Bleak House

I reviewed Blake Butler’s new novel There Is No Year for Bookforum. Here’s how the review starts:

In an interview published in the winter 2010 issue of the Paris Review, Jonathan Franzen said to Stephen Burn, “I’ve never felt less self-consciously preoccupied with language than I did when I was writing Freedom. Over and over again, as I was producing chapters, I said to myself, ‘This feels nothing like the writing I did for twenty years—this just feels transparent.’” Franzen added that this struck him as “a good sign”—an indication that he was “pressing language more completely into the service of providing transparent access to the stories I was telling and to the characters in those stories.”

Blake Butler is the opposite of that.

Read the rest.

On the strange stardom of James Franco

I’ve attempted a semi-unified theory of James Franco for the London Review of Books. You can read the first paragraph here, register for free to read the whole thing here, and check out a couple key paragraphs below:

Acting with James Franco and Erased James Franco didn’t shift public perception of the actor much: the former was a lark and the latter shown only in museums (there are a few minutes on YouTube; they’re enough). But in 2009, Franco embarked on a more public project. While discussing a new film with Carter, in which he was set to play a former soap opera star who has retired because of mental illness, Franco thought that it might be fun to star in a soap himself. He proposed the idea to the producers of General Hospital, America’s third-longest-running television drama, and the oldest still on air. Franco wanted his character to be both crazy and an artist. They created ‘Franco’, a one-named, pseudonymous graffiti artist who now sells crime-scene re-creations in galleries for good money. Shades of Banksy – though ‘Franco’ is actually a deranged killer who is terrorising the fictional town where General Hospital is set. Franco persuaded the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles to let them film there. In that episode, ‘Franco’ has a one-man show (‘Francophrenia’) at MOCA, and a detective – who has formed an unlikely partnership with a mob killer in order to track ‘Franco’ down – shows up to arrest him. In the climactic showdown, ‘Franco’ falls to his death from a third-storey balcony in the museum, while Kalup Linzy, an artist who draws on soap opera iconography in his own video installations, performs a musical number.

Franco has said that this piece of ‘performance art’ (his own description) was intended to make people ‘ask themselves if soap operas are really that far from entertainment that is considered critically legitimate’. The episodes are full of half-baked dialogue on aesthetics. In one, ‘Franco’, eyebrow arched, asks a magazine editor how she knows something is a work of art. ‘Everyone says so,’ she tells him. ‘Then it must be,’ he replies. These exchanges fall with a thud. What is interesting about the endeavour is what it says about Franco as an actor and as a celebrity, and what it might suggest about the nature of celebrity, now, for actors. ‘I disrupted the audience’s suspension of disbelief,’ Franco wrote in a piece about the project for the Wall Street Journal, ‘because no matter how far I got into the character, I was going to be perceived as something that doesn’t belong to the incredibly stylised world of soap operas. Everyone watching would see an actor they recognised, a real person in a made-up world.’ The phrase ‘real person’ jumps out here. His General Hospital castmates are real people, too. Franco means that people watching the show know who he is. But people watching movies always recognise the stars. Once upon a time, that recognition would not have made them seem ‘real’, but grand – maybe even, in the case of someone like James Dean, mythic. Franco’s ‘star power’ is remarkably diminished: he jumps out from his surroundings because of their littleness. ‘Franco’ is ‘mysterious’, but Franco is not.

Read the rest. (Pictured: Franco channeling Bruce Nauman.)

Yan Lianke’s nightmare

I’ve written a review for The National of Yan Lianke’s grim, moving novel about blood selling in China, The Dream of Ding Village. Here’s the last paragraph:

Both of the books by Lianke which are available in English were banned in China. Perhaps it was this very censorship which inspired Western publishers to make them available. I hope, of course, that both books—and especially The Dream of Ding Village—will eventually be published there, so that Lianke’s own countrymen can read them. But I also hope that his other books—some of which have won major Chinese literary prizes and received wide acclaim there—will be translated and published abroad, so that those of us outside the country can discover whether they, too, are as compassionate and engaged as the ones we have, so far, been able to see.

Read the rest. As I mention in the review, Lianke has said he censored himself (removing references to senior officials and downplaying his critique of China's rush to development); the government banned the book anyway.

(Photograph of Yan Lianke by Jonathan Watts.)

“There’s no sound people make when drama’s working.”

Another online addendum: New York magazine’s culture website, Vulture, has put up a longer version of my conversation with Judd Apatow. I liked this answer of his in particular:

Funny People seemed to show that influence in terms of writing about your own experience, even when it’s dark, and still being funny. Are you working on anything now that is moving in that direction?

