December 31, 2007
J. M. Coetzee: A brief comment and several reviews
(Photograph by Tony Cenicola for the New York Times)
I have just completed the last book I will read this year: J.M. Coetzee’s new novel, Diary of a Bad Year. Each review of the book has of course discussed its three-stream or three-band structure. The first stream, at the top of the page, presents a series of brief, sharp essays by a character only minimally different in biographical detail from Coetzee himself; they reflect on politics, ethics, and many other aspects of contemporary life. Beneath that, separated by a thin black line, is an interior monologue created by that character during the essays’ composition. Beneath another black line that begins twenty-five pages in, the reader encounters the thoughts of Anya, a young woman the Coetzee doppelgänger hires to type the essays printed at the top of the page. Several reviewers have noted that readers can choose whether to read the three streams simultaneously or consecutively. But, having read them simultaneously, the extreme control Coetzee exerts over this potentially unwieldy configuration gives reading them simultaneously a richness that I cannot imagine would come forth if read the other way.
At the outset of the novel, Coetzee and the book’s designer have arranged the text such that no sentence runs from one page to the next, thus giving the reader a natural pause with which to skip down to the next stream; only after forty-two pages does a sentence run across the gutter, causing one to read ahead with one narrative and then circle back to catch up on the next. By this point, all three streams have been introduced and the reader is relatively comfortable with how the pages are divided. Only then does Coetzee begin to push and pull the structure. Roughly halfway through the novel, the streams begin diverging fairly sharply in pace and tone, giving the story as a whole a fascinating kind of elasticity; on page 107, the third stream—recording dialogue between Anya and her boyfriend, Alan—not only fits with what came before it on page 106, but might also be seen to offer a comment on the stream just above it. Later still, Coetzee presses further, introducing a temporal malleability in which the streams no longer march in lock step, but lag behind and pass each other like runners in a race. The three tales remain bound together in the reader’s mind, and feeling the tension this generates offers a pleasure that conventionally structured novels, in which one can easily discern flashbacks and the like, rarely convey.
There is much to be said about the book, but aside from this comment on structure I leave it to professionals. Here are links to reviews by James Wood in the New Yorker, Judith Shulevitz in Slate, Hilary Mantel in the New York Review of Books, and Kathryn Harrison in the New York Times Book Review.
Coincidentally, when I read books I often make notations in the margin, and I was surprised to discover that the spread depicted above, in a photograph that accompanied Harrison’s review, was one I marked as being particularly important (I placed an asterisk next to the second stream). Did an editor purposefully choose a potentially important spread to reveal, or is this mere coincidence?
UPDATE, 01/01: Richard Eder reviews the novel in today’s New York Times. He picks up on another aspect of the interplay between the streams that I neglected to mention: As Anya becomes more fully embodied as a character, C.’s short essays dwindle in power (and length, as if he were losing his ability to concentrate).
And from here on, the pages divide: the top third, C.’s philosophical opinions; the middle third, his account of Anya, as well as his feelings; the bottom third, her account of C., as well as hers. Gradually the last two parts grow more vivid, while the opinions grow dustier. Anya expands into her reality; C. deflates, magnificently, into his.
UPDATE, 01/02: The Village Voice publishes a review of the novel by Allen Barra.
UPDATE, 01/04: Art Winslow reviews the book in the Los Angeles Times.
UPDATE, 01/07: Adam Begley reviews the novel in the New York Observer.
UPDATE, 01/10: Amelia Atlas reviews the book for the Barnes & Noble Review.
Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.
December 20, 2007
Alexandra Heifetz on independent bookstores
One definition of good criticism is that it reveals ideas that upon their disclosure seem to be self-evident. Such is the case with a review-essay by Alexandra Heifetz, managing editor of n+1, in that magazine’s winter 2008 issue. Discussing independent bookstores, Heifetz asserts:
Book Sense, a program launched by the American Booksellers Association in 2000, is probably the best-known of the cross-independent promotional tools mentioned in Reluctant Capitalists; it is certainly the most durable and dynamic. Paying-member bookstores get a website provided by the Booksense.com network. They are able to accept Book Sense gift certificates, which means that someone who votes “indie” can help a far-away friend make a purchase at the far-away friend’s local shop. In member stores, there are tables, shelves, or racks at the front displaying some of each month’s twenty Book Sense Picks, books which are also blurbed by participating independent booksellers in a free monthly newsletter and featured on the central website. The program has allowed the smallest new bookstores to open with an appearance of old-style handselling whether or not they have the inclination (or staff) to pick their favorites from the shelves. Major, established independents mix the Book Sense picks in with clerks’ favorites. Some tiny places let the Book Sense books stand alone.
