DeLillo on novel writing

Bloody hell this is a good quote. From Don DeLillo (via James Tata):

I was a semiconscious writer in the beginning," he writes. "Just sat and wrote something, or read the newspaper, or went to the movies. Over time I began to understand, one, that I was lucky to be doing this work, and, two, that the only way I'd get better at it was to be more serious, to understand the rigors of novel-writing and to make it central to my life, not a variation on some related career choice, like sportswriting or playwriting. The novel is different...We die indoors, and alone, and I don't mean to sound overdramatic but you know what I'm talking about. Anyway, all of this happened over time, until eventually discipline no longer seemed something outside me that urged the reluctant body into the room. At this point discipline is inseparable from what I do. It's not even definable as discipline. It has no name. I never think about it. But there's no trick of meditation or self-mastery that brought it about. I got older, that's all. I was not a born novelist (if anyone is). I had to grow into novelhood.

Friday Buzz - Woody and the Meaning of Life

Two new books recently have caught my eye. Oddly enough, both wrangle with philosophical issues --in entirely different ways.

Woody Allen's new book is, well, very Woody. Admittedly, I've cooled a bit toward Woody Allen ever since he married his 20-year-old daughter. (Who knew you could make a double entendre out of "robbing the cradle"?) There is no disputing his genius, however, when it comes to filmmaking and writing.

Take this excerpt from his new book, “Mere Anarchy," as reviewed in The New York Times:

“The land is arable and found primarily on the ground,” Mr. Allen writes, about a lonely burg located “just above the bluffs that form Planck’s constant.” ...just above the bluffs that form Planck’s constant.

“She loved fresh lightbulbs,” a former housekeeper says of a victim called Mrs. Washburn. “The linens we did once a year.”

As to the perpetrators of this heinous crime, the story concludes: “Whether the death penalty acts as a deterrent remains questionable, although studies show that the odds of criminals committing another crime drops by almost half after their execution.”

Pretty keen observations on the absurdities of our criminal justice system.

In addition to Mere Anarchy, this summer also sees the release of The Insanity Defense, a reprint combining Allen's three other humor collections (“Without Feathers,” “Side Effects” and “Getting Even” -- I've read the first two.)

I sort of envy those people who will come long after us and Mr. Allen have departed. They won't be subjected to the sordid details of his private life; they will just be able to bask in the lasting brilliance.

On another note, this book looks interesting: The Meaning of Life by Terry Eagleton. (Not to mention his book Literary Theory: An Introduction.)

For one thing, it's relatively short. (Heresy!) And for another, Eagleton is writing from the perspective of a literary theorist. Hence, his love and understanding of linguistics color his viewpoints, as demonstrated in this excerpt from the Salon review by Laura Miller:

For those who don't believe in God, or at least in a God with a plan for the human race, the question "What is the meaning of life?" seethes with puzzles. Can existence mean anything at all without someone (i.e., God) to mean it? Those famous 100 monkeys, pounding away on 100 typewriters for eternity, might eventually produce the exact text of "Hamlet," but they won't mean "Hamlet" the way that the man who intentionally wrote it did.

Eagleton brings contemporary linguistics-based theory to bear on the idea of "meaning," pointing out that it takes several forms. I might mean (that is, intend) to say the word "poisson" ("fish") to a French waiter, but I might actually say "poison," which in turn means (that is, signifies) something else entirely. ("Poison" has the same meaning in French, actually, as it has in English.) There's what I intend to signify or communicate when I speak, and then there's what my words mean in a larger system, such as a language. For linguists, the first kind of meaning is an "act" and the second is a "structure."

Whoa. I don't know about you, but I'm going to have to spend the rest of my Friday mulling over that tidbit.

Thoughts for Thursday: I am Schroeder

I am Schroeder!

"Creative and quiet describes you best. You're most often found off to the side, watching things happen and enjoying the show. Your love of the arts and beauty is a welcome retreat from your frequent bouts of neurosis."

Which Peanuts character are you? Take this quiz to find out.

2007: The halfway mark

I guess it's the pessimist in me, but the fact that 2007 is nearly half over makes me sad and queasy. I feel as if I'm neck-deep in water and running in place. A mad expenditure of energy to get nowhere.

Maybe that frame of mind is affecting my evaluation at how my literary endeavors have gone thus far.

