Point Omega, by Don DeLillo. Sunday Times, Feb 28, 2010.
March 2, 2010
The Sunday Times
February 28, 2010
Point Omega by Don DeLillo
The Sunday Times review by Stephen Amidon
Point Omega opens in the summer of 2006 at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where an installation called 24 Hour Psycho plays in a large, often empty gallery. The exhibit consists of Hitchcock’s seminal slasher film slowed down so that it lasts an entire day, until the “broad horror of the old gothic movie was subsumed in time”.
This proves a fitting opening to Don DeLillo’s 15th novel, where the dread unravels in devastating slow motion. As Janet Leigh steps into the shower on screen, two spectators enter, a dignified older man with a younger, casually clad companion. After a few moments, the bemused older gent stalks off, pursued by the other man. The action then switches to a house in the California desert, where the pair embark on an emotional duet that is half Samuel Beckett, half Newsnight. The older of the two is the home’s owner, Richard Elster, “a defence intellectual” who played a key role in planning the Iraq War. His guest is Jim Finley, a documentary film-maker whose sole film is about the comedian Jerry Lewis. Finley is trying to convince Elster to appear in a documentary about his involvement in the Iraq invasion, much as the famed film-maker Errol Morris did with Vietnam war architect Robert McNamara in The Fog of War.
Elster, a bone-dry intellectual who has written a scholarly essay about the etymology of the word “rendition”, proves an elusive prey. “A deathbed conversion,” he scolds Finley when asked to go before camera. “This is what you want. The foolishness, the vanity of the intellectual. The blind vanity, the worship of power. Forgive me, absolve me.”
Gradually, however, Elster opens up off screen. “A great power has to act,” he says in self-justification. “We were struck hard. We need to retake the future.” He explains, in a chilling echo of the real instigators of the assault on Iraq, that “lying is necessary. The state has to lie. There is no lie in war or preparation for war that can’t be defended. We went beyond this. We tried to create new realities overnight, careful sets of words that resemble advertising slogans in memorability and repeatability”.
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Elster is no Rumsfeldian stick figure, however. There is pain beneath the pomposity. However brash and self-assured he may at times seem, there is clearly a deep unease gnawing at him, a reason why he has fled to this harsh, remote terrain. “Time falling away. That’s what I feel here…time becoming slowly older.” The featureless desert is his “omega point”, a black hole where he might pass completely out of being and, conceivably, move beyond the pain and guilt of the war he helped wage. “We want to be the dead matter we used to be,” he claims against the bleak backdrop. “We’re the last billionth of a second in the evolution of matter.”
Elster’s quest for self-nullification is forestalled by the arrival of his daughter Jessie, an unemployed woman in her mid-twenties who is fleeing a relationship with a domineering boyfriend back in New York. She is a strange girl, edgeless and almost silent. “She wasn’t a child who needed imaginary friends,” her father explains. “She was imaginary to herself.”
Finley finds himself attracted to her, but before he can make a move, the real reason for her visit becomes apparent in a startling turn of events. Finley and Elster are left baffled and undermined. The film shoot is over before it even began. All they can do is pack their bags and return to civilisation. “The story was here,” Finley finally understands, “not in Iraq or in Washington, and we were leaving it behind and taking it with us, both.”
While some may find Point Omega’s brevity and slow pace off-putting, the patient reader will uncover a devastating vein of disquiet running beneath its tomb-cool surface. As in his recent novel Falling Man, which dealt with the attacks of 9/11, DeLillo chooses to take an oblique approach to a topic that might be blinding if viewed straight on. Like a hidden picture in a bland canvas, Elster’s desolation is difficult to make out at first. Once lodged in the mind, however, it is impossible to forget.
Cheever, A Life, by Blake Bailey, Sunday Times, Nov 15, 2009
February 21, 2010
The Sunday Times
November 15, 2009
Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey
American author John Cheever
The Sunday Times review by Stephen Amidon
In 1979, three years before his death, a survey found that John Cheever ranked third (behind Saul Bellow and John Updike) among living American writers whose work was expected to “endure and be read by future generations”. This fame was not to last, however. As Blake Bailey points out in his compelling biography of the great short-story writer, “if Cheever were eligible for such a survey today…it’s unlikely he would appear anywhere in the top 20”.
