the Richard Larson blog

Zadie Smith on Essays vs. Novels

Novels, by contrast, are idiosyncratic, uneven, embarrassing, and quite frequently nausea-inducing – especially if you happen to have written one yourself. Within the confines of an essay or – even better! – an aphorism, you can be the writer you dream of being. No word out of place, no tell-tale weak spots (dialogue, the convincing representation of other people, plot), no absences, no lack. I think it's the limits of the essay, and of the real, that truly attract fiction writers. In the confined space of an essay you have the possibility of being wise, of making your case, of appearing to see deeply into things – although the thing you're generally looking into is the self. "Other people", that mainstay of what Shields calls the "moribund conventional novel", have a habit of receding to a point of non-existence in the "lyrical essay".

 

"A Larger Art"

If you're writing in a genre, it's all the more important to read widely outside it in order to be aware what fiction is capable of. It's less a matter of importing techniques into the field [of horror fiction] than of seeing the field as part of a larger art. Depending wholly on genre techniques can lead too easily to the secondhand and the second-rate. There's only one Stephen King, but there are far too many writers trying to sound like him.

I like this quote from Ramsey Campbell (from "Avoiding What's Been Done to Death," his contribution to a volume of craft essays about horror fiction) because it identifies something important in the conversation about genre: the fact that each genre is simply a piece of the larger literary art, and genre can be looked at simply as one component of the general world of literature in which we all participate.

Interfictions Reading

On Friday night I attended a presentation at Housing Works by the Interstitial Arts Foundation showcasing some of the stories from the recent anthology, Interfictions 2, edited by Chris Barzak and Delia Sherman. I say "presentation" rather than "reading" because, well, the nature of the "interstitial" movement is such that the arts are sort of stitched together to create an altogether new type of work; in this case, it was the reading of a text, often combined with some sort of dramatic performance, set to live music (conducted, as it were, by Brian Francis Slattery, probably my favorite contemporary novelist). I'm not sure how I ultimately felt about the genre-blending taking place; being someone who already has trouble following stories read aloud at public events, the music certainly added an additional level of distraction. But it was a fun experiment, and the stories in the anthology are top-notch. And any chance to hear Jeff Ford read is a chance worth taking.

Madness!

From "The Madness of Art," by Joyce Carol Oates:

Those of us (how many of us!) who have given our souls to the activity of writing are obviously engaged in a lifelong quest. Perhaps, though we experience ourselves as individuals, our art is communal, like our language and our histories. We write in order not just to be read, but to read -- texts not yet written, which only we can bring into being. Is this quest quixotic, perverse, or utterly natural? Normal? Do we have any choice? Henry James, one of our exemplary beings who understood the lure of the grotesque, the skull beneath the smiling face, as well as any writer, has characterized us all in these words: "We work in the dark -- we do what we can -- we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."

Architecture and Evelyn Waugh

In Evelyn Waugh's Helena, when the titular character first explores the world outside of her kingdom, she does so with a learned enthusiasm for discovery; "so foreign, the gate to a new life, the starting point of the road ... to Rome, and whither beyond" (p. 44). But as her ambitious new hsuband, Constantius, explains to her the plans for a wall around the Roman empire, she realizes that the world outside is just more of the same. "Must there always be a wall?" she asks (p. 47), to which Constantius answers:

"... I love the wall. Think of it, mile upon mile, from snow to desert, a single great girdle round the civilized world; inside, peace, decency, the law, the altars of the gods, industry, the arts, order; outside, wild beasts and savages, forest and swamp, blood, mumbo-jumbo, men like wolf packs; and along the wall the armed might of the empire, holding the line. Doesn't it make you see what the City means?" (p. 47)

Helena, of course, then counters by asking the question, "Instead of the barbarian breaking in, might the City one day break out?" (p. 48) She speaks of Rome, and the idea that it might spread its influence and the benefits of its civilization rather than selfishly keep it behind a wall, unavailable, perhaps, to those who might seek it from beyond. The context in the novel of Rome as the center of civilized life, later to be read as the center of religious life -- specifically Christian/Catholic -- is an important one to consider as we think of Helena's missionary sensibility, her desire to spread what she believes is good to people who she thinks may benefit from it. Her initial skepticism of Christianity, followed by her eventual baptism ("one seed in a vast germination" [p. 125]) and mission to find what remains of the true cross, provides a trajectory by which to view the period as a whole (Helena was living in the 3rd/4th centuries) as one of almost contagious Christianity, represented by the proliferation of religious architecture -- a sort of architectural evangelism.

