book/daddy knows an 'older genius' -- and it's not himself
In The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell examines the popular tradition of the young genius:
Genius, in the popular conception, is inextricably tied up with precocity--doing something truly creative, we're inclined to think, requires the freshness and exuberance and energy of youth. Orson Welles made his masterpiece, "Citizen Kane," at twenty-five. Mozart wrote his breakthrough Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-Flat-Major at the age of twenty-one. In some creative forms, like lyric poetry, the importance of precocity has hardened into an iron law. How old was T. S. Eliot when he wrote "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" ("I grow old . . . I grow old")? Twenty-three. "Poets peak young," the creativity researcher James Kaufman maintains.
But studies have shown that this is simply not true, not true for lyric poetry, not true for music or literature. And Gladwell's leading example is Dallas' own Ben Fountain, a sweet guy whose terrific short story collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, came out in 2006. book/daddy happily compared Ben's writing to Graham Greene -- albeit Graham Greene crossed with some South American magic realist..
But before you take heart -- you, in your cubicle, knowing that your brilliance at online poker will be recognized at any moment -- it's plain that as much as Ben's success is evidence that inspiration can strike later rather than earlier, it's testimony to his incredible persistence:
He quit his job at Akin, Gump in 1988. For every story he published in those early years, he had at least thirty rejections. The novel that he put away in a drawer took him four years. The dark period lasted for the entire second half of the nineteen-nineties. His breakthrough with "Brief Encounters" came in 2006, eighteen years after he first sat down to write at his kitchen table. The "young" writer from the provinces took the literary world by storm at the age of forty-eight.
It also didn't hurt that Ben had, in effect a patron -- his wife. Gladwell's point is that some insights come as "conceptual" breakthroughs -- the brilliant flash -- while others come incrementally, tentatively. And those artists need time (and support) to find their way.
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Recommending
Richard Price's best novel since Clockers, Lush Life is a slice of life on the Lower East Side, complete with the ghetto kids, the new bohemians, the old Jews and the cops. A restaurant manager at 35 fears he's no longer the wannabe artiste who'd turn into a full-blown artiste some day. When he sees a younger version of himself get shot during a mugging (and then gets blamed by the cops), he comes apart. Price takes these cultures and stares through all of them. Lush Life is a crime novel, a terrific literary thriller, a sampler of Price's namebrand talents with dialogue and deadpan humor. Price is after more than just law-and-order, crime-and-punishment, justice-is-served. This is a portrait of big-city America..You think The Wire, Law and Order, the old Homicide are the best TV has to offer? This is all that -- between covers.
In Life Class, Booker Prize-winner Pat Barker returns to World War I, the setting for her magnificent Restoration trilogy. Where those novels followed shell-shocked poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfrid Owen through their convalescence, Life Class follows three painting students (based on real Slade School artists Christopher Nevinson and Paul Nash) as the war approaches. Elinor wants little to do with the war or with men: They're distractions from her art. Kit, a hot, young futurist, is primed for the war's industrialized destruction, while Paul flees his working-class background. As usual with Barker, the sexual relationships, war-time atmosphere and gruesome battlefield details are brilliantly conveyed: Her prose is lean but lyrical, compassionate yet cool-headed. No character is quite as compelling as Regeneration's bitter bisexual, Billy Prior, but the Great War's upheavals in art and combat, sex and class, provide Barker with material for exceptional historical novels. A new trilogy? One hopes so.
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