Jonathan Lethem is one of a very small number of contemporary writers who can be considered household names, even in houses not inhabited by novelists. And for good reason. Lethem has written eight novels, three collections of stories, two books of essays, and has contributed to dozens of edited anthologies, journals and magazines, garnering as many awards along the way. But you knew that already, from your household.

In March, 2011, Lethem was the Zell Distinguished Writer in Residence at the University of Michigan, and I had the opportunity to interview him over breakfast one morning. Now here’s the rub: Jonathan Lethem has talked about everything. A quick Google search will reveal his patient and thoughtful responses to such varied interview questions as “…is relativism your philosophical stance?” and “Do you find incessant rain, like that which at the moment has us hiding and scurrying, defeating or oddly comforting?”

Despairing of finding an incisive question about his work that he has not already addressed somewhere online, I decided instead to follow up on tidbits he’d mentioned during his visit to our program, especially those I found of particular interest to us MFA-types. And also, as a displaced Brooklynite, I indulged in some banter about my favorite city in the world with the writer who captures it like no one else can. (Read on to find out how New York is akin to a “giant Ponzi scheme.”) Lethem is, after all, New York’s most notable exile.

Interview

Roohi Choudhry: I wanted to start by talking about your “Promiscuous Stories” project and the related Harper’s essay that seems to be at the core of the upcoming collection of essays you’ve mentioned, The Ecstasy of Influence.

Jonathan Lethem: Yes, although it’s maybe deceptive. That essay is at the center of this new book, it gives it its title. And the spirit of that essay from the perspective of the writer who collaged it together—this sort of magpie approach to culture—pervades the whole book. But the subject of what you might say “copy-left” gestures, including my own copy-left gesture of creating that “Promiscuous Materials” project, really doesn’t come up, except in one very brief section about the writing of that essay itself.

The “Promiscuous Materials” are funny. I keep wanting to point out to people that, along with the many things I’ve done that are not original—that’s another one of them! Writers give things away all the time. A painter or playwright friend might take inspiration or directly adapt something that their writer friend does and say, “Do you mind?” And the writer says, “No.” I didn’t invent giving things away. All I did was point to it; I put a name on the gesture and bragged about it a lot and created the website.

On the whole, my experience with having written that essay, “The Ecstasy of Influence,” and having made those gestures—I ended up for a little while being one of these copy-left advocates who goes around talking about this all the time. It was interesting for a little while and then I felt that the people who were convinced got it. I admire people who can devote themselves to advocacy—it’s a teaching role, to reorganize people’s thinking or open up people’s access to information again and again along the same few lines. I do it in teaching, but there I do it about the aesthetics of fiction. Making stories. That I could talk about forever. The fact that I believe that copyright laws are dumb, is something I find I’m not actually interested in talking about forever.

The thing that interested me about this project is also about the aesthetics of fiction, though. I’m interested in how it connects with what we were talking about earlier this week: the idea of a kind of pre-professionalism becoming more rampant with MFA culture. We’re in an MFA program, but we’re also aware of the limitations and problems with that. And so, even though this collaborative impulse is not an original thing, even if it’s been done for all time, I wonder if some of that is now changing because of this pre-professionalism, becoming professionals [as writers] earlier, as we all in this community compete with each other for the same goals.

This, I would say, points to something that is much wider than the sphere of writing, per se, or even the arts. And that is the business paradigm, the capitalist vocabulary where everything is a zero-sum, competitive, Darwinian struggle for bottom-line success. It’s this disease in our culture in every way. It affects the way people think about things like the education of little children, or their own participation in the social arena, or even in family life. The business model pervades everything. When I was growing up, it wasn’t obligatory that every news story, every situation be followed by the “marketplace” equivalent—“Okay, now what will this mean for the stock market?” The fact that the New Yorker has a page of market analysis trivia every week. Or a writer like Malcom Gladwell, who basically writes about how social and aesthetic and interpersonal experience can be quantified and commodified. His specialty is showing you the business paradigm underlying all sorts of apparently non-commodifiable situations.

[Malcolm Gladwell, on spaghetti sauce]

The dominant nonfiction writer at the New Yorker when I was a kid was John McPhee, who wrote about rocks.

This ideology—and it is an ideology—is really, really potent. It overwrites all other ways of looking at experience. And it has to be assiduously battled, rolled back, from areas that are precious to you, in order that you can even see them clearly and dwell in them in good faith. So when you talk about pre-professionalism in MFA programs, or competition, I don’t think, “Oh gosh, MFA programs are so corrupt.” I think, “How tragic to hear of another description, which is basically the same larger description of things being looked at only through that lens.” It’s the only language that the culture validates for evaluating things. It’s as though anything else would be like magical thinking. Ideals like the commons, that’s not esoteric or religious or magical. That’s another framework being squeezed out by the ideals of privatization and commodity.

But to look at the truth of an arts culture—it’s the realm of participation in a commons, where only some gestures can be successfully commoditized. And even then in a very scattershot and unsystematic way. The irony of talking about pre-professionalism, of course, is that it’s so peculiar to even talk about the life of a very successful writer, critically or commercial, as though they were a professional: credentialized, with a systematic approach to their success that really mimics the professions. Because it’s not a professional realm. It’s a kooky, eccentric, individual realm of different kinds of stances and attitudes and results utterly inconsistent even within the experience of a single writer. Let alone something you can take: “Oh, I’ll model how that writer is doing it and do it precisely that way.”

There’s this Writer’s Digest world where you’re supposed to professionalize and learn how to stuff the envelopes just the right way and make sure you always have seven stories out in the mail at any given time. It’s very poignant and not evil in any way. It’s quite charming and human: the urge to find some kind of industrious beaver-ish approach to becoming a published writer or managing your career once you’ve broken in with some articles. But that Protestant work ethic aspect of it is very silly in a lot of ways, too.

I like that you mention the Protestant work ethic. It feels particularly relevant because the MFA is such an American phenomenon to begin with. There are a few programs elsewhere now, but the idea is still so uniquely American, in some ways.

I’m a funny case in that I’m a grotesque workaholic. I do have my kind of practical side. I approach my own work with a constant attitude of demystification: this is a set of tasks, let’s just do this and break it down. So, in one sense, I happen to reflect an apparent devotion to the idea of writing as industry. But in my belief system, as opposed to my behavior, I think it’s a misunderstanding that what I’m doing, or what any of us are doing, is worth doing because it’s productive or redemptive or will be remunerative or edifying for others. It’s an area of deliciously useless—it’s a cultural realm. It’s a conversation. It’s a game and it’s joyous and it’s diverting and can be unexpectedly rich. It’s bottomless for me; I’ve fallen into it as if plummeting through a bottomless chasm of fascination and experience.

It’s taught me everything I know – caring about books, writing them, talking about them, has become a life. But I’m not working in an assembly line manufacturing cars, nor am I a doctor curing cancer. Which is not to devalue what I do but to say, it simply has some different aspects. Art-making, cultural participation exist outside of the realm of the utilitarian world, and have to be looked at differently and talked about differently.

I think that’s a really useful way to frame it, especially for those of us at a program.

And also, writers as apprentices, and afterward as well, have to remember this aspect of play, mischief, freedom, that detaches from the idea of responsibility or usefulness. If, at some point the results [are like] “last night a DJ saved my life;” if at some point, I talked someone back from a ledge, or made someone treat another human being more sensitively. I’m not renouncing a potential received-use value in my work, although it would be a difficult kind to predict or quantify. But to work as though the reason it’s okay to spend your time locked in a room alone making up stories about imaginary people is because you’re helping humanity—you’re going to make crappy, crappy art and probably be miserable, too. Because the suspicion that you couldn’t have picked a less direct way to help humanity will be creeping up over you and making you feel guilty all the time. That remorse will destroy your confidence. You have to disenchant that nonsense. The problem is that, in a culture that is so Protestant-work-ethic, people have a great deal of trouble accepting that they’ve chosen a path of less contribution than putting their shoulder to raising the barn.

In some ways, it’s an immigrant work ethic, belonging to the new world. Because–you’re forming a new society, what are you doing for this new society? That pressure seems constant.

I think that’s true. Absolutely. It’s the American story, and it’s a very interesting one, very entrancing, which is why everyone reflects it. Not only naïve people; everyone feels this. It’s intense. Even I, growing up inside a hippie, bohemian, outsider perspective; my parents were also engaged with the Protestant work ethic in their different ways. Even if they sometimes seemed to be engaged by flying in the teeth of it. They were both, in different ways, dropouts in the mainstream. It was still a narrative that was hugely a part of their lives.

So, this goes together with busting up the present corporate, business paradigm, which is an even newer and more pernicious thing.

But underneath, it is this older story that provides its foundation. And that’s this utilitarian conceit: that art is okay to do because it can be somehow framed as a very productive or helpful human activity.

Because it’s enriching!

