Ballast For My Gorge

Marguerite Young and Miss MacIntosh, My Darling

2010-07-12T14:45:00.000-07:00

This review-essay appeared in the Washington Post Book World in 1994. A friend recently asked online whether I had ever read Marguerite Young, so let me post this as a reply.

*

Miss MacIntosh, My Darling
by Marguerite Young
Dalkey Archive, 1198 pp. 2 vols, $30

Angel in the Forest
A Fair Tale of Two Utopias
by Marguerite Young
Dalkey Archive, 331 pp. $13.95

Marguerite Young, Our Darling
Tributes and Essays
Edited by Miriam Fuchs
Dalkey Archive, 143 pp. $24.95

Inviting the Muses
Stories, Essays, Reviews
by Marguerite Young
Dalkey Archive, 246 pp. $21.95

by Gregory Feeley

The reception of Marguerite Young's enormous Miss MacIntosh, My Darling since its publication in 1965 has followed a pattern established by earlier American modernist novels of great scale and ambition: an interesting and mixed reception with meager sales, followed by long years of relative neglect (and often silence from the author) while the novel retains the ardor of a small but loyal audience who urge its virtues, decry its neglect, publish essays, and eventually see the book returned to print. William Gaddis's The Recognitions, Henry Roth's Call It Sleep, and (to a degree) Cynthia Ozick's Trust have experienced similar fortunes, but Miss MacIntosh, My Darling stands out: at three quarter of a million words, not only is it by far the longest, it is also the barest of incident, the most demanding of its readers' patience, and the slowest (to date) to win approval from critics or academia.

Withal, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling has had its partisans, along with several paperback incarnations over the past three decades, and has now found a patron in the Dalkey Archive Press, that indefatigable champion of avant garde literature. Readers who missed the last incarnation of Young's novel (a two-volume trade paperback from Harcourt Brace Jovanovich back in the late seventies) can now acquire the text in a handsome format (the pages photo-reproduced from the original Scribner's edition), which moreover allows one to follow the page citations in the essays being produced by the small but dedicated Marguerite Young industry. In publishing three books by or about Young this year (with a collection of her early poems soon to follow), the Dalkey Archive has radically enlarged the available material on Young, whose magnum opus has until now had to be approached solely on its own solitary terms, like a steep spur rising from the sea.

Despite the real interest of Young's 1944 Angel in the Forest (a study of the two utopian communities that successively settled New Harmony, Indiana in the early nineteenth century), and the three-volume biography of Eugene Debs, upon which Young has labored for most of the past thirty years and which will reportedly appear next year, Young remains very much a one-book author, and no one who hates Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (as Peter Prescott notably hated it in a prominent Newsweek review) should expect to find something more to his liking among Young's smaller works. Angel in the Forest may deserve a place among the important books on American social history, but the festschrift Marguerite Young, Our Darling and the occasional collection Inviting the Muses are at most minor satellites to Young's single and massive novel, whose readers have rarely had any but the strongest opinions.

Eighteen years in the writing, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is an intensely phantasmagorical work, dream-like, repetitive, resolute in declining to distinguish between reality and fantasy. Its very plot resists summary: Vera Cartwheel, a young or perhaps middle-aged woman, is riding a bus to Iowa in search for Miss MacIntosh, her beloved childhood nursemaid, who drowned herself when she was fourteen. Whether Vera doubts Miss MacIntosh's death (her body was never found) or is simply seeking to trace the dead woman's origins is never divulged: although virtually the entire novel takes place with Vera sitting on the near-empty bus, obsessively recalling Miss MacIntosh and her own childhood memories, we do not learn anything of her plans, nor what her adult life has been, nor what year (or decade) it is. All we have are her swirling memories, and these can be unreliable as well.

Vera's mother lives in a great mansion on the New England coast, where she dreams away the years in an opium haze, holding conversations with dead friends, historical figures, her chandelier, and her drug bottle. In addition to her mother and Miss MacIntosh, Vera's recollections grow steadily to encompass a large cast of grotesques: Mr. Spitzer, her mother's devoted but spurned lawyer, whose dead brother seems occasionally to exchange identities with him; Cousin Hannah, a world-traveller, balloonist, mountain-climber and suffragist who claimed never to have wanted a husband but proved, after her death, to have left behind forty locked trunks, each containing a different wedding gown; a graveyard seducer with a noose's scars on his neck; Esther Longtree, a cross-eyed waitress who murdered her baby and is now perpetually pregnant; and lots more.

This sounds like a narrative cornucopia, but the reader who imagines that these colorful figures will be brought to life in the manner, say, of those in Allan Gurganus's Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All will be in for a shock. Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is virtually bereft of dialogue and outward incident: the long paragraphs recount everything at the same shimmery remove, like objects glimpsed underwater, dissolving any narrative elements into a vast sea of prose.

"Mr. Spitzer, still in a mournful mood, for someone was always dying, had carried this alpenhorn embossed with mother-of-pearl, heavy as a tree branch, along the foggy beach when Cousin Hannah was no more, when doubtless she had climbed her last mountain, the hailstones like buring cinders dashing in her face, and he had blown a few wandering notes like some old ghost calling to his lost love as he had heard, above the ringing waves ringing like silver bells, the ringing, tolling of the silver sheep's bell which had once rung to the lost sheep, hearing also, as he did so, the cries of the grey loons in the grey fog and the bah, bahing of waves breaking upon this shore of stone and fog as thick as fleece streaking with the golden rays of the moonlight, waves coming to pasture like sheep with moony eyes beamed upon the waves of darkness. . . ." (529)

Even a few hundred thousand words of this goes a long way, and I found the novel almost unbearable when I recently tried to read it straight through. Setting oneself a pace (even a leisurely one, such as most of the summer) proved intolerable -- the book's remorselessness and utter lack of counterpoint drive one to frenzies of impatience -- while twenty years earlier, I had no difficulty dipping into it at random and reading so long as my interest held. (Peter Prescott, who justified his trashing of the book by proclaiming that he had labored over it for two days, here earns a modicum of sympathy: few books are less suited to a reviewer's schedule.) Although Young's advocates insist on the book's "fugal" nature and careful construction, Anne Tyler probably speaks for more readers when she recalls the pleasure of browsing its pages at odd moments, a practice she gives the protagonist of The Accidental Tourist.

Although the structure of the novel may be eccentric--Vera's bus ride lasts until page 948, and her sojourn in a (characteristically unnamed) Indiana town is almost devoid of incident until the book's closing pages--the novel is plainly something other than the inchoate mass that an unsympathetic perusal suggests. Early chapters were published in anthologies and magazines throughout the 1950s, and to compare them with the finished text is to see how radically Young reworked her prose during the long years of composition: a 1954 fragment from New World Writing, which seemed very much of a piece, ends up scattered and recast through various early chapters, with few sentences persisting unaltered. Whatever logic governs the novel's structure, it is the product of long and careful labor.

One problem facing readers of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is they are trained to read prose differently than Marguerite Young cares to be read. We prefer our symbols anchored by literal referents: the sea in Joyce may be the eternal thalassa, but it is also the Irish Sea, whose particulars Joyce knows well. For Young, however, the sea is everything: birth, death, eternity, mutability--she uses the word "oceanic" constantly, and "foam" and "tides" almost as much--and while we know that the sea here is the Atlantic Ocean, for the Cartwheels' seaside mansion is in New England, we don't know where in New England, and what few details Young lets drop convinces me that she doesn't, either. From Joyce to Nabokov (both in his novels and his essays) and Gaddis, we have learned to look for particularity in the elements of narrative; and the free-floating symbology of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling's strikes modern readers as overblown, just as the melodramatic acting style of the nineteenth century grates on twentieth-century audiences, who cannot but take their own era's style as a benchmark. It may take another generation before readers can look at this novel without finding its style of artifice a bewildering irritant.

Whether most readers will try, of course, is another question. Whatever its virtues, Young's massive novel is open to the objection that Leavis made about Clarissa: that the demand it makes on the reader's time is both proportionally and absolutely so immense as to be prohibitive. If one does not consider Ivy Compton-Burnett a major novelist one may concede that she is at least a very good one; but Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is either a great novel or it is nothing.

The contributors to Marguerite Young, Our Darling are in no doubt on this question. Expanded from a 1989 special issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction, this volume is the work of true believers. In addition to a section on "Tributes and Recollections" and another of "Essays," the book offers a gratifyingly full chronology, which sometimes tells us more than its compilers may have intended. Most of the writers who have lauded Marguerite Young over the decades--William Goyen, Mark Van Doren, Anais Nin, Kurt Vonnegut, their words of praise quoted on each Dalkey dustjacket--prove to have been old friends, while many of the younger writers who contribute full essays turn out, in the tributes they have also written, to be longtime protegees. It would be unfair but unsurprising for the cynical reader to exclaim, "This isn't an oeuvre, it's a cult."

Although these pieces show Marguerite Young scholarship to be still in its early stages--its contributors defensive about their subject's exclusion from "the canon," and readier to advocate than to discuss--anyone who has read Miss MacIntosh, My Darling will enjoy the company. Miriam Fuchs argues interestingly for Young's use of "liquescence as form," while Susan Strehle proposes that the novel evokes a "women's time" in which teleology, the yoking of cause to effect, and linear progression are supplanted by "the time of female subjectivity." And Marguerite Young herself--still living in Greenwich village, where she moved from the Midwest in 1945--is evoked with clarity and affection by a surprising number of writers, including Stanley Kunitz, Anne Tyler, and Amy Clampitt.

Other critical issues remain unexamined. Many of the novel's mythopoeic elements--Mr. Spritzer's shared identity with a radically dissimilar brother, as well as Vera's mother's dreamflights through history and the eternally pregnant Esther Longtree--suggest affinities with Finnegans Wake that I would have happily seen explored. Young, however, firmly denies any influence by Joyce; and her respectful scholars leave the point alone. It may be that Marguerite Young criticism will only come into its own once the imposing figure of Ms. Young is no longer in evidence.

In the meantime, her monumental Debs biography--2400 pages, according to a recent interview--will appear next year from Alfred A. Knopf. Such a massive project, coming on the heels of a revival of Young's previous work, will doubtless attract much attention, and prompt attempts by reviewers to link the socialist's biography with the phantasmagorical cult novel and the utopian study before it. Even with the ground cleared by the Fuchs volume, they will have their hands full.

