Manboys, Attack!!!

You know those moments in a cartoon when a character needs to howl in pain or protest, but for some reason cannot do it out in the open, and so must step into a closet, put on a deep sea diving helmet, or trap the scream in a jar?

I'm going to have to do that in the middle of this post.  So: fair warning.

I was planning on taking issue with Ed's treatment of Mailer, but I think I'm more irked about something else after following a link he provided to James Tata's take on Mid-Career "Superstars" (as Tata calls them).

Relatively long extract, so hold on:

I am struck by the slightness of so much of the writing by the mid-career (born around 1960) male writers who are often grouped together by critics and the publishing houses' PR departments in mimicry, conscious or otherwise, of the time when the novel writing business was dominated by men who might or might not have been trying to write "the Great American Novel," a term I loathe because I think its use is more often parodic than serious. A.O. Scott, without criticizing their choice of subject matter, recently identified several of these writers and their curiously (to me) arrested concern with the narratives of pre-adolescence:

The hero of Junot Diaz's first novel is an overweight Dominican-American man named Oscar, a "ghetto nerd" from Paterson, N.J., and a devotee of what he somewhat grandly calls "the more speculative genres." He means comic books, sword-and-sorcery novels, science fiction, role-playing games -- the pop-literary storehouse of myths and fantasies that sexually frustrated, socially maladjusted guys like him are widely believed to inhabit.

But of course an awful lot of serious young-to-middle-aged novelists (Jonathan Lethem, Dave Eggers, Michael Chabon) hang around there as well, lingering over the narratives that fed their childhood imaginations in order to infuse their ambitious, difficult stories with some of the allegorical pixie dust and epic grandiloquence the genres offer. [...]

I would add David Foster Wallace (b. 1962)...to the group including Lethem (b. 1964), Eggers (b. 1970), and Chabon (b. 1963) because, though as far as I know he does not share their subject matter, his pedantic and rarely funny use of footnotes, his gush of wordiness, and the trivial subjects he picks for his essays (cruise ships and lobsters among them) well-suit him for inclusion in a group characterized by intense self-involvement and a privileged distancing from the tumult of actual contemporary American life. Many of Jonathan Franzen's (b. 1959) essays are similarly self-involved about the trivia of a middle class upbringing, and the one work of fiction by him that I have read, the short story, "Two's Company," is slight, though humorous.

Now, excuse me while I put on this diving helmet.

[*Muffled scream*]

That's a little better.  Now, come along as I essay a bit.

This post could keep me arguing in shrill fashion for days, so I'll have to let go any issues of gender, high v. low culture, or the relative merit of competing mythologies (although it is worthwhile to ponder why it's easy to let serious writers treat of Greek/Roman and biblical mythology while at the same time recoiling from DC/Marvel mythology, which as a whole is just an extension of the previous tradition(s)).*

So leaving all else aside, this is the part that gets me:

I would add David Foster Wallace (b. 1962)...to the group including Lethem (b. 1964), Eggers (b. 1970), and Chabon (b. 1963) because, though as far as I know he does not share their subject matter, his pedantic and rarely funny use of footnotes, his gush of wordiness, and the trivial subjects he picks for his essays (cruise ships and lobsters among them) well-suit him for inclusion in a group characterized by intense self-involvement and a privileged distancing from the tumult of actual contemporary American life.

First of all, you're just not going to sneak loaded phrases such as "actual contemporary American life" past me.   This is the very same thing that gets my back up about boosters of realism: the assumption of subject matter and aesthetic that are real and serious, as distinct from all else--i.e., the solipsistic and trivial.

In other words, privileging the idea that actual contemporary American life is one or a handful of things instead of a wildly multivarious thing that can be gotten at via wild, multivarious approaches.

To me, the wonderful thing about talented writers is that they can wring meaning and beauty out of anything, even, as insaaaaaane as it might seem, the "trivia of a middle class upbringing."  That means that what Lethem does with Fortress of Solitude is the same thing that gritty realist Ray Carver does with a trivial, increasingly gin-soaked conversation between two couples in "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" (or what Chekhov does with his own quotidian characters).  One can argue the relative talent of the writers, or the degree to which they succeed, but that's a matter apart from the validity of their preoccupations and in what form those preoccupations are expressed.

I find that the DFW example above is instructive: Look at crazy David Foster Wallace, with his goofy footnotes and silly essays about lobsters.

Wallace's footnotes are, typically, not meant to be funny any more than are those found in law briefs or scholarly tomes.  Like 'em or not, they're Wallace's way of presenting his work and privileging this information over that--as in so-called serious work, you go to them for further information, connection to other works, or more casual asides.** 

(I guess one man's pedantic is another man's intertextual. Well, de gustibus, etc., and all that.)

As for "Consider the Lobster," to which Tata obliquely refers***, this is not some masturbatory travel piece or compendium of wacky fax and yuks about lobsters.  A slightly fuller treatment of this essay can be found in my review here, and suffice to say that DFW's using the ostensibly trivial or humorous subject, as he usually does, as a jumping-off point for an examination of meaning and being.  As I sez:

His dispatch metamorphoses into a tour de force of worry and dissection, in which he discusses PETA, chicken debeaking, brain chemistry, Mary Tyler Moore, zoological minutiae relating to the lobster, Peter Singer and Animal Liberation, meat euphemisms for edible mammals ("beef," "pork"), the philosopher Rene Descartes, pain response, value theory, epistemology, metaphysics, Aztec sacrifices and his own personal confusion.

Ultimately, what began as a happy travel article turns into a meditation on the meaning of the adjective "good" in Gourmet Magazine's catchphrase "The Magazine of Good Living." Put simply: How is it possible to live a morally sound life - to be "good" - when other animals must suffer for your enjoyment?

