characters, and he seems to pursue the evidence against George without malice or even special interest. He seems, essentially, to be a man who cares about his job, does the best he can, and — this is important — displays far more competence and compassion than higher-ups or peers.

His perspective falls away pretty quickly, but while we’re in it Barnes establishes (or guesses — hard to say what research he’s working from here, if any) that Campbell found the Edalji family very suspicious and strange, and that he seemed to have fairly good reasons for this finding. But it is not established that the evidence was tampered with in any way, or indeed precisely how it was handled in the first place.

Later, after Campbell is lost to us, Arthur spends a lot of time trying to work out how the evidence was tampered with, and by whom, and indeed whether or not it was tampered with at all. The police force looks to be alternatingly grossly incompetent and mendacious, and it seems clear that someone in authority had it out for George. But we’re not sure who. Certainly Campbell’s boss is a racist prick, but he wasn’t in a position to do some of the things Barnes suggests were done to hurt George, and in any case he couldn’t have done any of it alone. Which means that Campbell is almost certainly complicit.

Since we have seen the world through Campbell’s eyes before this point, it seems that one way to address this question — to move closer to a solution to this mystery — would be to return to his perspective. Since he was the lead detective on the case, and seemingly a competent man, he would presumably know quite a bit of the truth of the matter, or be able to guess it. He would likely even be outraged, which could be interesting to read about, or alternately complicit, which would be disturbing and interesting and sad, because we were given reason to respect him. But, presumably because Barnes himself does not know the answers to our questions, or does not want us to know them, he does not let us return to Campbell. And we are left to wonder: how did this seemingly competent, seemingly decent man get tied up in so fraudulent a prosecution? What was his involvement? Did he help to frame Edalji? It’s not that I need to know the answers to these questions — again, it’s that within the terms of the story I could know. And if I could easily know the answer to the mystery, but I don’t get to, it exposes the central lie of the genre.

This is why most detective stories are tied very specifically and closely to the perspective of the investigator, and perhaps his helper or friend or the victim, and other people like that. This has the interesting implication of casting the criminal as weird, unknowable “other,” which is often reinforced or echoed in the class/race/sex differences between criminal and victim, but that’s perhaps a subject for another post. I think that generally many novelists give far too little thought to the implications of their POV choices, philosophical and otherwise, and that we need to interrogate these decisions more closely, especially if we believe — as I do — that the best practical use of a novel is the improvement of one’s sympathetic faculties.

This post has already gotten a bit longer than I meant it to, so suffice it to say that the novel becomes boring because it becomes too much like Jane Austen. Arthur finds himself a mistress, and is childish enough to believe that not screwing her until his consumptive wife dies makes their love pure somehow, and it’s entirely possible that the author actually buys this line of horseshit, which is ludicrous. I’m willing to accept it’s possible they really didn’t have sex for a decade of secret courtship, but the idea that this is somehow laudible or renders their relationship less adulterous is somewhere between childish and insane. And it feels as if a hundred pages are devoted to his agonizing over the morality of this relationship, which means that Barnes must find some aspect of the moral problem here interesting or complicated, whereas I don’t really recognize it as complicated, interesting, or problematic. He’s cheating on his wife while pretending not to cheat on his wife. Her humiliating cuckolding is so thorough that everyone in the country knows about it, including, as it turns out, the wife herself. This is wrong. What he did was wrong. But it was not a great sin, in the scheme of things. So his agonies are not interesting.

Indeed, we might elevate this to a principle of writing: If your protagonist’s biggest problem in life is that he wants not to feel guilty about something like cheating on his wife, but does in fact feel guilty, your protagonist does not have a problem, and you do not have a story.

The novel picks up when he gets down to the mystery solving, but it never really gets back to where it was. And formally it becomes far less interesting. The changes in tense, as it turn out, are largely determined by the mood Barnes hopes to create (more urgency = present tense, which is not a very interesting rubric), or, in some cases, probably by a desperate need to regain the reader’s interest. The arbitrariness of this formal decision ultimately meant I couldn’t be troubled to give a damn what tense we were using.

As for The Handmaid’s Tale, I am less than halfway through, and much of my final opinion will rest on how the next hundred pages evolve. So far, I am less impressed than I had hoped to be. While I am all for politics in novels — I consider myself a political writer — Atwood’s are too simple, too clear-cut for novelistic treatment. Feminism = Good and vital and full of love. Religious conservatism = Bad and false and ugly and stupid. The conflict between second- and third-wave feminisms depicted in the protagonist’s relationship with her mother (and you know the novel is in trouble when I can so immediately determine the exact terms of their debate, and describe them so perfectly in modern buzz-words) is contrived and ultimately unimportant in the absolutizing world of the present action’s utopia.

I am also frustrated by the totally simplistic equation of violence against women with oppressive sexism against women, given that violence against women is far less common than violence against men, but I’ve ridden that hobby horse enough already. I’ll note it and move on.

More on this book, I think, when I am finished.

I was reading issue 9 of NOÖ Journal yesterday and I found two stories I liked. Here are those stories.

The first I found was called “Us, People” by Jimmy Chen. This is the first paragraph:

FACES HAD NO PORES because the people were not alive. Lie buttons, or eyes, were affixed onto their faces with conjunctivitis seal. Before bed, they removed their faces and tended to their sore skulls. During the day, they brined themselves in swimming pools for hours with chlorinated water. Each morning they applied their new face with a caulking gun.

There were some bits that worried me later because they used scare-quotes and a particular sense of humor that doesn’t always connect for me, but this time it did, probably because of the strange and frightening movement of the story. I thought that was cool.

The next one was called “Dream House,” by Rachel B. Glaser. I like it because it embarrasses me. It’s about teenage love. Maybe one of the smartest things I ever said to a writer — I said this to Antonya Nelson, and I think it might have surprised her or pleased her or embarrassed her — was that her story made me ashamed, which is some of the highest praise I can give to a story. This one made me a little ashamed. Here is the first paragraph:

JP AND MISSY WERE SO IN LOVE that when 10th grade began, JP switched all his afternoon classes to Missy’s schedule. Missy had tried to switch hers but she had the mean guidance counselor. Everyday JP quickly changed into gym clothes to be the first one waiting outside the girls’ locker room. Tying her hair with an elastic, Missy would stroll out with a calmness that had to do with dating JP. In CVS Missy looked at sex tips in Cosmo, trying to become a more adventurous lover. It was always the same tips. “It doesn’t feel good there,” JP said kindly as she tried to find it again, between the testicles and the anus, the spot magazine people swore by.