ADMIRAL but not POET

2010-02-21T16:57:00.000-08:00

I have been busy sedtting up a trust account for the Estate of Thomas M. Disch, a seemingly straightforward business save for the many forms required ("Letters Testamentary" and the like). On the day I brought all the stuff together, the bank representative went through the software options to establish the account. There was a drop-down option for the field for my name -- all sorts of forms of address proved available, including "Admiral." (I almost plumped for "Admiral Feeley," but decided to be serious.)

However, later on we had to putting in information for the other trustee, who will not be handling the account on a day-to-day basis but whose name needs to be on it. Entering data, the bank rep asked me for Ben Downing's occupation. Ben teaches and edits, but he publishes poetry regularly, so I suggested (not entirely winsomely) that she put him down as "Poet."

Sorry,the drop-down menu didn't allow for that one.

After Silence by Jonathan Carroll

2009-08-24T12:17:00.001-07:00

I came across this old review by accident, and found that I didn't remember it at all. It appeared in the New York Review of Science Fiction some fifteen years ago.

JONATHAN CARROLL: LONG, MEDIUM, AND SHORT

After Silence by Jonathan Carroll (London: Macdonald, 1992; L14.99; 240 pages; New York: Doubleday, 1993; $21.00; 227 pages)

"Uh-Oh City," F&SF, June 1992

"The Lick of Time," in Monsters in Our Midst, edited by Robert
Bloch (New York: Tor, 1993, $20.95; 303 pages)

reviewed by Gregory Feeley

After Silence, Jonathan Carroll's sixth book-length narrative in six years, is remarkably of a piece with the earlier works: vividly and beautifully written, sketchily (if at all) integrated with the other four novels and novelette in the unnamed (and, one guesses, improvised) sequence, haphazardly constructed. As before, Carroll's virtues begin paying off at once -- his sharp observations and striking metaphors are evident from the first page -- while his weaknesses conceal themselves until late, as his structure leans vertiginously forward so that the reader is impelled into the story, beguiled by Carroll's ability to tell (or at least begin) a Tale into a confidence that the author shall bring his Tale safely to harbor that proves finally misplaced. Readers may gnash their teeth at his novel's conclusion (although they should, by now, know better than be surprised), but there is little doubt that they will reach it.

Max Fischer, a successful but rather unreflective cartoonist, finds his long-deferred desire to raise a family suddenly fulfilled when he meets Lily Aaron and her nine-year-old son Lincoln. At once in love, Max falls effortlessly into family life, and lives in contented bliss until the gradual accumulation of tiny inconsistencies in Lily's accounts of her past at last drives Max into an unwise investigation. Discovering an awful secret, he is able to maintain his happy life only by becoming complicit with it.

Like Carroll's other novels, After Silence offers an intensely-felt meditation upon the vulnerability of loved ones (here, as before with Carroll, dramatized in a hospital); like his earlier novels, it captures moments of tenderness toward children with aching clarity (Max, seeking to impress Lily and Lincoln on their first meeting, draws a magic-marker cartoon on the front of Lincoln's white teeshirt while the delighted boy wriggles "like a puppy getting its tummy scratched"). And also, with Carroll, we get his snobbishness, his love of celebrity and disdain for the common, the untalented, and the ordinary; his infatuation with exotic names ("Max" is exceptionally unfanciful for a Carroll protagonist, but the novel contains other characters, all special, whose parents named them Foof, Mabdean, Sullivan, Anwen, Elvis. It is only working-class people -- almost invariably portrayed by Carroll as unattractive and boorish -- who are given names like Mark Elsen and Ruth Burdette).

And like other Carroll novels, After Silence fragments like a flaming race car as it attempts to negotiate a final tight turn and crashes the fence. Max's discovery of Lily's secret, and his decision to make a separate peace with its particular horror -- to brick it up, like a monster in the basement, and return upstairs to resume his happy life -- is powerfully (if, in its extended confession scene, long-windedly) evoked. The jump forward of seven years, and Lincoln's unforeshadowed transformation from a happy ten-year-old to a sullen, hateful, and dangerous adolescent, is dramatized with wrenching poignancy. But this heartfelt and anguished novel's leap into the supernatural (it comes late and abruptly, on page 185) knocks its emotional center from the realm of indissoluble cause and effect into a slumgullion of Carrollian metaphysics that goes nowhere. The inevitability of consequence is asserted -- among the talk of guardian angels, time travelling, and two persons being one -- but it is not made real; and even a last-page attempt to punch back out of the supernatural (it apparently involves a suddenly unreliable narrator) is unavailing.

The problem with After Silence (and, to varying degrees, of the other five volumes of this inchoate sequence) is not simply a matter of plotting. Carroll's inability to cope with the novelistic business of keeping chronologies straight (he tells us that thirty-eight-year-old Max has a brother twelve years younger, then later gives that brother a marital history plausible only for a man of mature years) doesn't finally matter, any more than it matters that he cannot conceive of a human being who doesn't have a quirky and rewarding job, or a dog that isn't a purebred. What matters is Carroll's failure to achieve imaginative resolution: to create artistic closure for the dream he has conceived. Despite his recurring concern with the inseparability of heedless act from tragic consequence, Carroll cannot shape events into a fitting and logical whole, which surprise us with turns that seem afterward as right. Instead, he summons up an otherworldly (and plainly ex post facto) explanation of events as needed and then -- as here, as in Outside the Dog Museum and Bones of the Moon -- rings down the curtain in a shower of magical fireworks.

Carroll's inability to surmount this shortcoming (apparent since Bones of the Moon) has been evident in all his fiction, including short stories and novellas. "Uh-Oh City" (F&SF, June 1992) is a longer work than the volume Black Cocktail (Legend, 1990), and offers the same degree of tenuous connection with his novel sequence: the narrator's daughter, who appears only in a telephone call, is the former girlfriend (never actually seen) of Max Fischer in After Silence. The novella contains all of Carroll's carelessness with detail (the protagonist, a Melville scholar, misspells Moby-Dick; a closer study of his chronology than Carroll seems to have conducted makes sense only if he received his doctorate at twenty-one; the young woman whose suicide he helped provoke is apparently both a freshman and a graduate student) and seems, like much of Carroll's fiction, to have been begun before the author knew what he was about. Entire sub-plots languish neglected, while characters' motivations and range of abilities shift in accordance with plot requirements. Carroll's central image -- an overweight, middle-aged woman who is dying of cancer -- seems to have found its inspiration with the fat lady evoked in the closing pages of Franny and Zooey; but what Carroll has done with it . . . Actually, it's difficult to know what Carroll has done with it. No three scenes in the novella possess thematic or narrative coherence.

The novella -- it concerns a preternaturally efficient cleaning lady named Beenie who persists in turning up unwanted reminders from the protagonist's past -- starts out as a kind of domestic horror story, then swerves suddenly (the cleaning lady turns out to be God, or rather one of the thirty-six lamed wufniks who, in Carroll's version, constitute God) into an emotionally fraught tale of unwitting injury and attempted amends. As long as one is reading, the succession of firecracker revelations hold the promise of coming finally together; it is only when one looks at the work entire that it falls apart.

When Beenie presents the protagonist with the manuscript of a novel written by a student who had committed suicide years ago, the bewildered man quietly decides to send it to her parents. This unannounced action calls down a rebuke from the apparently omnipotent Beenie, who explains, "Things like that, you either throw away or you keep 'em. Never pass 'em on." A few hours later Beenie blithely contradicts this bit of philosophy when she produces a cache of love letters a student once wrote to the protagonist, which she promptly shows to his wife. Bewildered and angry (he knows that both manuscript and letters had long since been discarded), the hapless protagonist goes to confront Beenie -- who proves to be sitting up with the ghost of the student novelist; and the plot takes another lurch.

None of these disparate developments prove compatible with each other. (A small example: The protagonist's wife already knew of the love letters, but had been assured by her husband that they had all been destroyed, as in fact they had. Her distress upon being presented with a batch of them was because she could only conclude, not unreasonably, that her husband had in fact kept the letters. So why would Beenie summon these letters back into existence and show them to the poor woman, if its only effect would be to create a false impression? Carroll doesn't know; the next scene produces a new surprise, and the narrative drops the previous issue, never to return to it.) As with After Silence, everything changes in the last pages, and then again in the closing paragraphs. Approaching the conclusion to a story,
Carroll -- trapped like the man who has painted himself into a corner -- can create dramatic conflict only by successively reversing everything he has hitherto said. Save for the steadily mounting stakes (the stories' final revelations often end up featuring God or angels), there is no inner logic, no structure to these frantic reversals.

At 4000 words, "The Lick of Time" is too compact to tangle itself in its plot threads, although its references to other characters and milieux from Carroll's fiction do get it into minor trouble. (After an entire novel about the problems of the Sultan of Saru, Carroll refers in passing to the "Republic of Saru." If we encountered this in the work of a writer more skilled at drawing connections between texts, we would guess that Saru has had a revolution since the events of Outside the Dog Museum. With Carroll, however, we conclude merely that he is again forgetting himself.) The story's opening lines:

Before leaving her apartment, Erin turned on the new answering machine.

Several nights before, sitting down with the instructions and a glass of wine, she'd waded

through a long list of what-to-do's to make the expensive, high-tech-looking thing work.

is quintessentially Carroll, down to the haughty name, the expensive gimmickry, and the glass of wine. Its striking observations (listening to her first phone messages, Erin notes how callers "lost heart" when they realized that they were talking to a tape and not a human being), and the familiar mise-en-scene -- Erin had a "new job with the theatre group," and works with folks with names like Weber Gregston and Wyatt Leonard -- could almost come from an exceptionally skilled parodist. The protagonist, another articulate, sexually anxious yuppie who isn't very nice, develops an interesting psychological pathology as pressures mount about her (she ends up talking to her phone machine, leaving heartening messages and occasionally acting out responses she had hoped to hear from others), but the story springs a supernatural twist in the final page, and that's that.

Carroll's fluent style, his striking facility with metaphors, and the manifest seriousness of his concerns have struck a chord with many readers ("Uh-Oh City" was a Hugo nominee), but his sloppiness has escalated in recent years from a problem to an embarrassment. Carroll's narrowness of range and problems with narrative are not bound to length: neither short story, novella, nor novel has permitted him to marshall his energies into a coherent narrative, and the reader who looks past the colorful conceits (a "dog museum" that costs a billion dollars; the appearance of a giant stuffed animal in the shape of a childhood nightmare in "Uh-Oh City") will find fictions that are largely a shambles.

