Archives for 2003

A reader writes with further reflections on Stephen King, Shirley Hazzard, and the National Book Awards. Hazzard, you’ll recall, told King that literature is not a competition, to which my correspondent replies:

Of course literature is a competition. Writers compete for prizes and readers and laurels, and anyone who fails to get all three (which is just about everyone) suspects the game is rigged in favor of the other, whoever the other might be.

But the real competition is for longevity, and this contest is the great equalizer. There are NBA winners that will fade into obscurity, just as there are million-book sellers who won’t outlast their own lifetimes.

King chose to champion popular bestsellers. (Oh, and primarily men, in genres he likes, as opposed to women writing romance, which outsells everything else.) But what about midlist writers working in genre? What about the one-in-a-million self-pubbed writer who has something to say? I agree with Hazzard on this point: this was not the time or place to give others a reading list.

By the way, I never understood the outraged reaction to King receiving an award that had previously gone to Oprah Winfrey at an event that’s been emceed by Steve Martin. I wonder if those who objected so vociferously to King have ever looked at the complete list of NBA winners over the years, which in 1980 recognized mysteries and westerns. John D. MacDonald is an NBA winner. As is Lauren Bacall, for her autobiography.

I’d noticed that Winfrey (not to mention Ray Bradbury) was among the previous winners of the lifetime-achievement award received by King, but I hadn’t looked at more than the last couple of years’ worth of National Book Awards. Very nice catch.

My correspondent is Laura Lippman, whom I cited
the other day as a genre writer whose books I read, enjoy, and admire. If you haven’t read any of Laura’s Tess Monaghan novels (there are several) and want to try her out, you might consider starting with her latest book, Every Secret Thing, which is her first non-series novel. (Laura might not agree with me about this, but I think the Tess books, like the Aubrey-Maturin novels–or any other roman fleuve, for that matter–profit from being read in sequence. If that piques your curiosity, the first one is Baltimore Blues.)

A reader writes, apropos of yesterday’s posting on Bill Clinton’s favorite books:

In re books & favorite books, I think in this case everybody is right, or nearly enough right. Greenfield, Clinton, and you. Most politicians would name the Bible and, if pressed, the Gettysburg Address (I know it’s not a book, but you get the idea). Their favorite car is any model American, a dwindling option. Their favorite food, hot dogs, fried chicken, or whatever inedible dish renowned in their constituency. Clinton at least came up with enough titles to start a neighborhood library, OK, a small neighborhood library. And I suspect that he has read them all, unlike me. That’s not to say that Greenfield’s and your skepticism is not well-founded. I spent 20 some years working in the Congress and I can testify that it is. In fact, I wrote a few of those lists.

Like I said, here’s hoping.

An hour or so ago, “About Last Night” was being read in 12 different time zones around the world (there are 24, duh).

That’s a nice number, but here’s a nicer one: OGIC and I racked up just short of 3,000 page views on Friday, an all-time record for this site. And we did it without benefit of any links from non-arts blogs.

The distinction is significant. Our previous sky-high days have been fed by one-time mentions on such heavily trafficked warblogs as Instapundit, Lileks, andrewsullivan.com, and BuzzMachine. Yesterday was different. “About Last Night” posted its best numbers ever solely because of a profusion of links from the arts-related sector of the blogosphere.

This puts legs under my growing conviction that blogging might end up being the most important thing to happen to fine-arts journalism in my lifetime. It’s not that, not yet, but when a four-month-old blog has a 3,000-hit day, something’s happening out there.

To every arts blogger who mentioned us on Thursday and Friday, Our Girl and I thank you and thank you and thank you. And to every reader who visited us for the first time as a result, thanks for coming…and please come again.

Here’s Lileks on the proposed designs for the World Trade Center memorial:

I wanted statuary. A broad wall with the name of the dead. A monument with allegorical figures, thank you. Grief and Pain Comforted by Hope

I’m about blogged out for this week. I might post something else later today, and I might not. It all depends. As for OGIC, she might post something later today, and she might not. Fridays are like that.

