Author Archives: Ryan

In Praise of Novellas (Especially Ones by Denis Johnson)

Posted on by under Authors, Book Recommendations

In the introduction to his story collection Skeleton Crew (1985), Stephen King remarks that “Reading a good long novel is in many ways like having a long and satisfying affair” (a few lines later he amends it to “an affair or a marriage”), while “a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.”

A novella would seem to land somewhere in between, the equivalent of that dude you spent the weekend with at that cool music festival out in the desert, or of a summer-camp romance, or–if the book isn’t good–of an ill-advised fling with a close friend. I especially like it when novelists who are known for writing huge books flip the script on us and bring out something much trimmer. For example, there’s Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day; Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49; and Dickens’s Hard Times (short for him, anyway). On the nonfiction side, there is William Styron’s Darkness Visible.

Denis Johnson has written more than one solid short novel–The Name of the World (2000) and Nobody Move (2009) are both fantastic–but the bulk of his popular rep is based on 2007’s Tree of Smoke, the Vietnam War behemoth that won a National Book Award. Literate people know it even if they haven’t read it. There’s also his hugely underrated NorCal narco-Gothic thriller, Already Dead (1998), which a lot of lazy critics griped was overwritten and too slow. (It isn’t either.)

In 2002 he published Train Dreams in The Paris Review, but the narrative wasn’t released as an independent book until a couple of years ago; a slim little thing that will fit in your coat pocket, it weighs in at 116 pages. You can read it during a cross-country flight. That’s what I did. No big deal, brah. Guess I’m just a reader.

Image

Set in the American West (mainly Washington, Idaho, and Montana) during the first half of the twentieth century, the book’s central character is Robert Grainier, a laborer. Nothing much happens to him: he doesn’t invent anything or kill somebody or write a famous book. Grainier works a lot of rough jobs, gets married, gets widowed, works more jobs, and makes it into his eighties, dying alone in his cabin. He never even gets drunk or shoots a gun (strange, given where and when he lives), though he does see Elvis’s touring train once.

But Johnson’s gorgeous narration (a sustained brew of narrative-driven realism, Gothic tall-tale, and dilatory, lush, at times surreal prose poetry) underscores the astonishing density of an ordinary life, the kind that most of us have, whatever era we happen to inhabit. Here is Robert as a logger in northwest Washington around 1920:

He liked the grand size of things in the woods, the feeling of being lost and far away, and the sense he had that with so many trees as wardens, no danger could find him. . . . Cut off from anything else that might trouble them, the gang, numbering sometimes more than forty and never fewer than thirty-five men, fought the forest from sunrise until suppertime, felling and bucking the giant spruce into pieces of a barely manageable size, accomplishing labors, Grainier sometimes thought, tantamount to the pyramids, changing the face of the mountainsides, talking little, shouting their communications, living with the sticky feel of pitch in their beards, sweat washing the dust off their long johns and caking it in the creases of their necks and joints, the odor of pitch so thick it abraded their throats and stung their eyes, and even overlaid the stink of beasts and manure. At day’s end the gang slept nearly where they fell.

Just look at that rhythm. After the switchbacks of a multi-clause, carefully unspooled, image-heavy sentence comes a short one rendered even crisper by Johnson’s decision not to use a comma after the introductory phrase “At day’s end.”

This being a story with a third-person narrator, the usual question arises of where the main character’s cognition stops and the author’s discourse begins, but regardless of where you think the border zone is, Robert is an observant, sensitive man, alive to the shocks of his own life.

Johnson’s mystery narrator also relishes subsidiary characters. This is how the dynamite handler in the logging camp dies:

It looked certain that Arn Peeples would exit this world in a puff of smoke with a monstrous noise, but he went out quite differently, hit across the back of his head by a dead branch falling off a tall larch–the kind of snag called a ‘widowmaker’ with just this kind of misfortune in mind. The blow knocked him silly, but he soon came around and seemed fine, complaining only that his spine felt ‘”knotty amongst the knuckles” and “I want to walk suchways–crooked.” He had a number of dizzy spells and grew dreamy and forgetful over the course of the next few days, lay up all day Sunday racked with chills and fever, and on Monday morning was found in his bed deceased, with the covers up under his chin and “such a sight of comfort,” as the captain said, “that you’d just as soon not disturb him–just lower him down into a great long wide grave, bed and all.”