More prolific than in his early years, Carroll is notably less craftsmanlike, and has fallen into tics and self-indulgence even as he continues to coin phrases and sentences of startling beauty. A dozen years into a remarkable career, Carroll is wallowing -- apparently oblivious -- in a creative crisis that threatens to whelm it.

The Truman Show: Another Retelling of Hamlet

2008-11-28T14:52:00.000-08:00

In an earlier post ("Why Hollywood Movies Are Like Hamlet," May 4, 2008), I described the experience of seeing Iron Man and realizing that Hollywood was again giving us, whether it (or its audience) realized it or not, another retelling of Hamlet. As the tale of a brilliant, troubled young man who, pursued by private demons, acts badly -- especially towards women -- and finds himself (rather being roundly censured by those around him) having everyone wondering exactly is going on in his head (could it have something to do with his intimidatingly impressive father? or maybe the seemingly benign figure who has now taken his place?), its affinities with Shakespeare's 1601 drama seem obvious enough, at least to me. Tony Stark ends up triumphant, rather than dead, but that particular Hollywood revision -- that the hero, a roguishly charming bastard at the film's beginning who quickly turns into a roguishly charming hero, shows his redemption by doing the the Right Thing, at the certain cost of all he values most, but ends up not having to pay the cost after all, and is shown at film's end victorious and universally adored -- is so fundamental as to apply even to, say, Cars.

A few days ago I showed the first forty minutes of The Truman Show to my twelfth graders, who had just finished reading Hamlet. They picked up on the parallels immediately: The Truman Show tells the story of a charismatic young man of seemingly limitless promise, admired by everyone in his tiny clockwork community, who has recently fallen prey to a seemingly unaccountable malaise. Everybody wants him to feel better, and assures him that this will happen if only he stops asking questions about things. His mother wants him to stop worrying and enjoy life; so does the best friend who is choreographed into his path at every turn. The love of a fair woman is dangled before him, inducement enough, people seem to hope, for him to forgo his wish to be elsewhere. But there is some mystery involving his beloved father, who is dead -- or is he? A ghostly appearance one evening . . . .

I mean, that sounds pretty obvious, doesn't it? The Truman Show has two Ophelia figures -- one good, one bad -- and it conflates Horatio with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern into one composite figure. But there is a true father (marginalized, indeed only problematically alive), and a would-be, seemingly benevolent father figure who controls all, and who wishes to control Truman as well. It ends in sappy triumph, rather than profound tragedy, but what recent movie doesn't? (Well, Sweeney Todd -- whose protagonist offers us another avatar of Hamlet -- doesn't, but it had its origins far from Hollywood.)

One of my students asked me whether The Truman Show had been intended as a modern-day riff on Hamlet. I told her that so far as I was aware, nobody had noticed the similarities but me. A few days later I checked online, and indeed, there are no references at all to such a parallel. They certainly seem evident to me.

Robinson, Le Guin, Clute, Egan

2008-10-19T08:07:00.000-07:00

I came across the file of this science fiction review column, written in April 2002 for the Washington Post Book World. It considers The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson, The Birthday of the World by Ursula K. Le Guin, Appleseed by John Clute, and Schild's Ladder by Greg Egan. I remember that it had been cut on its original appearance, with the final book omitted.

Looking it over, I think I managed to say some worthwhile things, though I would now put more emphasis on the virtues of Schild's Ladder (whose neat parts still linger in memory). Anyway, here it is:

April 2002 Science Fiction

New forms of representing the new are not common under the sun, and science fiction (always a more conservative genre than it admits to being) almost never makes a radical break with its past traditions. "No science fiction novel published at the end of a century of science fiction could stand alone," as one of the authors reviewed this month observes in an afterword, explaining the pressure of history that weighs on every attempt to sketch the future. The four books before us each embody a familiar mode of twentieth-century SF -- alternate history, "future history," space opera, and the scientist's creation gone berserk -- and its authors are in their fifties, seventies, sixties, and forties respectively, which neglects the younger end of the spectrum but does offer a broad-range look at a genre that boomed with the Boomers (and is now being shouldered aside by various flavors of Fantasy).

Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt (Bantam, 658 pp., $25.95) begins in the Islamic year 783, 1405 by the Christian calendar, with a scouting party of the Mongol conqueror Temur crossing west through the Moravian Gate to discover a land decimated by plague. Forbidden to rejoin the Golden Horde for fear of contamination, the party disperses and Bold, an aging campaigner, flees through a desolate landscape that makes clear that the population of Europe has been almost wholly wiped out.

The ten sections of Robinson's very long novel move from that year to the late twenty-first century of a world radically different from our own. Europe is slowly resettled by Muslims, who also colonize Africa and much of central Asia; China eventually conquers Japan and the Incas, while the Hodenosaunee League in North America loses the east and west coasts to encroaching foreigners but holds onto the interior. The developments of the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution take place in different periods, under very different conditions.

Alternate history is by now an established commercial publishing category, with a ready audience for books that describe the new course history takes after some implausible event -- hey, what if Robert E. Lee were supplied with Kalashnikovs by South African time-travellers, or a shower of giant meteorites destroyed the rivals to the British Empire, and the Raj prospers into the twenty-first century? -- opens up new military opportunities. Alternate history's appeal to politically truculent readers who seek fictitious validations of their personal ideologies, and to "military history" buffs who enjoy reading exotic variants of their favorite wars, is plain enough, and has given the sub-genre an artistic vitality that falls somewhere those of a role-playing game and a chat-room screed.

Robinson's novel is insistently unlike this, although its opening sections offer vivid tours of the transformed world that seem (at first) fairly conventional. But its sections are unified by an unusual device: the main characters of each are reincarnations of the same souls, whose continuity is easy to trace because their names over the centuries begin with the same letter. That soul who is Kyu in the first story (and Kokila, Katima, and so on thereafter) is combative, imprudent, and prone to getting himself (or herself) killed; while Bold (Bihari, Bistami . . . ) is more comfortable in the world, meliorist and optimistic.

The reader immediately notices that the hierarchical and essentialist metaphysics of the reincarnation theme is profoundly at odds with the rest of the novel, which presents a world that is secular, contingent, uncentered, and driven by economic realities. The system of coding souls by the initial letters of their mortal selves' names is even more peculiar; Robinson can't actually "mean it"; doing so would certainly consistute a Folly.

And indeed, parts of the novel contradict or undermine other parts, which is surely a fault if you believe that alternate history (or fiction generally) should offer a vision of adamantine seamlessness and "inner" consistency. Robinson does not, and his novel's willingness to dissolve boundaries it has earlier set up, or step outside its confines and comment on itself, shows it to be indeed a Folly, which Robinson has come to praise.

At one point relatively late in the novel, two characters are discussing whether history is cyclic or linear. The cyclic model invariably adopts the seasons of the year as metaphor -- "But what if they are nothing at all alike," asks a character, "what if history meanders like a river forever?" The image of history as a river -- specifically of unpredictable change manifesting as rising waters, and problematic revolutionary energies erupting in the breaking of a dam -- appears throughout Robinson's work, and perhaps someone will write a thesis on hydrology as synecdoche in the political imagination of Kim Stanley Robinson.

If so, they had better retain an appreciation of the droll. Robinson's novel is essentially comic, for all that it dramatizes many appalling events, and Robinson's willingness to peep around the side of his puppet theater and wink at the audience (there are half-hidden quotes of Karl Marx, John Fowles, and others, plus a faintly deprecating discussion of the "device" of giving a soul's successive incarnations names that begin with the same letter) stands as an implicit but thorough rebuke to the kind of war-gaming determinism that most "alternate histories" embody. The Years of Rice and Salt is Robinson's richest, most subtle and moving novel, a meditation on history and humanism that abjures easy answers and ends up (unlike most alternate histories) knowing more than in tells.

Six of the eight stories collected in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Birthday of the World (HarperCollins, 368 pp., $24.95) belong to her long sequence concerning the interstellar Ekumen, while one might as well be, and the last -- the longest, a tale of a generation ship's centuries-long journey which the ground rules of her future history preclude -- is antiphonal. Written over the past eight years (about the same period as last year's Tales of Earthsea), the stories are set on seven different worlds, but Le Guin doesn't differentiate between them in terms of gravity, atmospheric composition, axial tilt, or any other particular: they are mostly indistinguishable from Earth. More than ever before, her particulars are the stories' people.

The first story, "Coming of Age in Karhide," is a first-person account of a young Gethenian (a hermaphroditic native of the world Le Guin dramatized in The Left Hand of Darkness) growing into puberty in a clannish community where sexuality is not an issue except for a few days a month, when sex is an imperative and any non-relative a potential partner. The story proceeds smoothly -- abjuring all the conflicts and resolutions of conventional plot dynamic -- from ignorance to experience, and the protagonist's account of the sensations and misgivings s/he experiences is at once recognizable and strikingly unfamiliar. The reader's inability to draw a line where the one becomes the other -- that is, the story's ability to confound any reader's attempt to parse it -- is vivid evidence of its imaginative power.

Le Guin at her best is always undermining the borderline between categories, which is good because she has something of a weakness for them. Universality vs. individual experience, nubby particularity vs. general truths, are forever attracting Le Guin, who yearns to reconcile such oppositions in what a character calls "the body's obscure, inalterable dream of mutuality" but finally pulls back, knowing better. This tension often threatens to pull her stories apart, but seems actually (at least in her best work) to hold it together.

A critic once spoke of Orson Scott Card's stories as coming from either "Nice Orson" or "Nasty Orson," and one can venture (very provisionally) to see in Le Guin's work the hand of a Good Ursula and a Bad Ursula, the improving moral instructor and the scapegrace artist who capers outside the other's judiciously ruled lines. A model that attempts to account for a writer's resistance to modeling is a pretty shaky thing, and the most immediate problem with this one is the readiness of Good Ursula and Bad Ursula to switch roles when you're not looking. This readiness is nowhere more evident than in Le Guin's long interest in patterns of sexual politics, a subject (increasingly central since her 1991 volume Searoad) which has driven her at times to the precincts of the counsel of despair.

Le Guin's invocations of sexual violence, the destructive powers of religious orthodoxy (almost always masculine in nature), and men's susceptibility to militarism lead her time and again to the verge of concluding that there is something irredeemably destructive in the male psyche. Every story that touches this point, however, immediately reaches offstage to produce an example of a good male, an exception to what it seemed otherwise ready to rule. This is Good Ursula, recoiling from dogma and being fair. What is fascinating (I do not mean this sarcastically) is to see how Bad Ursula immediately undercuts this, showing -- with real subtlety and rhetorical power -- how this good male really isn't very different from the rest after all. Good Ursula may scruple at making such judgments, and Bad Ursula not hesitate or care, but there is no question which figure is more imaginatively alive.