We’ll see. Sometimes you make a movie and your intention is to make people deliriously happy. And when you’re working on a movie like that you understand the rules: The 40-year-old virgin needs to get laid, and when he does, the audience should be happy. And you’re trying to make every scene as unique and funny as you can. You know, with Funny People, I was trying to get big laughs, but also talk about issues which are not usually talked about in a comedy, and some of it is not meant to be entertaining as much as thought-provoking. And it’s a very different experience to try to walk that line than to make a movie where the final judge of every moment is, “Did it get a laugh?” There’s no sound people make when drama’s working. I wish there was. At a preview for the movie, maybe every time a dramatic moment’s working they could make a sort of squeal-y noise. But they don’t … I found that to be a very fulfilling experience, but it’s also painful because you’re really putting your heart into something and putting yourself out there. There are people who really take to it and see what you’re going for, and there are people who say, “Why isn’t it funnier?”

Read the rest. Above: Apatow again (a couple of times).

What Makes Judd Apatow Laugh?

I talked to Judd Apatow about the new book he edited, the pilot Conan O’Brien wrote for Adam West, Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, Raymond Carver, and, among a few other subjects, Woody Allen:

I did notice there’s nothing [in the book] by Woody Allen.
I continue to follow everything he does. He’s very up-front about making movies to avoid existential issues, and I try to think of myself as someone who’s more along the philosophical lines of James Brooks and Cameron Crowe—writers who are looking to say something positive about our time on earth. I’m not as old as Woody, and I still want to feel that life is good and you don’t need to make 90 movies to avoid your fear of death. As much as I love him, I wish he would tell me that things are going to be okay at some point. But I don’t think he will.

Read the rest. (Above, Apatow gets Barbara Walters to give thumbs down to Jay Leno.)

Off the Road

A small addendum to the review posted last week: on the LRB blog, I explain why Tao Lin sort of reminds me, just a little bit, of Jack Kerouac (pictured left... singing?).

A Kind of Gnawing Offness

In the latest issue of the London Review of Books, I take a look at Tao Lin’s new novel, Richard Yates, along with his five previous books—and I consider his method for rendering online experience in his fiction (more successfully, I think, than Daniel Kehlmann does):

In an email exchange published earlier this year, David Gates asked Jonathan Lethem: ‘If I write about people for whom the internet is—as far as the reader can see—peripheral or nonexistent, am I not essentially writing historical fiction?’ If the answer is yes, then nearly every major author in America is now writing historical fiction. Writers seem stuck on the challenge of depicting the seamlessness with which the internet is already woven into our lives. Lin’s solution is to do what writers have done with handwritten letters for centuries. He quotes from instant messaging conversations extensively in both Shoplifting from American Apparel and Richard Yates, but he punctuates them the same way he punctuates the other dialogue, and everything is spelled correctly. This sacrifices some degree of verisimilitude—there are no real-life typos, and capital letters (unusually for him) are in the proper places—in order to show that online conversations don’t stand out anymore for many of us; they certainly wouldn’t for Lin’s characters. And they don’t stand out in his prose either.

If you subscribe to the LRB, you can read the rest here. If not, well, Lin has put up the whole thing on his site, so...

(Above, Tao Lin poses for a parody of this Jonathan Franzen/Time magazine cover.)

Disappointed in “Fame”

I reviewed Fame—Daniel Kehlmann’s collection of nine linked “episodes,” newly translated into English by Carol Brown Janeway—for The National:

Characterisation has never been Kehlmann’s forte, to judge, at least, from the three of his books available in English. Measuring the World, his sporadically fanciful but mostly historical novel about Carl Friedrich Gauss and Alexander von Humboldt, works well partly because Kehlmann does not burden the story with psychological nuance; he speeds briskly through two lives crowded with incident, one belonging to the owner of an unimaginably brilliant, abstract mind and the other to a fearless man restless for discovery. Me and Kaminski, an earlier book, suffers because its shallowly rendered characters do far less interesting things (though the ending is clever). The same can be said about most of Kehlmann’s latest, too.

Read the rest (but don’t blame me for the headline). That’s Kehlmann looking almost Zuckerberg-like in the hoodie above.

No Great Work of Art Can Be “Spoiled”

I've written another piece for The Awl, this one about “spoilers”:

Consider this: Alfred Hitchcock knew as much about creating suspense as perhaps any narrative artist of the past century; and when he made what is, hands down, his most artistically ambitious movie, Vertigo, he went out of his way to spoil the mystery halfway through. Vertigo is the story of one woman pretending to be another in an effort to deceive a man, and Hitchcock easily could have preserved the mystery of that woman’s identity until the end of the film.