Given this diminished reputation, it is now hard to believe that Cheever’s face once graced the covers of Time and Newsweek, and he was even featured in a Rolex advert. During his prime in the 1950s, he was the Chekhov of the American suburb, an eminently civilised voice whose tales of philandering commuters and lonely housewives (a staggering 121 of which were published in The New Yorker) defined Mad Men territory. In The Five-Forty-Eight, for instance, a businessman on an evening commuter train is confronted by his gun-toting jilted mistress. In The Swimmer, a disillusioned suburbanite decides to swim home from a cocktail party through his neighbours’ pools. In Cheever’s own words, his stories depict “a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat”.
Cheever certainly fitted the bill as the bard of the upper middle class. Born in 1912 into an ‘‘old’’ Boston family, the sort with ancestors named Ezekiel, he had a headmaster’s face and a crisp waspish voice. Married with three children, he lived in a leafy New York suburb, where he served as a volunteer fireman. He wore smoking jackets and had a fling with the wholesome blonde actress Hope Lange. His stories had the authority of inside jobs, written by a man who understood what it was like to worry about how his lawn looked.
Soon after Cheever’s death, however, this image crumbled with the publication of his letters and journals. The author, it turned out, was a serious drunk who would bolt gin before lunchtime. At the age of 50, he suffered a bout of delirium tremens so severe that he thought a copy of The New York Times containing a rave review of his work was, in fact, a confession the KGB was making him sign.
Even more shocking were revelations of his secret taste for homosexual sex, including rough trade with men picked up in train stations. This tension between image and reality only increased his need to drink, and to write. “In an upper-class gathering I suddenly think of myself as a pariah,” he confessed in his journals, “a small and dirty fraud, a deserved outcast, a spiritual and sexual impostor, a loathsome thing.”
Bailey’s frank depiction of this hidden life raises the question of how central these revelations were to Cheever’s eventual loss of status. Did the country-club types who formed his ideal readership drop him once they discovered he was prowling the men’s room at Grand Central Station? Or was his decline more a question of changing literary fashions, as postmodernism and dirty realism gained sway?
Bailey’s biography makes it clear that while both of these featured in Cheever’s declining reputation, the central reason for his fall from grace is that he abandoned the short story to seek legitimacy as a novelist, even though he was never at his best with the longer form. One of his editors wondered “how Cheever could compress the material for four or five novels into 20-odd pages” while leaving his novels feeling relatively threadbare.
This misguided quest was fuelled in part by financial insecurity, and by the need to keep up with his great rivals, Updike and JD Salinger. According to Bailey, by 1971, “never again would [Cheever] complete another ambitious, first-rate short story”. Even though his novels were critically acclaimed and, in the case of Falconer, bestsellers, they failed to enter the canon in the same way as Rabbit, Run or The Catcher in the Rye.
One closes Bailey’s monumental study hoping that Cheever’s stories will gain their proper place in that canon. The Stories of John Cheever, which won the Pulitzer prize in 1978, remains the greatest single collection of short fiction by an American. As Bailey points out, Cheever’s work encompasses the entire range of the short story, deploying not just stark suburban realism but also magic, whimsy and humour to expose the soul of the American middle class. They should be read by anyone interested in the genre.
It took a Hollywood film, last year’s Revolutionary Road, to resuscitate the reputation of another great chronicler of the American suburbs, Richard Yates (the subject of Bailey’s previous biography). One can only hope that some A-list producer is currently making his way through Cheever’s stories with a similar resurrection in mind.
Cheever by Blake Bailey
Picador £25 pp770
JD Salinger’s silent rebel yell. Sunday Times, Jan. 31, 2010
January 31, 2010
The Sunday Times
January 31, 2010
JD Salinger’s silent rebel yell
The author of The Catcher in the Rye, who died last week, was the voice of teenage angst, but the words he never published are almost as important
He stopped publishing in 1965 and retreated from the world but his influence continued, stretching beyond literature to the worlds of film and rock music
Stephen Amidon and Robert Collins (interviews)
JD Salinger was never just a writer. From the moment his debut novel, The Catcher in the Rye, started being passed around by angst-ridden American teenagers in 1951, it became clear that the book’s influence on a world that its author so clearly mistrusted would be immense.
Over the next half-century this story of a teenage prep school dropout named Holden Caulfield would echo far beyond the classrooms where it was both the most assigned and the most banned book of its time. Salinger has spoken like no other author to the fringes of society, from indie rockers to cutting-edge film-makers to deranged assassins. Beloved by people who might not ever read another novel, he was the poet of youthful alienation before youth really knew what that was.
Anyone who doubts the breadth and depth of Salinger’s influence need only look at the roster of gunmen who found warped inspiration in Caulfield. Mark David Chapman had practically learnt The Catcher in the Rye by heart by the time he killed John Lennon in 1980.
