Mark O'Connell
Filed under Criticism …
Review: How Literature Saved My Life, by David Shields, New York Times 10/2/2013
When you read David Shields, the first thing you learn is that he takes literature very seriously. The second thing you learn is how seriously he takes his taking seriously of literature. There’s a striking moment in the closing pages of his new book, “How Literature Saved My Life,” when he tells us that he is interested only in literature that obliterates the boundary between life and art. “Acutely aware of our mortal condition,” he writes, “I find books that simply allow us to escape existence a staggering waste of time (literature matters so much to me I can hardly stand it).” If there were such a thing as a quintessentially Shieldsian pronouncement, this may be it, with its odd tonal mixture of the bombastic and the beseeching. Shields wants you to know that he is a writer for whom neither life nor art is a matter to be taken lightly.
Read the rest at The New York Times
Both Flesh and Not, by David Foster Wallace
There’s an aspect of the David Foster Wallace nonfiction reading experience that hasn’t, as far as I’m aware, been much remarked upon. To read his essays, reviews and articles is (for me at least) to feel a kind of retrospective anxiety on behalf of the unknown editors who commissioned them in the first place. For instance, one of the pieces collected in Both Flesh and Not, the new assortment of Wallace’s nonfiction, is a review of a special issue of a journal dedicated to the form of the prose poem. Early in the piece, which originally appeared in the literary periodical Rain Taxi, Wallace makes a point of explaining the unorthodox way in which it’s written (essentially, it takes the form of an exhaustive itemised list of aspects of the text): “The words preceding each item’s colon technically constitute neither subjective complement nor appositive nor really any recognised grammatical unit at all; hence none of these antecolonic words should count against RT‘s rigid 1,000-word limit.”
Read the rest at The Observer
The Different Drummer: James Wood’s The Fun Stuff
A balding man in his early-to-mid 40s sits at a kitchen table, wearing a blue cardigan and a look of placid expectancy. A number of items are arranged in front of him on the tabletop—a paperback book, a large souvenir coffee mug, a plastic container. A child’s voice, off camera, can be heard giddily shouting “Go, Daddy, Go!” The man then begins a dextrous finger-drum solo; he starts out tamely enough, laying down a stolid 4/4 with the heel and fingers of his right hand, but gradually builds toward a sustained run of jazzy showboatery, using the various items as improvised kick drums, snares and cymbals. By the end of the two-minute video, he’s tearing it up like a Gene Krupa of kitchenalia, maintaining his benignly cocksure facial expression all the while, but clearly getting a kick out of how much of a kick his children are getting out of him. You could enjoy watching this YouTube video without knowing anything about this man—it’s entertaining enough just seeing a father thrilling his kids with an interlude of incidental virtuosity—but it adds an extra layer of counterintuitive delight to know that he is in fact James Wood, New Yorker staff writer and, arguably, one of the most influential cultural critics of his generation.
Read the rest at Slate
Self-Control, by Stig Saeterbakken
How much ambiguity can a novel sustain while still keeping a firm hold on the reader’s attention? How much apparently crucial information can be withheld before the reader begins to feel manipulated or, worse, overlooked? These questions may not have been on Stig Saeterbakken’s mind when he was writing Self-Control, but they were certainly on mine when I was reading it. And the answer to both – if the extent to which I found the novel compelling is anything to go by – seems to be a surprisingly large amount.
Read the rest at The Observer
Bolaño’s Abysses
Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches, 1998-2003 by Roberto Bolaño
Originally published in Stonecutter Issue 2
Roberto Bolaño’s introduction to a 1999 Spanish edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn begins with one of those great and flagrant generalizations for which, among many other things, his writing is remarkable. “All American novelists,” he announces, “including those who write in Spanish, at some point get a glimpse of two books looming on the horizon. These books represent two paths, two structures, and above all two plots. Even sometimes: two fates. One is Moby-Dick and the other is the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” The fact that the piece, which is included towards the end of Between Parentheses, is entitled “Our Guide to the Abyss” is only the first clue to Bolaño’s readers that he is writing at least as much about his own fiction here as he is about Mark Twain’s (the abyss, the empty presence of absence itself, is a symbol as central to Bolaño’s work as the labyrinth is to that of his great hero Borges). Continue reading →
The Fine Art of the Fart Joke: Rob Delaney’s Physical Comedy
A word of warning: If you decide to download Rob Delaney’s new online-only standup special, you should be prepared to listen to a great many reflections on, and observations about, the subject of semen. Delaney does tackle a variety of other (mostly autobiographical) topics throughout the course of the 60 minute special—unsuccessful experiments in anal sex, the methodology of masturbation, torrential public diarrhea, flatulence as a weapon of class warfare—but it’s to semen that he most frequently returns. It’s the conspicuous leitmotif of his work.All That Jizz probably wouldn’t be a commercially viable title to give a comedy special (even a self-released download-only comedy special), but it would have been no less accurate than the brusquely utilitarian Live at the Bowery Ballroom.