Emperor Constantine's (Helena's son) desire to build a triumphal arch for himself reveals the superficial ornamentation, rather than substance, represented by the old tradition. Later he imbues his monument with Christian relics, further confusing his intent. But he understands a responsibility to populate the world with new architecture: "All I live for is other people -- teaching them, keeping them out of mischief, putting up buildings for them" (p. 173). And this is a central part of Helena's efforts when she leaves Rome in search of the true cross; it is said that she "directed the buildings of shrines and basilicas" (p. 185), and even as imperial architects invade Jerusalem and begin building, the bishop himself "lost among dust and industry" (p. 195), Helena begins the project of building a basilica in the place in which she also completes her search for the cross, as though the very act of proliferating a particular kind of architecture could be rewarded by such a monumental discovery.

When Helena begins to feel that Rome itself is an "echo from an old empty world" (p. 129), even as the city had once represented the summation of all of her hopes and dreams, I was reminded of Brideshead, the estate central to Waugh's more famous novel, Brideshead Revisited, and its protagonist's shifting relationship with the house itself. Charles Ryder first experiences the house as the representation of a whole new world opening itself up to him, but when he eventually becomes an architectural painter, taking commissions to paint flattering portraits of extraordinary homes, his occupation becomes a remarkably apt representation of his relationship with Brideshead:

After my first exhibition I was called to all parts of the country to make portraits of houses that were soon to be deserted or debased; indeed, my arrival seemed often to be only a few paces ahead of the auctioneers, a presage of doom. (p. 227)

Indeed, the first house he "paints" (in terms, at least, of his garden-room series within the confines of Brideshead) is the old troubled mansion itself, home of his first love, Sebastian, and his diversely complicated family; and the house -- and the entire Flyte family, by extension -- also seems to come to ruin upon Charles's involvement with it. The house of Brideshead acts as a container for all of the family strife that Charles encounters with the Flytes, and indeed he comes to respect architecture, or "buildings," more than he does his fellow man:

I have always loved building, holding it to be not only the highest achievement of man but one in which, at the moment of consummation, things were most clearly taken out of his hands and perfected, without his intention, by other means, and I regarded men as something much less than the buildings they made and inhabited, as mere lodgers and short-term sub-lessees of small importance in the long, fruitful life of their homes. (p. 226)

 

This relationship to buildings and homes suits the novel's sense of nostalgia, especially as the loss of Brideshead -- as Charles turns away from the family -- coincides with a loss of inspiration, particularly the inspiration of youth. When Charles first leaves the house behind, thinking it to be for the last time, he feels that he "was leaving part of myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world" (p. 169). And then: "I had left behind me -- what? Youth? Adolescence? Romance?" (p. 169) Charles has tied up his feelings about his youth with his relationship to Sebastian, expressed in the context of Brideshead; and when, years later, he encounters the house in a much different context, that of a wartime captain, it is a confrontation with an older version of himself and all of its associated memories (his love for Sebastian, his ambivalence about the future, even his drinking) that he finds most troubling. And this is remarkably similar to the trajectory Waugh explores later in Helena, in which the stateliness of Brideshead is replaced by the splendor of Rome: at first incredibly alluring, the places come to represent a hermeticism that is antithetical to growth, either personal -- in the case of Charles Ryder -- or spiritual, in the case of Helena and, indeed, Christianity itself.

Review of House of Windows and Slights

My review of John Langan's House of Windows and Kaaron Warren's Slights, two solid debut horror novels, is now up at Strange Horizons.

Writing New Things:

When it became clear to me I might finish my first novel I was already thinking that I wanted my second one to be as different as possible from my first. Then I wanted my third to be as different as possible from my second. Mainly because— not because of ambition— I just didn't like the idea of always writing the same novel. There are authors I love who always write the same novel, like Ernest Hemingway or Cormac McCarthy. I mean they might not feel that way, Hemingway might have been like, what are you talking about? But from an aesthetic point of view, he was writing the same book over and over. It would drive me insane. It would be like an obsessive person at an asylum darning the same sock.

-- John Wray, on the experience of writing Lowboy

Kakutani on Chronic City

From Michiko Kakutani's review of Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City:

“The Fortress of Solitude” demonstrated that the gifted Mr. Lethem did not need to rely on the postmodernist pyrotechnics and cutesy special effects that had animated much of his earlier work, and that when he dispensed with these framing techniques, he could write vividly and movingly about regular people — about fathers and sons, about friends who grow apart, about people trying to grapple with the thorny issues of race and class and social change.