If "Coming of Age in Karhide" is purely wonderful, and the next story, "The Matter of Seggri," scarcely less so, the rest seem (with the exception of the penultimate, title story) to march steadily downward in quality, which is troubling because Le Guin seems to have arranged them in something close to their order of composition. "Paradises Lost," the generation ship novella, is full of sharp observations and lovely moments, but gives us a devious religious cult that is too plainly tailored to merit the reader's scorn for it to possess any imaginative reality. The natural world with its discomforts and dangers is proven superior to an artificial environment; uncertainty and openness superior to serene dogma, especially when it's sneaky. Too tidily categorical, the story undermines only its own straw men. Bad Ursula does better with real targets.

The inhabited galaxy of John Clute's Appleseed (Tor, 335 pp., $25.95) seethes: with people zipping through vast artificial structures, starships popping through wormholes, tractor beams and laser weapons and other sci-fi hardware flashing across space. But mostly it seethes with the movement of data, AIs (here called Made Minds) as ubiquitous as the electronic devices in the kitchens, home offices, and living rooms of Clute's twenty-first century readers. The protagonist's ship is named Tile Dance and the tiles suggest both the computer chips of our own era, the tiny colored tiles that constitute figurative wall designs (the Portugese art of azulejaria is repeatedly cited), and any flat surface -- a screen, a sheet -- that can offer a vista onto distant realms. On every page, they dance.

Radically transformed environments are inhospitable to description via familiar language, and Clute's first novel in twenty-five years employs a prose style that fuses neologisms, old-fashioned slang, and various arcane terminologies into a dense kinetic impasto ("For several Heartbeats, within Klavier, where a trillion trillion axons had begun to find each other again across the commissural link forged by Tile Dance, the wound of Vipassana's passage through muscle and tendon of the heartwood burned like a white-hot poker caught between teeth. A trillion tongues burned to ash"). Readers used to a diction that holds to a high (or low) style, or who balk at mixed metaphors, may have trouble getting a grip.

Clute's tale of the complications that envelope the captain of the Tile Dance when he accepts a job transporting cargo to an unfamiliar planet is fast-moving, crunchy in its gnashing complexities, and suitably cosmic in implication; a sequel may be needed. A turbo-charged space opera that shows considerable fondness for its earnest predecessors (it was Clute who made the remark about the influence of a century of SF), Appleseed has seemingly little in common with The Birthday of the World. Yet each shows a painful awareness of the dichotomies between embodiment and abstraction, between ravening male and abiding female; each expresses -- in very different ways -- a yearning to locate a state of true center, where incompatibilities can be balanced if not reconciled, and authenticity, a dream that haunts both books, can body forth distinct from the imitative and the unreal.

Greg Egan's Schild's Ladder (Eos, 342 pp., $25.95) deploys a good deal of ingenuity and mathematics to tell his story of far-future scientists who create a novel vacuum state that expands uncontrollably, eventually filling millions of cubic light years and swallowing thousands of worlds. Unfailingly imaginative and intelligently written, it does everything more than ably -- Egan surmounts many problems he sets up for himself, such as maintaining interest in superhumans who can flee even such a cosmic calamity without loss of life -- and offers plausible renditions of a range of striking notions, such as the Qusp, a "quantum singleton processor" installed within the human brain that allows people to carry out cognitive operations without producing entangled systems, thus allowing posthumans to become what Homo sapiens had merely imagined themselves to be: creatures of choice, "capable of doing one thing and not another."

A conceit this piquant should give rise to some deeply strange protagonists, but Egan's characters seem surprisingly drab, despite the increasingly bizarre transformations they undergo. Egan creates an interesting twist on the Frankenstein theme by giving us a protagonist who finds the expanding menace the most refreshing thing to happen to mankind in millennia, but the reasonableness with which he (and his opponents) explain their convictions becomes slightly numbing. More interesting for its individual moments than for the (surprisingly conventional) form of its tale, Schild's Ladder fails to startle the reader in the way that Egan's best work does. When Egan is ready to tell a story that confronts the implications of its strangest elements, he will produce something genuinely uncanny.

Right about the Anthrax

2008-08-08T04:01:00.000-07:00

This week's news has brought to mind my story "Giliad," written during the fall of 2001 and dealing with the events of that time. I opened up the file and searched on "anthrax," to find this:

The weeks that followed pulled Leslie in opposite directions: toward the fixity of the past and the lunacy of a fantasy future. She read with disbelief the mornings' news of anthrax spores mailed to TV studios and the nation's capital, with senators' offices contaminated and postal employees dead. The conclusion was inescapable: the United States was under attack by biological agents. The twenty-first century was turning out just as her teenaged sci-fi reading had predicted.

"They say it's Saddam." Trent was following the links from news reports on the spores' surprising sophistication to declarations by "fellows" at right-wing institutions that Iraqi responsibility was certain.

"Well, it certainly isn't the Taliban." The medieval theocrats who were regrouping in disarray under assaults from their warlord adversaries and miles-high bombers seemed poor candidates for the invisible attack that sent the world's superpower into panic, though perhaps (pundits mused) al Qaeda's penchant for low-tech operations staged within the target country had led them to obtain a cache of Soviet-era war germs. Such a theory did not require the hand of Saddam, but Leslie found it hard to push the reasoning further. The idea of pestilence blooming in the nation's nerve centers like sparks falling on straw left her disoriented. She did not fear for her own safety, but felt the axis of her being tilt vertiginously, a slow tipping into boundless freefall.

And, a few pages later:

By this point Trent was convinced that the anthrax attacks had not been the work of Islamic militants at all. He suspected rogue forces within the American "bioweapons community," which had secretly developed the strain of anthrax. "Even the administration has admitted that the spores belong to the 'Ames strain,'" he argued, link-clicking deeper toward the documentation he sought. Leslie found his explanations painful to listen to, and she shrank without looking at those windows he left on her screen: laparoscopic images of warblog, like lab reports of current pathology.

It seems as though my character was right.

Why Hollywood Movies Are Like Hamlet

2008-05-04T05:42:00.000-07:00

Emily's choir group is off touring this weekend, so we took Nathaniel (who felt neglected) out to see Iron Man. Felt like a lemming doing so, being stampeded right in the direction that most lemmings go.

The film is what (I hope you) would expect; for $100 million plus, you get a polished script with some funny and witty lines, and striking special effects. It is also emotionally dishonest in the way that virtually all big-budget Hollywood films are: it trucks essentially in one theme, Redemption, which is achieved at no real cost. The protagonist was a roguishly charming bastard at the film's beginning, and now he's a roguishly charming hero, but exactly what has he renounced, and with what effort? He has, in the climax, done the Right Thing, at certain cost of his life, but he didn't die, the Right Thing did exactly what it was supposed to, and now he's universally adored.

Look at just about any contemporary Hollywood epic (at least one with a male protagonist) and you get the same thing. Which is to say that the film is, on one level, basically Cars.

And on another level it's basically a bargain-counter Hamlet. Has anyone noticed how many Hollywood movies are about a charismatic, brilliant, but troubled young man who acts badly and, instead of being roundly censured, has everyone wondering exactly is going on in his head? And a dead father figure, not necessarily murdered by the false father who stands in his way, but usually something like that? And bad behavior toward women, which the film wants us to forgive readily?

I don't get to watch a lot of movies, but I see this quite often when I do. Did anyone else notice that The Truman Show is basically Hamlet?

Pynchon's Prose

2007-02-23T11:32:00.000-08:00

Here is a paragraph from Thomas Pynchon's new novel Against the Day. (It's from pp. 359-360). I want to discuss Pynchon's prose in this novel, which differs, subtly but distinctly, from that of his previous books.

First the post, then I'll come back tomorrow and make a few comments. You don't have to wait for me to go first.

This passage is set in the Rocky Mountain region around Colorado, just about a hundred years ago. Stray (Estrella) and Reef are a young couple.

"This was how for years, all through that quarter of the continent, they had fought, fled, beckoned, resumed . . . . If you took a map and tried to follow them over it, zigzagging town to town, back and forth, it might not have been that easy to account for, even if you recalled how wild, how much better than "wild" it'd been not all that many years ago, out here, even with the workdays that had you longing for the comforts of territorial prison, yes hard as that, when whatever was going to become yours--your land, your stock, your family, your name, no matter, however much or little you had, you earned it, with never no second thoughts as to just killing somebody, if it even looked like they might want to take it. Maybe a dog catching their scent coming down the wind, or the way some trailhand might be wearing his waterproof, that could be enough--didn't matter, with everything brand new and the soldiering so hard, waking up each day never knowing how you'd end it, cashing 'em in being usually never too distant from your thoughts, when any ailment, or animal wild or broke, or a bullet from any direction might be enough to propel you into the beyond . . . why clearly every lick of work you could get in would have that same mortal fear invested into it--Karl Marx and them, well and good, but that's what folk had for Capital, back in early times out here--not tools on credit, nor seed money courtesy of some banker, just their own common fund of fear that came with no more than a look across the day arising. It put a shade onto things that parlor life would just never touch, so whenever she or Reef pulled up and got out, when it wasn't, mind, simple getting away in a hurry, it was that one of them had heard about a place, some place, one more next-to-last place, that hadn't been taken in yet, where you could go live for a time on the edge of that old day-to-day question, at least till the Saturday nights got quiet enough to hear the bell of the town clock ring you the hours before some Sunday it'd be too dreary to want to sober up for . . . . So in time you had this population of kind of roving ambassadors from places like that that were still free, who wherever they came to rest would be a little sovereign piece of that faraway territory, and they'd have sanctuary about the size of their shadow."

Short Article on Thomas Pynchon

2007-01-13T12:19:00.000-08:00

This appeared in the current issue of the New Haven Advocate. (They didn't put it into their online edition, so I am posting it here.) The title isn't mine, but I can't think of a better one.