Come back and see for yourself. A little suspense never hurt anyone. And there’s plenty to read either way!

A lot of ink has been spilled (or whatever the information-age version of that figure of speech might be) over what Stephen King said at Wednesday’s National Book Awards ceremony in New York, and what Shirley Hazzard said right back at him.

Of all the many reactions I’ve seen, this one struck me as especially worthy of note:

When is it appropriate to make lists and start lecturing and when is it wiser to keep a steady campaign going, to talk about books one loves, to highlight what makes genre fiction so good and complementary, even, to literary fiction?…

Good writing is the key. It’s in places we don’t necessarily expect it to be, and comes in many different forms. Let’s keep our minds open and welcome all the possibilities. No, literature isn’t a “competition,” as Hazzard put it, and neither should people feel any sense of guilt that they aren’t reading the authors King recommends. These things take time, obviously. But labels are just that, designations often arbitrary. If it’s good, then that’s all that should matter.

Read the whole thing here. It’s by Sarah Weinman, who blogs at Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, where she writes regularly (and smartly) about mysteries and other related matters.

What struck me about this posting is its openness to the full range of potential aesthetic experience–an openness that Shirley Hazzard, as fine a writer as she is, appears to lack. Like Hazzard, I’ve never read any of Stephen King’s books (though I mean to), but I do read a moderate amount of genre fiction, and I think some of it deserves to be taken quite seriously. Raymond Chandler and Patrick O’Brian, for instance, both merit that kind of consideration, and so do James M. Cain and Rex Stout, albeit on a lesser level. I haven’t read much of Georges Simenon, but what I’ve read I’ve found compelling. Among living writers, I enjoy Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake. And I’m lucky enough to count Laura Lippman, a first-rate mystery writer whose latest book is something more than that, as a friend.

As for Stephen King’s speech, I think it was misguided at best. You don’t change people’s minds by calling them names, which he came perilously close to doing on Wednesday. If King changed any minds at the National Book Awards ceremony, I’m not aware of it. More likely, he hardened still further the resistance of his highbrow listeners to considering the possibility that he might have had a point–which he did.

To my way of thinking, genre fiction is by definition limited in its expressive possibilities, but those limits are a lot less restrictive than many, perhaps most people realize, especially by comparison with much of what is now thought of as “serious” fiction. Back in 1997, I wrote an essay called “Real Cool Killers” about Crime Novels: American Noir, a two-volume set published by the Library of America. (Yes, it’ll be in
A Terry Teachout Reader.) Here’s part of what I said:

The Library of America, a nonprofit publisher whose dust jackets declare it to be “dedicated to preserving America’s best and most significant writing in handsome, enduring volumes,” has brought out Crime Novels: American Noir, a pair of volumes containing eleven examples of what has lately come to be called “noir fiction,” after the cinematic genre of the Forties known as film noir. No such fancy name was applied to these short novels when they first appeared in paperback, bedecked with cheesy cover art and tumescent blurbs promising their semiliterate purchasers the cheapest of thrills. Forty years ago, Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me and Charles Wileford’s Pick-Up were smut; now they belong to the ages.

Arrant relativism? Well, yes, and then some. But while the noir novelists scarcely deserve to be ranked among America’s best and most significant writers, their harsh tales are infinitely more readable than the chokingly tedious output of a thousand American writers of impeccably correct reputation, and I venture to guess that people will still be turning the pages of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice and Cornell Woolrich’s I Married a Dead Man long after the likes of Toni Morrison and Allan Gurganus are remembered only by aging professors of literary theory who wonder why nobody signs up for their classes any more.

Does that put me in Stephen King’s camp? I think not. I don’t think The Long Goodbye is as good a book as The Great Gatsby, and I believe the difference between the two books is hugely important. But I also don’t think it’s absurd to compare them, and I probably re-read one as often as the other.

The point is that I accept the existence of hierarchies of quality without feeling oppressed by them. I have plenty of room in my life for F. Scott Fitzgerald and Raymond Chandler, for Aaron Copland and Louis Armstrong, for George Balanchine and Fred Astaire, and I love them all without confusing their relative merits, much less jumping to the conclusion that all merits are relative.

In case you hadn’t noticed, that’s part of what this blog is all about–a big part.

I gave Anna in the Tropics a rave in this morning’s Wall Street Journal:

When coolness is all, nothing is so deadly as to be declared old-fashioned. So please don’t get me wrong when I say that Nilo Cruz’s “Anna in the Tropics,” which opened Sunday at the Royale Theatre, is old-fashioned in the best sense of the word. It’s melodramatic, unabashedly poetic and perfectly serious–and it won a Pulitzer Prize from a panel of judges who’d never seen it on stage, a circumstance that left me wondering whether it could possibly be any good, especially in light of the suspiciously convenient fact that Mr. Cruz was (quoth the press release) “the first Latin American to win the coveted prize for drama.” Nobody ever went far wrong questioning the motives of Pulitzer judges, but this particular bunch, God knows how, managed to hit the target. “Anna in the Tropics” touched me as much as anything I’ve seen since I started writing this column….

I also very much liked the new production of Shakespeare’s Henry IV
that just opened at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, directed by Jack O’Brien and starring Kevin Kline as Sir John Falstaff:

He’s properly sly and unctuous, and if his Falstaff is perhaps a bit too much the roguish clown, he nonetheless rises with ease to the terrible moment when Prince Hal (Michael Hayden) betrays him. “I know thee not, old man,” declared the newly crowned king, and the audience gasped–I’m not exaggerating–as Mr. Kline reeled at the shock of his public humiliation.

As I say, there’s much else to like about this “Henry IV.” Mr. O’Brien imposes no high directorial concepts of his own, dressing his players in conventional period garb and letting Shakespeare be Shakespeare….It’s Shakespeare for moviegoers, in short, “popular” in the same pleasing way that “Anna in the Tropics” is old-fashioned. It runs through Jan. 11, and you won’t be sorry to see it.

No link, so to read the whole thing (including my two cents’ worth about Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, which closed after one performance, which was one too many), buy today’s Journal and look me up in the “Weekend Journal” section, which is worth reading for all sorts of other reasons.

Dear OGIC:

ODID is absolutely right, and I squirm to admit it. (Nobody’s father should be right.) To be sure, Stephen Maturin is a more than sufficiently interesting character in the earliest books, but I do think it took O’Brian a bit of time to start identifying personally with Maturin. Once he did–and in particular when he began writing about Maturin’s obsession with Diana, the love of his life–the focus of the series shifted.

Incidentally, here’s a story I’ve always wanted to tell in public. In my New York Times Book Review piece about O’Brien’s The Yellow Admiral, I made the following comment:

If Evelyn Waugh or Anthony Powell (or Anthony Trollope, for that matter) had been writing these books, the curve balls would have started flying several volumes back; Diana, for example, might have been killed off, and Stephen’s resulting grief used to deepen our understanding of his personality. But Mr. O’Brian coddles and cossets his darlings instead of murdering them, a sure sign of loss of nerve: there are by now at least a dozen untouchable continuing characters in the series, all of whom must be tended, watered and trotted out for their annual star turns.

And do you know what? Somebody really important died in the very next volume, The Hundred Days. (I won’t say who, since you’re clearly teetering on the verge of Aubrey-Maturin addiction.)

Anthony Trollope wrote in his Autobiography about how he went to his club one day, overheard a pair of clergymen complaining about one of his recurring characters, then went straight home and killed her off in the book he was writing, The Last Chronicle of Barsetshire. Ever since The Hundred Days was published, I’ve always wondered whether I might have similarly contributed to the demise of…well, never mind.