After the shooting, Chapman reportedly sat on the pavement and began to read the book inside whose cover he had inscribed the words, “This is my statement”. John Hinckley, who shot President Ronald Reagan less than six months later, was also obsessed with the novel .
While it would be unfair in the extreme to say that Salinger deliberately inspired killers, The Catcher in the Rye, which has sold more than 65m copies since publication, certainly speaks to the wounded, estranged sensibility that seems to exist primarily in teenagers — and in those who cannot let go of being teenagers.
All Salinger’s characters are brilliant, hypersensitive outcasts who think they can see through the world’s phoneyness even though this clarity brings them nothing but pain. Caulfield in particular captures the bewilderment of adolescence better than any American character since Huckleberry Finn.
“Salinger’s voice as a writer seemed to confirm the reality of adolescence for me,” says Andrew O’Hagan, the novelist. “This was a guy who homed in on a particular dismay that can exist in people who are between childhood and adulthood. I think he made poetry of that.”
“He saw the teenager,” Hanif Kureishi agrees. “The teenager was always going to be there in the post-war period and he was the first person to put his finger on it, to exemplify it.”
Salinger’s influence was perhaps at its strongest in the 1960s, when youthful rebellion was still finding its voice. Nowadays, when teenagers are practically expected to run wild, there is less hunger for his work.
“I read him when I was a teenager and a young man, in my teens and twenties,” claims Martin Amis. “It was like someone shining a torch on your own thoughts … I think it was a very pure voice he had. There was no one like him.” Amis, however, admits to not having looked at Salinger’s work in years. Indeed, there is something of a childhood romance about this infatuation among writers. It has been said that The Catcher in the Rye has influenced more first novels than any other book but has never inspired a second.
“I very much loved his books,” says Will Self. “I loved them obsessively. And then I repudiated them. I think I understood even in my teens that Salinger was essentially a case of the genius as arrested development, that there was something sentimental and pretentious about his writing.”
Salinger’s influence in other genres defies these limits. Rock bands from the Cure to the Beastie Boys have acknowledged deep debts to his work.
Salinger also wielded a powerful influence over the film world, even though the only movie directly based on his work is the forgotten My Foolish Heart (1949), which is based on Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut, a short story published in The New Yorker in 1948. Salinger hated it so much that he never permitted a film version of The Catcher in the Rye. This did not prevent it being one of the most sought-after properties of the past halfcentury. Actors from Jack Nicholson to Tobey Maguire hungered after the role of Caulfield, although no one seemed to want it more than Jerry Lewis, a fact that makes Salinger’s reluctance understandable. Then there’s the film-maker Wes Anderson. The protagonist of Anderson’s movie Rushmore, a failing student with a broad interest in extracurricular activities, is clearly based on Salinger himself. Anderson’s oddball masterpiece The Royal Tenenbaums is inspired by Salinger’s stories of the Glass family, whose seven siblings share the same intelligence and piercing cynicism as the Tenenbaum kids. Legend has it that Nicholson’s haunted writer in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, who goes mad as he retypes the same sentence, is a gloss on Salinger in his later years. Which brings up a less tangible but equally profound influence that Salinger exerts over the imagination of rebels — his silence. Almost as important as the words he has published are those he has not. In her essay The Aesthetics of Silence, Susan Sontag claims silence “is the artist’s ultimate other-worldly gesture; by silence, he frees himself from servile bondage to the world, which appears as patron, client, audience, antagonist, arbiter and distorter of his work”.
Salinger’s silence is one of his most powerful artistic statements. “There is a marvellous peace in not publishing,” he once claimed. “I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.” He stopped publishing in 1965, retreating to an impenetrable New England compound. Its numbing isolation was described by Joyce Maynard, his teenage lover, in her 1998 memoir At Home in the World, which pictured a manipulative, health-obsessed recluse who ate frozen peas for breakfast.
Salinger’s silence was further bolstered when he stopped Ian Hamilton, the British writer, from publishing a 1986 biography in a lawsuit that went all the way to the US Supreme Court. The novelist Don DeLillo’s Mao II (1991) is a haunting study of a burnt-out writer, clearly based on Salinger, who is at work on a “dead” novel that occupies an entire room of his fortress-like home.
What will be uncovered when the safes where Salinger reportedly kept his later work are opened is one of the most tantalising mysteries of contemporary writing.
Generosity, By Richard Powers. Sunday Times, Jan 10, 2010
January 10, 2010
January 10, 2010
Generosity by Richard Powers
The Sunday Times review by Stephen Amidon
Everybody wants to be happy. But does anyone want to be happy all the time? Without shades of melancholy grey, wouldn’t perpetual bliss make life unbearably bland, a sort of whited-out death on earth?
