I read with sadness the news that Philip Roth has given up reading fiction.  He still reads, but he’s switched to the non-fiction genres of history and biography. 

Why did he quit reading fiction?

“I wised up,” Roth says.

The word choice is troubling, for it suggests that he now views fiction as some kind of scam or, at best, a frivolity that diverts intellectual attention from worthier endeavors.  I dearly wish Roth’s interviewer, Jan Dalley, the Arts Editor of The Financial Times, would have drawn him out more on this.  Although it appears that Roth still believes in writing fiction, he apparently no longer believes in reading it.

Regardless what one thinks of Roth—and I’m well aware that many judge him intolerable—the fact that a novelist of his stature would imply that fiction is no longer worth reading should give everyone pause. 

To me, what Roth said is incomprehensible.

More than most contemporary writers, Roth’s work overtly converses with Literature, both challenging and paying homage to the very concept of fiction.

Consider, for example, some of the novels he’s published within the last five years:

Everyman, which won the Pen/Faulkner Award in 2007, is a modern update on the medieval morality play of the same name.

Exit Ghost (titled after a Shakespearean stage direction) riffs on Joseph Conrad’s 1916 novella, The Shadow-Line, and Roth’s own The Ghost Writer (in which the legacy of Anne Frank and her diary play a crucial role).

In Indignation, his 2008 novel depicting American life during the Korean War, the central character rebels after reading a Bertrand Russell essay.  The novel itself is mostly set in Winesburg, Ohio—in homage Sherwood Anderson’s story collection.

Even in the minutia of Roth’s sentences, one finds references to other literary works. 

Here is Roth describing the mounting Korean War causalities from the vantage of a football-obsessed American college student:

“Four thousand young men like yourselves, dead, maimed, and wounded, between the time we beat Bowling Green and the time we upset UWV.” (Indignation, p. 218)

Now check out Tadeusz Borowski, who describes the mounting executions in a Nazi concentration camp from the vantage of a soccer-obsessed prison guard:

“Between two throw-ins in a soccer game, right behind my back, three thousand people had been put to death.” (This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, p. 84)

[Roth edited Borowski’s This Way for the Gas… while overseeing Penguin’s Writers from the Other Europe series in the 1970s & 80s.  Through that Penguin series, Roth helped introduce American readers to a number of important East European writers, including Milan Kundera, Bruno Schulz, Danilo Kis, and Witold Gombrowicz].

As literary critic Elaine Showalter points out, Nemesis, Roth’s most recent novel, “is a brilliant and compassionate American re-imagining of Albert Camus’s fable, The Plague.”

The literary allusions do not necessarily mean these are great novels (reviewers, after all, have not been abundantly kind in their appraisal of them), but it is fair to say that the allusions indicate that Roth conceptualizes his creations through the lens of literary references.  That’s why it surprises me that he no longer wishes to avail himself to reading fiction—it’s almost as if he’s exiling himself from the stream that has nourished his creative mind for the past five decades.

Elsewhere, it’s been implied that dwindling mental alertness is responsible for Roth’s inability to read fiction nowadays, but that strikes me as a wildly inappropriate conjecture—and one seemingly at odds with the otherwise alert and thoughtful man that Roth is portrayed as being in Dalley’s interview.  No doubt others will read into Roth’s words a note of regret for the years he has devoted toward reading and writing fiction, but evidence of that regret is also absent in Dalley’s article.

In a 1993 New York Times interview, Roth addressed the perceived decline:

"I don't think there's a decline of the novel so much as the decline of the readership," Roth said, mounting what he admitted was a favorite hobbyhorse. "There's been a drastic decline, even a disappearance, of a serious readership. That's inescapable.”

In that same interview, Roth conjectured that only 120,000 serious readers remained in this country. 

I have no idea how accurate Roth’s guess might have been, or whether Roth ever updated that count.  However, it now appears that we have one less serious reader of fiction than we used to have.  For all of our sake, I hope it is only a temporary loss.

I’m not sure how I feel about this: Ann Patchett is opening an independent bookstore in Nashville. 

Don’t get me wrong: I’m a big fan of independent bookstores and a big fan of Patchett’s work.  Though I haven’t yet read her latest novel, STATE OF WONDER, I thoroughly enjoyed both BEL CANTO and THE PATRON SAINT OF LIARS.

According to the Christian Science Monitor, Patchett, a Nashville native, is opening the store because Nashville apparently is now among the growing list of cities without a bookstore. 

“It’s very weird to have a book coming out without a bookstore,” Patchett [said]. “When [longtime Nashville book seller] Davis-Kidd closed, I thought, ‘I don’t want to live in a city without a bookstore.’”