DAY TRIPPER
by Gregory Feeley

A month after its long-awaited publication, Thomas Pynchon’s sixth and longest novel has received a problematic reception. Early reviews were sharply mixed, with a publication-day savaging from the New York Times’s notorious scold Michiko Kakutani, who called it “a humongous, bloated jigsaw puzzle of a story, pretentious without being provocative . . . complicated without being rewardingly complex,” followed by a longer, more astute appreciation by Sunday reviewer Liesl Schillinger, who hailed it as “his funniest and arguably his most accessible novel.” If it is not hovering low on the best sellers’ list, as Pynchon’s previous few novels had managed in their first weeks of publication, it has nonetheless enjoyed a fierce, if focused, attention: a Wiki site devoted exclusively to its mysteries was launched the day the novel appeared, burgeoning with glosses and annotations that grow by the day.

In fact, both Times critics are wrong: Against the Day is not a pretentious mess, nor is it the best entry point for readers new to his work (The Crying of Lot 49, scarcely a tenth the current novel’s size, is surely that). Its tremendous length – the 1,085 pages hold nearly half a million words – encompasses something like half a dozen plot lines, most spooling off from a murder of a Colorado anarchist in 1900 by union-busting mine owners and his various children’s attempts to avenge or come to terms with it. Numerous reviews have mentioned the multiplicity of narratives and enormous cast, and all have noted its succession of exotic locales (and no surprise: the jacket copy, written by Pynchon, colorfully emphasizes it).

As reviewers have also mentioned, Against the Day shares many features with earlier Pynchon novels. The underrated Vineland had a comic subplot involving a Japanese monster attacking a city; Against the Day features a much stranger and melancholy tale of an indefinable (and, strangely, soon forgotten) monster devastating New York City. Gravity’s Rainbow opposed the arc of nature’s rainbow with the malign trajectory of the V-2 rocket; Against the Day plays off both metaphors. The nineteenth-century fancy of a hollow Earth, which figures in Mason & Dixon, reappears (to even stranger effect) in Against the Day.

More significantly, the vivid central image of Mason & Dixon – its protagonists’ boundary line conceived as a gash upon the Earth’s being, the imposition of unnatural linearity upon the complex topography of the living Earth – is evoked repeatedly in the new novel, where numerous man-made features – mine shafts, state lines, railroads – are presented as industrial capitalism’s violations of nature. (The name of the murdered anarchist, Webb Traverse, embodies this tension between linearity and an organic interrelatedness.)

What no one has mentioned is how profoundly this vision seems indebted to a much older writer, one whom Pynchon’s postmodern fans have probably never read: D.H. Lawrence. It may seem peculiar even to mention the hectoring and deeply unfashionable Lawrence, who since the Sixties has been excoriated (somewhat unfairly, if only somewhat) as a male supremacist and proto-fascist. But Pynchon is a child of the Fifties, not the Sixties, and the Fifties saw Lawrence as an apostle of sexual liberation and heroic opposition to the dehumanizing power of modern society and industrial capitalism. The opening chapters of his 1915 novel The Rainbow, which dramatize the sundering of the Brangwens’ farmland by the first railroad lines, sees a powerful echo in Pynchon’s scene of Traverse selecting and then blowing up a railway bridge that cut through the countryside and people’s lives.

Lawrence’s biographer John Worthen has noted that what Lawrence’s contemporaries found radical and upsetting about his work was how it “centered on articulating the experiences of the body,” and this characterizes Pynchon’s work as well. Lawrence and Pynchon are profoundly different writers – Lawrence could be pretty humorless, while Pynchon is as comic a writer as Joyce – but the Lawrence who wrote in 1914 that “You mustn’t look in my novel for the old stable ego of the character” is a writer with whom the author of Gravity’s Rainbow – whose protagonist in the end simply dissolves into the landscape – possesses important (and overlooked) affinities.

Pynchon’s novel opens with a scene of high-spirited airship-flying young men – the Chums of Chance – soaring through the clouds, a parody of the boys’ adventure novels (such as The Airship Boys Due North) of the early twentieth century, which Pynchon relates in the actual style of those old novels. This tactic was first used in Into the Aether, a 1974 novel by Richard Lupoff, but Pynchon’s use of it is considerably more original and complex.

Lecturing at Cornell in the Fifties, Vladimir Nabokov noted that the fantastical scenes in the Nighttown episode in Ulysses could not be explained as the hallucinations of any character or combination of characters, but represented something strikingly more free-form: “The book is itself dreaming and having visions.” Pynchon was one of Nabokov’s students, and the strangest, most disconcerting aspect of his later novels – that some scenes are set in a different universe than others – may have had their inspiration here. The Chums of Chance, like the indeterminate monster and other bizarre creations, inhabit a different reality than the rest of the novel, and until the reader realizes this, he will vainly try to reconcile Pynchon’s painstakingly researched evocation of pre-World War I America with an alternate universe in which people used airships like roadsters.

Much of Pynchon’s novel is a good deal easier than this: Schillinger is right to emphasize its humor, and to observe that Pynchon can be “uncharacteristically earnest” when treating political matters. (Various characters, including Traverse’s youngest son Kit, must deal with the system’s attempts to co-opt them, which Pynchon describes – “Despite having gone in with a determination to cut the place some slack, Kit had seen Yale almost immediately for what it was” – with unconcealed disdain.)

How good the novel is – whether it will be remembered, like Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason & Dixon, as one of the great American novels of our time – is a judgment no one can make after a single reading, and I certainly have not yet gone through its thousand pages twice. Richer and more various than any six novels you are likely to encounter, Against the Day requires a significant investment of time and energy. Like exploring a new continent, it promises to exhaust you at times, leave you feeling lost, and show you some things you have never seen before.

Lawrence's Prose

2006-08-28T05:26:00.000-07:00

Here is an extended passage from about a quarter of the way into The Rainbow. Tom and Anna, who own the farm known as the Marsh, have a daughter, Anna. Will, a nephew whose family they rarely see, now lives nearby and comes to visit.

"He was very much excited and filled with himself that afternoon. A flame kindled round him, making his experience passionate and glowing, burningly real.

"His uncle listened with twinkling eyes, half-moved. His aunt bent forward her dark face, half-moved, but held by other knowledge. Anna went with him.

"He returned to his lodging at night treading quick, his eyes glittering, and his face shining darkly as if he came from some passionate, vital tryst.

"The glow remained in him, the fire burned, his heart was fierce like a sun. He enjoyed his unknown life and his own self. And he was ready to go back to the Marsh.

"Without knowing it, Anna was wanting him to come. In him she had escaped. In him the bounds of her experience were transgressed: he was the hole in the wall, beyond which the sunshine blazed on an outside world.

"He came. Sometimes, not often, but sometimes, talking again, there recurred the strange, remote reality which carried everything before it. Sometimes, he talked of his father, whom he hated with a hatred that was burningly close to love, of his mother, whom he loved, with a love that was keenly close to hatred, or to revolt. His sentences were clumsy, he was only half articulate. But he had the wonderful voice, that could ring its vibration through the girl’s soul, transport her into his feeling. Sometimes his voice was hot and declamatory, sometimes it had a strange, twanging, almost cat-like sound, sometimes it hesitated, puzzled, sometimes there was the break of a little laugh. Anna was taken by him. She loved the running flame that coursed through her as she listened to him. And his mother and his father became to her two separate people in her life.

"For some weeks the youth came frequently, and was received gladly by them all. He sat amongst them, his dark face glowing, an eagerness and a touch of derisiveness on his wide mouth, something grinning and twisted, his eyes always shining like a bird’s, utterly without depth. There was no getting hold of the fellow, Brangwen irritably thought. He was like a grinning young tom-cat, that came when he thought he would, and without cognisance of the other person.

"At first the youth had looked towards Tom Brangwen when he talked; and then he looked towards his aunt, for her appreciation, valuing it more than his uncle’s; and then he turned to Anna, because from her he got what he wanted, which was not in the elder people.

"So that the two young people, from being always attendant on the elder, began to draw apart and establish a separate kingdom. Sometimes Tom Brangwen was irritated. His nephew irritated him. The lad seemed to him too special, self-contained. His nature was fierce enough, but too much abstracted, like a separate thing, like a cat’s nature. A cat could lie perfectly peacefully on the hearthrug whilst its master or mistress writhed in agony a yard away. It had nothing to do with other people’s affairs. What did the lad really care about anything, save his own instinctive affairs?

"Brangwen was irritated. Nevertheless he liked and respected his nephew. Mrs. Brangwen was irritated by Anna, who was suddenly changed, under the influence of the youth. The mother liked the boy: he was not quite an outsider. But she did not like her daughter to be so much under the spell.

*

It is easy to find serious fault with this prose. Lawrence repeats words abominably, in a manner that must be deliberate (trying for some incantatory effect?), but which can look to our eyes like simple carelessness. Many of his sentences are so ill-formed ("The mother bowed her head and moved in her own dark world, that was pregnant again with fulfilment") as to be risible -- no wonder he is easy to parody -- and a few of them on the same page can make him seem unreadable. The jumbled metaphors of light in the first paragraphs are badly phrased ("his face shining darkly") and look badly confused (so is he a source of light, as several images insist, or -- a few lines later, "the hole in the wall, beyond which the sunshine blazed"?).

One can say that Lawrence is disregarding established conventions of prose narrative, or pushing them to its limit: shifting metaphors in a way so fluid that stodgy readers will condemn it as "mixed"; fitting clauses together in defiance of syntactical norms to suggest restless change. I will listen to such arguments, but they don't -- here -- work for me. This prose, if not objectively "bad," gives me no pleasure; I have not found an angle of access, a way of reading it, that brings it alive.

Trying to Read D.H. Lawrence

2006-08-26T06:01:00.000-07:00

One of my summer ambitions was to manage finally either to read a mature Lawrence novel or conclude definitively that I could not. Summer is nearly over, and, a hundred pages into The Rainbow, I find myself reading other books. This has happened before.

Lawrence's reputation was in deep eclipse when I attended college in the mid-seventies, and I wasn't assigned anything by him in college. Reading serious criticism in the years immediately afterward, I was struck by the high regard many writers I respect held for his poetry; the enormous praise his travel novels had won from a variety of sources, and the disparity of viewpoints on his fiction, especially his novels. Though there was something like a general consensus that Women in Love was his greatest, a lot of writers who loved Lawrence had other candidates; and those who liked his novels often described them very differently.

The virtues of Sons and Lovers are easy to perceive, and its shortcomings easy to forgive: the author is plainly young, and brilliant. I have been able to enjoy many of his short stories over the years, although I noticed that they tended to be a good deal less radical and original than his novels: I was able to like them because they were more like what other, more traditional writers of his era were doing, and less like the crazy Lawrence who got everyone upset.