Yes, and people have misunderstood me in the past, and thought I was making a cry for a decadent perspective—very rarified and elitist art-for-art’s sake—that somehow seems an insult to the democratization of art, or an insult to the people who feel they have received use-value [from art]. I believe in the received use-value of art all the time. It’s saved my life a hundred times over. But not because the person who made it was thinking: “I’ve got to save that young man’s life!” That’s not how that happens.

And that can cause really un-complex decisions in making one’s art.

Or unnecessarily complex ones. Pretentious ones. Both. All sorts of bad art can come out of that.

What you say about art saving your life speaks to my next question. Because we were talking about the idea of subcultures earlier this week. I don’t want to cannibalize your lecture [“What I Learned at the Science Fiction Convention”] tomorrow too much. So less about conventions. But in that general context, I wanted to talk about the idea of finding subcultures as a refuge from alienation, and relating that to writing. Something you said in another interview made me think about this. You said that, most of the time, in your books, “language has disappeared, or someone has vanished, or memory has gone.”  Which made me think of Essrog [the Tourette’s-afflicted protagonist of Motherless Brooklyn] and how he’s always touching people, kissing people, reaching constantly for something to fill that void. His language overflow seems to make up for an alienation, something missing. And I wonder how language and writing, and characters, have provided a mode of contact for you, in terms of finding, touching a subculture or community?

Ironically, you couldn’t know this, but you are cannibalizing my lecture, because that’s where I end up in that sequence I’ll read. For tomorrow night, I’ve put together some different parts of the essay book into one confessional essay about this yearning to connect that underlies the writing act. You just completely paraphrased a big chunk of it, in a way.

In that case, we can move on!

No, no, it’s great to talk about. There’s a peculiarity of the writer both feeling special or different from other people in some inchoate way, not always in a grandiose way, maybe feeling very inferior or alienated, but—apart. And, choosing then to deepen this situation, in a way, by the life procedure of writing, which is very isolating. To go away and to do this. We’re fundamentally social creatures, we’re born into families, we’re in a social context instantly. We’re not solitary selves to begin with. And that continues, we’re mostly creatures that understand ourselves in our tribes and in our families and in environments of others. It’s a pretty big strain on that experience to go away from the tribe as often as you need to, to begin to write and continue to write. It’s really uncomfortable.

In some ways, the MFA has become our tribe.

Sure, it’s another version of that. So again, you’re anticipating me because then the fact is, what do you do when you go off to this place? You think about the people you’ve taken yourself apart from and you make up stories about imaginary versions of people. You’re participating in a secret tribalism. And the world of books is a strange kind of surrogate social reality. I experienced it that way: as an enormous engine of loneliness-destruction, these lives that were speaking to me through the voices of novels and stories. The authors and the characters were this incredible reality of a social conversation that I was entranced by. That simultaneously took me out of daily life—my immediate physical opportunities of social connection—and replaced it with this vast, historical, exalted, strange, other conversation. But it was and it wasn’t simultaneously a replacement for what was being sacrificed.

And my own writing becomes another door back into the world. I wanted to speak back to those books. I wanted to have commerce with them. That was my strongest impulse: not to impress myself or others or to save lives, but to join the company, in a sense, of these voices. And just be among them. Gain a voice in a realm where a child struggles to acquire speech, and then the writer struggles to be audible to the world of books that he adores. It’s like your parents—a vast library of parents and you want to be heard by them. So I’ve always seen it in a social context.

But I’ve also always seen it as: this is my special chance, as a kid born into subcultures, very specifically. The fact that I had more than one made me really see, early on, the power and the function, and understand my attraction to them, and also my diffidence about them. Because I was simultaneously but never completely: a hippie, a Jew, a Quaker, an artist, and a New Yorker. And I was a weird kind of New Yorker, because Brooklyn is a subcultural identity in relation to the mainstream of New York City—to Manhattan.

And then there’s the Star Wars watched-twenty-one-times subculture.

Oh, that’s the subculture of one—fool. But actually, it’s quite relevant because, when I bumped into the fact that there was a science fiction subculture which I was completely unaware of, it was really like Columbus bumping into Puerto Rico. I was nineteen when I first gathered that there were people who organized themselves socially according to reading those books. I was just reading the books. I read a lot of science fiction, but I didn’t know there was a behavior.

Was that at college?

Yeah. I’d gone to one comic book convention as a teenager. So I’d glimpsed that there was a fan culture around comic books. But it was actually when I was 21 or 22 that I went to a science fiction convention. The fact is that I found it absurd and totally delightful at the same time because I found so many people interested in things I was interested in, and so persistently thought they were interested in the wrong ways. But good enough. Nobody’s subcultures are perfect.

And it was only many, many years later that I [understood] so much of my attraction to it, and so much of my distressing way of behaving in that situation to myself and others. I wasn’t being mean or drinking a lot—I mean I was always talking about how we should dissolve the subculture. Which isn’t actually what subcultures want to do! I thought that was the goal. I was like: “I want to make science fiction more normal.” And they were all actually horrified by that.

But it had to do with my own attraction and responsiveness to subcultures in general which was: to want to show them how they’re really just part of the human tribe. Or have their ideals disseminate. You know, the way the hippies were supposed to change everything and hadn’t managed to. I had found my new hippies! So I have a very strange fascination with and incompetent use of subcultures. I’m very drawn to them, and I’m very perplexed by the tribal reinforcements that they impose. The resistance to transmissions in or out from the outside world.

Interesting. As writers, we feel alienated and isolated, so are drawn to subcultures. But then we want them to be more like what we were running away from in the first place.

Yeah I think these conflicts are built in. I think it has a lot to do with American identity, which is this giant incoherent idea or set of ideals that can’t be resolved in a unified way. It can only be resolved sub-culturally. That’s why I include New York as one of the subcultures that I’ve experienced. People are understandably very fixated on New York’s arrogance and myopia. And these things are true. But also, growing up inside that world, I know how vulnerable and naïve and fearful of “elsewhere” you can be as a New Yorker. That it is a self-reinforcing sub-cultural identity of a certain sense. You know, that famous New Yorker cover image of Manhattan, where you see Tenth Avenue and Eleventh Avenue and Twelfth Avenue, and then the Hudson River, and then the vast plain with a few specks of light on it. One very familiar interpretation of that, and the dominant one, is that this shows the solipsism and narcissism of New York. But it also describes a helplessness and naïvete: “what IS out there?” It’s terror. New Yorkers can’t drive and they have to be proud of that, because there’s no other option but to act as though it’s a wonderful thing. But that’s helplessness and dysfunction.

So this is another version of sub-cultural brandishing your difference and even your weakness as your badge, your emblem. And I think a lot of American life resolves into certain versions of subculture. The people I know in rural Maine will say to me, “Not only have I never been to New York but I would never wish to go.” It’s just an inconceivable world. Well, Mainers don’t go to conventions where they wear nametags that say “I’m from Maine and my name is such-and-such.” But they are also participants in a sub-cultural identity as Mainer—specifically, this flinty, caustic, sea-salty, coastal Maine identity is a subculture. It may not have as many love beads as being a hippie, and it wouldn’t be very willing to see itself in the framework I’m proposing as analogous to MFA programs. But it’s another kind of sub-cultural choice that’s been made.

There are only subcultures, in a way, is what I’m saying, and then an idea of a whole or outside. Even “mainstream” literary authority—let’s just say, to be able to isolate more or less what we mean—the people who are routinely asked to write reviews for the New York Times Book Review and therefore, and let’s please understand that it is therefore, guaranteed that their own books will be reviewed by the New York Times Book Review, among whom I will now number myself. As hegemonic and oppressive as the assumptions that go with that, the degree to which that subculture has the privilege and utilizes the privilege of pretending there are no other literary cultures besides itself, it’s also still a subculture, where social reinforcements and tribal ritual prevail. And where a limited number of people are executing maneuvers amongst one another as though it is a whole world, but it’s not.

But then, the “weakness worn as a badge” idea is a less relevant sub-cultural idea there. Or maybe then, it’s a weakness as compared to Wall Street, or something.

Well, this is a very interesting question. What you then have is a ritual hand-wringing over the death of the novel, or the death of publishing. Which is a kind of a bogus victim-identity to substitute for or to basically blur the power assumptions of their privilege—or our privilege. Which is why I think those narratives are such fetishes. You know, that the novel has always just suddenly died, and publishing has always just suddenly extinguished itself. Because then you can mourn your loss of power, status, value, relevance, and that becomes your version of stigma or crisis. It’s crisis as identity politics. If you’re not, let’s say, Black or Asian or Transgendered, you can be a hurt, deposed king. I mean, that’s why I hate all the movies about the poor little royalty, because it’s this fetish.

Poor little royalty?