This news seems like yet another turn in the continuing slide towards a literary culture where authors are responsible for almost all facets of its economic survival.  The readership of small literary journals is said to be almost entirely comprised of writers hoping to be published in those journals.  Over the last couple of years, a trend has emerged where, through submission fees, writers are being asked to directly bear the financial burden of keeping these journals afloat.

Meanwhile, e-book innovation has allowed some authors (including relatively new writers like Amanda Hocking) to eschew traditional publishers altogether and still reach sizeable audiences. 

Now, with many traditional bookstores disappearing, I wonder if Patchett’s venture is a harbinger of things to come. 

Bookstores are vital, for now, to the maintenance of a healthy literary culture.  Even as we transition to an economic model where more books are being purchased online than in physical stores, the stores still act as a kind of “showroom” where potential readers can browse the latest offerings before they head online to take advantage of the steep discounts Amazon and other online retailers can offer.

[Last week, the New York Times ran a fascinating article about how, in part to combat the “Amazon showroom” mentality, some bookstores are now charging admission fees to the author readings they host.]

What makes me hesitant to endorse the Patchett model of author involvement are the financial risks.  While those risks are presumably balanced by the promise of financial reward should the venture turn profitable, my guess is that few authors possess both the financial wherewithal and the business aptitude necessary to open up a book store.  It’s one thing to ask that writers devote a couple of weeks to learn how to format and program their own e-books, but quite another to ask that they plunk down their life savings to support what, at best, might be called a risky business venture.

As publishing culture and industry models change, each change creates opportunities for new practices.  Self-publishing is only now becoming a reputable practice.  Still, if bookstores as an institution are to survive (a debatable proposition), I wonder if there might be some room to develop them as not-for-profit author co-ops.  

Yesterday, the mail brought a copy of the new issue of Bellingham Review. I had entered their fiction contest but didn't place, my only consolation being the "free" copy of their journal that they sent.

This year, Bellingham’s contest was won Jacob Appel, who seems like a good guy and has won a gazillion other contests, so I started reading his story ("Bait and Switch") and, dang, Appel’s first paragraph was awesome:

Aunt Jill had been courting Mitch W. at the Citarella fish counter for eight relentless months, stockpiling our freezer with pompano filets and hand-sliced sable, when the giraffe painter swept her off her swollen feet. This happened the summer I turned fourteen, the year we lived opposite Grant's Tomb in a rent-stabilized railroad apartment strewn with half-depleted bottles of Xanax and Zoloft. I'd been looking forward to having free run of the place while my aunt played "den mother" at an upscale day camp-- to savoring lazy afternoons with Jeff Katz on what had once been Grandmother Edith's canopy bed-- but these plans collapsed one blustery June evening when Aunt Jill charged into the kitchen looking as though she might spontaneously hemorrhage from glee. She carried a paper shopping bag emblazoned with the distinctive Italian boot of Marconi's Bakeshop. A turquoise visitor's pin, hooked to the lapel of her raincoat, informed the world that she'd recently visited the Museum of Natural History. "Laurie Jean! We're celebrating!" she cried, setting an enormous strawberry cheesecake on the linoleum countertop and carving us each the tiniest sliver. "I've finally met the man I'm going to marry."



What I liked about the paragraph was how quickly it established the story’s characters, setting, and premise.  Read it over again.  It’s remarkably effective.

It was only later, when typing out that paragraph to a friend in an email, that I realized how heavily Appel relied on adjectives.  Indeed, maybe he over-relied on them (swollen, blustery, enormous, railroad, half-depleted)-- is there a noun here that is unadorned?-- but on first read that paragraph sure worked for me.   

And this made me wonder, really, about how prose works vs. how we’re taught prose works.  For instance, we’ve all heard the caveats about adverbs, which are said to be a sure indicator of flabby writing.  If you find the proper verb, the adverb is supposed to be unnecessary.  I took my first writing workshop in the 1980s, when Raymond Carver minimalism was still in vogue.  Somewhere along the way, I had come to believe that adjectives could be just as unnecessary as adverbs.  But I have to admit that when I’m in reading mode, adverbs and adjectives rarely irk me.

Appel’s prose was just as richly layered throughout the story.  One can see why his work so consistently rises to the top of consideration in magazine contests: it just seems so authoritative and true.  

I recently came across Bernard DeVoto’s 1936 essay “Genius is not Enough,” which took Thomas Wolfe to task for including too much “placental” material in his published novels. 