The prose is always like that, swinging between the straightforward (“deceased”) and the disorienting (“knotty amongst the knuckles”!). In short, Train Dreams is incredible. You can read it over a weekend. And it costs about $5 on Amazon. You can thank TGR later.

From the Department of No Shit

Posted on by under education

As every teacher you have ever gotten to know has almost certainly told you, it turns out that administrative and managerial bloat is waaaay more of a problem than the extremely popular myth that holding small classes with real professors talking to actual students is “Just Too Expensive, what with the Internet Revolution and all.” The author is kind of a prick at the end, managing to (sort of) still blame profs for the situation, but this is worth a read. Two minutes.

The Economist: You’ll always feel sophisticated reading it, whether they’re offering sensible higher-ed policy advice or claiming that invading Iraq is a good idea.

Falling Off

Posted on by under Authors, Other Critics

If you’re a writer or the kind of reader who doesn’t confine yourself to Dan Brown and Harry Potter, you probably believe that brilliance eventually triumphs: that even if a writer’s work goes out of print during his or her lifetime (e.g., Faulkner until the late 1940s), the obscurity isn’t permanent. Taste changes, after all.

But even if we leave aside talent that never got a chance to write in the first place (e.g., Virginia Woolf’s famous imaginary example, in A Room of One’s Own, of Shakespeare’s sister), is this actually true?

In a great essay published in the Boston Review in 1999, Stewart O’Nan (noice name) uses the American novelist Richard Yates to argue that it isn’t, at least not all of the time. Ironically, this piece helped revitalize Yates’s literary-historical fortunes. In the twenty-first century he has gotten reprints, a first-rate biography, a long essay in The New Yorker (unfortunately it’s by the staggeringly dull James Wood), and a Leo DiCaprio vehicle. Good on him. (That said, he’ll always be the Stone Temple Pilots to John Cheever’s Nirvana. And I like STP–but they aren’t Nirvana.)

But given the decline of reading among Americans (and lots of other people), you could say that every great writer is doomed to oblivion. Eh? Eh?

Fallen Fruit

Posted on by under in the news, The Moronic Inferno

It would be reductive to say that Apple sells “Cool.” I mean, yes, they sell Cool, but their brand appeal is at once more specific and more expansive than that word implies. On the fly, I’d say that this particular multinational profit-generating venture offers its customers a hygienic, techno-progressive, fundamentally meliorist view of history, one that embodies some of the most infuriating, and alluring, traits of Western cosmopolitanism. Granted, Apple’s products are pretty slick; my iPhone is a couple years old, but it is still a cool machine, and if I had the money, I would probably spring for a new iPod to help make my jogging regimen less painful. Further, it’s not like anyone makes you buy Apple’s stuff or forces you to worship St. Jobs if you do.

But whenever I check basketball scores on my phone I feel like a dupe. Because even if you aren’t the kind of dork who gets excited by the idea of visiting the Apple store or considers Technology (a term so broad it doesn’t mean anything) a globalist cure-all, you, Apple consumer, are still at least partially complicit in a worldview that blends narcissistic consumerism (there will always be newer, sleeker, cooler apps and devices to run them on), bourgeois sentimentality (e.g., that unbearably twee commercial where the rich child sings to her telegenic gramps), and smug Silicon Valley tech-worship (one observer calls it Solutionism), a worldview that is backed by a very real corporate behemoth with very real economic and political clout.

Given this institutional reality, it probably shouldn’t surprise anyone that Apple has been assiduously hiding billions and billions of dollars of profit from the US government and, thus, from American society. You know, all of us who drive on roads, eat food, attend school, and visit doctors, whether or not we own MacBooks.

While this present news is galling, the core problem isn’t Apple. Maximizing profits is what corporations do; it is the only thing they exist to do, even if the CEO votes for Obama or gives money to African orphans while extolling the benefits of local organic farming. And thanks to America’s insane tax code and the Gordian knot of international finance regulations, one of the best ways to maximize profits is to . . . follow the laws. As the silver-haired plutocrat at the company’s helm has testily reminded everybody who asks, Apple didn’t violate any rules, at least not the kind that have legal implications if broken. 