A couple of noted accomplishments, however: My "Months of Reading" idea seems to be working so far for me. I feel focused without being reined in. I also feel good about the volume sizes I've managed to work my way through. Young Girls in Flower, Cat's Eye, My Uncle Napolean and Portrait of a Lady are all hefty novels. And, I'm quite pleased with the quality and variety of my reading; I'm especially proud that I've managed to fit in 3 classics.

Well, 3, once I finish Don Quixote, which may wind up topping the "best of" list for 2007.


What do I hope to accomplish by year's end?

1) More classic literature, hopefully by at least 1 author I have not yet read. Bob Dylan suggested Balzac's Cousin Bette, which I must say intrigues me. I also have Hunchback of Notre Dame waiting in the wings (think it's time for some French masters).
2) Jane Austen. Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey (plus Lady Susan) are languishing on the shelves. I'd like to make my way through at least 1 of them. Northanger Abbey is a likely candidate for the...
3) RIP Challenge. I've been working on my list of gothic and horror since last year. Dracula, anyone?
4) Horror Story Short Challenge. I plan to host this in October, to promote, read and examine the short horror story genre.

Oh, and Kate, please let me know if or when you'd like to take on Dud Avocado!

What are your literary plans for the remainder of 2007?

Slow Man by JM Coetzee

JM Coetzee's novel Disgrace was one of the best I've read in a decade. Unfortunately, the two novels I've read subsequent to Disgrace thudded in my sensibilities like drinking Kool-Aid after a glass of Reserve Napa Valley Cabernet.

And to think, elements of one bad novel made an appearance in the second bad novel. Well, that was bad luck for this reader.

Let's start with Slow Man. The novel started out well, if fairly typically, with a "life-changing crisis:" Sixty-year-old Paul Rayment is hit by a young driver while riding his bicycle and his leg is amputated. Bidda-bing, we are catapulted along with the protagonist into a new world, with limitations and new people and all sorts of reflective moments. Coetzee could pull this approach off because his prose is spare and his observations dead-on.

I had the same feeling starting Disgrace, actually. I thought, oh, God, another story about an aging professor banging a young student and embarking on a mid-life crisis. But Coetzee's prose was so stellar, I decided to hang with it -- and that novel took an amazing twist and then an amazing turn, and so forth, for a spectacularly satisfying read.

Slow Man never really took off (another bad pun). Although I had twinges of "this hits too close to home" (Rayment is childless and regretting it, along with his life lived generally for himself. Shades of moi, unfortunately...), the novel clanged into a rather predictable gong of the patient falling in love with his nurse and then unaccountably crashed (whoops) into disaster with the appearance of Elizabeth Costello.

Elizabeth Costello is the heroine of the eponymous novel released prior to Slow Man. This was the OTHER novel of Coetzee's I decided to read, after Disgrace. That book is essentially a series of lectures on writing by the writer Elizabeth Costello. Oh, hey, meta-fiction, my favorite. Yawn.

As if it wasn't bad enough to have a whole novel devoted to the ponderous ponderings of a fictional windbag, Coetzee has to bring her slap into another story. The character of Elizabeth Costello did not improve in the transition, either. She's unpleasant and unnecessary, and really, I have to work with a lot of people who are like that; if an author insists on being all cutesy with meta-fiction and recycling his character, then it better be for a very good reason.

Unfortunately, Elizabeth Costello doesn't have the grace to jump off the nearest cliff. She sticks around until the bitter end of the novel.

The whole point to this post is: I really, really want to love JM Coetzee. He obviously is a brilliant writer. Is Disgrace the only great book he wrote? Or did I simply have the misfortune to pick the two duds out of his entire oeuvre?

Falling Man by Don DeLillo

This weekend was a milestone: I finished two novels, Slow Man by JM Coetzee and Falling Man by Don DeLillo. Interesting in that each of the protagonists was an alienated modern man on the verge of losing everything. But, never mind the weird coincidences one runs into as a reader. This post focuses on Falling Man.

From what I've read so far, other readers have mixed feelings at best. Well, I'm going out on a limb here: I liked it, and I gotta cheer at DeLillo's guts in fictionalizing the most sacred cow of current events, 9/11.