The King’s Speech. Our culture’s willingness to play certain games about exalting privilege and power by always finding ways to fill it with sympathy. It’s like the novel is equivalent to British royalty. Or, like we all have to clap our hands to keep Tinkerbell alive, because it would be so sad to see the mighty fall. And I just think, if the only good thing about the novel any more is that we remember how great it was, and we would be sorry and feel bad for it if it didn’t still feel great, then let it die. Let Tinkerbell die. That’s not why I cherish it.

So, I wanted to track back a bit to the idea of New York as a subculture. I find interesting this idea of “different New Yorks,” the many subcultures within it. There’s that E.B. White passage about the three kinds of New Yorkers—the native, the commuter, and the settler. I think it was up in the subway for a while. I’m curious about how you see yourself and your work fitting into that kind of system; the different ways those identities maybe interact in your work.

I don’t have a lot of useful observations about how the culture of New York works as a whole because I have experienced it in such a miniaturist’s perspective, and so subjectively, and it’s been so different for me at different times in my life. I found myself writing about the idea, the projections of Manhattan, in Chronic City. But it still doesn’t equate to an E.B White-style diagnosis of the functions of that great city over time. It was more, for me, like trying to freeze a single impression basically of Manhattan in 2004, on the edge of the re-election of George Bush, and with the trauma of 9/11 settling very uneasily into the background, as the financial engine of the city revived. Of course, we now know that it was only reviving to crash precipitously.

In fact, my freeze-frame image of 2004 in retrospect becomes an image of a city in a delusory lull between the two traumas of 9/11 and the coming financial collapse. And that was enough: to try to think about: what I felt and saw in the life of Manhattan and some Manhattanites, and the city’s idea of itself. Or its avoidance of an idea of itself. Its will to be amnesiac, its will to erase reality in favor of a dream of privilege and glamour and decadence. That was enough to try to contend with. That was easily a 700-page novel. To try to think about very much more than that little freeze-frame is too much for me. I don’t have the capacity. That’s what I’ll say about my writing about Brooklyn, the most serious attempt obviously being The Fortress of Solitude: that I basically just took one grainy photograph of a certain block in Brooklyn on a certain summer day in 1973, and blew it up and blew it up, and looked harder and harder at it to try and fathom what I felt. And what it meant and what its implications were and how it got that way. And what about it could be sustained, and what about it was unsustainable. But it doesn’t mean that I understood Brooklyn historically. Even Brooklyn is much too big, much too conflicted, much too various.

Right, and I ask that question, even though it’s sort of unanswerable, because I’m coming from a completely settler perspective to New York, such a different New York from your books, which is partly why I was initially drawn to your work.

Well, the paradox of New York is captured in an interesting way in this conversation. Because, of course, there’s the yearning for a notion of authenticity and provenance. And I end up walking around with that credential, having accidentally printed out that credential, as having “street-cred” in some way; deep, inside knowledge. But my parents were arrivers in Brooklyn. Contrary to the widely-disseminated lie, I wasn’t even born in Brooklyn. I was born in Manhattan, then lived in Kansas City for a while. The fact is, New York is defined in many ways by the newer arrivals. The “natives” are often bystanders as New York is being enacted or reenacted or redefined by very new immigrants. Whether at the level of the desperate and hungry immigrant looking for a foothold in the new world. Or the “Euro-trash,” the privileged occupants from afar who come to make this fantasy place their fantasy place. And also, in the middle between those two extremes, the arriving artist class. The ultimate New Yorker is someone like Dawn Powell or Andy Warhol or Truman Capote. Who comes from the provinces, seizes this place, makes it their own, defines it. Because they recognize themselves in it, and could never imagine living anywhere else.

I’m the inversion of that. I grew up there, and I often can’t imagine living in New York. I run away from it compulsively. I don’t think that I’m as true a New Yorker in a funny sense as Andy Warhol, or my wife, who came there from St. Louis and fell in love with it and felt that this is the only place where the world was the way she’d grown up hoping it might be. That’s New York. It belongs to the arrivers. We sort-of natives, we children of New York, are more often its perplexed bystanders.

That’s essentially what E.B. White is saying in the passage. It’s interesting, and I suppose it’s what I want to believe, but aesthetically it seems definitely to belong to you.

Oh, I’m very much of the place, and I think about it all the time. But it belongs to whomever seizes it at the instant. It’s a place that’s not about provenance. It’s about the present and the future. This is probably something of an oversimplification and historians could pick it apart, but I feel that if you want to look at real historical meaning, New York is the first secular city. It’s the first city built by enterprise and ideas and deal-making, as opposed to by some national or religious or authoritarian settlement. The defining moment in the founding of New York City as a place was the Dutch letting the Jews get in. And they didn’t do that because they liked the Jews. They did that because New York wasn’t sacred to them and the Jews were going to make useful deals. They were going to amp up the commerce.

That decision is characteristic of New York. It’s replenished by avaricious, opportunistic growth-models. So now—here I am ending up with business language, which is just what I said [at the start] we had to overthrow; that we have to defeat business language. But New York, for better and worse—and I think for both—is a business place. And also, an illusion place. A fantasy-of-business place. It’s the center of Wall Street and of Madison Avenue. The literal core of the idea of the dream factory, of selling the sizzle not the steak. It’s virtual reality before virtual reality. It’s a place of projections. But not the projections of religious authority, or the power of kings, or the purity of nations. It’s a place of: “Come here if you can make the projection bigger. We’ll let you in, you weird people.” Because the deal is going to get bigger. It’s a Ponzi scheme, you know: “Keep ‘em coming in, we need more punters, we need more buyers, we need more sellers.”

New York is a huge Ponzi scheme?

Yeah.

That’s great. What are you working on now?

I’m writing about Queens, that’s my novel in the background. Soon as I finish the neatening-up work on this big, crazy essay book, I’m going to get back to it. I’ve got 150 pages, I’m just underway, of a book that’s another New York book. I guess, in some ways, if I was going to make a very crass blurb for it, I’d say it’s like a girl’s Fortress of Solitude. It’s my mother’s world in Queens and Greenwich Village in the fifties and sixties. But then, it will stumble forward all the way to the present.

There are a lot of historical moments in the book. And some are the first time I’ve ever written something that tries to convey a mimetic authority, the classic naturalist authority over time periods I didn’t live through myself. That’s different for me. I had to do a lot of research to write about the seventies in The Fortress of Solitude, but I was researching stuff that my own senses had apprehended. I was just fleshing it out, confirming stuff, intuitions, reminding myself of what I already knew, really.

Can you talk about your process of doing that historical research?

You know, it’s weird. I was joking [earlier in the interview] about how silly it is to accuse of any writer of professionalism. I end up buying a lot of books that I don’t read. My research is often talismanic. I just surround myself with the possibility of knowing things, and then I guess about them instead. So I spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars on very difficult-to-find books about the political and social dichotomy of New York City and the outer boroughs specifically. Communists in Queens and labor unions in Canarsie. And then, they’re way too boring to read.

I’m glad I’m not the only one who does that.

What I often find—I guess this is a very Ecstasy of Influence thing to say—is that the best way into the mind of another American era for me, to really just make myself believe that I could feel and think like a character at the time, is to read a lot of novels from that time. Tremendous number of contemporary novels. Sometimes the same couple over and over again.

What are you reading for this project?

Well, I’m reading Norman Mailer. He’s very important to this book. I’m reading memoirs by radicals from that era, the waning days of New York communism. So, Vivan Gornick. I found an assortment of mostly out-of-print novels that capture some part of that milieu. Not famous books. And not always the kind of books that you think are unjustly out of print. You can understand why they’re not in print.

Are you someone who likes those processes to be simultaneous? The creating and the research?

Yes, because it’s too anxious and pedantic-feeling to just sit and read books and hold off the writing. You don’t know what you need to know anyway until you’re working. Somebody said: build the car out of the parts you have. Start going at it. You might have to stop and grab another part at some point, but start driving the car. Start driving the car.

Spend more time with Jonathan Lethem:

Part Three: The Bellow Problem

The Adventures of Augie March and Seize the Day feel like perfect novels. Augie March doesn’t really have a plot, or even a specific theme, but these aren’t needed. Augie delivers his rambling experiences across North America and Europe, and it’s hard to come up with a sense of the book different from those Augie pronounces, because its largeness defeats a reader’s critical faculties. It is amusing to see critics gratefully grabbing the explanations the novel offers of itself, like drowning men grabbing at ropes. There is so much exuberance in Augie’s world, both in his language and the people he meets, that a plot seems out of place, and symbolism excessive. One reads to hear more about Simon’s ambition and Thea’s pride, rather than how Augie will change or grow.

Bellow wrote Seize the Day next, and I wondered if, wounded by complaints about Augie March’s shapelessness, he set out to write a planned gem. Aside from a jarring flashback in the first chapter, the novel is perfectly plotted and shaped, rising in tension and suspense as the wretched Wilhelm flails around for any possible hope of seizing his day. Bellow’s supporting cast demands that Wilhelm accept their more cheerful philosophies of life, but the novel seems to be suggesting that we are made of memory and regret, and fashionable platitudes about ‘living in the moment’ ignore what makes us human. I’m not sure, however, if my summation will agree with every reader’s impression, or even if I agree with it myself, because the book is so well plotted that it generates, rather than disseminates, ideas.