After Sons and Lovers came The Rainbow and then Women in Love, ostensibly its sequel although the two evidently have little crucial in common. Several times over the past twenty years I have tried to read The Rainbow, and if I didn't find in it the Lawrence who was being denounced when I was in college -- the women-hating proto-fascist -- neither did I like his prose, which seemed weirdly hectoring: Lawrence would describe a characters in strangely personal terms, as though his personal feelings about them were getting in the way of the description; and his prose seemed shot through with repetitions of words and images and enormously careless phrasing. It often looked like a first draft.

But many times I have heard the The Rainbow was a transitional work and Women in Love its triumphant realization; and decided that I could not write Lawrence off without reading the latter work. A new edition of the earlier novel persuaded me to give it one more chance, and to go on to try Women in Love if I truly failed.

So that was one of my summer projects. More on how it turned out tomorrow.

Why I Love Lawrence Sterne Scholarship

2006-05-03T19:54:00.000-07:00

Everyone loves Lawrence Sterne, but Lawrence Sterne scholarship is a largely unknown pleasure. It certainly sounds forbidding, critical analyses -- and worse, textual apparatus-wrangling -- being few novel-lovers' idea of fun.

But the faint-hearted should think again. If you like Sterne, a passage like this:

"After studying the surviving manuscripts of A Sentimental Journay and A Journal to Eliza, the editors decided that normalizing Sterne's erratic spellings, grammar and punctuation would, in too many instances, possibly confuse his intentions. Did he, for example, alter 'Rugians' (the name of a Germanic tribe correctly spelled in his source) to 'Bugians' to create a bawdy play (see n. i to VI.xvii), or did the compositor, unfamiliar with 'Rugians,' make a simple error? Is Sterne showing his poor command of French when he write 'a le pere,' as many correcting editors seem to believe; or is he making a deliberate error, designed to echo 'à la mere' (see nn. 4 and 5 to I.xx)?"

offers an inquiry wholly in the spirit of the man. Wayne Booth wrote an essay asking whether Tristram Shandy is in fact complete; how can lovers of that novel not find the question interesting? (Remember, the final page merely says "Here Endeth the Ninth Volume," in similar manner to its predecessors.) Booth adduces passages in the first four volumes to argue that Sterne had always intended the work to end with the history of Uncle Toby's amours.

Tristram Shandy is always so nearly on the edge of turning into a critical apparatus of itself that it would take a particularly incompetent or priggish commentary (I am sure some exists) to traduce it. I am rereading the novel for the first time since college, and using the new Penguin edition, which retains the original Christopher Ricks introduction but adds a new one and employs the definitive "Florida" edition and has no notes. How Shandian it is to have two introductions!

Finished One Book; Resuming Another

2006-05-01T21:04:00.000-07:00

A week or two ago I finished Kentauros, a 33,000 word novella (or very short novel) that I have been working on for nearly a year. Today I returned to the novel I had interrupted to embark on this this joie d'esprit.

Did I spend very nearly a year (with a few weeks off for the occasional book review) to produce only 33,000 words? Well, yes: the novella required intensive research, with prety much a whole new set of it for each successive section. My two or three years' work on my long novel -- itself interrupted by illness -- was put into dry dock for this. Looking it over today, I find (to my relief) that it hasn't suffered from dry rot during its period of neglect, but that I am now farther from all the intensive research that it had required. Will I be able to reconstruct all the little sub-plots and intrigues I was slowly developing? Maybe they are detailed in my notes.

I had better stick with this (very long) project from here on out.

A Word Some Reviewer Will Call Foul

2006-01-30T06:04:00.000-08:00

Deep in a work of fiction, I have found myself writing a piece of verse, one that seems (in the story) to be either by Percy Bysshe Shelley or a by contemporary who is able to manage a good imitation. I am expending a lot of effort in avoiding anachronisms, getting a feel for Shelley's rhythms, punctuation, the kinds of rhymes he relied upon or avoided, and much else.

My poem employs the word "unbeholden," meaning not obliged to anyone. Shelley used the word himself at least once, but in its more common sense, unperceived. The other meaning, though attested back to the seventeenth century, is much less common, but he would have known of it -- "not beholden" was common enough in his time -- and not hesitated to use it if he needed to.

I'm sure I'm going to get called on this, though. Well, tough.

A Scrap of Code

2006-01-03T11:22:00.000-08:00

From today's New York Times:

"Cute cues are those that indicate extreme youth, vulnerability, harmlessness and need, scientists say, and attending to them closely makes good Darwinian sense. As a species whose youngest members are so pathetically helpless they can't lift their heads to suckle without adult supervision, human beings must be wired to respond quickly and gamely to any and all signs of infantile desire.

"The human cuteness detector is set at such a low bar, researchers said, that it sweeps in and deems cute practically anything remotely resembling a human baby or a part thereof, and so ends up including the young of virtually every mammalian species, fuzzy-headed birds like Japanese cranes, woolly bear caterpillars, a bobbing balloon, a big round rock stacked on a smaller rock, a colon, a hyphen and a close parenthesis typed in succession."

Boy, that really makes you feel like an outdated scrap of code, doesn't it?

Joy Williams is an unsettling genius

2005-12-19T06:11:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago I mentioned Joy Williams’s introduction to a Jane Bowles story in the anthology You’ve Got to Read This. I had been reading Williams’s collection of essays Ill Nature over the past few months (since she writes 140 proof prose, you don’t chug it), and knew that she had a story collection published recently, but had not yet acquired it.

I have now done so, and want to draw attention (to the degree that I can) to Williams’s scintillating prose. Here is the opening paragraph of her story, “Honored Guest”:

She had been having a rough time of it and thought about suicide sometimes, but suicide was so corny and you had to be careful in this milieu which was eleventh grade because two of her classmates had committed suicide the year before and between them they left twenty-four suicide notes and had become just a joke. They had left the notes everywhere and they were full of misspellings and pretensions. Theirs had been a false show. Then this year a girl had taken an overdose of Tylenol which of course did nothing at all, but word of it got out and when she came back to school her locker had been broken into and was full of Tylenol, just jammed with it. Like, you moron. Under the circumstances, it was amazing that Helen thought of suicide at all. It was just not cool. You only made a fool of yourself. And the parents of these people were mocked too. They were considered to be suicide-enhancing, evil and weak, and they were ignored and barely tolerated. This was a small town. Helen didn't want to make it any harder on her mother than circumstances already had.

Note the shifting relationship between narrative voice and the protagonist. Although told in the third-person, the narrative is essentially inside the protagonist's head, and numerous touches in the opening sentences ("Then this year . . .") reinforce this. Then it seems to take a step backward, into a more omniscient mode ("Under thecircumstances, it was amazing that Helen thought of suicide at all"). The narrative voice then ventures a bit closer again ("It was just not cool") and seems to toy with the second-person ("You only made a fool of yourself"). The final sentences seem to move out again, like a camera dollying back, to give a view of other parents and indeed the community. This is then tied off with a final sentences that brings it back into Helen's head.

This can sound as though the author is simply being inconsistent, but actually she is modulating the tone, with great skill. The most intimate sentence ("Like, you moron"), which goes inside the head of other, unknown students -- who are reacting to the action of an unnamed individual -- is full of contradiction: it is highly mediated (there is one more level of mediation: all these derisive responses are being imagined by Helen) yet very direct; extremely compact, yet full of feeling. These contradictions, binding the sentence together like the nuclear force of a heavy atom that would otherwise blow apart, lend it great energy.

The paragraph undergoes a major change after that point; it's a judgment call whether there should have been a paragraph break there. In those last sentences, there is another contradictory movement: we are both farther into the real world (we are speaking of other parents, and the community at large) and farther into abstraction (these are hypothetical parents of hypothetical suicidal kids, rather than the three kids who had actually tried or succeeded.) And this contradictory movement echoes one in the first half of the paragraph: the complex reaction the reader had -- perhaps without registering it -- to the two girls who committed suicide, who really did do it, and who are mocked for their multiple, effusive notes. "Theirs was a false show." Show? False? In what way? -- the poor girls are dead. Their peers' derision is doubtless covering other emotions: grief, horror. The pathetic notes are held up to ridicule because they are unbearable. The girl who OD'd on Tylenol is, in one respect, being jeered at not because of her similarity to the two suicides but because of her crucial dissimilarity: she plainly hadn't meant it. And all of this, of course, is being imagined by Helen, the single consciousness who holds it all together.

This is really brilliant prose.

Best Story Collections of 2005

2005-12-17T17:37:00.000-08:00

Maureen McHugh asks if I can suggest some of the best short story collections of 2005. Having been nominated for a big prize for her own collection (huzzah!), she finds herself wondering what else is going on out there.

I haven't been following new fiction as closely as usual this past year (mostly because of preoccupation with my own projects), so I can make only a few suggestions. Terry Bisson published two collections this year, Greetings and Other Stories and Numbers Don't Lie. (The good folks at Tachyon sent me reviewer's galleys, but I have so far not found a newspaper interested in commissioning me to do a review of recent SF.) I have read about half the stories in Greetings, and it's good. As good as Bears Discover Fire? Can't say till I've read the rest.

Numbers Don't Lie is a trio of novellas about this colorful character. Such a volume may not be considered a story collection by everyone, but Jim Harrison's The Summer He didn't Die also comprises three novellas, and it was also nominated for the Story Prize, so hey, it counts. (Anyway, I like novellas.) And at least one of the stories in this volume involves Harrison's own colorful character, Brown Dog, so there. I liked the novellas, so count Bisson in.

James Salter's Last Night has some superb stories in it. Maro Lanagan's Black Juice appeared from Eos this spring, but I believe it first appeared overseas last year. Um, does anyone have other candidates?

A Three-Story Day

2005-12-06T05:05:00.000-08:00

I sat in a coffee shop last night while my daughter went to music class and read three (fairly short) stories out of You've Got to Read This. Grace Paley's "Wanting," the opening story in her Enormous Changes at the Late Minute, I have read several times. It is, in its quiet way, an astonishing work: Paley constructs a model bird out of popsicle sticks and Elmer's glue, and it spreads wings and flies away. More surprising, if less familiar, was Donald Barthelme's "The School," another three-page story. I read a lot of late Barthelme a few months ago from his collection Forty Stories, and they can pall fairly quickly. This may also be a late story (the volume has a wholly inadequate credits page), but it proved shockingly good, in a way wholly unlike Paley's. The story is a bravura piece, a performance almost, like someone making a wedding cake with the smallest layer on the bottom and the rest expanding as it grows upwards, the whole thing swaying precariously but remaining upright. You want to cheer.

