The Amphibium, pt. 2
This is Vol. 2 of the Amphibium, and I'm already a little behind.
Stitching and unstitching
The current issue of Harper's Magazine includes my review of the Nocilla Trilogy by the Spanish novelist and physicist Agustin Fernández Mallo. The subhed of the piece is “Spain’s answer to Knausgaard arrives in English,” the kind of line that editors love and writers hate, which puts me in an awkward position, since I am both the writer of the piece and an editor at the magazine that published it. (If you don’t know much about Knausgaard, I also wrote about him recently for Harper’s.) In fact, Fernández Mallo’s three short novels are not much like Karl Ove Knausgaard’s very long autobiographical project, My Struggle, but they do have enough things in common to justify the comparison, chief among them the pace at which they were written. Each of the three “Nocilla” books was completed over the course of a few months:
This is an impressive pace, in its way, but these days the competition is fierce. Fernández Mallo’s work arrives in the United States as part of a procession of books that have foregrounded the velocity of their composition. Knausgaard’s three-thousand page My Struggle was written at a rate of up to twenty pages a day. His four follow-up books, the Seasons Quartet, were composed as a series of daily journal entries and published without revision. The Scottish writer Ali Smith is now three volumes into her own Seasonal Quartet, books that have been written in a matter of weeks and published almost immediately after their completion. The first of them, Autumn, is set in the aftermath of the Brexit vote, and it was in bookstores just four months after the referendum took place. Olivia Laing’s Crudo was written in seven weeks, during which Laing gave her Twitter followers more or less daily updates on her progress. Where once it was a mark of high-art seriousness to work on a book for two decades, now the real cred comes from getting it done in two months.
In the piece I talk a bit about what value this kind of speed might have for a writer, as well as some of the costs that come with it. All of these books, in their different ways, read as though they were written quickly, which is part of the point, but if that doesn’t sound exactly like a compliment, that’s because it isn’t.
While reading Fernández Mallo, I thought often of W.B. Yeats, who wrote of poets, “A line will take us hours maybe,/Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,/Our stitching and unstitching have been naught.” There seem to be more and more writers who just skip the “stitching and unstitching” part and leave the moment’s thought at that.
I tend to be on the opposite end of the spectrum, which has its own cost; you do, after all, want these things to seem a moment’s thought. But it occurred to me—just this moment, in fact—that this newsletter is in part an effort to send something out into the world with a little less stitching.
Ars Poetica
This same issue also has a remembrance of Philip Roth by Benjamin Taylor, who was one of Roth’s close friends and early readers. (Roth's late novel Exit Ghost is dedicated “To BT.”) Ben is working on a book about his friendship with Roth, and this piece, which was delivered at a memorial service for Roth, will be a chapter from it. If you are a fan of Roth’s work, it’s well worth reading.
I met the great man a handful of times, all by way of Ben. At one party, Ben very kindly got me seated next to Roth for a few minutes, first telling him that I was a would-be novelist and admirer of his work. Roth was somewhat gruff and forbidding in the way of his public reputation, until something caught his eye: a purse on the seat next to him, presumably left there by one of the other guests. He began, quite openly and unapologetically, to look through it.
I think I said something like, “Are you really doing that?” To which he immediately responded, laughing, “I thought you wanted to be a novelist. That’s all a novelist is—someone who rifles through stranger’s purses.”
So that’s my Roth anecdote, which has always seemed almost too perfect, such that when I tell it, people sometimes look at me as though I’ve made it up. I've always treasured the moment as speaking to Roth's commitment to artistic playfulness, even irresponsibility. Of course, Ii reads a little differently these days—the prerogatives of the great male artist to invade female space as he sees fit—than it did a few years ago.
Other things
At the Paris Review, Matthew Zapruder writes an appreciation of his former teacher, James Tate:
If you are completely unfamiliar with contemporary American poetry, you could do worse than to start with Tate’s two volumes of selected poems, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Selected Poems of 1991, and The Eternal Ones of the Dream: Selected Poems 1990–2010. This would be both edifying and incredibly pleasurable. Tate is a great gateway drug, but unlike a lot of poets one might love in one’s youth, the effect doesn’t wear off. It just gets stronger and weirder.
For the Baffler, Lucy Ives has written a very interesting essay about social fiction in the Age of Trump:
The New Yorker’s turn to topicality and didactic parables caused me to think more about the connection between not just the news and fiction, but social fact and (social) fiction. At the end of the day, even if the plot of Madame Bovary was once ripped from headlines, this, the ripping of material from headlines, is not a reliable means of selecting one’s fictional subjects (see my earlier contentions re: Tom Wolfe). The writer needs a descriptive thickness not necessarily or absolutely associated with sensationalism, if not a personal connection to events.
Life-changing Magic
I have way too many books. The problem is that it takes less time to buy them (or to pick them up off the pile at my office) than to read them, so that no matter how quickly you read, you're always falling behind. (Then, of course, you've got to keep all the books you've read, in case you want to read them again.) Occasionally I try to do a purge, focusing on books I have read but didn’t like enough to pick up again and books that I'm unlikely ever to pick up for a first time. During my last purge I almost tossed an unread copy of Milan Kundera’s Immortality that was given to me as a gift more than a decade ago. Instead, I left it on the shelf, more or less at eye level.
Last weekend, I was running out somewhere. The book I was reading (Joseph and His Brothers) was too big to fit in my coat pocket, and I did not want to bring a bag, but I have a strict policy of never leaving the house without a book. I looked at the shelf and there at eye level was a paperback that precisely fit the pocket of my coat. So I came to read--and thoroughly enjoy--Immortality. One could write quite a bit about the ways that Kundera--who seems to have fallen completely out of fashion--anticipated a lot of the major trends in contemporary fiction. But for now I'm just taking this as a kind of anti-Marie Kondo argument in favor of overflowing shelves full of books you don't ever intend to read.