I have the advantage here of not having read other of DeLillo's work. It seems that his fans find Falling Man falling short (sorry for the pun) of his previous novels, and I haven't been indoctrinated into this cult. So, I can take Falling Man on its own terms. I wouldn't say it is the definitive account of 9/11 or even brilliant, but, flawed as it might be, it succeeds at trying. Here is what I mean:

The book starts out as the protagonist lawyer Keith Neudecker, covered in ash and glass shards, escapes from one of the burning towers. He makes his way to the home of his estranged wife and son. (Many reviewers have qualified this move as "inexplicable," but it seems fairly logical to me that one would seek out those who are or have been closest to you, emotionally and in physical proximity....Who did you talk to on 9/11?) Thus, the plot unfolds as Keith, his wife Lianne and their son (referred to most often as simply "the kid") try to reconnect and make sense of their lives in a post-9/11 world.

To me, Keith is an archetype character, but it is a device that DeLillo successfully exploits. Keith is a stand-in for those of us who did not suffer the physical horror of the day; he is the emotional conduit for us, and as such, could not be too particularized. Lianne, being one step removed from the WTC collapse, is shaded in a more complex way.

Both she and Keith are involved in actitivities that work as clever and rich metaphors within the novel. Lianne runs a workshop for dementia patients to record their thoughts before they lose their memories -- an echo of how Americans have had to re-establish their own histories and worldview after 9/11. Keith is a poker player, whose obsession with the game of chance (just as his escape was a play on luck) is as fraught with ritual as the terrorist's jihadist preparations.

DeLillo was less successful with the novel's central metaphor, Falling Man. This describes a performance artist who appears around New York City, tethering himself to a safety line and jumping from unlikely places, dressed in a business suit -- a living reminder of the images of jumpers from the towers; the metaphor doesn't ever seem to really gel, to hold the portent of complexity of the events and emotions it calls to mind.

DeLillo attempts to bring in other worldviews. He does get inside the head of one of the terrorists, and one of the peripheral characters adds a perspective of other nations' reactions to 9/11. I think he really was trying to address many facets of 9/11, in as straightforward manner as possible. All in all, I applaud his effort.

Not too many other reviewers do, and personally, I think it's because there seems to be as little perspective, six years after the event, as there was on 9/12/2001.

The NYRB article by Andrew O'Hagan seems a fairly typical take on the novel. Decrying 9/11 as the event that "instantly blows DeLillo's lamps out," O'Hagan essentially dismisses this author's (or any, for that matter) ability to recapture a media-logged traumatic event as Biblical as 9/11:

In this book, the events aren't enough, or they are too much, which amounts to the same thing for a novelist. There appear to be few writers in America now who could bring us to know what might have been going through the minds of those people as they fell from the building—or going through the minds of the hijackers as they met their targets—but there is no shortage of those who would do what DeLillo does, which is to show us an anxious, educated woman watching a performance artist hanging upside down from a metal beam in Pershing Square. It is a form of intellectual escapism. The oddity of the art world can easily be made to stand in for the profundity of life and death, but none of us who lived through the morning of September 11, 2001, could easily believe that the antics of a performance artist, no matter how uncanny, would suffice to denote the scale and depth of our encounter with dread. The Falling Man, the artist, can do no better than constitute some figurative account of the author himself, suspended in freefall, frozen in time, subject to both the threat of gravity and the indwelling disbelief of the spectators below.

And this is from the UK Guardian:

The feeling of being decentred, peripheral to oneself, is clearly appropriate to a narrative of aftermath, but turns out to be an abiding, almost defining, characteristic of the book.

It's almost as if the reviewers want to punish DeLillo -- a slap on the wrist, maybe, but punitive nevertheless -- for daring to touch the untouchable, for adding fictional narrative to a story that is very real, with very real consequences. Or, even more subtle and insidious, is the implication that the novel is "passe," out of step with the technological times. I've seen this attitude curling around the edges of various articles and essays -- the proverbial death of the novel. What a lack of imagination! What a myopic love affair with gadgets and widgets and things that go beep in the night! One could really stretch and say that it was this very lack of imagination, this over-confidence in the superiority of technology that led to 9/11...but perhaps that would be going too far, even when grappling with understanding a situation in which you really can't go far enough.

Tomorrow: My thoughts on Slow Man.

Quelle dilemma!