The third story, however, was in its way the most interesting: "A Day in the Open" by Jane Bowles. It was introduced by Joy Williams, and in a reversal of the previous day's policy I chose it for the introducer rather than the author. (Williams is a fascinatingly fierce writer, whom we can discuss later.) Bowles' story, as Williams notes, is rough-edged in many ways; Bowles "introduces characters woodenly, usually in terms of their nationality. She doesn't know how to get into her stories or how to end them." Her husband, Paul Bowles, urged her to use the "hammer and nails" of fictional technique to get herself over these problems, but Bowles, as Williams says, had to invent her own hammer and nails for every story, and the effort shows.

This doesn't sound promising, and the story indeed has obvious problems of craft. (Bowles indeed introduces the secondary characters in terms of nationality, but not the two protagonists, who are presumably of the country in which the story is set -- which is never specified.) The story -- set in a whorehouse in, probably, Mexico -- involves a picnic that a powerful patron takes with two of the prostitutes, whom the brothel owner compels (though they have just woken up) to undertake. He takes them to a secluded place, along with a second man, and you get the awful feeling that violence will ensue.

A kind of violence does kind of happen, but it's not what you expect; nothing is what you expect. (The second man pays no attention to the proceedings, but spends the afternoon looking at his accounts ledger.) The story has clumsy sentences and bits of strikingly precise observation. You feel unsettled by the entire experience (in a way that reading an ordinarily insufficiently-crafted story never does).

It makes me want to read more by Jane Bowles, though not right away.

A Story A Day

2005-12-05T05:29:00.000-08:00

I am going to try to read a short story a day, a good resolution from whose perch I get knocked off regularly.

Yesterday I brought home You've Got to Read This, a hefty 1994 anthology (ed. Ron Hansen and Jim Shepard) in which about three dozen of "today's leading fiction writers" introduce their favorite story. I like anthologies like this, because a critic you like can lead you to an author you have never heard of, and vice versa.

Charles Baxter, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Deborah Eisenberg, Amy Hempel, Edward P. Jones, Lorrie Moore, Francine Prose, Eudora Welty, Joy Williams, etc. introduce stories by a raft of writers, some nineteenth century (Dickens) or early twentieth (Joyce, Borges) but a fair number by writers who were living twenty years ago (Cheever, Carver) or are living now (Munro, Tim O'Brien). Why just "leading fiction writers," instead of including also some non-fiction writing critics? Never mind.

So I read "Labor Day Dinner" by Alice Munro. David Leavitt's introduction begins, "Few stories mean as much to me as Alice Munro's 'Labor Day Dinner,' which sounded enticing enough. I read the rest of the introduction only after finishing the story, and it was a fairly unenlightening intro. But the story (early for Munro: it was reprinted in a 1982 collection) is very compelling. A rather large cast (six women and two men, most of them important characters) interacting complexly. Munro introduces nearly all the characters before anything really gets going, which would usually be a fatal misstep. And she ends the story with near-violence that comes out of nowhere, also risky. It all works.

The story also moves from third-person omniscient into the POV of various characters by turn, which isn't easy. It is also told in the present tense. I suppose this shows that you can pull off anything, if you can pull it off.

More Bad Rhetoric

2005-12-01T05:55:00.000-08:00

Michael Rubin, a Bush administration flack, attempting to defend its disgraceful policy of planting occupation-friendly stories in Iraqi newspapers:

"We need an even playing field, but cannot fight with both hands tied behind our backs."

Say what? This is too inept an utterance to warrant comment (note the nonsensical "but"), save that he is doing what I pointed out in the last post: trying to intensify an image by ramping up its quantitative element. Instead of playing with one hand behind one's back, it's "both hands," just as some people think that "one-dimensional" is just like "two-dimensional" but with more punch.

I suppose it's a bit of a consolation that the fatuous mediocrities and preening war criminals of the Bush administration do not seem to have competent apologists.

Modern Rhetoric

2005-11-13T05:25:00.000-08:00

An expression that has long annoyed me is "one-dimensional." It's an obvious intensifier of "two-dimensional," but I don't think it a very good one. "Two-dimensional" makes sense, conveying flatness and cartoon unreality. Subtracting a dimension for emphasis is essentially witless; one might as well trump the lot by saying "no-dimensional."

Yet everyone says it.

I'm not going to set up shop here as a language grouse, an unlovely breed associated with aging crabbiness and reactionary resentment. But not every figurative expression that catches on deserves to.

The Consolation of Unphilosophy

2005-09-16T09:24:00.000-07:00

I learn new words every day (although I sometimes suspect I forget them as I sleep), but my current research is throwing up a number of interesting Regency terms, many of them cant.

One is "unphilosophize," a transitive verb. It was actually first used (so far as we know) by Alexander Pope, in a letter of 1713: "Our passions, our interests, flow in upon us, and unphilosophize us into mere mortals."

That makes its meaning clear enough. But just over a century later, Byron adds a sexual sense. Writing to his half-sister, he is explaining why he failed to hold to a resolve to keep his sexual distance from a woman who has been pursuing him (and who in fact followed him from London to Geneva):

Now--don't scold--but what could I do?--a foolish girl--in
spite of all I could say or do--would come after me--or
rather went before me--for I found her here . . . I could
not exactly play the Stoic with a woman--who had scrambled
eight hundred miles to unphilosophize me.

Post Posties

2005-09-12T08:33:00.000-07:00

A postie is someone who posts on his blog a lot. (I just made that up.) "Post postie" is a postmodernist way of describing the condition of having gotten beyond, or anyway past, the condition of frequent posting. I became post postie because of a busy summer. A busy autumn looms (in fact, it's already upon me), but I'll try to post a bit more often.

But meanwhile I hear that LiveJournal is in fact that hot way to have a blog, not Blogger or other venues. In LiveJournal you can do things with "Friends" not available here. I got going here on Blogger because a friend opened a blog and for a while (until she changed her settings) you had to join to comment. Now my friend has closed up her shop, other friends here are also (or exclusively) posting on LiveJournal, and here I am, out of date again.

This is the story of my life, to be forever one phase shift behind. I show up in my tie-dye T-shirt, bong in hand, and everyone is three blocks away throwing themselves into a mosh pit.

TRADE PUBLISHERS TO SHORT FICTION: DROP DEAD

2005-07-15T04:38:00.000-07:00

A number of interesting collections of science fiction and fantasy have appeared in recent months. Here is a list:

Greetings and Other Stories by Terry Bisson (Tachyon Publications)
I Live With You by Carol Emshwiller (Tachyon Publications)
Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link (Small Beer Press)
Mothers and Other Monsters by Maureen F. McHugh (Small Beer Press)
Thirteen Ways to Water and Other Stories by Bruce Holland Rogers (Wheatland Press)
Heart of Whitenesse by Howard Waldrop (Subterranean Press)

Notice something peculiar here?

(There are also collections by David Gerrold and Harry Turtledove, also from small presses.)

I have deliberately excluded from the list titles whose authors typically publish in small presses, such as The Emperor of Gondwanaland and Other Stories by Paul Di Filippo, and large omnibuses produced by small-press publishers who specialize in this, such as The Masque of Mañana by Robert Sheckley or the recent tenth volume of Theodore Sturgeon's complete works. The books listed above are all by writers who regularly publish with trade hardcover houses such as Tor, St. Martin's Press, Viking. All (or just about all) of them have published novels, and almost never with small presses. (Carol Emshwiller is publishing a novel just this summer, from Penguin/Viking.) Even Howard Waldrop, supposedly hard-core small press material, published his last collection with St. Martin's Press. None of them are new writers; all of them have won prizes, if you are impressed by that sort of thing.

No more. I looked for examples of collections published by trade SF publishers this year, and can see three examples: by Garth Nix, China Miéville, and Gene Wolfe. All are prolific and extremely successful novelists whose collections are being brought out by the houses that are busily bringing out their novels. Critically acclaimed novelists whose sales are more middling (there are some on the above list) are expected to take their collections elsewhere.

One could argue about counter-examples, which don't refute my thesis but complicate it, such as writers like Lucius Shepard who, despite critical acclaim, publish both novels and collections with small presses; or Golden Gryphon, which publishes lots of collections and is midway between a small and a trade publisher. (Its founder, James Turner, was very annoyed when I referred to it in print as a small publisher.) The trend, however, seems clear. A short fiction collection, unless it is by a distinctly successful novelist who is currently publishing novels, is unwelcome at all trade publishers. (And even one by a requisitely pop author, such as Gerrold or Turtledove, will not be touched if their audience looks to be one that doesn't read short fiction.)

Anthologies, both original and reprint, continue to be published by both hardcover (St. Martin's Press) and mass market (DAW) houses. With their variety of authors, they seem to be a more commercial proposition.

David G. Hartwell, an editor at Tor Books, writes (in his introduction to the Sheckley volume) that the present disparagement of writers of short SF is "a growing disaster and a betrayal of the history of SF achievement in the 20th century." He continues:

"Despite the efforts of NESFA Press and others, almost everybody is looking at novels as the measure of a writer's true quality. If this goes on without challenge, everone from Damon Knight to Harlan Ellison, from Lucius Shepard to Ted Chiang will end up as second rank, and not worthy of Grand Master awards no matter how fine their stories. And to put it bluntly, there are a disproportionate number of excellent short story writers in the SF tradition, but not a lot of first class novelists."

True enough -- and I have heard other Tor editors make the same lament -- but it's hard not to notice that Hartwell, who was Terry Bisson's editor for his entire career up until now, seems to have abandoned collections by "excellent short story writers," as have his colleagues.

It has always been the case that trade publishers wince at publishing collections, and often would publish one only if the author delivered a novel. But I do not believe that collections of literary merit have ever been so entirely abjured by trade publishers as now.

Seen on a Dust Jacket

2005-07-15T04:08:00.000-07:00

"Link's exquisite stories mix the aggravations and epiphanies of everyday life with the stuff that myths, dreams and nightmares are made of."

-- Laura Miller, Salon

"Sly and charming, tart and wise."

-- Michael Berry, San Francisco Chronicle

"Stranger Things Happen is a tremendously appealing book, and lovers of short fiction should fall over themselves getting out the door to find a copy."