However, from Henderson the Rain King onwards, Bellow’s work poses readers with a problem. Henderson, Herzog, and Humboldt’s Gift are novels where the protagonist has to learn something, either alone or from a supporting character, and this learning takes up a large proportion of each book’s page count. In Henderson, the educational endeavour is about redeeming one’s base nature. In Herzog, it is the contrast between romanticism and reality. In Humboldt’s Gift, spirituality versus commerce. While it is a commonplace that stories are supposed to show a character learning, usually this is understood to mean that through events and experiences, a character “learns” something about life (in a metaphorical sense of “learning”—it is presumably nothing one could write down as the answer to a quiz question) and, through that insight, is able to grow. However, Bellow’s novels portray a character trying to understand an actual concept or theory, and even a reader who feels herself familiar with the concepts being introduced may remain unsure how to respond.

The idea-heavy nature of these novels should not, in itself, be a problem for the average lover of literature. After all, many great writers see philosophising as a key part of their art. But I believe that a reader can love novels like The Unbearable Lightness of Being or To The Lighthouse, and still come away bemused by Bellow. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera outlines a few philosophical ideas—such as Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence—and explains that he will now illustrate and question these ideas by introducing a cast of characters, and seeing how their lives prove or refute them. The philosophy offers a framework for understanding the events, and vice versa. One can finish the novel and feel that the events do not completely fit the interpretation Kundera gives, but everything is above board and in earnest. To The Lighthouse, by contrast, offers the reader a world in which thought and musing are as real as action, and a common human inheritance, and so the novel moves towards a climax that is at once physical (finishing a painting, sailing to the lighthouse) and intellectual (having a vision, understanding an old problem). However, neither of these approaches to the philosophical novel explain a work like Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King (1959).

I read Henderson right after Augie March, and while I adore the book’s opening and middle section, I felt perplexed by its last third. Henderson is a hilarious character, a huge tycoon maddened by desire.

Now I have already mentioned that there was a disturbance in my heart, a voice that spoke there and said, I want, I want, I want!

He goes to Africa, fleeing his wife and himself, where he becomes great trouble to two villages. However, the actual action—Henderson meeting peculiar Africans and trying out his mad schemes—largely ends about half way through. The rest of the novel focuses on a long conversation and training programme with King Dahfu, who offers Henderson a very strange kind of therapy. Now, when a novel opens with the claim that, “…the world which I thought so mighty an oppressor has removed its wrath from me,” hasn’t the author offered the reader a contract? This book promises to show how the character went from state A (unhappiness) to state B. In the actual story, however, it’s unclear how Henderson achieved this, and so the book is a bit of a puzzle. Is the king’s lion-based therapy meant to be a genuine and successful aid for Henderson? If it is, why is no turning point actually shown on the page? But if it is not meant to be genuine, why is so much time devoted to it? It seems to go on too long to be only a joke. While I was reading, I had the feeling, justified or not, that Bellow was gearing himself up to make a great pronouncement of some kind, but just couldn’t position his characters well enough to actually say it.

Humboldt’s Gift has a similar structure. Citrine says, early on, that he has since found “light,” and so now, from his future perspective, views the madcap events he is describing with newly found peace. Yet what actual event or insight causes this “light” remains dark. Citrine talks at great length, and often movingly, about the importance of spirituality, and speaks fairly persuasively about his interest in Rudolf Steiner’s theories of “anthroposophy.” And Citrine’s mental operations, which often take place while he lounges on his sofa, seem to form the real structure of the novel—Citrine is on a mission to figure something out, something important, and the reader turns pages with the anticipation that this quest will either succeed or fail. Or that by the end, the two plotlines—of wild, unthinking Chicago-on-the-make, and Citrine’s grandiose meditations on art and the soul—will somehow merge into a revelatory unity. However, the book ends without any sense of whether the mental journey was a sort of comic red herring, or whether it succeeded or didn’t succeed, or whether parts of it were meant to be significant and other parts not, and, if so, which parts. I read the very lovely paperback Penguin Classics editions of Bellow’s novels, which come with celebratory introductions by writers such as Philip Roth and Jeffrey Eugenides, and it is clear that while Roth and Eugenides love Bellow, they acknowledge this feature of Humboldt’s Gift is a problem, and they don’t have an easy answer to it.

I remained confused about these questions throughout my reading of Bellow’s novels. After I ended the novels, I began his collected essays, and his letters, and through those, I have since come to a kind of greater understanding, a kind of lightness, which I will explain in this essay’s final section, but before then, I want to develop here my own take on the “Bellow problem,” and suggest a slightly different view of it.

I suspect that the difficulty readers find in Bellow’s work is not actually, or not only, his ideas, but his characters. In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf’s narrator makes it clear that Clarissa Dalloway is no great intellect. She is not supposed to be either especially brilliant or deep. She is a normal woman. From where, then, come the dazzling reflections and speculations that fill Woolf’s pages? Certainly the narrator is telling them to us, but the implication seems to be that these are thoughts and memories everyone has, and it is just chance that the novel has picked Clarissa as its focus. The novel proposes that we are all like Clarissa Dalloway, that one doesn’t need to be an intellectual or an artist to be filled with poetry—the artist’s power is simply to put it down on the page and so reveal it. We get Clarissa’s thoughts in the form of Virginia Woolf’s incredible prose because that elevated language is the only way to understand the experience of living, of which thinking is one joyful part.

This is not the sense I get from reading Bellow’s Herzog. Herzog does not suffer from the “endings issue” I described above: it has a terrific ending, poignant and sublime. What made it hard for me to read was the nihilistic portrayal of the supporting cast. One can easily love Herzog, who is eccentric, vain, troubled, learned, and lusty. But his world is populated by monsters. We learn about Herzog’s ex-wife and her lover (Herzog’s once-friend) only from Herzog’s reminiscences, but if his view of them is faulty, we have very little information with which to form a second opinion, and the outside evidence that the novel presents is that Madeline, the sultry liar who has left him, really is as crazy as Herzog says. Valentine, the ex-friend with a wooden leg, seems equally nuts. I think this ruins the novel’s philosophising. Herzog often contrasts high ideals with “reality,” as if there is a world made of romance and a world made of pragmatism, and the two are not compatible. Both attempt to educate the other, and as the world of romance is the weaker, it needs to accept its chastisement, and toughen up. But because Madeline and Valentine are so monstrous, and their explanations so self-serving and deluded, Bellow’s duality fails. To me, they represent psychosis, not “reality,” and poor Herzog simply needs to get away from them, not learn from them. This made the middle section of the book frustrating going, as it was obvious no encounter, insight, or flashback could have any value where these two were concerned, and the reader must simply wait for Herzog to realise this.

In his survey of Bellow’s work, Philip Roth writes of Herzog, “In all of literature, I know of no more emotionally susceptible male, of no man who brings a greater focus or intensity to engagement with women than this Herzog,” a man “as lavish in describing the generous mistress as Renoir.” I find this judgement troubling. Certainly, one can agree that Herzog is lavish and intense. But through his eyes, we see women as very peculiar creatures. We meet a devotee of sex in Herzog’s lover, Ramona, the sad, enigmatic, emotionless pencils that are Valentine’s wife and Herzog’s first wife, and the castrating sex bomb that is Madeline. Very rarely do we feel that these characterisations are different from these characters’ reality—the novel seems to suggest that these women really are as limited as Herzog sees them.

Anita Berber, by Otto Dix (1925)

And what is more regrettable still is how these same types reappear in Humboldt’s Gift. Citrine encounters three kinds of women in his travels: his lover Renata, a deceitful sexual priestess, Denise, his cold, hate-filled ex-wife, and a variety of leggy, doe-eyed students and secretaries. Harold Bloom is right to dismiss Bellow’s female characters of the later novels as “third-rate pipe dreams.” When a reader, holding Humboldt’s Gift in his hands, looks back at Augie March, the journey Saul Bellow has taken in his depiction of people is a very sad one. There is no way to compare the daring, principled Mimi Villars, Augie March’s one equal in oration, to the simple Ramona (Herzog), or to the comically shallow Renata (Humboldt’s Gift). Where is a woman equal to Augie’s Thea in these later books? And the male cast goes on a similar, if less marked, decline. Cantabile in Humboldt’s Gift is a hilariously manic plot device, but as an individual he no offers no comparison at all to the volcanic ambitions, peculiar code of honour, and suicidal longings of Simon, Augie March’s elder brother.