What is strange about these “political” practices is that they may actually neutralize the uniqueness and independence of independents. Book Sense bookstores fight the good fight; but if you go to enough of the affiliates nationwide, you begin to see that the Book Sense aspect of them (except where it is downplayed, hidden, or mixed in with local choices) also creates a certain national homogeneity of taste, just the way the bigger corporations try to do. It pursues economic localism rather than the encouragement of a local or decentralized taste in books.
This seems to me true based upon my experiences in independent bookstores in Chicago, Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, and elsewhere. It is why I prefer Bookman’s Alley (in Evanston), the now-shuttered shop on Newbury Street (in Boston), Three Lives and Westsider (in New York), Family (in Los Angeles), and Ten Editions (in Toronto)—note that several of these stores do not have websites—to the somewhat larger, brighter, fresh-faced indies in each city. Heifetz nails something essential about this homogeneity with a later characterization of Book Sense taste: “The aggregate personality of Book Sense likes unsurprising, slightly literary novels and memoirs with a ‘universal’ hook, and thrillers and sci-fi with better than average prose. It skews in its choices toward titles from the big conglomerate New York publishers, while devoting significant room to occasional independent publishers.”
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
December 19, 2007
A review of John Berger's Hold Everything Dear
My review of John Berger's new essay collection, Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance (Pantheon), has been published in the Detroit Metro Times. Here is an excerpt:
"Stories are one way of sharing the belief that justice is imminent," writes John Berger in Hold Everything Dear, his new, raggedly uneven collection of recent essays. A humanist concern for justice marks these texts, which range in length from two pages to 20 and are characterized by Berger's messianic sense of conviction. His fervor is inspiring when he bears witness to the perseverance of individuals in battle-scarred lands or dilates on poems, films and photographs. But more often it is off-putting, as he grandiloquently and unmindfully rages against multinational corporations, the current U.S. administration, Israel's occupation of Palestine, and what he calls the delocalization of the entire world.
To read the rest, click here.
Posted in Books, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
December 17, 2007
Dore Ashton on art criticism and the essay form
What I have noticed in the so-called postmodernist criticism is a marked tendency toward theory—not the ancient Greek notion of theoria, in which there is a suggestion of looking outward toward something, which after all is open—but the positing of a fixed structure to which all experiences must submit. We all know how many professional and academic writers title their works “The Work of Art and Society,” “The Work of Art and the Family,” “The Work of Art and the Gallery,” or “The Work of Art and the Elephant.” Such specificity in allusion is highly regarded. But not by me. Each person, as I see it, builds his own culture. He grasps materials according to his temperament, his background, his education, his own nature. In order to survive in a world of others, he knows he must acquire a knowledge of a number of things just because they are there. But in order to respire in a world of thought, he is always the hunter and the shaper, wielding both the bow and the lyre. The lyre, alas, has been repressed; in other words, the lyrical is usually derided. I can speak of my own case in which I have more than once been dismissed as an “impressionistic critic”—something quite expendable in my country. I often think of the definition of the lyrical poet given by a very logical and commonsensical thinker, John Stewart Mill. “The lyrical poet,” he said, “is not heard. He is overheard.”
I believe the best writing—or, if you prefer, criticism—about the visual arts is done by he who is explaining first to himself, and only then to the others. He asks himself why he responds so passionately to this or that painting or sculpture. I sympathize with artists who so often find the words about their works wanting. A painter, James McNeil Whistler, remarked: “A life passed among pictures makes not a painter—else the policeman in the National Gallery might assert himself.” Of course Whistler was an injured party, having been demeaned by a very famous critic, John Ruskin.
Read more at The Brooklyn Rail.
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
December 10, 2007
Women and the Making of the Modern House review
My review of the Yale University Press reissue of Alice T. Friedman's Women and the Making of the Modern House has been published in the Detroit Metro Times. Here's an excerpt:
When this book was originally published in 1998, Alice T. Friedman's recourse to letters, memoirs, and newspaper and magazine accounts charted relatively new territory for an architectural historian. The portraits of six modernist houses, interwoven with profiles of the creators and their clients, still make for engaging material. (A stray reference to the late Philip Johnson living at his Glass House "to this day" bears evidence that the text has not been updated for this paperback edition.) Friedman's revisionist narrative aims to show how the confluence of feminist thinking and the utopian social aims of modernist architecture caused a radical rethinking of domesticity. It's a fascinating thesis that holds interest beyond the case studies presented in this volume.