Letter of the law aside, the situation remains appalling, because when corporations slither away from the taxes that basic economic and moral principles (but not, again, laws) suggest they are obligated to contribute, the rest of us, the people who pay for the roads along which Apple ships its products and the schools that educate many of its engineers, have to pony up the difference. From the New Yorker, here’s John Cassidy:

Partly as a result of their evasive tactics, big businesses now shoulder a lot less of the tax burden than they used to do. In the years after the Second World War, the corporate income tax accounted for about a third of over-all tax revenues. Today, its share is less than nine per cent. Who has made up the difference? Who do you think? Sixty years ago, individual and payroll taxes accounted for about half of over-all tax revenues; today, they account for more than eighty per cent.

No wonder our physical infrastructure is crumbling. That’s what happens when the social contract rots. I hope the little girl from the Christmas ad plans on going to private school.

Yes, Read Gogol

Posted on by under Book Recommendations, Other Critics

From the Wall Street Journal, of all damn places. Murdoch owns them, but at least they still print serious book reviews. While I suspect Russians might take some issue with this—not the “vast and barbarous country” part (Russians are rightly proud of the fact) but rather the critic’s assertion that Dostoevsky, Gogol, and company “mysteriously” emerged from that country—the essay is a good piece a’ read. It’s the length of a cup of coffee, too. There is no Kafka without Gogol. Good Saturday, everyone.

Today in Allen Iverson News

Posted on by under American Masculinity, Other Critics, The Moronic Inferno

If you like watching fun basketball games, you probably liked watching (or like–thanks, YouTube) Allen Iverson ball. Dude was built like an elf and shot too many bad jumpers, but as a creative, articulate, borderline-psychotic volume scorer, as a player whose neurotic self-enclosed style ended up shortening his career in the NBA, he’s a Romantic hero. Cf. Kobe Bryant. Unlike Kobe he’s an acrobatic poet; he’ll break your heart.

Unfortunately his personal life sounds like something Percy Shelley or John Berryman would get up to. Highly recommended–the article, not the life.

Fake Conservatism and the American University

Posted on by under education, in the news, The Moronic Inferno, the polis

Griping about how “tenured radicals” destroyed academia’s commitment to the humanist tradition is quite a tradition among pundits who consider themselves Conservative Intellectuals. As the general narrative goes, US colleges and universities were awesome until the 1960s, when left-wingers took the wheel and ruined everything, such that now our children are forced to study post-colonial queer Marxist avant-garde TV culture instead of the Great Books. The New Criterion is one of the coaling stations for this point of view. Now, to their credit, TNC publishes work by William Logan, one of the last good poetry critics in America. But to their discredit, they also publish appallingly stupid bullshit like this:

Academia is still a protected oasis—you can gauge just how protected by checking the astonishing price tag—but its signature purpose is no longer to pursue the scholarly life, to preserve and transmit to the next generation the riches of our cultural inheritance. On the contrary, colleges and universities have increasingly been subjugated to a leftist ideological agenda bent on dismantling that tradition. Anyone who speaks of “the riches of our cultural inheritance” would be shouted down as a reactionary whose views were not worth listening to. . . . They find willing accomplices in college administrators whose chief ambition is not to uphold standards of accomplishment and conduct but to appear ostentatiously enlightened.

Really? For the past thirty years American schools have replaced full-time professorships with an army of graduate-student TAs and adjuncts, even as the number of richly compensated corporate managers (er, Administrators) balloons, even as those administrators suddenly push for outsourced online courses, even as more lucre goes to amenities like gyms and football stadiums, even as the humanities have experienced the worst of the unnecessary and devastating cuts in public funding for higher education (even though, pace current mythology, the humanities fund the STEM fields), TNC claims this? This? Has their entire editorial staff undergone some terrible brain trauma? That’s their argument? That deviously powerful liberal intellectuals have rendered themselves broke and powerless so as to become . . . even more powerful?