It seems that as Bellow re-focused his lens on thought, and a main character’s deliberations over it, the fictional world around that central character darkened and cheapened. As the narrator / protagonist’s internal action grows, around him warmth and depth shrinks, until, by Humboldt’s Gift, it is clear that on a mental level, Citrine is utterly alone. This falling away of the world then renders the interplay of thought and reflection a sterile joke, as whatever the main character finally decides, there is no outside world for his deliberations to have meaning. Bellow has little choice, in the world of raging shadows he creates, other than to step away from the quest of thought at the climactic moment, and pretend he was only kidding. The novels remain staggering for their invention, their comedy, their culture, and their mingling of riotous squalor with the precepts of a course in philosophy. Bellow writes with a genius that is hard to fathom. Readers may, however, feel troubled by the books’ frequent difficulty in forming a coherent whole.

I finished my study of Bellow’s novels a frustrated fan. I loved Seize the Day and still find myself dreaming of the verbal rhythms of Augie March. I would recommend newcomers to start with either Henderson the Rain King or Seize the Day, then read The Adventures of Augie March. After that, I would recommend putting his fiction aside for a while, as I did not do, and turning to Bellow’s essays and letters, before reading the big late books, which, while unquestionably incredible works of art, contain certain potholes for the reader, as described above. His non-fiction, however, has given me a different insight into Bellow, and has made me re-see his novels.

Part Four: It All Adds Up

The closing of my local Borders allowed me to pick up a copy of Bellow Collected Letters for half price, and I downloaded the audio book of his collected essays and lectures, It All Adds Up, from Audible. I have since been recommending It All Adds Up to everyone. Bellow is a brilliant essayist, and listening to his Nobel Prize lecture while wandering in Philadelphia, I had to pause halfway down Eleventh Street, restraining tears. For these essays and talks, Bellow seems to have created a very different self than that of both his letters and his novels. Bellow the essayist is calm, rueful, valiant, and he expounds, through essays on Mozart, Paris, and Chicago, his central theses about the challenge of creating art in his America, and the dubious pessimism of much modernist art.

From the introductory essay on Mozart, I was stunned straightaway, because what the essays reveal is that Saul Bellow is more than capable of making a clear argument. I realise this seems an absurd claim to make about a writer laurelled with almost every major award, but having read several of his novels, in which his heroes, who often seem slightly altered versions of himself, strain to launch their ineffectual polemics, one becomes accustomed to the enormous pressure of a grand intellect not quite expressing itself. At first, the essays’ fluency only bewildered me further. Why can Bellow express in clear, kind language his thoughts about the soul when speaking as himself, and why can he not when writing as Henderson? Perhaps Bellow considered those fragmentary insights which litter his novels the true location of his visions of the universe, and, focusing on those, he was content let the overall shape of the story, and its climax, come out however it wished.

More importantly, the essays suggest that great fiction writing may not be the controlled, serious, balanced activity implied by the present-day world of MFA workshops and books on craft. Bellow seems to have accessed quite different sides of himself when he wrote his fiction and when he tried to explain it. Something wild and sorrowful and titanically self-pitying becomes clear when one sees the novels in relation to all of Bellow’s words—they express the part of him that struggles to cease weeping. Perhaps really great writing takes place in hell, where no wounds heal, and the same ex-wife, long dead in reality, is demanding alimony with the same ferocity every minute. Whatever the author might wish from his or her art, the path down to the inferno changes little over the years, and the same world-making toolkit is available for each project, no matter what the writer chatting away up in the sunlit world would prefer.

I would not recommend the Collected Letters with the same fervour. At least during Bellow’s early years, they do not form a coherent biography, and, more remarkably, they contain very little discussion of the craft of writing. As a writer, Bellow seems pitifully alone through his twenties and thirties, and seems, in these letters and the memoirs contained in It All Adds Up, to have had no one with whom he discussed his work on a technical level. Even when he passes by James Baldwin in Paris, he avoids him, afraid the broke Baldwin will ask for a loan, and when, in a wonderful fantasy that he scribbles for his agent, Bellow imagines himself meeting F. Scott Fitzgerald in Switzerland, all the two men do is drink and gossip. I came to believe that this isolation was connected to the structural problems I have described above, how the novels don’t come out with the full clarity that Bellow as a thinker and polemicist was capable of. When complaining about a criticism, or building up a story’s worth to an editor, his letters show him using the most vague criteria—he says a story is too risky for the establishment, or “very good,” or makes some other basic claim. Thirty-something Bellow also hates explanations of his work, and asserts a rigid division between scholars and artists, between the dead leaves who analyse a book to death, and the living readers who enjoy it—but this is to claim an unworkably crude divide between conscious and unconscious pleasures, and one that his own fiction does not recognise, depicting a succession of scholars ruminating on Plato as they chase skirts.

One feels that a young Bellow today would be a very different writer, attending workshops and having to teach theories of screen-writing, and that the private hell that forged his novels would have necessarily been a more public, better-lit location. Perhaps, as a result, the novels would have been more tightly organised. Perhaps they would have been less remarkable. The connection between isolation and greatness that I have just implied is probably, of course, nonsense, another permutation of the old boring duality of “genius versus talent.” But Bellow’s works do lead me to consider either that cliché or something much like it, combining as they do such immense technical skill and such immense technical peculiarity. Hearing Bellow say of his youth that he was the only full time novelist in Chicago, one senses that we will not see his like again.

Further Links & Resources:

Part One: a season’s reading

I began the year without having read a page of Saul Bellow, and made a plan to fix this. As a writer concerned with the life and sensuality of his own prose, I wanted to provoke an encounter with the American novelist who James Wood claims, “…makes even the fleet-footed—the Updikes, the DeLillos, the Roths—seem like monopodes.” If Wood’s claim was true, I wanted to first enjoy this fleet-footedness, and secondly figure out how it was done. Planning my survey, I was not necessarily interested in achieving completeness. I would read, I decided, five Bellow novels, absorbing and savouring something of Bellow’s sentence and novel-making, and go further if the feeling moved me. Bellow, of course, had written more than five books, and far more than five books had been written about him, but I invoked the artist’s sweet prerogative of leaping to conclusions, of being biased, partial, fanatical. We are not as moral as scholars, who feel unjustified if they judge from a position of half-knowledge, a desire for credibility that perhaps obscures for them a little of each book’s divine fire. I tried, therefore, during my reading project—which ended up including the six novels The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, A Theft, Herzog, Seize the Day, and Humboldt’s Gift, plus his Collected Letters and his collection of essays, It All Adds Up—to read more as writer than critic, to eat well, although I am not sure I succeeded in avoiding the mind set of the English teacher, and in the judgements that follow, you may well feel that I have failed. Although I have now read a major portion of his work, Saul Bellow’s fiction continues to perplex me.

However, before I begin my introduction to Saul Bellow’s beauties and confusions, I’d like to answer any readers’ doubts about the value of making such a single-author study. There are disadvantages: for instance, flaws that recur novel to novel become disproportionately noticeable. Probably Bellow’s contemporaries noticed that the female characters in Humboldt’s Gift seem awfully like the female characters from Herzog, but as eleven years had passed between their reading of the two works, it may not have bothered them the way it bothered me. And it is hard not to assign a narrative to the development of the writer’s art, seeking in the current novel what one felt incomplete in the just read. But I think the more serious doubt a writer or lover of literature might have, in our hurried age, is that to focus on one author like this seems indulgent, a fatal luxury when so much unread literature cries its demands. How can I devote a season to Bellow while still ignorant of Cervantes? Against this worry I must stand firm. Reading is not worth doing if it becomes a craven struggle to feel well informed. Remaining human in our continuing search for pleasure and education in literature, we should accept that we are people, not filing cabinets, and the two best ways I have found to do this involve either focusing on a writer’s work or a critic’s recommendations. Better to cultivate and care for one garden than, like a squirrel, dig frantic holes in a great number.

Part Two: Bellow’s staggering paragraphs.

The first Bellow novel I opened was The Adventures of Augie March (1953), a six-hundred-page word-avalanche. I’m not sure anything can prepare you for the density, the vitality, the variety of Augie March’s delivery. What takes this beyond the merely impressive—any writer can open a thesaurus—is how Augie sounds like he is inventing his language as he goes along. He is a self-educated street urchin who just happens, somehow, to be able to throw out with unconscious ease one unique phrasing after another.

The filth of the house, meantime, and particularly of the kitchen, was stupendous. Nevertheless, swollen and fire-eyed, slow on her feet, shouting incomprehensibly on the telephone, and her face as if lit by that gorgeous hair which finally advanced her into royalty, she somehow kept up with her duties. She had meals on time for the men, she saw to it that Friedl practiced and rehearsed, that the money collected was checked, counted, sorted, and the coins rolled when Coblin wasn’t on hand to do it himself, that the new orders were attended to.

Part of this “vernacular” effect comes from how the final parts of the long sentences do not live up to the grandeur of what precedes them. After we read about fire-eyes and royally gorgeous hair, Augie finishes with, “She somehow kept up with her duties,” an abrupt drop in register, as if he has heard what a periodic sentence is but didn’t quite grasp the principle, or seems dubious of his own eloquence.