At her best, as in chapters featuring Truus Schröder and Constance Perkins, the actively engaged clients of Gerrit Rietveld and Richard Neutra, respectively, Friedman gives ample evidence of the congenial tugs of war that led to the creation of masterpieces and documents the satisfaction each woman got from living in her home.
To read the rest, click this link and scroll to the middle of the page.
Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.
December 3, 2007
A talisman
Below is an excerpt from an interview between the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and the artist David Robbins, published in the Summer 2007 issue of X-TRA. Robbins is discussing the advent of his Ice Cream Social project:
From the beginning of my involvement with art I was a man of pop theater, a TV kid, but I was articulating that theater via objects and images, in a context devoted to objects and images. I got the art context fundamentally wrong, and gradually built that misperception into an alternative to it. The visual art context is really designed for people who want to, or already do, seek to align their emotional and psychological lives with the neutrality of form, while theater more fully recognizes the narrative dimension of human life—tragedy and comedy. The art world is always suppressing the narrative line, looking for ways to take it out or play it down, to zero it out. I wanted a fuller embrace of the fact of narrative—we live, we die, there’s narrative—not in order to critique art but only because that position was more authentic to what I was interested in.
I was never a darling of the New York Times or of the Whitney—far from it, believe me—but there are many ways to have a career in the art world, many ways to have a valid history. Come to think of it, don’t you find it odd that whenever we think of an artist, in any field, who no longer appears active, we always think that it’s because they somehow “failed”? Really, isn’t it just as likely that they found not to their liking whatever system they were required to engage in order to get their work out—the system failed them, on the human level—and, in an act of maturity and self-possession, they moved on? Culture systems such as the art world may be all we have, but that doesn’t mean they’re good systems. From a certain perspective the art world is a deeply unhealthy network that brings out the worst in people. It’s too bad that the pursuit of beauty and knowledge should do that, but it does.
The more time I spent in the art context, the more uncomfortable I became with the faith-based dimension of it. I had to invent a way out, and into another kind of creativity.
Posted in Art, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
December 2, 2007
"What's wrong with the American essay"
Truthdig.com has published an essay by Cristina Nehring, nominally a review of the 2007 edition of “The Best American Essays” series, under the heading “what’s wrong with the American essay.” The text has made its way rapidly across the web (see this Technorati search, or this Google Blog search); I came to it via this post on Anecdotal Evidence, Patrick Kurp’s blog. Describing the contemporary essay as “an apologetic imitation of the short story,” Nehring, who contributes regularly to The Atlantic, Harper’s, and the London Review of Books, says that the problem extends far beyond the middling prose and limited ambition of our essayists:
The problem, of course, is not merely our essayists; it’s our culture. We have grown terribly—if somewhat hypocritically—weary of larger truths. The smarter and more intellectual we count ourselves, the more adamantly we insist that there is no such thing as truth, no such thing as general human experience, that everything is plural and relative and therefore undiscussable. Of course, everything is plural, everything is arguable, and there are limits to what we can know about other persons, other cultures, other genders. But there is also a limit to such humility; there is a point at which it becomes narcissism of a most myopic sort, a simple excuse to talk only about one’s own case, only about one’s own small area of specialization. Montaigne thought it the essayist’s duty to cross boundaries, to write not as a specialist (even in himself) but as a generalist, to speak out of turn, to assume, to presume, to provoke. “Where I have least knowledge,” said the blithe Montaigne, “there do I use my judgment most readily.” And how salutary the result; how enjoyable to read—and to spar with—Montaigne’s by turns outrageous and incisive conclusions about humankind. That everything is arguable goes right to the heart of the matter.
Kurp adds: “Well, yes and no. Argument, without wit or style, is tiresome.” In recent reviews of art exhibitions and books, I’ve found myself praising outsize ambition, even if it leads to errors or other shortcomings. As Nehring writes:
Today’s essayists need to be emboldened, and to embolden one another, to move away from timid autobiographical anecdote and to embrace—as their predecessors did—big theories, useful verities, daring pronouncements. We need to destigmatize generalization, aphorism and what used to be called wisdom. We must rehabilitate the notion of truth—however provisional it might be. As long as persons with intellectual aspirations are counted idiots for attempting to formulate a wider point, they will not do so, and even if they dared, most editors would not publish them and most critics would not praise them.