2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, A Visit From the Goon Squad

I want to begin this post with a little advice (to myself) from John Updike. His five/six rules for reviewing books (from Picked-up Pieces-1975):

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation—at least one extended passage—of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending. (How astounded and indignant was I, when innocent, to find reviewers blabbing, and with the sublime inaccuracy of drunken lords reporting on a peasants’ revolt, all the turns of my suspenseful and surpriseful narrative! Most ironically, the only readers who approach a book as the author intends, unpolluted by pre-knowledge of the plot, are the detested reviewers themselves. And then, years later, the blessed fool who picks the volume at random from a library shelf.)

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author’s ouevre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it’s his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in an ideological battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never (John Aldridge, Norman Podhoretz) try to put the author “in his place,” making him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.

Sage advice I think, especially for newspaper film reviewers, who seem to make a business out of the “fuzzy precis” (more on that in another post). So let me try my best to do an Updikian review of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. The book revolves around two main figures, Bennie Salazar, “an aging former punk rocker and record executive”(back cover), and Sasha, a talented young kleptomaniac Bennie employs. The description of Bennie as “aging”, though, is a bit misleading, as the novel jumps back and forth through time and setting, with a wide variety of narrative voices, usually limited omniscient, but occasionally in other registers. Many of the chapters only include Bennie and Sasha in a peripheral way, and it is really quite fascinating to build your knowledge of the characters obliquely. It is this kind of structural play, I think, that accounts for the Pulitzer, as Egan is truly adept at using postmodern narrative models without turning her work into a Faulknerian labyrinth (i.e. see my friend Will’s travails with The Sound and the Fury).

The Essay

 

“A writer is first of all a reader. It is from reading that I derive the standards by which I measure my own work and according to which I fall lamentably short. It is from reading, even before writing, that I became part of a community – the community of literature – which includes more dead than living writers. Reading, and having standards, are then relations with the past and with what is other.”

-Susan Sontag, The World as India

 

 

One of the things that has become apparent to me working as a teaching assistant and as a writing tutor is the strange discrepancy between the number of essays students write and the number of essays they read. It is deeply surprising to many of them that there are even good essays out there to read. In many ways our highschools are to blame for this. The reading material of the English curriculum is made up almost entirely of novels, with the mandatory Shakespeare thrown in, as well as the odd poem. Despite this, the standard form of output required of students is the essay. Few third and fourth year undergrads, and almost no highschool students, have ever read an essay all the way through, and if they have, they have only done so under the rubric of a course or as research for one of their own papers. It is no surprise to me, then, that students constantly produce tepid, uninspired prose; they have no models for emulation. I went to a highschool that prides itself on academic rigour, and yet I can only recall reading one essay in any of my five years English classes. It was Emerson’s Self Reliance, and only in my senior year. I remember, though, that it was a revelation. Up until that point I had been taught that the best essay was one that followed a predictably dry structure (introduction, including thesis, followed by three main paragraphs each pointing out one piece of evidence supporting that thesis, culminating in a conclusion that restates the thesis), never used the first person, and actively sought to render any interesting subject into the monotonous regurgitation of rote formulae. Emerson, surprisingly, had never been taught this, and wrote as if one might do so for pleasure (God forbid). It is this active opposition to all joy that not only stifles students’ prose, but also turns them against literature, since it teaches students that the appropriate response to literature is formulation. Imagine if, instead of bombarding them with abstract structural models, we introduced students to the essay by example, say this passage from Montaigne’s Of Friendship (prehaps the best essay ever written):

This is Exactly How I Feel About Dangling Participles

I am often shocked at the number of dangling participles and misplaced modifiers I find in the essays of undergraduates, whenever marking their papers. Wait….. NO! I didn’t mean it. Aaaaargh.

PS. A remarkably similar one from Mitchell and Webb.

Long live octopodes!

Classic Novels: I, Claudius

One of several recent successful manifestations of HBO’s new brand of television drama is the semi-historical epic Rome, which narrates the events of the transition from Roman Republic to Roman Empire. Audacious in scope, attentive to detail, and soaking in gore, the series is compellingly written to appeal to classicists and the uninitiated alike. Like the Ridley Scott film Gladiator, it captured the grandeur and bizarreness of the greatest empire of the ancient world. Unlike the feature film, however, the series provided a reasonably accurate alternative to Scott’s historical ass gravy. I highly recommend the show to anyone who has the stomach.

In many ways, though, a show like Rome could not have existed without a predecessor like Robert Graves’ 1934  I, Claudius, which I read for the first time about a month ago. Narrated in the first person by Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, relating the events leading up to his eventual acclamation as emperor in 41AD, this story takes up almost exactly where the Rome series leaves off, at the height of Augustus’s power. The real Claudius, who was the grandson of Augustus’s wife Livia, had a club foot, a stutter, and was partially deaf. Because of his infirmities Claudius was despised and ostracized by his family. It is probably because of this, though, that he managed to survive the various purges of the Roman nobility carried out by Tiberius and Caligula. Graves uses this historical felicity to channel the ancient accounts Tacitus, Plutarch, and Suetonius (particularly the latter, whose account of Tiberius’s sexual mores will send a chill down your spine) through the intimacy of a fly-on-the-wall observer of all the inner workings of the Roman elite. In this way, the book is endearing, engaging, as well as troubling. Through all the political intrigue, which rivals any John Grisham novel, the reader encounters a narrator who is clearly of a different age. His nonchalant descriptions of the games in the coliseum, for example, point out just how differently Roman society considered violence, and the value of human life. The following is a nice example of what I mean, in which Claudius describes his frist time attending a gladiatorial combat: “In the first six combats one man was killed, one so seriously wounded that he died the same day, and a third had his shield-arm lopped off close to the shoulder, which caused roars of laughter.” Nevertheless, Claudius’s infirmity  and level-headed self-deprecation endears him to the reader, and one can’t but help to begin to see Rome through his eyes. A wonderful achievement for any writer.

This “intimate strangeness,” I think, is what accounts for the novel’s long-lasting acclaim and popularity, and what made it ideal for its adaptation into the famous BBC television miniseries, which itself became a model for the burgeoning HBO platform of today’s best drama. The show starred some of the famous old-blood of British stage and film, including Brian Blessed as Augustus (of “Gordon’s Alive!” fame, for those who know the reference).  Derek Jacobi, whom my generation will recognise from his role as senator Gracchus in Gladiator, does a stellar job of portraying our stuttering protagonist. If you can embrace certain elements 70’s cheese, the show is as good, and as historically insightful as HBO’s Rome. It’s too bad the same cannot be said of Jacobi’s endorsement the Oxfordian heresy or his involvement with the new film endorsing such tripe. Jacobi’s sins, however, should not be held against the series that made him famous. The novel, which I highly recommend, is a fascinating and entertaining read, and its adaptation for the small screen is as revealing about the history of television as it is about the history of Rome (and is all available on youtube).

I, Claudius Episode 1, “A Touch of Murder,” part 1

Adventures in Etymology # 2: A History of English in 10 Minutes

A wonderfully entertaining brief history of the development of English created by the Open University. Chapter 4, in particular, is a useful followup to my previous post on God’s Secretaries and the King James Bible. Because WordPress does not support playlists, ARRGH!, I have embedded all 10 below.

Yes, there’s more…