One has the feeling of simply getting more in one of Augie’s paragraphs than one gets from some whole chapters of other narrators, as if he could present a dozen more adventures without fatigue.

At first we often worked in the same places. We went to Coblin’s sometimes when he needed us for his crew, and down in Woolworth’s cellar we unpacked crockery from barrels so enormous that you could walk into them; we scooped out stale straw and threw it in the furnace. Or we loaded paper into the giant press and baled it. It was foul down there from the spoiled food and mustard cans, old candy, and the straw and paper. For lunch we went upstairs. Simon refused to take sandwiches from home; he said we needed a hot meal when we were working. For twenty-five cents we got two hotdogs, a mug of root beer, and pie, the dogs in cotton-quality rolls, dripping with the same mustard that made the air bad below. But it was the figure you cut as an employee, on an employee’s footing with the girls, in work clothes, and being of that tin-tough, creaking, jazzy bazaar of hardware, glassware, chocolate, chicken-feed, jewelry, drygoods, oilcloth, and song hits—that was the big thing; and even being the Atlases of it, under the floor, hearing how the floor bore up under the ambling weight of hundreds, with the fanning, breathing movie organ next door and the rumble descending from the trolleys on Chicago Avenue—the bloody-rinded Saturday gloom of wind-borne ash, and blackened forms of five-storey buildings rising up to a blind Northern dimness from the Christmas blaze of shops.

Reading critics on Bellow, one sometimes gets the feeling that they believe such language is to a large extent a memesis of actual Chicago Jewish street-talk, that Bellow wrote like this because it was how he spoke or thought. But when one reads lines like, “… hearing how the floor bore up under the ambling weight of hundreds,” one realises that such a view is simple craziness. Vowel hunters will have already noticed how the phrase starts on one loose pattern—how, floor, bore—and then switches to another—under, ambling, hundreds. Perhaps something similar occurs in the equal marvel that is, “the bloody-rinded Saturday gloom of wind-borne ash.”

But Augie was not the end of Saul Bellow’s development as a stylist. The novel came out when he was thirty-eight, and he continued to write during his long life, publishing his last novel, Ravelstein, almost fifty years later. I detected two additional style periods in my incomplete survey. Firstly, in Seize the Day (1956) and Herzog (1964), Bellow seemed to create a “mature” style, restraining the abundance of Augie in order to create pure beauty. Herzog, in particular, reads so beautifully at times it doesn’t feel like reading, more like looking out a window on a breezy day, or overhearing music.

This is from the novel’s first page:

It was the peak of summer in the Berkshires. Herzog was alone in the big old house. Normally particular about food, he now ate Silvercup bread from the paper package, beans from the can, and American cheese. Now and then he picked raspberries in the overgrown garden, lifting up the thorny canes with absent-minded caution. As for sleep, he slept on a mattress without sheets—it was his abandoned marriage bed—or in the hammock, covered by his coat. Tall bearded grass and locust and maple seedlings surrounded him in the yard. When he opened his eyes in the night, the stars were near like spiritual bodies. Fires, of course; gases—minerals, heat, atoms, but eloquent at five in the morning to a man lying in a hammock, wrapped in his overcoat.

Why is this so great? The tone is quiet, deliberate, a narrator explaining just how things are, someone who will introduce us to the metaphysics in Herzog’s mind but will not be pushy about it. A voice both authoritative and agnostic. And the sentences vary so well in length and rhythm, creating that effortless reading experience I just waxed about. The paragraph opens with two short and simple “be” sentences (“It was,” “Herzog was”), then the third puts the main clause in the middle, and ends with a list whose items come in increasing brevity. Between two sentences that begin with dependent clauses (“As for sleep,” “When he opened his eyes”), Bellow gives us a one clause sentence with an long subject phrase (“Tall bearded grass and locust and maple seedlings surrounded him…”). This variety makes for easy eyes. And, intellectually, we feel like we have touched many things journeying through this one short block of text—the warmth of day and cold of night, processed food versus the thorns of berries, a failed marriage surrounded by pleasant nature, the stars, spirituality versus science, solitude. We feel that real life is actually like this, this constant interplay of complexities, and we were longing for a novelist who knew how to do justice to the scope of our own shimmering thoughts.

Then, in Humboldt’s Gift, published when Bellow was sixty, Bellow seems to deconstruct his own stylistic achievement, creating for his frantic narrator Charlie Citrine a more repetitive, less various prose.

Cantabile caught me by the sleeve. “You wait,” he said. I didn’t really know what to do. After all, he carried a gun. I had for a long time thought about having a gun, too, Chicago being what it is. But they’d never give me a license. Cantabile, without a license, packed a pistol. There was one index of the difference between us. Only God knew what consequences such differences might bring. “Aren’t you enjoying our afternoon?” said Cantabile, and grinned.

Humboldt’s Gift means to race along, in a five hundred page dash of subject-verb-object sentences, as Citrine’s so-called friends pull him onwards through journeys of crime, divorce, sex, socialising, at the same as he attempts, in the quiet of his own mind, to remember his friend and hero, the dead poet Humboldt, and to come up with a genuine solution to the decline of poetry in our modern age. Humboldt’s Gift is frenetic, sexy, unbelievably erudite, and for about 380 pages of its 500 was one of the greatest reading experiences of my life. I have not often felt so compelled to keep reading a literary work, grabbing time to stretch out on my sofa and catch another thirty pages, feeling satisfied on so many mental levels, from carnal to abstract. And yet, the novel’s last hundred or so pages were a colossal letdown. I have rarely been so dismayed by a book’s so-called climax, and wished that Saul Bellow were still alive so I could ring him to ask, “What the fuck?” The novel seems to fall away from its ambitions, losing faith in itself. By the last few scenes, Bellow seems to be pretending that he hadn’t wanted to say or dramatise anything in the first place. A reader may at first feel cheated, and then start to wonder if she has missed something.

Indeed, during my reading of his six novels, this discordant mix of emotions was a regular companion. For me, Bellow’s work continually captured my admiration, but only rarely my loyalty, and for all his obvious genius, few of his novels landed quite right. Now, I may have been too picky, my critical impulses sharpened by the speed at which I moved from one Bellow book to another. I may be one of the intellectuals that Bellow is constantly critiquing in his letters and essays. But reading his critics, it’s clear that there is a sort of “Bellow problem,” whose parameters have a remarkable degree of uniformity among critical readers, and which even his admirers feel the need to justify. It is this problem that I will now address, and try to find a solution for.

Editor’s Note: Please return to Fiction Writers Review tomorrow for the conclusion of Daniel Wallace’s essay “The Confusing Pleasures of Reading Saul Bellow.” In it, Wallace considers how Bellow constructs philosophical briar patches into which character and reader may fall, the progression of characters throughout the six novels, and how reading Bellow’s nonfiction provides the perfect foil to his fictional expansiveness.

Further Links & Resources are included at the end of Part 2.

Just kidding. I don’t mean versus as in fight to the death / zero-sum / there can be only one winner. I mean versus as in: what’s the difference? How are these two forms alike and where do they diverge, and if we’ve been speaking the language of one for a while, how can we shift our thinking so as to be fluent in the other?

Because let’s face it: novels are what sell. Send a bunch of agents short stories, and they’ll ask, “But do you have a novel?” That’s the hard-headed, business side of writing—writing a novel is probably a good thing for your career. (Didn’t know writing had a hard-headed business side, did you?)

But there are aesthetic reasons for writing novels too. Most of us read novels. Most of us love novels. Here at FWR, we love novels and short stories like parents love their kids: we recognize that each is a different creature with different strengths and weaknesses, but ultimately, we love both equally. We’ve been talking short stories all the past month, but as Short Story Month 2011 draws to a close, let’s take a moment and think about how writing short stories can make us better novelists—and vice versa.

The Grub Daily, Grub Street’s recently launched writing blog, tackles this question in a recent post. Author and Grub Street instructor Jenna Blum offers some helpful advice to a writer who, faced with writing a novel, asks, of writing a novel, “Can’t I just write 15 short stories about the same characters?”

Blum’s answer: well, kind of. She explains:

If you can write a short story, you can write a novel–because both of them have beginning, middle and end. [...] The short story contains its own arc. The novel imposes its arc on a series of chapters–or stories.

Read the rest of Blum’s column here, and tell us: what lessons has short story–writing taught you about novel writing? What lessons has novel-writing taught you about short stories?

Erika Dreifus / photo credit: Lisa Hancock

In the beginning, I read. I read histories and testimonies. I read Anne Frank’s diary, and “books for children” with titles like Mischling, Second Degree and The Endless Steppe. I read Elie Wiesel. I read Schindler’s List before it became a movie. In college and graduate school, I read more. Much more. I began to notice a shift in authorship. Rather than reading books by those who had lived through Nazi persecution, I was discovering memoirs and fiction by that generation’s children. These were “second-generation” writers, I learned: 2G.