But the pleasures and satisfactions of Vertigo don’t depend on not knowing a basic aspect of the plot. They derive from the movie’s brilliant illustration of love and desire and the ways we idealize and romanticize particular human beings and then become disappointed or even disgusted by their simple, physical humanity. It’s the best thing Hitchcock ever did, and knowing who is actually who doesn’t change that.

On the other hand you have The Usual Suspects, which, after you have learned the identity of Keyser Soze, really isn’t very good.

Read the rest. (Pictured above: Kim Novak, James Stewart, and Kim Novak, in a publicity image for Vertigo.)

Where have all the Sontags gone?

At The Awl, I respond to an essay by Lee Siegel:

It would be easy to dismiss Lee Siegel’s piece—“Where Have All the Mailers [he means Norman] Gone?”) in the New York Observer this week—but what fun would that be? Siegel, writing in typically bombastic fashion, obviously intends to start an argument. His essay is essentially a lament for the disappearance of fiction from just that sort of debate: the shared (and perhaps largely imaginary) upper-middle-brow cultural conversation many of us try to engage in by reading magazines like the New Yorker and going to see certain movies, etc. I enjoy that conversation, too; so let's have at it.

Read the rest.

(Pictured above: Susan Sontag in 1962, photographed by Fred W. McDarrah.)

Where is the Great Mormon Novel?

I tackle that question for Slate, in light of a new book by Brady Udall:

In 1888, a bishop and one-time newspaper editor spoke to a gathering of young Mormons about literature. “We will yet have Miltons and Shakespeares of our own,” he told them. It was more prediction than prophecy, but Orson F. Whitney eventually became an apostle of the church, and his words, published in a short-lived Mormon monthly, survived; I first heard them in my teens, quoted by a Sunday school teacher. More than a century after his remarks, bookish Mormons still occasionally get to thinking about those latter-day Miltons and Shakespeares and ask, “Well, where are they?”

Read the rest. And check out Alan Wolfe’s take, also published today by Slate, on the Book of Mormon as a literary text. I wrote about the Book of Mormon myself several years ago, for the London Review of Books.

(Pictured above: Orson F. Whitney.)

Baseball’s biggest bargain

My brief review of The Eastern Stars: How Baseball Changed the Dominican Town of San Pedro de Macorís, by Mark Kurlansky, is up at the Barnes & Noble Review:

In 1960, the U.S. government began an embargo against Cuba; five years later, Major League Baseball instituted the amateur draft. As Mark Kurlansky points out in The Eastern Stars: How Baseball Changed the Dominican Town of San Pedro de Macorís, these two decisions helped make the Dominican Republic—a small country that until 1956 had not produced a single Major League player—the world’s greatest per capita source of Major Leaguers. Dominican players became baseball’s biggest bargain; last year, one in every ten Major Leaguers was Dominican.

Read the rest. And go Sox.

(The pitcher above is Juan Marichal, still the only Dominican in Major League Baseball’s Hall of Fame.)

The rest is fallout.

In the new Bookforum, I review another debut:

Brian Hart’s debut novel, Then Came the Evening, begins with a calamitous misunderstanding. Bandy Dorner, hungover and in trouble with two police officers, is told that his cabin burned down the night before. Bandy assumes his wife, Iona, was inside, and in a confused fury he shoots one of the cops, killing him. But Iona, we soon learn, did not die in the fire. She took off with her new man earlier that night—just after she burned down the cabin.

The rest is fallout.

Read the rest.

“One should never tell anyone anything.”

Today in The National, I write about the massive and fantastic novel Your Face Tomorrow by Javier Marías (pictured left), the third volume of which has just been published in English.

Your Face Tomorrow, the enormously ambitious novel in three volumes by the Spanish writer Javier Marías, began seven years ago with a warning: “One should never tell anyone anything.” Not that Marías or his narrator, Jaime Deza, believes this advice – both go on to violate it for nearly 1,300 pages. But that opening remark haunts all that follows. Like so much fiction by Marías, Your Face Tomorrow returns again and again to the moral complications of storytelling: the hidden motives behind the stories we tell; the inevitable inaccuracies of language; the way that just listening to a story can implicate us in what it recounts. As the narrator of another Marias novel, Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, says: “the only safe option would be never to say or do anything”.

Read the rest.

From Chance the Gardener to Joe the Plumber

Today in Slate, I argue that Hal Ashby’s best movies—culminating in his masterpiece, Being There—are deeply political.

Unlike Network—made four years earlier and based on the fear that one man could amass enormous influence on the airwaves—Being There suggests that television's real threat is the way it scatters our attention among random stimuli. As Eve says in the clip above, we now have too much information, and it's all become "a muddle." Which is precisely why Chance—mistaken by Eve's husband for an economist named Chauncey Gardener—can rise to prominence by obliviously spouting platitudes like "as long as the roots are not severed, all will be well" and "growth has it seasons." Soon the president of the United States is echoing his remarks, and Chance himself is invited to share his wisdom on the talk show circuit—a trajectory that, at this point, feels sadly familiar.

