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February 2004

BOOKS BOUGHT:

Old School—Tobias Wolff

Train—Pete Dexter

Backroom Boys—Francis Spufford

You Are Not a Stranger Here—Adam Haslett

Eats, Shoots and Leaves—Lynn Truss

BOOKS READ:

Enemies of Promise—Cyril Connolly

What Just Happened?—Art Linson

Clockers—Richard Price

Eats, Shoots and Leaves—Lynn Truss

Meat Is Murder—Joe Pernice

Dusty in Memphis—Warren Zanes

Old School—Tobias Wolff

Introducing Time—Craig Callender and Ralph Edney

PLUS: a couple of stories in You Are Not a Stranger Here; a couple of stories in Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme; a couple of stories in Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry? by Elizabeth McCracken.

My first book was published just over eleven years ago and remains in print, and though I observed the anniversary with only a modest celebration (a black-tie dinner for forty of my closest friends, many of whom were kind enough to read out the speeches I had prepared for them), I can now see that I should have made more of a fuss: in Enemies of Promise, which was written in 1938, the critic Cyril Connolly attempts to isolate the qualities that make a book last for ten years.

Over the decades since its publication, Enemies of Promise has been reduced pretty much to one line: “There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall,” which is possibly why I was never previously very interested in reading it. What are you supposed to do if the pram in the hall is already there? You could move it out into the garden, I suppose, if you have a garden, or get rid of it and carry the little bastards everywhere, but maybe I’m being too literal-minded.

Enemies of Promise is about a lot more than the damaging effects of domesticity, however; it’s also about prose style, and the perils of success, and journalism, and politics. Anyone who writes, or wants to write, will find something on just about every single page that either endorses a long-held prejudice or outrages, and that makes it a pretty compelling read. (Ironically, the copy I found on the shelf belongs to one of the mothers of my children. I wonder if she knew, when she bought it twenty years ago, that she would one day partially destroy a literary career? Connolly would probably argue that she did. He generally takes a pretty dim view of women, who “make crippling demands on [a writer’s] time and money, especially if they set their hearts on his popular success.” Bless ’em, eh? I’m presuming, as Connolly does, that you’re a man. What would a woman be doing reading a literary magazine anyway?)

Connolly spends the first part of the book dividing writers into two camps, the Mandarin and the Vernacular. (He is crankily thorough in this division, by the way. He even goes through the big books of the twenties year by year, and marks them with a V or an M: “1929—H. Green, Living (V); W. Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (M); Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (V); Lawrence, Pansies (V); Joyce, Fragments of a Work in Progress (M),” and so on. One hesitates to point it out—it’s too late now—but shouldn’t Connolly have been getting on with his writing, rather than fiddling around with lists? That’s one of your enemies, right there.) And then, having thus divided, he spends a lot of time despairing of both camps. “The Mandarin style… is beloved of literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one. It is the title of those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel.” (Yay, Cyril! Way to go!) Meanwhile, “According to Gide, a good writer should navigate against the current; the practitioners in the new vernacular are swimming with it; the familiarities of the advertisements in the morning paper, the matey leaders in the Daily Express, the blather of the film critics, the wisecracks of the newsreel commentators, the know-all autobiographies of political reporters, the thrillers and ’teccies… are all swimming with it too.” (Cyril, you utter ass. You think Hemingway wrote like that lot? Have another look, mate.) Incidentally, the “know-all autobiographies of political reporters”—that was a whole genre in the nineteen-thirties? Boy.

The invention of paperbacks, around the time Connolly was writing Enemies of Promise, changed everything. Connolly’s ten-year question could fill a book in 1938 because the answer was genuinely complicated then; books really could sit out the vicissitudes of fashion on library shelves, and then dust themselves off and climb back down into readers’ laps. Paperbacks and chain bookstores mean that a contemporary version of Enemies of Promise would consist of one simple and uninteresting question: “Well, did it sell in its first year?” My first book did OK; meanwhile, books that I reviewed and loved in 1991 and 1992, books every bit as good or better than mine, are out of print, simply because they never found a readership then. They might have passed all the Connolly tests, but they’re dead in the water anyway.