What do I read next? Yes, I am knee-deep in Don Quixote, and yes, I am halfway through a bio on D.H. Lawrence (Note to self: Be grateful you never met D.H. Lawrence.) And yes, I am about halfway through Kerouac's The Subterraneans.

I guess the real question is: Why do I want to start another novel?

Before I do any soul-searching over that, I want to lay out some of the choices that I'm toying with. Perhaps you all should vote on one for me.

Slow Man by JM Coetzee
Falling Man by Don DeLillo
Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwicke (I could read along with the Slaves of Golconda folk.)
The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy

Okay, I VOW to finish Kerouac before starting one of the above. That should keep me focused.

You know, I think I like the IDEA of having all these books to read better than actually STARTING one. I think I get a little freaked out by another commitment (Note to self: Sue therapist over not solving commitment-phobia issue). It takes me a while, too -- at least 60 pages -- to get really rolling on most novels. I have to force myself to stick with one 'til the hooks finally grab into my skin.

Not always. Sinking into Don Quixote, for example, has been like hopping on a trolley. Just get on and ride. I have a hunch the updated translation is a big help, though I know next to nothing about the science of translations, in the general sense or specifically about the history of this particular tome.

Enough rambling, dear readers. Time to visit Kerouac as I ride home on the BART...

The democracy of Don Quixote

Cross-posted at Tilting at Windmills

Here is an interesting article about Don Quixote and the state of the novel. Spoiler Alert: Don’t read the article until you’ve finished DQ. (But you can read my excerpts…)

The article by Jonathan Ree begins:

In or around 1605, European literature changed. No one realised it at the time, but when Don Quixote set off to save the world, a new kind of writing was born. The old forms of storytelling—the epic, the romance, the oral tale—would from now on be pitted against a boisterous young rival. Before long it would be universally acknowledged that a reader hoping to enjoy a good story must be in search of a novel.

Ree provides a pithy overview of the cultural relevance of the novel — and essay — (vis a vis politics), quoting several recent books, among them, Milan Kundera’s The Curtain, which refers to Cervantes and Don Quixote:

By inventing a narrator through whose consciousness such dumb events could be worked up into an affecting “scene,” Cervantes created a form of literature that could do justice to “modest sentiments”; and so a new kind of beauty—Kundera calls it “prosaic beauty”—was born. Henry Fielding took the technique further when he created a narrator who could charm his readers with benign loquacity, and Laurence Sterne completed the development by blithely allowing the story of Tristram Shandy to be ruined by the character trying to recount it.

The article concludes:

The novel, (Mario Vargas Llosa) thinks, articulates a basic human desire—the desire to be “many people, as many as it would take to assuage the burning desires that possess us.” Alternatively, it stands for a basic human right—the right not to be the same as oneself, let alone the same as other people. And the defiant history of democracy began not in politics but in literature, when Cervantes first tackled “the problem of the narrator,” or the question of who gets to tell the story. No doubt about it: Don Quixote is “a 21st-century novel.”

Books I will NOT be reading this summer

I will not be reading:

1. Exploitative books by anyone with the surname of Bush. Except if it's a travel guide about club-hopping and buying blow in Paraguay. Something the author really KNOWS about. I smell Judith Regan in this book deal...

2. The Secret by Rhonda Byrne. I won't be watching the DVD, either. 'Cos the real secret to everything is: Get Oprah to talk about it.

3. Anything containing the words "Harry Potter." I once dated a guy who too closely resembled Harry Potter. And I once wore polyester mini-dresses. No sense revisiting the ugly past.

4. The Reagan Diaries. I really never want to get into this guy's head, thank you very much.

5. Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes. One of the blurbs for this book reads: "What do Hegel and Bette Midler have in common?" What's next? Understanding Classical Music through Britney Spears?

Don Quixote and other musings

A word on DQ: Is it me, or are Don Quixote and Sancho the Laurel and Hardy of literature. Talk about slapstick! Well, folks, that is my erudite reading of DQ. At least, for a Monday. And this observation: For being so famous, the windmill scene was surprisingly short.

Summer Solstice Reading: Another month gone by? Time: It's an outrage. Yes, indeed, the clock ran out on May 2007, and we are already 4 days into June. I slated June as the ubiquitous "Summer Solstice Reading" month, which means I can pretty much read what I want to, preferably anything of substantial length. Don Quixote certainly fills that quota, and I have other books I am longing to begin. (Apparently, I'm in good company; check out The New York Times' survey of reading recommendations by writers. Note that Michael Crichton apparently is doing research for a global-warming thriller.)