These questions stand at the heart of Richard Powers’s provocative 10th novel. Set in contemporary Chicago, it ponders the fast-approaching time when neuroscience will allow us to control our emotions. The story centres on Thassa Amzwar, a 23-year-old Algerian immigrant who has fled that nation’s brutal civil war after the slaughter of most of her family. Although she has much more reason to be depressed than the self-involved American students at her film school, Thassa is the picture of happiness, emerging from the “walking corpse” of Algeria “glowing like a blessed-out mystic”.
Not surprisingly, that sort of personality doesn’t go unnoticed in a nation founded on the pursuit of happiness. Her writing professor, Russell Stone, a depressed has-been, quickly falls in love with her and starts to worry that her apparent happiness might be a case of “massive anesthesia from post-traumatic stress disorder”. After Thassa sees off a would-be rapist by the sheer positive power of her personality, there is no longer any chance of hiding her brilliant light under a bushel. She comes to the attention of Thomas Kurton, a visionary geneticist who believes she can help him isolate the happiness gene. After he apparently hits pay dirt, the media circus comes to town, leading to blanket coverage in the national press and an invitation to appear on an Oprah-type chat show. In a country where happiness is seen as something that can be purchased on the open market, Thassa becomes “pretty much a publicly traded commodity”. Soon, the pressure threatens to take a toll on her that Algeria’s death squads were never able to exact.
Powers, whose previous novel The Echo Maker won the National Book Award, has always been adept at exploring the problematic frontiers of contemporary science. Here, his acuity and satire are as sharp as ever, allowing him to deconstruct brilliantly the commercially charged world of genome mapping, where a few Brahmins are well on the way to patenting and controlling the stuff of our being. “Homo sapiens is already divided…into demigods and dispossessed, those who can tame living chemistry and those who are mere downstream products.”
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He also takes some effective swipes at the mass media and at college writing courses, where “feelings are the new facts. Memoir is the new history. Tell-alls are the new news”.
What really makes Generosity tick, however, are its characters, who are as multifaceted and alive as any Powers has ever created. Kurton is the sort of rabid capitalist who makes optimism seem like one of the seven deadly sins. His belief in a future where everyone will be bathed in gladness should make readers long to retreat back into the gloom of our depressing past. Stone is also a fine creation, a gifted nonfiction writer whose 15 minutes of fame ended when he realised he didn’t have the stomach for telling unhappy truths about his fellow man.
It is Thassa, though, who holds pride of place in the novel. With her, Powers shows that a predisposition for bliss can, ironically, make a person’s life hell. As the corporate smiley faces begin to close in on Thassa, the reader is placed in the unusual position of rooting for a beloved heroine by wishing a bracing dose of misery on her
Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem, Sunday Times Jan 3, 2010
January 3, 2010
Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem
Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving
The Sunday Times review by Stephen Amidon
John Irving’s new novel is often as turbulent as the river that provides its name. It contains dog fights, drownings, shotgun blasts, fatal car wrecks, severed limbs, babies in peril, and, as with many other Irving novels, the threat of bear attacks. In one memorable scene, a naked skydiver plummets into a pigsty. Although it never quite achieves the narrative frenzy that made Irving famous in The World According to Garp, his fans will not be disappointed, especially when stacking the book against its anaemic competition. The story opens in a New Hampshire logging camp in 1954, where a widower named Dominic Baciagalupo works as a cook. He is assisted by his fragile, dreamy 12-year-old son, Daniel. Their hard lives are made all the more difficult when Daniel inadvertently kills a member of their tightly knit community, a tragic mistake that sends father and son into a five-decade exile. Boston, Vermont, Iowa, Colorado and Canada all provide way stations as they flee the insane local deputy sheriff who has vowed revenge on them for the incident. Along the way, Dominic changes his name and becomes a successful restaurateur, while his son also adopts a new identity to become a famous novelist, whose output is not dissimilar to that of one John Irving.