[...]

True, Wallace is not a hard-core philosopher...His conclusions are not always remarkable [and] they're often provisional at best. What is remarkable, however, is Wallace's free-wheeling mind and that mind's ability to weave through the most far-reaching source material to get at the core questions that drive us but are also so easily forgotten or obscured: What is true? What does it mean to be "good"? Why are we here, anyway?

From what I can tell, Wallace's whole project is to turn "intense self-involvement and a privileged distancing" on its head, to question these phenomena, and to see what he can make of them.  (Has Tata taken in the much-discussed "E Pluribus Unum," which attacks this stuff head-on?)  As such, DFW's hardly exemplary of fuzzy-headed navel-gazing, or preadolescence.

Nor are Chabon, Lethem, or Franzen, generally, I would say.  Sure, Franzen's essays put my teeth on edge, and are ripe for the criticism Tata levels, but his fiction--whatever you think about its quality and his nakedly ambitious statements regarding its reach--does try to speak of and to at least one facet of actual contemporary American life. 

Even when you factor in Franzen's occasionally off-putting self-regard, calling this ad hoc quintet of writers preadolescent levels a low blow to a group of authors who, as one part of their body of work, are simply expressing their take on the Bildungsroman.

If part of the charge is that these escapism-loving fellows are avoiding reality, then I'd ask this: If you grew up loving comics, and you use this to inform your novel about a young man who grows up loving comics, and if this book becomes popular, especially among other young men who grew up loving comics, then where exactly is reality being avoided?

If you mean that Lethem, for example, isn't horse-sweat-and-tobacco-juice gritty, then you're right; but we have Cormac McCarthy, Jim Harrison, and scores of other authors if we're hungry for that particular kind of narrative.

Further, by Tata's broad definition, a good chunk of Dubliners could be tarred as having an arrested concern with the narratives of pre-adolescence.  Take "Araby."  Here again, it's not that Joyce captures something as supposedly common and trivial as a preadolescent's disappointment, it's the wonderful thing he makes of it, in language uncommon and eternal.

Above, though, it seems we just have a wish for writers to quit fucking around and get to the serious work, going on the general assumption that there is a subject and approach that represent appropriate adult fare:

There is reason for hope, however. Chabon is a wonderfully skilled writer and a stylist of beautiful prose, skills that would well serve narratives about subjects other than comic book artists or a murder mystery set in a fantasy Yiddish-speaking Alaska.

Yes, his writing could serve narratives about other subjects, but need it do so?

Some would say yes, and I couldn't disagree more strongly: I hope Chabon, et al. grow in whichever way they see fit, even if it takes them further down the rabbit hole to weirder subjects and genres.  The open-minded, thoughtful, and voracious reader, I would think, cares how well these mid-career superstars serve their chosen subjects, what and how much they make of them, and nothing else.

And as for Benjamin Kunkel as a reasonable, Bellow-like alternative, well, I'm just going to put this diving helmet back on and.....

*    *    *    *    *

*And, by the way, I wasn't much into comic books or super heroes as a kid, and still am not.  Therefore, I tend to be a little baffled at the depth of, say, Chabon's or Lethem's admiration for same.  That said, I don't see why the latest iteration of myths is any less valid than the previous, Bulfinch-approved ones.

**Yes, this is an extremely reductive reading that doesn't take into full account the complicated interplay of footnotes and text in, say, "Host" or Infinite Jest.

***I can't tell if he's actually read "Consider the Lobster" or if he thinks the subject is jokey and unserious on its face.  He says he's not read any Franzen novels, and only one of Franzen's short stories.

Comments

[Dave]

Well said, sir.

[R Ellis]

Phew, yes, indeed. "Consider the Lobster" *really is* a deeply thoughtful, painfully serious essay, which is proof enough that Tata doesn't know what he's talking about.

Keep screaming, man.

[Dan]

I agree entirely. Not a great fan of the writers attacked personally, but this criticism is trying to undercut, well, what you said – alternate mythologies, intertextualities, etc. It's a developing aesthetic, it maybe isn't "there" yet but, getting better as every new writer says (without self-consciousness) this is my Tradition.

[Chris Armstrong]

I've just read the brilliant Kavalier and Clay, and to suggest that it is a piece of reality-avoiding escapism would be to seriously miss the point. It's a novel about escapism, and its costs, which should be obvious. It's primary subject is a young man haunted by the Nazis' destruction of his family, who out of desperation (for what else can he do?) uses his fantasy life (in comics) to come to terms with that reality. But by the end of the novel, he has finally renounced (at least own literal) escape, accepted his responsibilities, and settled down to 'real' life. What could a fan of 'realism' disagree with here anyway?

[callie]

"Though as far as I know he [DFW] does not share their subject matter, his pedantic and rarely funny use of footnotes, his gush of wordiness, and the trivial subjects he picks for his essays (cruise ships and lobsters among them)well-suit him for inclusion in a group characterized by intense self-involvement and a privileged distancing from the tumult of actual contemporary American life."

I could not disagree more with Tata’s assessment. For one, I find DFW's footnotes to be funny more often than you'd expect. As to his gush of wordiness, I believe that is a matter of reader preference. I dig his style. What irks me the most, though, is the assumption that cruise ships and lobsters are trivial, self-involved subjects. The “cruise ship” essay (A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again) was one of the best pieces of non-fiction I read that year and was a scathing commentary on whole sections of our society. It was also hysterically funny. The “lobster” essay was equally compelling and took a stark look at the ethical dilemmas involved in killing animals for “cuisine” – hardly the self-indulgent writing of a middle-aged dilettante.