God, I long for the days of school vacation, when summers lived like years.

Friday Buzz - What's new in short stories

Happy Friday, everyone! Here are some random happenings going on in the short story world:

June 1 New Yorker: Works by two of the best short story writers are featured: William Trevor and George Saunders. Check it out!

Steven McDermott collection: Storyglossia editor Steven McDermott's new collection Winter of Different Directions is now available. Storyglossia was recently named Best Online Publication by Million Writers.

Charles Baxter on the craft of fiction: Short story master and novelist Charles Baxter has a new book coming out: The Art of Subtext.

Reading how you're read: This article examines how you can evaluate criticism of your fiction.

Thoughts for Thursday - A guzzle of dyspepsia

Dyspeptic. Isn't that a good word? Means both "indigestion" and "disgruntled." I like a word that is a multi-tasker. Barkeep! Another round of dyspepsia! And fresh horses for the men!

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There are none so blind...as those trying out new contact lenses. I've been on these new soft lenses that are like putting half a grapeskin into each eye in order to try to correct my failing nearsightedness while still addressing my woefully inadquate farsightedness. The half-a-grapeskin solution is in lieu of 1) adjusting to bi- or tri-focal glasses or b) permanently searing my corneas with laser surgery. I am holding out that the lenses will eventually work, but now everything is sort of hazy, like through a sheet of Saran Wrap. This isn't a good view for an editor...

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Oh, lists are fun. Especially when they are lists of the favorite movie adaptations by prominent intellectuals. Now I can have a TBV (to be viewed) list in addition to my old standby, the TBR list.

I am going to start another list, that of the "most adaptable author." And for me, gotta go with Henry James. "The Heiress," "The Innocents," and "Wings of a Dove" are all excellent films. E.M. Forster comes in second, with "Passage to India," "Room with a View," and "Maurice." Please feel free to join in with your favorite adaptable authors.

Top 10 satires

Here is a good list from the UK Guardian on the "Top 10 Satires."

The only one I've read is Catch-22 (long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away).

Coupla TBRs in here:
1) Um, didn't know Cervantes wrote stories.
2) Dickens, always.

What he missed (!!!):
Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
Animal Farm, George Orwell (which I have yet to read)

What are your favorite satires?Has anyone read some of the Guardian choices? Any recommendations?

Looks like I will have to select a Selected Satire Month for my 2008 reading!

Diddling with Edgar Allan Poe

From "Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences," (a mock scientific treatise) by Edgar Allan Poe:

A crow thieves; a fox cheats; a weasel outwits; a man diddles. To diddle is his destiny....Diddling, rightly considered, is a compound, of which the ingredients are minuteness, interest, perseverance, ingenuity, audacity, nonchalance, originality, impertinence, and grin.


Source: The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe and the Invention of Murder by Daniel Stashower

Now, go forth and diddle.

Thoughts for Thursday - Randomness

My secret thought, exposed on a public web site. This is what keeps me up at night (and far away from my keyboard):

The physical act of writing a book may not be difficult, but there's a big difference between smacking away at a keyboard and writing something that anyone who doesn't really love you wants to read. -- from The Shocking Truth About the Slush Pile

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Question: If a blog post is posted and nobody reads it, does it make a sound?

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Am I the last person to know about this site? Cool.

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Summer unofficially starts this weekend. The most "summery" book I remember reading was called Seventeenth Summer by Maureen Daly. Since it's a teenage love story written in the Fifties, I can't believe it's still in print (I can't believe people would find it relevant!). So I ordered myself a used copy, just for nostalgia's sake. If only I had an apple tree to read in, with a tall glass of lemonade ...

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Do people really read at the beach? I think it's a marketing myth. Sort of like hair conditioner that can actually make your hair look shiny and not greasy. I always found the beach far too glarey for reading, what with the sun reflecting off every surface: sand, sea, lavishly-oiled bodies. Then you get all hot and sweaty and the pages stick to your hands and then the wind ruffles the pages too much and then when you try to hold them down with your hot, sweaty hands you get sand in the bookspine. And then you lose your place after watching the young men play shirtless beach volleyball, and then you realize you have a blazing headache, the kind you get from too much sun and not enough water and squinting and laying on a hard surface too long and sucking in your stomach to make it look somewhat flattering in front of the shirtless volleyball players.