Last Night in Twisted River is at its best in its depiction of the long, meandering course a life can take. “As for the river, it just kept moving, as rivers do — as rivers do,” Irving writes, though he might just as easily be talking about his protagonists as any body of water. Few other writers labour as tirelessly to construct complete human beings on the page. From the big geopolitical issues of the day to the feel of an Indian woman’s unfurled braid, Irving strives to include just about everything that goes into creating a consciousness. As usual, there are also plenty of comically violent set pieces, most notably the assassination of a dangerous dog and a square dance held on an ice-covered river. There is even a cameo by a sagacious Kurt Vonnegut. Most novels are too expensive these days; you just happen not to feel quite so profligate when consuming Irving. This generosity is most apparent with Daniel, yet another Irving hero who occupies that fertile territory between the author’s autobiography and his unbridled imagination. Daniel’s novels might closely resemble Irving’s (including one about abortion that is made into an Oscar-winning movie that sounds a lot like The Cider House Rules), but he is also very much his own man, one who seems to attract tragedy like an uncovered honey pot draws flies.
Lesser characters also leap from the page, such as Lady Sky, that naked parachutist, and Aunt Filomena, the apparently mousy spinster who provides a teenage Daniel with his sexual education. Irving proves rather less successful with a crusty old logger named Ketchum, who, perhaps not coincidentally, shares the name of the Idaho village where Hemingway killed himself. With Ketchum, Irving’s glorious excesses become simply excessive, bringing to mind not so much a believable character as a character actor trying to be colourful. As in previous books such as Garp and A Widow for One Year, Irving also meditates on the art of fiction throughout the narrative, though there is now a playfulness to this authorial self-consciousness.
At one point, Ketchum criticises Danny for an over-reliance on semi-colons, saying “they look like someone smashed a fly over the comma”. This causes the reader to notice the absence of this form of punctuation from the text, but also to wonder what Ketchum might think of all Irving’s dashes. Elsewhere, Irving seems to poke fun at his own tendency to long-windedness when he notes how Dominic detects “a kind of logorrhoea had possessed his son” in the middle part of his career.
Despite numerous similarities to Garp and The Hotel New Hampshire, Last Night in Twisted River is ultimately somewhat calmer than those books. The story is turbulent, yes, but there are also plenty of backwaters and eddies. Perhaps the author’s jacket photo provides a clue to the change. There is gray hair showing in his prose as well as on his pate, and the wise twinkle in those once pugnacious eyes also permeates his storytelling. Not that this will detract from the reader’s pleasure. After all, just because a performing bear is winking at you does not mean that his tricks have lost their charms.
Spooner, by Pete Dexter, Globe and Mail, Oct 15, 2009
October 16, 2009
The Daily Review, Thursday, Oct. 15
Dunce Moves Pete Dexter
Pete Dexter’s latest novel follows the ill-advised antics of a man not gifted with a strong intellect who manages to thrive nonetheless
Warren Spooner, the eponymous hero of Pete Dexter’s richly comic new novel, is a very naughty boy. Raised in Kennedy-era Georgia, he manages to get himself kicked out of kindergarten for sprouting a precocious erection every time he draws close to his pretty young teacher. Soon after his expulsion, he begins to terrorize his sleepy town by sneaking into neighbors’ houses at night and urinating into the shoes of unsuspecting owners. And then there’s the incident where he plants himself on a teeming colony of fire ants, just to see how it feels. People around him can be forgiven for suspecting nothing good will come of the boy.
But Spooner discovers in his teens that he has a gift for something other than sociopathic mayhem – he can throw a baseball. He is drafted into the big leagues, only to have his elbow disintegrate before he can strike it rich. After a few shiftless years in door-to-door sales and a busted marriage in Florida, he winds up in Philadelphia, where an auspicious combination of talent and incompetence lands him a job as a tabloid columnist. He also starts writing novels that share plots and even titles with the early work of one Pete Dexter, who also worked for a spell as a newspaper columnist in Philadelphia. The novel ends with Spooner living on an island in Washington State, where he proves himself singularly unwilling to go gentle into that good night. And that’s about it. Unlike the best of Dexter’s earlier novels, Brotherly Love, The Paperboy and the National Book Award-winning Paris Trout, Spooner relies more on tone and character than a surging plot to work its magic.
With Warren Spooner, Dexter has just the hero to carry this load. Anarchic, stubborn, befuddled and shrewd, he wins over the reader from the moment he is born. Although each of his siblings proves to be intellectually gifted, Spooner is deemed a dunce by most everyone, including himself. “He had a certain curiosity about how that might feel, to be intelligent, but didn’t dwell on it when it didn’t come.” Women seem particularly down on him, notably his first wife, Honey, who, “like so many women of Spooner’s acquaintance … looked at him one day and seemed to come all at once to her senses. It was always the same, like they’d wandered into a pet store and almost bought a monkey.” And yet Spooner somehow manages to thrive, perhaps because he lives in a world where so many smart people seem intent on cornering the market in stupidity.