You end up muttering back at just about every ornately constructed pensée that Connolly utters, but that’s one of the joys of this book. At one point, he strings together a few sentences by Hemingway, Isherwood, and Orwell in an attempt to prove that their prose styles are indistinguishable. But the point, surely, is that though you can make Connolly’s sentence-by-sentence case easily enough, you’d never confuse a book by Orwell with a book by Hemingway—and that’s what they were doing, writing books. Look, here’s a plain, flat, vernacular sentence:

So I bought a little city (it was Galveston, Texas) and told everybody that nobody had to move, we were going to do it just gradually, very relaxed, no big changes overnight.

This is the tremendous first line of Donald Barthelme’s story “I Bought a Little City” (V); one fears that Connolly might have spent a lot of time looking at the finger, and ignored what it was pointing at. (“See, he bought a whole city, Cyril! Galveston, Texas! Oh, forget it.”) The vernacular turned out to be far more adaptable than Connolly could have predicted.

Reading the book now means that one can, if one wants, play Fantasy Literature—match writers off against each other and see who won over the long haul. (M) or (V)? Faulkner or Henry Green? I reckon the surprise champ was PG Wodehouse, as elegant and resourceful a prose stylist as anyone held up for our inspection here; Connolly is sniffy about him several times over the course of Enemies of Promise, and presumes that his stuff won’t last five minutes, but he has turned out to be as enduring as anyone apart from Orwell. Jokes, you see. People do like jokes.

The Polysyllabic Spree, the twelve terrifyingly beatific young men and woman who run this magazine, have been quiet of late—they haven’t been giving me much trouble, anyway. A friend who works in the same building has heard the ominous rustle of white robes upstairs, however, and he reckons they’re planning something pretty big, maybe something like another Jonestown. (That makes sense, if you think about it. The robes, the eerie smiles, “the Believer”… if you find a free sachet of powdered drink, or—more likely—an edible poem in this month’s issue, don’t touch it.) Anyway, while they’re thus distracted, I shall attempt to sneak a snark under the wire: Tobias Wolff’s Old School is too short. Oh, come on, guys! That’s different from saying it’s too long! Too long means you didn’t like it! Too short means you did!

The truth is, I’ve been reading more short books recently because I need to bump up the numbers in the Books Read column—six of this month’s seven were really pretty scrawny. But Old School I would have read this month, the month of its publication, no matter how long it was: Wolff’s two volumes of memoir, This Boy’s Life and In Pharaoh’s Army, are perennial sources of writerly inspiration, and you presumably know how good his stories are. Old School is brilliant—painful, funny, exquisitely written, acute about writers and literary ambition. (Old School is set right at the beginning of the sixties, in a boys’ private school, and you get to meet Robert Frost and Ayn Rand.) But the problem with short novels is that you can take liberties with them: you know you’re going to get through them no matter what, so you never set aside the time or the commitment that a bigger book requires. I fucked Old School up; I should have read it in a sitting, but I didn’t, and I never gave it a chance to leave its mark. We are never allowed to forget that some books are badly written; we should remember that sometimes they’re badly read, too.

Eats, Shoots and Leaves (the title refers to a somewhat labored joke about a misplaced comma and a panda) is Britain’s number-one best seller at the moment, and it’s about punctuation, and no, I don’t get it, either. It’s a sweet, good-humored book, and it’s grammatically sound and all, but, you know… it really is all about how to use a semicolon and all that. What’s going on? One writer I know suspects that the book’s enormous success is due to the disturbing rise of the Provincial Pedant, but I have a more benign theory: that when you hear about it (and you hear about it a lot, at the moment), you think of someone immediately, someone you know and love, whose punctuation exasperates you and fills them full of self-loathing. I thought of Len, and my partner thought of Emily, neither of whom could place an apostrophe correctly if their lives depended on it. (Names have been changed, by the way, to protect the semiliterate.) And I’m sure Len and Emily will receive a thousand copies each for Christmas and birthdays, and other people will buy a thousand copies for their Lens and Emilys, and in the end the book will sell a quarter of a million copies, but only two hundred different people will own them. I enjoyed the fearful bashing that Lynn Truss gives to the entertainment industry—the Hugh Grant movie Two Weeks Notice (sic), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (sic), the fabricated English pop band Hear’Say (sic)—and the advice she quotes from a newspaper style manual: “Punctuation is a courtesy designed to help readers understand a story without stumbling,” which helps to explain a lot of literary fiction. I had never before heard of the Oxford comma (used before the “and” that brings a list to a close), and I didn’t know that Jesus never gets a possessive “s,” just because of who He is. I never really saw the possessive “s” as profane, or even very secular, but there you go.

The most irritating book of the month (can’t you feel the collective heart of the Spree beating a little faster?) was Joe Pernice’s Meat Is Murder. One can accept, reluctantly, Pernice’s apparently inexhaustible ability to knock out brilliant three-minute pop songs—just about any Pernice Brothers record contains half a dozen tunes comparable to Elvis Costello’s best work. But now it turns out that he can write fiction too, and so envy and bitterness become unavoidable. Meat Is Murder and Warren Zanes’s Dusty in Memphis are both part of a new and neat little “33-and-a-third” series published by Continuum; Pernice is the only writer who has chosen to write a novella about a favorite album, rather than an essay; his story is set in 1985, and is about high school and suicide and teen depression and, tangentially, the Smiths. Warren Zanes’s effort, almost the polar opposite of Pernice’s, is a long, scholarly and convincing piece of nonfiction analyzing the myth of the American South. Endearingly, neither book mentions the relevant records as much as you’d expect: the music is a ghostly rather than physical presence. I liked Art Linson’s What Just Happened?, one of those scabrous, isn’t-Hollywood-awful? books written by someone—a producer, in this case (and indeed in most other cases, e.g. Julia Phillips, Lynda Obst)—who knows what he’s talking about. I can’t really explain why I picked it up, however; perhaps I wanted to be made grateful that I work in publishing, rather than film, and that’s what happened.

Clockers was my big book of the month, the centerpiece around which I can now arrange the short books so that they look functional—pretty, even, if I position them right. I cheated a little, I know—Clockers is essentially a thriller, so it didn’t feel as though I’d had to work for my 650 pages—but it was still a major reading job. Why isn’t Richard Price incredibly famous, like Tom Wolfe? His work is properly plotted, indisputably authentic and serious-minded, and it has soul and moral authority.

Clockers asks—almost in passing, and there’s a lot more to it than this—a pretty interesting question: if you choose to work for the minimum wage when everyone around you is pocketing thousands from drug deals, then what does that do to you, to your head and to your heart? Price’s central characters, brothers Strike (complicatedly bad, a crack dealer) and Victor (complicatedly good, the minimum wage guy) act out something that feels as inevitable and as durable as a Bible story, except with a lot more swearing and drugs. Clockers is—eek—really about the contradictions of capitalism.

I’ve been trying to write a short story that entails my knowing something about contemporary theories of time—hence Introducing Time—but every time I pick up any kind of book about science I start to cry. This actually inhibits my reading pretty badly, due to not being able to see. I’m OK with time theorists up until, say, St. Augustine, and then I start to panic, and the panic then gives way to actual weeping. By my estimation, I should be able to understand Newton by the time I’m 850 years old—by which time I’ll probably discover that some smartass has invented a new theory, and he’s out of date anyway. The short story should be done some time shortly after that. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it, because it’s killing me.