Is this a jab at Lethem's earlier science fiction works? Is Kakutani saying that the use of genre is a "cutesy special effect" and the only fiction worth reading is literary realism about "regular people"? If so, she's missing out on some of Lethem's most interesting work, and indeed some of the most interesting work being produced by "literary" authors today. Lame, Michiko: lame. (Which, incidentally, is a word she uses herself to deliver one final blow to Lethem's novel at the end of her snide and unhelpful review.)

Sigrid Undset's The Bridal Wreath

In the first volume of her series of novels based on her character Kristin Lavrandsdatter, Sigrid Undset's The Bridal Wreath, there is a preoccupation with the supernatural as representative of the unknown, apparently a terrifying concept to residents of fourteenth-century Norway: a fear of "uncanny things that are stirring" in strange, foreign places -- "forest beasts," etc -- almost comes to represent a fear of ungodliness (p. 10). When Kristin first goes on a journey with her father into parts unknown, she gazes "with great eyes -- never before had she dreamed that the world was so big and wide" (p. 11). There is a sense of Christianity as set up against the supernatural: Kristin suspects that "under every stone there dwelt trolls and goblins and elfin-folk, and she was afraid, for no one knew the number of them -- but there must be many times more of them than of Christian men and women" (p. 12).

This is all established very early in the novel, and the supernatural comes into play more subtly later on, except in the case of Lady Aashild, a "witch-wife" who uses magic to (apprently) lure men to her (p. 37). People in the parish feared her; she appears, over time, not to age. Yet when they need her, they call on her, and she comes, especially when Kristin's younger sister's health is severely threatened. She figures prominently in the novel's concluding pages as she proves complicit in the death by poison of Kristin's betrothed's former paramour, allowing for Kristin's union with Erlend but not by deceitful means; she is seen, rather, as being swept up in plots which she does not support. Throughout the novel, godliness is seen as an eternal struggle, a pact which can be broken so easily and carelessly -- and to great shame. Thus, people tend to sin in private, and much drama is made of their attempts, often futile, to keep secrets. While much is made of Kristin's betrothed's prior sinfulness, having produced two children out of wedlock, the novel's conclusion involves Kristin's own mother confessing to her husband that she, too, has sinned in a similar way.

Thus there is indeed an invisible veil that each character must pull over their most shameful selves to hide them from God, yes, but also from each other; "such sins as these -- it may be that God may forgive such sins more easily than many others -- but they lay waste a kindred in such wise that it can never be made whole again" (p. 187). It is their relationships with each other, ultimately, that these characters cherish most. Godliness is equated to human goodness in problematic ways that refuse to allow for mistakes, which otherwise could be forgiven. Religion becomes a trap from which these characters have very little hope of escape. Sins against God involve sins against other people; Kristin notes that "Much have I done already that I deemed once I dared not do because 'twas sin. But I saw not till now what sin brings with it -- that we must tread others underfoot" (p. 214). Eventually it takes vaguely supernatural weather conditions to bring all of these personal dramas to light, but they do indeed spill forth, and we come to see that it is to each other, rather than God, that these characters feel most closely bound. We must eventually face those who we have tread underfoot and bear, for all to see, the "hideous deformity of sin" (p. 260).

The city, the self, and the past:

I'm convinced that no one writes the city better than Orhan Pamuk. Except maybe F. Scott Fitzgerald in certain beautiful passages from The Great Gatsby.

A Pamuk quote, from Istanbul:

Whenever I find myself talking of the beauty and the poetry of the Bosphorous and Istanbul's dark streets, a voice inside me warns against exaggeration, a tendency perhaps motivated by a wish not to acknowledge the lack of beauty in my own life. If I see my city as beautiful and bewitching, then my life must be so too. A good many writers of earlier generations fell into this habit when writing about Istanbul: Even as they extol the city's beauty, entrancing me with their stories, I am reminded they no longer live in the place they describe, preferring the modern comforts of western cities. From these predecessors I learned that the right to heap immoderate lyrical praise on Istanbul's beauties belongs only to those who no longer live there, and not without some guilt: for the writer who talks of the city's ruins and melancholy is never unaware of the ghostly light that shines down on his life. To be caught up in the beauties of the city and the Bosphorous is to be reminded of the difference between one's own wretched life and the happy triumphs of the past.