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But I digress.


Everyone enjoy a safe, happy Memorial Day weekend (even if you're not in the States). And, if you get a minute, let me know what your favorite summer reading involves.

What is wrong with the modern novel?

What is wrong with modern literary novel, asks Julian Gough in the May 2007 Prospect.

Even if you don't think anything is wrong, this article delivers some interesting food for thought for readers and writers alike.

His basic premise is that Western culture undervalues the comic novel -- and he makes some pretty sweeping statements in doing it. But, if you can get past the hyperbolic nature of certain statements, Gough pokes at some sacred cows, right in the rump, with a sharp little pencil point:

The literary novel, by accepting the embrace of the universities, has moved inside the establishment and lost contact with what made it vital. It has, as a result, also lost the mass audience enjoyed by Twain and Dickens. The literary novel—born in Cervantes's prison cell, continued in cellars, bars and rented rooms by Dostoevsky, Joyce and Beckett—is now being written from on high. Not the useful height of the gods, with its sharp, gods'-eye view of all human classes, all human folly, but the distancing, merely human height of the ruling elite, just too high up to see what's happening on the street below.

And another jab:

With its cartoon event-rate, a classic series of The Simpsons has more ideas over a broader cultural range than any novel written the same year. The speed, the density of information, the range of reference; the quantity, quality and rich humanity of the jokes—they make almost all contemporary novels seem slow, dour, monotonous and almost empty of ideas.

And he really is bracing when he ruminates about the nature of the novel:

The novel, when done right—when done to the best of the novelist's abilities, talent at full stretch—is always greater than the novelist. It is more intelligent. It is more vast. It can change your entire internal world. Of course, so can a scientific truth. So can a religious experience. So can some drugs. So can a sublime event in nature. But the novel operates on that high level. Sitting there, alone, quite still, you laugh, you murmur, you cry, and you can come out of it with a new worldview, in a new reality. It's a controlled breakdown, or breakthrough. It's dangerous.

The novel cannot submit to authority. It is written against official language, against officialdom, and against whatever fixed form the novel has begun to take—it is always dying, and always being born.

Now, that speaks to me.

Bye, Proust; hello, Cervantes!

Red-letter day: I finished the second volume of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. While In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower wasn't as satisfying overall as Swann's Way, it did provide the patented Proust moments of awe, as well as some genuine chuckles.

I also am almost finished with a New in the Stacks read: The Beautiful Cigar Girl by Daniel Stashower. Part biography, part murder mystery, this nonfiction read details the convergence of a scandalous murder with Edgar Allan Poe's life. The murder inspired a work called "The Mystery of Marie Roget." I had no idea that Poe was orphaned then raised in a wealthy family, whose patriarch cut him off when he was a young man. Interesting, quick read...and whets my appetite for Poe. May have to find a way to work him into the Horror Story Short Challenge in October!

Now, with a clear conscience, I move onto Cervantes and Don Quixote! This is going to be a doubly satisfying challenge, insofar that I get to read a great novel AND it sort of preps me for a trip to Spain I am taking in November. Two whole weeks of vacation, from Barcelona to Madrid, with a very likely stop in Morocco. Hola!

Thoughts for Thursday - Jack and Marcel

Okay, if you're a regular reader, you know I've been enmeshed -- er, enrossed -- in Proust. As many pages as I can stand, each evening.

In my previous Proust post, I pondered on how his prose struck me like a heavy drug trip: you know you've had a profound experience, but you are not sure you could describe it.

Litlove commented that she had to write about Proust as a critic. I was suitably impressed.

It got me to pondering more about what makes Proust Proust.

Somehow, that got me thinking about Kerouac, another writer I've been reading and whose work I admire. Then I got to pondering (I ponder quite a bit in my downtime): Why am I associating these two writers in my mind?

I think I may have hit upon a link--I'd like to hear your thoughts. The prose of Jack and Marcel cannot be discussed in terms of conventional literary devices (plot, character, dialogue) if you have a hope of conveying their writing. You can discuss theme, but I think with both writers you would have to broaden the discussion.