At that time, Wolfe’s critical appreciation was at its apex.  On the strength of his first two novels, Look Homeward, Angel (1929) and Of Time and the River (1935), he was widely considered one of the best novelists then alive.  DeVoto’s take-down put an end to that.  Nowadays, if Wolfe is remembered, he is remembered as an out-of-control stylist who famously asked Maxwell Perkins (his editor) to fashion something that might resemble a “novel” out of the tens of thousands of manuscript pages that he had delivered to Perkins in a steamer trunk.

DeVoto recognized that passages within Wolfe’s novels could be brilliant, but he added that

“… there were parts that looked very dubious indeed—long, whirling discharges of words, unabsorbed in the novel, unrelated to the proper business of fiction… aimless and quite meaningless jabber…”

This material, DeVoto suggested, might have been necessary to Wolfe when conceptualizing and writing his novels.

“…it was as if the birth of the novel had been accompanied by a lot of material that had nourished its gestation.”

As the novel progresses through various stages of completion, DeVoto believed it was the job of the novelist to discard the placental “psychic material” that guided its creation. 

“There comes a point where the necessities of the book are satisfied, where its organic processes have reached completion… The [purpose of the placental] material which nature and most novelists discard when its use has been served.”

                                                                                       ~~~

Several weeks ago, my son Sebastian let on that he and his friends had been reading my blog at school.  He told me that his friends thought the blog was “awesome,” and then when that compliment did not have the desired effect, he said that, “Dad, you don’t understand: my friends think you’re, like, the greatest Dad ever.”

I’m often forced to rally around whatever stray supports I can find to justify the efficacy of my life, so I truly appreciated what Sebastian said.  Yet, these compliments were strangely inhibiting.  Not only did I worry that I might write something that would radically alter how my son’s friends would regard me (and, by extension, him), but it also never occurred to me that what I wrote could possibly resonate with a fourth-grade audience. 

Of course, it also occurred to me that Sebastian was maybe buttering me up with praise just to make me feel good, for Sebastian is like that: someone who genuinely cares how others might be feeling.

                                                                                      ~~~

I’ve been working furiously at novel revisions lately.  A couple of weeks ago, I shot my agent a revised draft.  I had line-edited the manuscript again, paring down my sentences and bringing characters into sharper focus.  As I was doing this, and doing away with my baggier sentences and razzle-dazzle effects, I realized I was achieving the emotional resonance that I had sought.  I chucked a few scenes, and added others that I hoped added insight into characters’ motivations and inner conflicts.

Last week, my agent questioned certain aspects of my novel that she thought caused readers to disengage with the narrative.  From the outset, I had rigged the novel with a series of supports that had nothing to do with the novel’s actual story.  For example, although my novel is set slightly in the future, I included an 1,800-word digression about the Palmer Raids of 1919.  Another chunk dealt with the etymological derivation of “pupil.”

What my agent was questioning was my placental material. 

This material provided a kind of background chatter as I built up the world of my novel, yet it wasn’t until several days after my conversation that I realized NONE of it was necessary to the novel itself.

                                                                                      ~~~

My agent tells me that a couple of editors have specifically asked to see my novel again.  Others will also be seeing it soon.  This brings me great hope.  What had been a 399-page beast is now a relatively sleek 359-page monster.  It’s a novel that I honestly believe deserves to be published.

                                                                                      ~~~

Hessel errata: Stéphane Hessel’s Indignation will soon be re-titled and published as Time For Outrage in this country.  Here’s the announcement from Publisher’s Marketplace:

French Resistance hero Stéphane Hessel's TIME FOR OUTRAGE, translated by Marion Duvert, a 29-page call-to-arms that has reportedly sold more than 4 million copies worldwide since its publication in October, rejecting the dictatorship of world financial markets and defending the social values of modern democracy, reminding us that life and liberty must still be fought for, and urging us to reclaim these essential rights we have allowed our governments to erode, and to defend them for those who can't defend for themselves, to Cary Goldstein at Twelve, for publication in September 2011, by Eileen Cope at Trident Media Group on behalf of Sylvie Crossman at Indigene (US).

This news also brings me great hope.  I’ve written before on this blog about Hessel, and also mentioned his work in an interview.  Hessel’s message is exactly what is needed to re-invigorate liberal activism in this country, and Twelve has a fantastic record of bringing thoughtful books to the forefront.


                                                                                           ~~~
Tallman errata:  Last week, The Rumpus published a fantastic story by Jenniey Tallman, my friend and one-time collaborator.  If you have some time, check it out.  But warning: it’s “an illustrated sex toy mystery,” so be careful if you’re browsing it at work!