Read the rest.

(Above, Chance the gardener watches television.)

Bruce Springsteen, 1975

Over at the Barnes & Noble Review, I consider Louis P. Masur's new book, Runaway Dream: Born to Run and Bruce Springsteen's American Vision:

In May of 1974, Jon Landau saw a little-known band open for Bonnie Raitt in Harvard Square, then went home and penned perhaps the most famous line in all of pop music criticism: "I saw rock and roll's future and its name is Bruce Springsteen." That's as gutsy as reviewing gets: personal, uncompromising -- and also pretty wide of the mark. The future of rock and roll was punk and heavy metal, followed by indie rock and its offshoots. Springsteen, who turns 60 in a few weeks, is an incredible talent, and 35 years ago he had a great career ahead of him. But his music, his lyrics, and his public persona have always had much less to do with the future than with the past.

Read the rest. By the way, the house in New Jersey where Springsteen was living when he wrote Born to Run is currently on sale for $299,000. This is the house that Bob Dylan might have been looking for as he wandered alone through the rain a few weeks ago.

(The postcard above was produced for ten shows Springsteen played at the Bottom Line in Greenwich Village to promote his forthcoming album to New York's rock cognoscenti.)

“...imminent, comet-delivered doom.”

I’ve written a short review of Everything Matters! by Ron Currie, Jr., for Bookforum:

Ron Currie Jr. writes fiction that a Hollywood executive might call high-concept. His first book, God Is Dead (2007), imagines life on earth after God has taken human form—in Darfur, no less—and died. His second, Everything Matters!, tells the story of a young man called Junior, born in Maine in 1974, who is informed at birth by a voice in his head that the world will end roughly six months after his thirty-sixth birthday. Everything Matters! is largely free of sci-fi trappings and dwells frequently on familiar human dilemmas, but its “What if?”–style premise keeps the story moving. The reader roots for Junior to get his act together and win back his girlfriend, while also wondering whether he’s going to save the planet from its imminent, comet-delivered doom.

Read the rest.

The Theory of Light and Matter

I've written a short review for the new issue of Bookforum:

"Hole," the opening story in Andrew Porter's debut collection, The Theory of Light and Matter, draws a blueprint for the nine that follow: A young man looks back on his suburban childhood, recalling the strange hole in his neighbor's driveway and the day, a decade before, his friend climbed into it and died. The book's other narrators struggle with the metaphoric gaps that manifest themselves in otherwise ordinary lives. "As he entered me for the first time," a woman says about her soon-to-be fiancé, "it seemed that I had just opened up a hole in my life." "A father's decision to leave home had left a hole in our lives," says a boy, "though we did not talk about that hole."

"...at least it's an ethos."

With the 10th anniversary of The Big Lebowski upon us, I present the argument in Slate today that Walter Sobchak, the bellicose Vietnam vet played by John Goodman, is a neocon:

If that seems like a stretch, consider the traits Walter exhibits over the course of the film: faith in American military might (the Gulf War, he says, "is gonna be a piece of cake"; in the original script, he calls it "a fucking cakewalk"); nostalgia for the Cold War ("Charlie," he says, referring to the Viet Cong, was a "worthy fuckin' adversary"); strong support for the state of Israel (to judge from his reverent paraphrase of Theodor Herzl: "If you will it, Dude, it is no dream"); and even, perhaps, past affiliation with the left (he refers knowingly to Lenin's given name and admits to having "dabbled in pacifism"). Goodman, who has called the role his all-time favorite, seems also to have sensed Walter's imperialist side. "Dude has a rather, let's say, Eastern approach to bowling," he said in an interview. "Walter is strictly Manifest Destiny."

(That's Walter up there on the left, by the way, played by John Goodman, and doing his best Colin Powell.)

Daniel Mendelsohn's essays

In the New York Observer this week, I review Daniel Mendelsohn's How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken, a collection of his (brilliant) essays:

Daniel Mendelsohn brightens the dour New York Review of Books like few other contributors. This is partly thanks to his subject matter: neither Iraq nor climate change but literature, theater and the movies. It’s also thanks to his—not style, exactly; Mr. Mendelsohn’s a gifted writer, but the prose of his essays is less lyrical than that of his books, The Lost (2006) and The Elusive Embrace (1999). What distinguishes his criticism, rather, is a willingness to address not just the arts but their reception. He writes reviews as cultural commentary, and he’s more or less mastered the form.