Wonder what those traitors think about how things stand? Speaking as a college lecturer, I can assure you that it is easy to slide through four years of school without reading a long novel or learning anything about Plato or Gettysburg. So they are probably pretty happy, right? Consider one prof’s take on the situation:

“Here’s what matters: These and other treatments of grand trends insist that higher education is one of the last revered Western institutions to be ‘de-churched’; that is, it is one of the last to have its ideological justification recast in terms of corporatization and commodification and to become subject to serious state surveillance,” she writes. “Universities are no longer to lead the minds of students to grasp truth; to grapple with intellectual possibilities; to appreciate the best in art, music, and other forms of culture; and to work toward both enlightened politics and public service. Rather they are now to prepare students for jobs. They are not to educate, but to train.”

“Western institutions”? “The best in art”? Guiding young minds? Why, that sounds, uh, conservative. Unless you’re huffing glue, or not bothering to actually read what your supposed opponents are saying, TNC‘s pronouncements are tough to accept. Oops.

Granted, there are plenty of shrill leftist ideologues in academia, people who have proudly told me things like “I don’t teach white authors” (as if one couldn’t do Malcolm X and Henry Adams in the same course). But those people are not deans, regents, consultants, or chancellors. They aren’t running the show. Theirs is not, in fact, the dominant view of most of the American academics I’ve met. On the contrary, the majority of humanist scholars believe passionately in the idea of a Tradition of great texts and ideas. They might argue about who belongs to that tradition, but they are at heart Burkean conservatives, because they are committed to the crazy notion that thoughtful grown-ups should know something about literature, philosophy, history, and the arts (and math and science, for that matter).

Indeed, it is difficult to be an academic scholar without having a fundamentally conservative temperament. You might undertake a queer-feminist reading of Shakespeare or apply Edward Said’s theories to Impressionism, but you’re still writing about Shakespeare or Impressionism. Someone needs to remind TNC‘s hacks how much fucking training in the Western Tradition it takes to earn a PhD in the humanities, whatever one does with that education afterward.

The creepy corporatist mentality that has damaged American higher education so badly isn’t conservative in the true sense. Rather, it is a mode of Ayn Randian free-market fetishism that also contains a pronounced contempt for intellectual life, a contempt which emanates from the present-day Republican Party and its bleating lackeys. (As Andrew Sullivan has been arguing for years, the contemporary GOP is dominated by right-wing radicals, not actual conservatives, because actual conservatives don’t proudly reject science, deny gay citizens the right to marry their loved ones, attack long-standing institutions like Social Security, revile a private citizen’s right to make decisions about her own body, harbor imperialist fantasies, or try to stifle the will of the people.)

A blog post probably isn’t the best place to work this out, but in general I’m with Sullivan: ultimately, conservativism in the tradition of Burke is a framework for looking at the world, not a discrete collection of ideological convictions. It is a tool, not a dogma. Conservatism is about accepting the inevitability of change while managing and negotiating it within the context of a society’s cultural and political institutions. One can have progressive sympathies–like Barack Obama–and still be a philosophical conservative who constantly talks about things like fatherhood, marriage, and Enlightenment democracy (like Barack Obama).

Unfortunately, the word “conservative” is probably ruined in the United States, because most people with functional cerebral cortexes and a glancing familiarity with current events hear it and think of cheap-hearted thugs like George W. Bush and Ann Coulter. Maybe someday it will be reclaimed the way “liberal” is being reclaimed by young activists, but I doubt it. At the very least I’ll be moribund by the time it happens.

The dumbest thing about the supposedly pro-market worldview of the people who run our colleges and universities is that it licenses policies that hurt the free market. Just as the lack of a decent national health-care system stifles innovation because it discourages people from starting their own companies (ask a small-business owner how fun it is to purchase insurance on the open market), so too does gutting the budgets of universities, especially public ones, devastate the economy. It is difficult to invent, to innovate, to create, to re-imagine when you can’t get a decent education without taking out ruinous loans (if your broke-ass, standardized-test-riddled high school even prepared you for college in the first place).

And the band plays on. Stupid professors.