My interest in the subject matter was deeply personal. My father’s parents, German Jews, had immigrated to the United States as young adults—each, alone—in the late 1930s. They met in New York and married in 1941. My father, their only child, was born in 1944. The first of two grandchildren, I arrived in 1969. We were very close. In literal terms, our south Brooklyn apartment was footsteps from theirs; after my parents and sister and I moved to New Jersey in 1978, our visits were frequent and our phone calls even more so.

In my twenties, I began writing about this legacy in a few nonfiction pieces. Then I started writing fiction. Increasingly, I found that my fiction was inspired by my grandparents’ refugee experiences and their own family histories. This focus continued after my grandmother’s passing—she was the last surviving grandparent—at the start of my second semester in an MFA program in January 2002. It has resulted in one novel manuscript (unpublished) and one short-story collection, Quiet Americans (published earlier this year).

But when I began this work, I didn’t know that elsewhere—at other desks, in other countries—other writers were similarly engaged. Also born in or on the edges of the 1970s, these writers, too, have published fictional narratives inspired in some way by their grandparents’ encounters with Nazism, and by their own Holocaust-related family histories of war, immigration, and survival.

Among them are three novelists: Julie Orringer (b. 1973), whose The Invisible Bridge was published in 2010 to considerable acclaim and re-issued in paperback a few months ago; Alison Pick (b. 1975), whose Far to Go, published in the author’s native Canada last fall, has won that country’s Jewish Book Award for fiction and will be released in the U.S. in May 2011; and British writer Natasha Solomons (b. 1980), whose debut novel was published last year in the U.K. as Mr. Rosenblum’s List: Or Friendly Guidance for the Aspiring Englishman and in the U.S. as Mr. Rosenblum Dreams in English.

Julie Orringer / photo credit: Stephanie Rausser

Alison Pick

Natasha Solomons / photo credit: Mike Carsley

Whether in front matter, acknowledgments, author bios, or easily-accessed interviews, all three of these writers have spoken openly about their books’ roots in their grandparents’ histories. Moreover, rather than focusing on the sequelae of this family experience on their own lives and psyches—a tendency for which critic Ruth Franklin has sharply (at moments, perhaps too sharply) criticized certain second-generation fiction writers in her important and equally recent book, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction—they have spun stories grounded in their grandparents’ prewar and wartime European worlds (and in the case of Mr. Rosenblum, extending into the 1950s).

Reading these novels by Orringer, Pick, and Solomons in the months leading up to and following my own book’s publication, I found an unusual sense of companionship, as an author and as a grandchild.

And as the annual observance of Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Memorial Day) approaches—this year, it will begin at sundown on Sunday, May 1—it seems especially appropriate to recognize these works from an emerging literary cohort.

First, a comment. Some readers—I’ve encountered a few—may believe that, for lack of better phrasing, “too many” “Holocaust stories” are “already” out there. That, again for lack of more felicitous wording, there’s “nothing new” to be gained from work that evokes this cataclysm. To this, I can respond no more eloquently than by quoting Roma Nutkiewicz Ben-Atar, co-author with her son, Doron S. Ben-Atar, of What Time and Sadness Spared: Mother and Son Confront the Holocaust:

The variety of Holocaust experiences is equal to the number of survivors. A terrible common reality engulfed all of us, and yet when I speak to other survivors I sometimes have the distinct impression that each of us, despite having been in the same “there,” has been in a different place. We experienced the horrors as differently as we reacted to the events at the end of the war: the sudden freedom, the liberation we dreamed of, and the return home to find nothing and, most horribly, nearly no one.

Moreover, by shifting the literary terrain away from the by now horrifyingly familiar ghettos, gas chambers, and attics to encompass other stories, including those of people who—like Solomons’ grandparents, or mine— managed to leave their European homelands before World War II’s actual outbreak—we spotlight characters who, as Solomons has so beautifully explained in an interview, lived “on the edges of history,” and their less-recognizable conflicts, plotlines, and settings.

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Let us begin with Natasha Solomons’ book, Mr. Rosenblum Dreams in English. As I noted in a review for Jewish Book World last year, the “About the Author” section at the conclusion of this novel states that Mr. Rosenblum “is based on [Solomons'] own grandparents’ experience.” The novel focuses on Jack (né Jakob) Rosenblum, who emigrates from Germany with his wife, Sadie, and their baby daughter in the summer of 1937. Upon arrival, Jack receives a “dusky blue pamphlet entitled While you are in England: Helpful Information and Friendly Guidance for every Refugee.” If Jack cherishes a Bible, this pamphlet is it: “He obeyed the list with more fervour than the most ardent Bar Mitzvah boy did the laws of Kashrut….” Over time, he expands and adds to the list based on his own observations.

Sadie Rosenblum does not share her husband’s enthusiasm for throwing off their past (or for his “verdammt list”). She is haunted by the family left behind—and lost—in Germany. This domestic conflict underlies the novel.

But the challenge that actively drives the plot is Jack’s postwar quest to build a golf course in Dorset, which results from his being denied golf-club membership—the final list item, “the quintessential characteristic of the true English gentleman.” In Solomons’ book, then, two specific strands of experience emerge: the immigrant quest to assimilate (in this case, with the immigrant’s Jewishness playing at least as much a role as his Germanness); and a type of “survivor’s guilt” experienced by someone who survived by seeking refuge in another country.

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How, when, and where to seek refuge from Nazism are questions at the foundations of the conflicts and tensions in Alison Pick’s Far to Go. Two narratives alternate: one set in the late 1930s and one much more “presentist.” The former narrative dominates, in both page count and power; as at least one reviewer has noted, it is this historical storyline that more compellingly captures the reader’s attention and emotions. (I empathize with the challenge that Pick faced here: One of the repeated responses my then-agent and I received when we circulated my aforementioned novel manuscript was that the book’s “historical” chapters far outshone the ones set closer to the present. In any case, Far to Go’s secondary narrative seems deliberately opaque, evidently a mystery that the reader is intended to comprehend only as the book nears its end.)

The main story opens in September 1938, on the eve of the Munich agreement that delivered the Sudetenland to Adolf Hitler. Pavel Bauer is a prosperous factory owner—Jewish—living in a “sleepy Bohemian town” with his wife, Anneliese; their little boy, Pepik; and Pepik’s devoted, non-Jewish governess, Marta. Backgrounded by the steady Nazi takeover of territory from Munich forward, the novel depicts a specific slice of Jewish experience in the Nazi era: in Czechoslovakia, the land that Pick’s paternal grandparents fled in 1941.

Far to Go also spotlights the Kindertransport, by which thousands of Jewish children living in Germany or German-annexed territories (including Czechoslovakia) were able to seek refuge in Great Britain. Reading this novel, one is reminded anew about fiction’s power to illuminate “emotional truths.” One of Pick’s most significant artistic successes is this: It is impossible to absorb scenes at the train station, where little Pepik’s parents and Marta manage to separate themselves from the child, or the subsequent ones in which Pepik finds himself alone on that train and bewildered by what follows once he reaches his destination, without sensing at least a glimmer of the anguish that the actual, nonfictional families must have experienced.

Kindertransport Memorial, Liverpool Station, London

In a radio interview, Pick described her family background. Like Pavel Bauer, Pick’s Czech grandfather owned a factory. But it was another family altogether—that of the factory’s similarly Jewish plant manager—that appears to have supplied the spark for the Kindertransport storyline. (Here, too, I hear echoes of my own fiction-writing experience: the true-life inspiration for my book’s opening story, “For Services Rendered,” came not from the lived experience of my own relatives, but rather from my grandmother’s fairly matter-of-fact mentions of a refugee pediatrician she first encountered when, as a new immigrant in the U.S., she obtained a job as a nanny for a little girl who was this pediatrician’s patient.)

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With Julie Orringer’s The Invisible Bridge, we find ourselves again in other settings: the Hungary of the author’s grandparents, and the Paris of the 1930s where both her grandfather and her protagonist, Andras Lévi, went to study architecture. One of the current bugaboos of review-speak is the phrase “pitch-perfect,” but I hold a PhD in Modern French history as well as an MFA in creative writing, and I can assure you that “pitch-perfect” is exactly the right term to describe the 1930s Paris of the first half of Orringer’s novel. As beautiful and romantic as the city remains—Paris is where Andras falls in love with another Hungarian Jewish émigré, Klara, whom he eventually marries—it is nonetheless moving inexorably toward war, with all of the accompanying xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and other ugliness that were indeed part of the true historical picture. In the novel, these forces propel Andras and Klara back to Hungary when Andras’s student visa cannot be renewed in France.