They are working on a different plane than many other fiction writers: Employing Language to convey Big Ideas. Kerouac also employs Style/Voice (which I cannot precisely account for in Proust).

Is this simplistic or just plain wrongheaded? Am I figuring something out that about a hundred critics have already figured out 20 years ago? What do you think about the Jack and Marcel connection -- and which other authors work on the same plane?

A note about your comments: I love comments. I feel as if I am having a discussion or actually connecting with a person. Maybe that's a technical glitch, a mechanical illusion. But I don't care. Bring on the comments! Please know that I cherish each and every one of them. Even when I don't quite understand them.

The mystery of publishing

Check out this interesting article from the NY Times, in which publishing bigwhigs debate about the industry and how little they know about the marketplace:

...other industries...have made a point of using new technology to gain a better understanding of their customers. Television stations have created online forums for viewers and may use the information there to make programming decisions. Game developers solicit input from users through virtual communities over the Internet. Airlines and hotels have developed increasingly sophisticated databases of customers.


Publishers, by contrast, put up Web sites where, in some cases, readers can sign up for announcements of new titles. But information rarely flows the other way — from readers back to the editors.

“We need much more of a direct relationship with our readers,” said Susan Rabiner, an agent and a former editorial director. Bloggers have a much more interactive relationship with their readers than publishers do, she said. “Before Amazon, we didn’t even know what people thought of the books,” she said.

Most in the industry seem to see consumer taste as a mystery that is inevitable and even appealing, akin to the uncontrollable highs and lows of falling in love or gambling. Publishing employees tend to be liberal arts graduates who enter the field with a starting salary around $30,000. Compensation is not tied to sales performance. “The people who go into it don’t do it for the money, which might explain why it’s such a bad business,” said WilliamStrachan, editor in chief at Carroll & Graf Publishers.

Apparently, little has changed in the industry since Guttenburg's press:

It’s the way this business has run since 1640,” he says. That is when 1,700 copies of the Bay Psalm Book were published in the colonies. “It was a gamble, and they guessed right because it sold out of the print run. And ever since then, it has been a crap shoot,” Professor Greco said.

There is a “business model” that supports this risk-taking. As Mr. Strachan puts it, “Lightning does strike.”

Turning on, tuning in to Proust

If reading is a drug, then Proust is the literary equivalent of an LSD trip.

You read Proust, and you see writing and the world in an entirely different way. You've glided through the doors of perception, tuned in, experienced the Divine Truth.

Then you wake up the next morning and try to explain the experience to someone.

And you cannot find the words. And you start thinking, what was it that I really experienced? Has my reading comprehension really degraded that much? Do I really understand English?

Although I'm about 2/3 of the way through In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, I couldn't tell you the plot. I think Marcel is going from adolescence to adulthood. He breaks up with Gilberte. He goes to a hotel. He meets a few snobs. He acts like a cry-baby.

But he's at his most hallucinogenic when he reflects on life.

Here, for example, is a striking passage about artists and friendships:

Friendship is a dispensation from this duty [to live for the artist's self], an abdication of self. Even conversation, which is friendship's mode of expression, is a superficial digression which gives us nothing worth acquiring. We may talk for a lifetime without doing more than indefinitely repeat the vacuity of a minute, whereas the march of thought in the solitary work of artistic creation proceeds in depth, in the only direction that is not closed to us, along which we are free to advance--though with more effort, it is true--towards a goal of truth. And friendship is not merely devoid of virtue, like conversation, it is fatal to us as well. For the sense of boredom which those of us whose law of development is purely internal cannot help but feel in a friend's company (when, that is to say, we must remain on the surface of ourselves, instead of pursuing our voyage of discovery into the depths)--that first impression of boredom our friendship impels us to correct when we are alone again, to recall with emotion the words which our friend said to us, to look upon them as a valuable addition to our substance, when the fact is that we are not like buildings to which stones can be added from without, but like trees which draw from their own sap the next knot that will appear on their trunks, the spreading roof of their foliage.

Now, I ask you: How can you explain this passage to someone, without destroying the experience of actually reading it? That, to me, is what makes Proust a writer like no other. His prose can only be experienced by the reading of it. Not by making it into a film, not by reading a book review or Cliff's Notes or a few chapters. No cheap bottle of Ripple or bong hit will do. You have to lay yourself open to the entire experience to get the buzz.