Dexter structures his story upon a series of deftly drawn set pieces. One of the best involves a high-school football coach named Evelyn Tinker, a man who manages to combine pig ignorance and boundless self-confidence in such a perfect balance that it’s a wonder he is not a Republican congressman. Like so many coaches, he’s fond of exhorting his players to give more than 100 per cent, and sticks stubbornly to his guns when challenged by a pie-chart-drawing geometry teacher. “What I’m trying to instill in these individuals is to want a bigger pie,” the coach explains, “which the only way to get it is to give a hundred and twenty per cent.”
Equally captivating is Harry Faint, a heavyweight boxer with an unfortunate name whose main pugilistic skill is the ability to take a punch. He endures such a pounding after his arrival in Philadelphia from the wilds in Texas that “it is possible that in the history of the democracy no citizen has ever had his nose broken by so many different people in one week.” Spooner meets him, in all places, at a literary luncheon honouring Margaret Truman, the daughter of the former president whose attempt at novel writing proves as inept as her earlier career as an opera singer. “The sentences rolled out of Mrs. Truman, bloodless and arthritic, one after another, more dangling fancies stuck to the ends than a French tickler.”
It is Harry who accompanies Spooner on his most perilous adventure, an ill-advised but altogether characteristic trek to a South Philadelphia bar to confront the enraged family of a small-time drug dealer Spooner insulted in his column. Spooner barely survives the ensuing riot, though any notion that he has learned his lesson is put to rest in the novel’s final chapters, as he once again enters combat, this time with an obnoxious neighbour. Their prolonged battle, both funny and menacing, is a perfect finale for this fine novel, proving that, although Spooner may be getting old, when it comes to riling people up he is still willing to give it 120 per cent.
Beginners by Raymond Carver, Sunday Times, Oct 4, 2009
October 4, 2009
Beginners by Raymond Carver
Raymond Carver, Syracuse, New York. (1984)
(Bob Adelman)
In the summer of 1980, after reading the edited manuscript of his second collection, the great American short-story writer Raymond Carver sent a pained letter to his editor, Gordon Lish. Although Lish, while working at Esquire magazine, had made Carver’s name by publishing much of his early work, the author was stunned to discover that his friend, now a book editor at Knopf, had cut his manuscript by more than 50%. A recovering alcoholic, Carver begged Lish to scrap the project, claiming that his “very sanity [was] on the line” if publication were to proceed.
Lish would not budge. The resulting book, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, was published with his drastic edits. Carver did not lose his sanity, however. Instead, he became famous, earning an ecstatic front-page review from the New York Times Book Review, and freedom from a hardscrabble life. But the damage had been done to their relationship. In the years leading up to Carver’s premature death from lung cancer in 1988, Lish would have no influence on the career he had helped fashion.
Recent revelations about the extent of Lish’s editing have threatened to damage Carver’s reputation as the most important short-story writer of the past 30 years, his matter-of-fact style influencing auth- ors as diverse as Tobias Wolff and Jay McInerney. As with William Golding and Charles Monteith, or F Scott Fitzgerald and Maxwell Perkins, the apparent disclosure of a deeply collaborative relationship between author and editor challenged the whole notion of great writing being the result of lonely genius. Now, editors William L Stull and Maureen P Carroll, working with the blessing of Carver’s widow, Tess Gallagher, have attempted to set the record straight, “restoring” the original manuscript from beneath the thick canopy of Lish’s pen and publishing it under the title of Beg-inners. The goal is to establish that Carver was the victim of editorial meddling who would have soared higher even sooner if not for Lish.
The truth, however, is somewhat more complicated than the simple tale of a Svengalian editor taking advantage of a brittle author. In contrasting the Beginners manuscript with the published volume, it grows clear that Lish often had good reason to wield his red biro. Several of the 17 stories Carver submitted for publication benefit from radical reduction. The story Carver called Want to See Something? (but Lish published as I Could See the Smallest Things) is a cumbersome piece whose memorable image of poisoned slugs is diminished by the inclusion of a subplot involving an albino child. Lish rightly excised this ham-fisted ana-logy, and the story came into its own.
Similarly, Pie, which Lish renamed A Serious Talk, ends with a spasm of marital violence that feels at odds with the comic mayhem wreaked earlier by its alcoholic narrator. Lish changes the ending to include a petty theft that perfectly encapsulates the story’s dramatic trajectory. To his credit, even Carver admitted that the edit was “inspired and wonderful”.
Despite these improvements, Lish’s editorial bravado often does cross the line into a disquieting infringement. In two of the stories, Lish changes the names of several characters to no obvious effect. Perhaps he thought that transforming Kate into Melody would better evoke a working-class milieu, though there is a real arrogance in anyone telling America’s premier dirty realist how babies are named in the nation’s trailer parks. In Gazebo, Lish whimsically changes a hotel room number from 22 to 11, as if a 50% reduction will somehow defray printing costs. Elsewhere in the story, he adds the phrase “with a stick” to Carver’s “You couldn’t beat it”, an addition that would tempt many writers to set about their editors with a similar implement.
In the story The Fling, whose title Lish unwisely changes to Sacks, a smug narrator uses the word “sordid” to describe his father’s confession of marital infidelity. Lish cuts this in the edited manuscript, a seemingly small change that nevertheless sets the tone for his later demolition of the story’s emotional foundation. And in the story that was to give the title to both collections, Lish almost completely removes an important subplot involving an old couple, thereby depriving the writing of its emotional resonance.
All of which leaves the question of why Lish did it. The answer appears to be literary taste. Lish, while an editor at Esquire, was one of the great champions of the laconic, unsentimental “minimalist” style that was to dominate the American short story in the 1970s. From Carver’s first significant publication (by Lish) in 1971, the author was the foremost practitioner of this brutalism, seen to stunning effect in his first collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976). By the time Carver submitted his second collection, however, he was breaking out of minimalism’s constraints to work in a richer, more emotive manner. Lish’s edits were simply the efforts of the master trying to keep the prize student from leaving the fold. Carver’s two subsequent collections, Cathedral (1983) and Elephant (1988), were both produced without any editorial help at all. They contain his best work, and prove beyond a doubt that his genius was very much his own. Lish may have helped put Carver on the map of the American short story, but the writer made himself its capital city.
Nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in A Small, Good Thing, one of the stories in Beginners that Carver was to “restore” in his lifetime. Carver’s original tale of the unexpected communion between an aggrieved young couple and a lonely baker is a perfectly executed work of almost unbearable feeling and insight. But Lish, editing ferociously, cut it by almost 80%, creating The Bath, a fragmentary piece that contains none of its source’s emotional power. The result might be a shining example of literary minimalism, but it is not what we want to read about when we read Raymond Carver.
Beginners by Raymond Carver
Cape £16.99 pp224
The Confessions of Edward Day by Valerie Martin
Orange Prize-winning author Valerie Martin from New York State, USA.
At the start of Orange prize-winner Valerie Martin’s engrossing new novel, the ambitious actor who narrates it has his life saved by another man. While holidaying with some fellow thespians, 22-year-old Edward Day finds himself all at sea after falling from a pier during a night-time stroll. In danger of drowning, he is saved at the last minute by Guy Margate, a moody, mysterious actor who bears an ominous resemblance to Edward. Although apparently a blessing, the rescue turns into a curse on both their lives.
Their relationship almost immediately takes a sinister turn. Guy asks Edward for a substantial loan, then starts to hit on his new girlfriend, the beautiful but emotionally brittle Madeleine. Edward’s increasingly urgent desire to get away from Guy is tempered by a strong sense of obligation. “If he had not jumped in to save me,” he confesses, “I would have drowned. I couldn’t deny it; I owed him my life and my obligation was a bond that must endure between us forever.”
Martin follows this tortuous relationship over the next few years as the two men try to ascend the greasy pole of their profession in 1970s New York. Guy is first to get the upper hand, landing a choice part in a new play in which he gets to parade his choicest part during a full-frontal nude scene. His performance wins him the twin holy grails of a young actor’s life: an Equity card and an agent. Edward, meanwhile, founders in a play about criminal activity in a bakery. The reviews are scathing, including one that calls him “a mincing, predatory fop”. Off stage, the two men continue to duel over Madeleine, who is notably less contemptuous of Guy’s nude strut than Edward.
The tables are slowly turned, however, when Edward begins to land the good roles just as Guy’s career founders. Their rivalry over Madeleine also undergoes an important shift during a summer Edward spends performing at a festival in rural Connecticut. Relations among this desperately intimate threesome explode when Edward and Madeleine are cast together in a big production of Uncle Vanya, while an unemployed and increasingly volatile Guy is left to stew in the wings.
The best thing about Martin’s novel is its portrait of the life of an actor. Callbacks, table-waiting jobs, endless classes and petty jealousies are detailed with wry accuracy. There is a wonderful evocation of the hell of summer stock, where ambitious young actors are consigned to performing, “night after night, to audiences of 40 or 50 who looked on like lost children in the wilderness of empty seats. Their applause sounded like dried peas rattling in a tin can”.
Martin’s ease with the world of the theatre allows her to have a fine old time with characters such as Teddy Winterbottom, the scion of a rich family who thinks he’s had an artistic breakthrough when he ditches his pretty fiancée for a creepy Greenwich Village artist named Wayne. Madeleine is also a powerful creation, as flighty as the Chekhov characters she excels at playing. And Guy’s brooding Brandoesque confidence conceals a soul that is surprisingly feeble.
Martin has set herself a harder task with her hero. Since the novel is his confession, Edward is the one character the author cannot hide behind an elaborate mask. We see right into his soul, and it is not a pretty sight, fractured as it is at an early age by the suicide of a narcissistic mother. From that moment on, Edward navigates through his turbulent life using his own self-interest as a north star, including one supremely selfish moment when his only response to a tragedy that befalls someone close to him is to worry about its effect on his performance at the following day’s matinee. It is a testament to the author’s skill that Edward’s shortcomings only serve to make the book more enjoyable. He may be a monster, but if the theatre teaches us nothing else, it is that monsters are often the characters who get the biggest applause.
The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown – Sunday Times, 27 Sept, 2009
September 28, 2009
From The Sunday Times September 27, 2009
The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown
Sunday Times review by Stephen Amidon
Somewhere in the labyrinth of obscure history and new-age philosophy that underpins Dan Brown’s latest book, the reader will find an emerging field of inquiry called noetic science. Employing “cutting-edge technologies”, this branch of neuroscience maintains that if a sufficient number of human brains focus in unison on a single task, then the boundary between mind and matter can be breached. Mountains, figurative and actual, can be moved. “Human thought can literally transform the physical world.” Brown might be on to something here. After all, tens of millions of people believe his new book, The Lost Symbol, is a novel. This comes despite considerable evidence to the contrary, not least of which is the oddly defensive proclamation at the book’s beginning that “all organisations in this novel exist” and “all rituals, science, artwork and monuments in this novel are real”. Has any other mega-selling novelist ever felt the need to make it clear from the onset that he will not be employing one of the central conventions of his genre — the freedom to make stuff up?
This unease with fiction continues throughout the book, which involves Robert Langdon, the Harvard professor hero of The Da Vinci Code, travelling to Washington DC to do battle with a tattooed villain known only as Mal’akh, who has used his vast wealth and cunning to penetrate to the 33rd level of America’s Masons, allowing him to kidnap the group’s leader, Peter Solomon, who is also head of the Smithsonian Insti-tution. Mal’akh threatens to kill Solomon unless Langdon, the victim’s close friend, helps him uncover the encoded secret being kept hidden deep in Washington by the powerful Masons. The CIA soon enters the fray, suggesting that the Masons’ family jewels are not simply club secrets, but have far-reaching national security implications. Although the story sometimes has the pace and structure of a thriller, it is at heart a guidebook to the hidden bits of America’s capital, with Brown serving as both lead-footed bus driver and garrulous tour guide. See that neogothic building over there, from which Langdon and Solomon’s leggy noetic scientist sister, Katherine, emerge, pursued by a CIA helicopter? That is the Washington national cathedral, “the sixth largest cathedral in the world”, which contains “a 53-bell carillon, and a 10,647-pipe organ”. If you look to your left, at the building currently being penetrated by an emblazoned eunuch carrying a severed human hand, you will see the Capitol, for whose secret catacombs two maps are provided. After that, we will arrive at the House of the Temple, the majestic Masonic headquarters, where you would be advised to be on the lookout for falling shards of glass resulting from a blast from an electromagnetic pulse-gun wielded by a surgery-scarred Japanese-American CIA agent.
While Brown was largely able to get away with this authorial sleight of hand in The Da Vinci Code, it now feels as if the pedant has overtaken the storyteller. Langdon is also a curiously wan and passive presence, good for lengthy disquisitions and not much else. His escapes from various pickles are usually thanks to Katherine. He even admits as much to her near the novel’s end: “You know I didn’t do anything, right?” The plot itself turns out to be oddly inconsequential.
What saves the book from foundering completely is the well-handled story of the Solomon family, which provides several surprising twists and some rare moments of real heart. But it is after Brown’s tale reaches its conspicuously tepid climax that he plays his true hand. The book abandons all pretence of thrilling the reader and degenerates into 40 pages of gooey noetical nonsense that is delivered as Langdon pays dawn visits to various Washington high points. The vistas are spectacular, to be sure, but not even a billion minds working in unison could turn it into a novel.