Orringer’s mastery of Paris and French history make me have faith in her subsequent rendering of wartime Hungary, too. And, as Janet Maslin noted in her New York Times review, “‘The Invisible Bridge’ is unusual partly because Hungary was unusual.’” Indeed, deportations of Jews from Hungary to the death camps did not commence until 1944. Which is not to say that life before 1944 for Hungarian Jews like Orringer’s grandparents—or her characters—was easy or secure. Far from it, as the plot of the novel’s second section, which I will not detail here, shows.

I will tell you, however, that throughout both the French and Hungarian portions of the book—which is to say, for the vast majority of my reading time—it seemed as though I were immersed in a classic nineteenth-century realist novel. I am by no means the only reader to have discerned this, and in an excellent interview for the Moment magazine blog, Orringer affirmed that it was at least partially her intent to write exactly that kind of book. But she also wanted to write something “very contemporary.” Toward the book’s end, Orringer does two things to remind us not only of the story’s relevance in the present, but also of her personal connection to the material.

Wislawa Symborska / photo credit: Mariusz Kubik

In her epilogue, Orringer writes of the Lévis’ granddaughter: “She’d learned about that war in school, of course—who had died, who killed whom, how, and why—though her books hadn’t had much to say about Hungary. She’d learned other things about the war from watching her grandmother, who saved plastic bags and glass jars, and kept bottles of water in the house in case of disaster, and made layer cakes with half as much butter and sugar as the recipes called for, and who, at times, would begin to cry for no reason.” And: “There were strands of darker stories. She didn’t know how she’d heard them; she thought she must have absorbed them through her skin, like medicine or poison. Something about labor camps. Something about being made to eat newspapers. Something about a disease that came from lice. Even when she wasn’t thinking about those half stories, they did their work in her mind.”

Indeed they did. I’ll go so far as to suggest that for all of us, even two generations later, in the United States or Canada or Great Britain or wherever our grandparents were able to raise our parents and, eventually, watch us grow up, the stories—fragmented or not—have done their work in our minds. If they hadn’t, it’s unlikely that these books would have been written.

Further Links and Resources

By age and family history, if not by genre, this literary cohort also includes Johanna Adorján (b. 1971). Adorján’s book, An Exclusive Love (trans. Anthea Bell), was published in Germany in 2009 and released in an English edition in the U.S. earlier this year. Technically, An Exclusive Love is a memoir. It focuses on Adorján’s paternal grandparents, Hungarian Jews who survived the Holocaust, fled Budapest during the 1956 uprising there, and rebuilt their lives in Denmark. This is all important and essential background, and Adorján is careful to delineate what she knows about it and what she has been unable to find out. But the book’s driving force is Adorján’s effort to reconstruct a single day in her grandparents’ lives: October 13, 1991, the day they committed suicide together. In the very best sense, An Exclusive Love is a memoir that reads like a novel, combining the strengths of both literary worlds and, importantly, remaining steadfastly honest about what “really happened” and what can only be envisaged.

Other relatively recent books of fiction that I’ve found striking at least in part for the authors’ inclusion of “grandparent” characters with origins in Nazi Europe include Our Holocaust, by Israeli author Amir Gutfreund (trans. Jessica Cohen), and The Pale of Settlement, a collection of linked stories by Margot Singer that won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and the Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction. For a brief summary of the former, which won Israel’s Sapir Prize, see its Kirkus review, which also alludes to the book’s autobiographical/familial elements. For interviews with Margot Singer about the latter, including discussions of the relevance of her own grandparents’ histories, see Reform Judaism magazine and Southeast Review Online. (See also my review for Kenyon Review Online.)

Ruth Franklin’s above-mentioned A Thousand Darknesses in fact concludes with a section on “The Third Generation” (available in part via Google books). Franklin does not delve into the family histories of the authors she cites as belonging to this cohort. (Did Michael Chabon’s grandparents come from Nazi-dominated Europe? For Franklin, the question is quite possibly irrelevant.) But simply by training her expert critical eye on fiction that she characterizes as “third-generation,” Franklin advances the discussion significantly. She hesitates, she says, to call writers of this cohort “‘Holocaust writers,’ because although their works do touch on the subject, tangentially or more directly, it is never their main focus. Indeed, this is part of their literary liberation.” In addition to Chabon, her exemplars include Nathan Englander and Jonathan Safran Foer. She focuses on the ways in which these writers “have turned Jewish literary tradition inside out” and in particular, their use of fantasy.

Image credit: Flickr - accent on eclectic

In the New York Times, Dan Kois takes a peek into the abandoned novels of famous writers. Evelyn Waugh, Nicolai Gogol, Harper Lee, Truman Capote, and many more all scrapped novels. So if there’s a novel slowly decaying under your bed, take heart. You’re in good company—and possibly wise:

“A book itself threatens to kill its author repeatedly during its composition,” Michael Chabon writes in the margins of his unfinished novel “Fountain City” — a novel, he adds, that he could feel “erasing me, breaking me down, burying me alive, drowning me, kicking me down the stairs.” And so Chabon fought back: he killed “Fountain City” in 1992.

And actually, sometimes those killed darlings can still be resurrected. Kois points out that Stephen King’s Under the Dome is a complete rewrite of a failed novel from 30 years ago. Thirty years! And Michael Chabon’s “Fountain City”? Last fall, McSweeney’s published the first four chapters in its Issue 36, in a box shaped like a head. Does this remind anyone else of zombie brains?

Anne shared an interesting piece from Salon that posted on Monday. In the aptly-titled essay, “Who will win the National Book Award for fiction?“, Tom LeClair breaks down the five books in the running – Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey; Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon; Great House by Nicole Krauss; So Much for That by Lionel Shriver; and I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita. LeClair plumps for Nicole Krauss and Great House. Who’s your favorite to take home the award?

Dear Everyone,

Some of you may know that up here in Saugerties, NY we’ve been hatching a plan for a summer writing workshop, and now that we’ve got some official flyer-type-things and an application form and even a website, I’m sending this out in the hope that you all might pass it along to potentially interested students, former students, or anyone you know who might be game for such a venture. It’s this July 19-26: The Catskill Studio for Writing!

The website is: http://catskillstudioforwriting.blogspot.com/ It’s not exactly a work of art, but we’re fiction writers, not web designers… [This link also takes you to the flyer and application form.] We’re only going to take 15 people at most this first year, so the sooner people can apply, the better.

We’ll be updating the site soon with photos, links, etc. It’s all pretty low tech right now, but then, so are we… but if folks want to see where some things will be happening, I’ve got photos of our house up on flickr. It’s a pretty glorious place to be… and we’ve got a new enormous garden where a lot of the produce we’ll eat during the CSW will come from, and chickens (we don’t eat them, but we do eat their eggs!), and a creek to swim in…

Apply! And check out Nissen’s books; click on any of the titles to read excerpts and buy copies (new) from Powell’s:

Colson Whitehead

Kathy Robenalt, the executive director of the festival, was also kind enough to ask Fiction Writers Review to participate in this year’s writer’s conference. We shared the exhibit space with Dzanc Books and Hobart in the Palmer Commons on Friday afternoon. Both of these projects are doing terrific work, and I couldn’t have been happier with the company.

I was also able to catch up with Kevin Smokler, who I hadn’t seen since last year’s festival. Kevin is the editor of Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times and the co-founder of Booktour.com.

Sung Woo and Katie Crouch

And, of course, a huge Thank You to everyone who stopped by the FWR table. It was great to introduce the site to some new readers and potential contributors. I’m especially excited to do some collaboration with (or, at least, publicity for) the Gist Street reading series in Pittsburgh. Sounds like a great project. Salvatore Scibona will be their next upcoming guest.

Steve Amick, Colson Whitehead, and Valerie Laken

As the Friday conference wrapped up, we turned to drinks and dinner and socializing. Then, after a bit of sleep, we returned Saturday morning to do it again. This day, however, the festivities were located outdoors on the Ingalls mall, near the University of Michigan’s central campus. Here, at the foot of the Bell Tower, the majority of events took place on various stages set up under tents centered around a bronze fountain of Triton. Highlights for fiction writers included a fantastic reading by debut novelists Sung Woo and Katie Crouch (Girls in Trucks); a panel on “Place as Theme” with Steve Amick (Nothing But a Smile), Valerie Laken (Dream House), and Colson Whitehead; and a reading and conversation about hip hop literature, featuring Adam Mansbach (The End of the Jews) and Kevin Coval (Everyday People). And if that weren’t enough, Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary performed a labyrinthine—yet rousing—rendition of “Puff, the Magic Dragon” worthy of a Grateful Dead jam. I mean, it is Ann Arbor, after all…

And then, like the passing clouds, the festival had come and gone. Though soon you’ll see interviews with both Colson Whitehead and Sung Woo on these pages. I’d like to offer each of these authors special thanks for taking the time out of their busy schedules to sit down to talk with me (and a second thanks, too, to Sung for several of these pictures).

In the meantime, get your hands on these writers’ fantastic new books; click on any of the covers below to buy new copies from Powell’s: