This may be last week’s news, but the issues it raises are still worth a jaw.
From The Daily Beast (via some friends who were at this event: a reception and Q&A with the Man Booker International Prize judges, who met to discuss the finalists for this prestigious biannual award):
The book world is generally so polite and civilized, that it’s sort of fun when a kerfuffle breaks open as it did last night at the New York Public Library. [...] Up on stage were The Daily Beast’s Tina Brown, acting as moderator, and the three judges: novelists Amit Chaudhuri, Andrey Kurkov, and Jane Smiley.
Midway through the question-and-answer session, Brown asked the judges if the deaths in recent years of major literary figures such as Updike, Bellow, and Mailer represented the end of an era. With fewer readers, straitened times for book publishing, and less coverage of books in the media, could such literary giants ever emerge again?
Smiley’s answer was tart: “When those figures died, they were colossal—in New York. They were not colossal in San Francisco or Minneapolis.” She went on to argue that the literary world is more dispersed than it used to be, “but it’s just as passionate.”
[...]
The novelist Jay McInerney, however, wasn’t having it. He spoke up from his seat in the audience, addressing Smiley directly. “Were you insulting San Francisco or Minneapolis? Or Updike and Mailer?”
Apparently things heated up from there, and Smiley argued that authors like Frederick Manfred remain a bigger deal in the Midwest than Updike or Mailer (though BookScan reveals that the combined sales of all of Manfred’s books last year was 39 copies, and a Google search for “Jane Smiley Updike” yields quite a few thoughtful, admiring quotes from Smiley on Updike’s work).
Smiley’s point — that the New York literary scene is not the only one the US has to offer, nor is it wholly representative of our rich variety of experience — is a good one, and even though it’s far from a new complaint, it doesn’t often get discussed in such a public forum.
BUT it’s odd that she chose to call out Updike, of all writers, for this reason–both because he so recently died and because he was decidedly not a New Yorker. Just a few weeks ago there were at least several articles devoted to why Updike didn’t live in New York (beyond a very brief stint here) and never warmed to this city’s particular rhythms. He was a New Yorker magazine man, but not a New York one. It’s unclear, I guess, what Smiley felt the need to reckon with — the East coast superiority complex? the fact that most mainstream publishing happens in New York? Is this about where writers live, where readers live, or is it about wanting to shake up assumptions? Is she bristling at that occasional tendency at New York literary events for New York-based writers to stick together and accidentally say rude things about Kentucky, or to ask the writers who have traveled from academic jobs or writing lives elsewhere when they’re “coming back” to the city, as if being anywhere else is a symptom of failure? And did she take into account the tendency of writers from smaller towns to remark in mock-admiration, how do you do it?!, as in call this city home…that they could never really live here, and how do these New York writers find time to write with so many distractions and evil publishers breathing down their necks and cocktail parties and being so damn full of themselves and in love with their own highly romanticized history?
**deep breath**
Of course most of this is rarely said aloud, at parties or elsewhere; much of it is probably not even thought. And often this supposed NYC v. Rest of Country division is actually expressed as flattering envy by both parties…the desire to, at least for a short while, live in a writers’ hub or get the hell away from it. Many writers, successful or lesser known, would probably scoff at such divisions; most embrace variety of experience: they don’t just hunker down in one place and never leave. But then there are the (often more vocal) exceptions, those who dread the tunnels and bridges that take them away from New York and those who hate leaving the beauty and familiarity of their own town–which almost certainly has its own highly romanticized, if less globally known, history.
If we were talking about larger political issues, I wouldn’t highlight New York in this way, but it really is the only publishing center in this country. There are great houses throughout the US, and there are certainly other equally notable communities of writers — San Francisco, Chicago, Austin, Boston, Ann Arbor, Boulder, Portland, Iowa City, Missoula, Irvine, and so many more… — but nowhere else where so many agents and editors and authors share such little space, meet face to face and know each other so well.
So my questions for you are: Does this really harm writers and writing from elsewhere, and if so, why and how much? Conversely, what are the benefits to there being such a centralized New York scene? If you’re living in or from New York, how do you feel about making your home here and being a writer? If you’re not living in or from this city, how often — if ever — does this place figure into your consciousness? Does hearing about New York and all it connotes make you feel ambivalent, annoyed, nostalgic, thrilled, connected, disconnected?
Tangential question for everyone: Do you like reading books set in New York, are you tired of doing so, or does it depend entirely on how good the book in question is?
As I re-read this, I’m also struck by how I managed to take an event about an international award and turn it into an entirely US-based issue. Someone please be offended (in an intelligent way) or I’ll be forced to take issue with myself.
I wonder if Smiley wasn’t trying to question our deification of authors like Mailer, Updike, and Bellow, rather the New York scene. Granted, her spat with McInerney ended up moving in that direction. But maybe her real point was that we talk about the deaths of these literary giants and start prematurely wringing our hands about the death of American Literature… whereas, in fact, there are plenty of authors out there–many of them removed from the New York/East Coast literary scene–who are also important parts of American Literature, but who are often overlooked in favor of the “colossals” Mailer et al.
Okay, Frederick Manfred might not have been the best example for her to choose. But that justifiable indignation–that important writers are getting overlooked in favor of The Big Guys–often comes out as a jab against the east coast in general and New York in particular, because that tends to be where those big names center, as well as where the adulation for them swirls up most. In other words, The “Big Guys. vs Overlooked Little Writers” debate and the “New York vs. rest of country” debates often get conflated, and it looks to me like that’s what’s happening here with both Smiley and McInerney.
On the Big Guys vs. Overlooked Little Writers front, I understand Smiley’s tartness. I have little patience for handwringing myself, and it seems silly to ask “Hey, these three great writers have died; do you think that’s–gasp!the END OF AN ERA?” It would be even more frustrating, I bet, if I were a successful and Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist getting asked this silly question. Because really, underneath that question is the suggetion that American Literature is withering and dying away. And if we think that’s true–just because Updike and Mailer and co. are dead–what are we all doing here at Fiction Writers Review?
God bless Jane Smiley. I mean, not for (almost?) blasting Updike (which seems really strange and not at all justifiable to me), but for trying to diversify (I realize that this is a generous reading) the contemporary literary imagination. Novels and stories should come out of the world, should represent shifting populations, cultures, styles, not just emerge wholly formed from the tastemaking machines of the literary establishment. Michelle Tea’s Valencia and Stephen Elliot’s Happy Baby mean as much to me–if not more–than Pigeon Feathers; despite the fact that Updike is describing a world–small-town PA–that I am very familiar with, it still isn’t quite my world he is describing. It feels sacrilegious to mention any writers in the same sentence as Updike like I did, but that’s the point, isn’t it? I think Smiley is trying to be honest about how books affect us, and that means not allowing independent (I almost want to say ’secular’) sensibilities to be steamrolled by the literary mainstream. Breece D’J Pancake should mean more in West Virginia. Donald Harington should matter more in the Arkansas Ozarks. Michael Byers should matter more in the Pacific Northwest. There’s a kind of spiritual journalism here that can–and really should–only be communicated by someone who knows the place they are writing about thoroughly. Was it Milosz who said writers are ’secretaries of the invisible?’ But doesn’t what’s invisible change as you drive down the 5, from San Francisco to Los Angeles?
B. Short, I agree with your point completely–that “novels and stories should come out of the world, should represent shifting populations, cultures, styles, not just emerge wholly formed from the tastemaking machines of the literary establishment.” But why on EARTH should it be “sacrilegious” to “mention any writers in the same sentence as Updike”? No writer should ever have to apologize for liking writers other than Updike, Bellow, and Mailer–or have to offer a disclaimer anytime they’re NOT mentioned after the words “my favorite”! I think it’s this kind of uber-reverence towards writers like Updike that inspires ire like Smiley expressed.
The gist of what’s going on here, as far as I’m concerned, is this: If what Smiley said had been said about any city OTHER THAN New York, there wouldn’t have been any argument at all. And that is precisely the problem.
To state it more plainly: There are some good writers in New York; a few New York writers are great. But even the greatest of them publishes the occasional piece of crap, of which Norman Mailer’s ‘Ancient Evenings’ is a prime example. The problem is that New Yorkers can never own the fact.
New York publishing needs to pull its literary nose out of its literary backside and sniff some of the air that wafts across the river from the rest of the country. There are scads of good writers all across the United States who cannot make themselves heard. New York publishing houses these days become great publishing houses, not by publishing more great writers but by buying each other out and downsizing quality staff.
The business model adopted by New York publishers is the same business model that drove the rest of the American economy into a hole from which it will take a hundred years to climb out. If New York publishing won’t listen to anybody short of a critic such as Dorothy Parker or E.B. White then New York publishing is truly doomed, because there are no writers of that caliber present in New York today.