Read the rest at Slate
The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories, Don DeLillo
Ever since 1997′s vast and fragmented Underworld, Don DeLillo’s novels have been characterised by decreased length, the decommissioning of plot machinery and the steep deceleration of narrative time. As fitfully brilliant as they can be, The Body Artist, Cosmopolis, Falling Man and Point Omega often feel less like novels than short stories stretched too thin for too long. So it’s no surprise, reading The Angel Esmeralda (his first story collection), how suited his writing is to the form. The stories are arranged chronologically from 1979 to 2011, and for a writer whose work has gone through the evolutions and stylistic refinements that DeLillo’s has, it’s striking how cohesive the collection feels. The characters are all isolated in some way, existing at both a literal and figurative remove from the world.
Read the rest at The Guardian
The Genius in the Room: D.T. Max’s biography of David Foster Wallace
In a 2004 New York Times review of Edwin Williamson’s Borges: A Life, David Foster Wallace invoked what he called a “paradox about literary biographies.” Most people interested enough in a writer’s life to read a whole book about it were, he argued, likely to be admirers of that writer’s work, and were therefore inclined to idealize him or her as a person. “And yet,” he wrote, “it often seems that the person we encounter in the literary biography could not possibly have written the works we admire. And the more intimate and thorough the bio, the stronger this feeling usually is.” The Borges that Wallace encountered in Williamson’s book (“a vain, timid, pompous mama’s boy, given for much of his life to dithery romantic obsessions”) didn’t seem to have a whole lot in common with the genius who wrote the stories in Ficciones and The Aleph. Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, D.T. Max’s biography of Wallace, doesn’t elicit quite as stark a sense of paradox, or as thorough a disillusionment. The things we learn about DFW the Guy tend to correspond to what we already knew about DFW the Writer. What’s surprising, though, is how often those correspondences take forms we mightn’t have expected.
Read the rest at Slate
Promiscuous Reading: Why Theodor Adorno Kept My Attention
Over lunch about a month ago, a friend asked me if I had read any good books recently. After some vacillation, I settled into an eager endorsement of Ben Lerner’s novel “Leaving the Atocha Station.” My friend accepted the recommendation and told me that he would seek out a copy. “I’d loan you mine,” I said, “but I haven’t finished it yet. I actually sort of stopped reading it a few weeks ago, about two-thirds of the way through. I should probably get back to it.” My friend narrowed his eyes, sighting me skeptically down the barrel of his burrito. He didn’t get it. If it was such a good book, and such a short one (a hundred and eighty-six pages), why had I abandoned it? An excellent question, maybe even a necessary one, but I didn’t have much of an answer. Abandoning books was just something I did, I told him, and something I was increasingly unable to stop myself from doing. I’ll start a book, get about halfway through it, and then, even if I’m enjoying it, put it down in favor of something else. My friend just shook his head sadly, perhaps a little dismissively, and resettled his attention on his burrito.
Read the rest at The New Yorker
A Martin Amis Hatchet Job? On Lionel Asbo: State of England
There is a certain type of writer whose books loom especially large as targets for hatchet jobs. A lot of critics are inclined toward gladiatorial showboating when reviewing a flawed book, and find that the temptation to indulge this tendency is exacerbated when it happens to have been written by an author of major significance or universal renown. The problem of the book’s failure is compounded by its being positioned within the broader context of its creator’s success. Here the question shifts from that of whether the book is any good to that of whether its author has any right to his or her exalted position in the first place. What’s really being asked, in other words, is something like “who is this person, and how do they keep getting away with this sort of carry-on?”
Read the rest at The Millions