-- Gregory Feeley, Washington Post Book World

"A joy. I've not been so moved and affected -- and dammit, yes, inspired -- by a book for a long time.

-- China Miéville, Iron Council

China Miéville is still reviewing for Iron Council?

The Silence of the Tomes

2005-06-21T05:38:00.000-07:00

Girl in Landscape is full of talk, but it is perhaps, at the same time, the most silent book I can easily remember ever reading.

-- John Clute, 1998

Most alternate histories – Arabian Wine is, barely, one of these – sing the wrath of change. They are all about getting somewhere by other means. Arabian Wine does not so utter. Its lips are sealed. It is the most silent work of sf I think I may have ever read.

-- Ibid., 2005

My Favorite Greek Myth

2005-06-17T06:01:00.000-07:00

Of all the Greek myths that have lodged in my memory -- and some of the most striking are fairly obscure ones, such as the story of Niobe and the death of Caeneus -- the one that means the most to me is the story of Philoctetes. I can't say that Sophocles' play (the earliest extant telling, though both Homer and Pindar mention him) is the greatest Greek tragedy, though it's a tremendously good one. But the story (especially as James Blish, of all people, unconsciously revised it) has never lost its power to move me.

Certainly the story of Philoctetes resonates with Modernist sensibilities. Edmund Wilson noted that in "The Wound and the Bow," pointing out that the linking of superlative talent with a crippling disability is a concept that the early twentieth century found very alluring. In the play, of course, these characteristics are not implicit in each other: Philoctetes, who possessed a bow that never misses its target, is bitten by a snake as he approaches a shrine to which the Greeks intend to make a sacrifice, with no connection between the two implied. When James Blish published the first section of his novel The Seedling Stars in 1955, he replicated all the basic elements of Philoctetes (nothing in his letters suggests he was aware of doing this, though he seemed to regard Sophocles as the greatest Greek dramatist). In his story, these two characteristics are facets of the same phenomenon: the condition that renders the protagonist a pariah also causes him to be sought out by those who would use him.

Certainly Sophocles' play makes for great drama, and one cannot read the long scene between Philocretes and Neoptolemus -- in which Philoctetes' ulcerous leg begins to throb, grows worse, recedes before returning, and finally erupts in a fury that causes the absess to burst and leaves Philoctetes insensible -- without wishing to see it staged. (It is this scene, of course, in which the conflicted Neoptolemus wins Philoctetes' trust, just as Odysseus had told him to do.) And yes, all sorts of Modernist poetics catch the light of Sophocles' dramaturgy -- and not just Modernist: the play has been adapted not only by Gide but recently by Seamus Heaney.

But to make a confession: the play probably speaks so forcefully to me because it is about betrayal, and the pressure to make third parties complicit in someone's betrayal: themes that recur repeatedly in my own fiction, whether I invite them to or not. And that is probably why Philoctetes is my favorite myth.

Want Some Latin with Your Greek?

2005-05-19T05:26:00.000-07:00

I am now writing a story -- it's actually kind of half-essay, half-story -- and will have to decide how to transliterate words in ancient Greek. The basic decision comes down to employing the spellings most common in English, which derive from Latin, or transliterating more literally the Greek alphabet. Olympus vs. Olympos, in other words; Hephaestus vs. Hephaistos.

My first impulse is to go with the Greek -- I am trying to evoke the experience of living in the Greek Age of the Gods, which should not be filtered through Roman recensions. This means emphasizing some distinctions most English readers do not really know about, like the fact that the Latin ligature æ is a transliteration of the Greek letters "ai" and should be pronounced with a long a rather than a long e. (The Latin ligature that should be pronounced with the long e is œ, as in œconomia and fœtus.)

This doesn't bother me, and certainly most readers have encountered spellings like "Hephaistos" and "daimon." But "ph" is itself a Latin creation, for that sound is rendered in Greek as one letter, phi. If you transliterate that properly as "f," you get words like Hefaistos, Fobos, and fallus, which I don't think readers will accept.

No Cancer Yet

2005-05-17T08:19:00.000-07:00

I usually restrict posts here to topics of interest (to others), but I will note that I saw one of my doctors yesterday, and by one measure at least, my cancer has not returned.

The Origins of Centaurs

2005-05-13T08:55:00.000-07:00

No one knows what Kentauros looked like. (Indeed, few people seem to know who Kentauros is.) Neither Edith Hamilton nor Bulfinch's compendia of Greek mythology include accounts of the origins of centaurs, and when other mention it, it usually to say that centaurs were born when the human Ixion lay with a cloud in the shape of Hera. The moral of that story -- that Ixion's unnatural lust for the goddess, compunded by the fact that it was in fact a cloud (or, in other accounts, the cloud nymph Nephele) with whom he slept, could only produce monsters -- is echoed in other myths, such as that of Pasiphae and the Minotaur. But in the earliest account I have found -- that of Pindar, who precedes just about everyone except Homer and Hesiod -- Ixion's union with the simulacra of Hera produced Kentauros, called a monster but otherwise undescribed. It was Kentauros's mating with the Magnesian mares that produced the race of hippocentaurs, the half-horse, half-humans known today simply as centaurs.

Here is Pindar's account, from Pythian II:

Far were the Graces when Cloud
Bore him a monstrous issue,
She like nothing, and like nothing It;
Which found no favor among men, nor in
The company of the Gods.
She nursed It and called It Kentauros: and It lay
With the Magnesian mares on Pelion's foot-hills.
And a race was born
Prodigious, in the image of both parents,
Their nether parts of the mother, their father's above.

(tr. C.M. Bowra, from the Penguin Odes)

The word kentauros seems to mean bull-slayer. (My ancient Greek is very weak but consulting Donnegan seems to confirm this.) One can see what Pindar was getting at: the union of a human and a nymph could only produce something human in appearance; but if its monstrous nature (a produce of its monstrous conception) led it to mate with animals, the resulting offspring would partake of both parents.

But of Kentauros nothing else (that I can find) was said by any ancient source. Pindar's "far from the Graces" means that its birth was unblessed (the more literal Myers translation available from Perseus says "without favour of the Graces"), so that although he was nurtured by his mother, his cursed nature was recognized -- by a validating source whose authority was beyond appeal -- even before his birth. From this, we gather, came a life of solitude, including erotic solace found only among a herd of horses in Thessaly.

A potentially interesting figure, Kentauros. But I have never read anything else about him.

Romans à Vapeur

2005-05-08T15:32:00.000-07:00

Bruce Holland Rogers, who best known for his short stories, is engaged in writing a long novel, Steam, which he describes on his website at http://www.sff.net/people/bruce/steam.htm I have known Bruce for some time, and found his project intriguing, so I subscribed.

Bruce is currently six chapters into the novel (and very interesting they are; I recommend it). In a recent one -- written in the last week of April -- a character builds a steam engine and then uses it to convert coffee into espresso. I was struck by this, since the same thing happens (accidentally) in my Arabian Wine. I don't think Bruce has read my novel; likelier he got the idea on his own, since it's obvious enough if you are thinking about steam.

I found it interesting that his novel is primarily about futures trading, manic-depression, and steam power, and secondarily about coffee. My novel Arabian Wine is exactly the reverse.

Are there any other romans à vapeur out there?

Steam, Not Steampunk

2005-05-06T11:44:00.000-07:00

A colleague recently read Arabian Wine and wrote to tell me how much he liked it. He got several of the sneaky allusions I worked into it (including the Kipling ones), but also called it "an example of steampunk -- in its most literal sense."

Well, yes and no. One of the odd things about Steampunk (to the degree that it was a coherent phenomenon in the first place) is that it had next to nothing to do with steam power. The term was coined after the appearance of James P. Blaylock's Homunculus in 1986, although the sub-genre's salient characteristics -- its crackpot rationalism, demonstrated by the lunatic inventions that actually work; its British, usually London setting; its focus on the individual (usually a lone inventor or investigator, typically of independent means) against a backdrop of ironically-regarded Imperialism -- had been evident in the work of Blaylock and his friends Tim Powers and K.W. Jeter for nearly a decade. Something about the conceit fell into perfect step with the zeitgeist, and the next dozen years saw any number of variously cyberpunk novels, most famously Gibson and Sterling's The Difference Engine, but also Michael Swanwick's The Iron Dragon's Daughter, Stephen Baxter's Anti-Ice, and (one that deserves to be better-known) Colin Greenland's Harm's Way.

One interesting thing about these novels, however, is that they tend to have very little to do with steam power. Nineteenth-century engines, yes, and a blast of steam can sometimes be discerned in the gaslight, but what Sadi Carnot called "the motive force of fire" in 1824: no, not much. "Steam" is here a metaphor for nineteenth century energies: industrial, imperial, often sexual. But it is rarely itself dramatized.

I can think of only a very few contemporary novels about steam. One of them is the little-known Steam Bird by Hilbert Schenck. It was serialized in F&SF in 1984, then appeared as a slim paperback four years later. The book concerns the deployment of a nuclear-powered bomber -- its steam turbines able to keep it in the air for days without refuelling -- such as the U.S. military actually planned to build in the 1950s but eventually abandoned. In Schenk's alternate history, a small number of such bombers were actually built, and in a brief military crisis, one of them is sent aloft. The enormous plane, the largest ever to fly, is both a military and ecological disaster -- it can't fly faster than three hundred miles and hour, spews radiactive steam, and is prohibitively dangerous to land -- but the crew of die-hard steam enthusiasts who man it convince the President to abandon military considerations and send it on a good will round-the-poles flight, and the novel ends in a giddy paean to the romance of steam power.

So, no, Arabian Wine isn't steampunk. It's about real steam power, something much more interesting.

Anachronisms!

2005-03-29T04:21:00.000-08:00

A week or so ago I picked up a copy of a novel, Mister Posterior and the Genius Child by Emily Jenkins. (It was a trade paperback by Berkley, which doesn't usually publish contemporary non-genre fiction, so that may have caught my eye.) Partly because of a laudatory blurb by Sarah Willis, partly because of an immensely charming cover (you can see it at http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/042518627X/ref=sib_dp_pt/103-6095491-0271812#reader-link), and -- because these had gotten me that far -- an engaging opening page (http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/042518627X/ref=sib_dp_pt/103-6095491-0271812#reader-link) and funny cover copy, I took the book home.

It's a novel set in Cambridge in 1970, told from the point of view of an eight-year-old girl. Since the girl is narrating, but from the vantage of later adulthood, it raises interesting technical issues, which could interact fruitfully with its (interesting) setting.

I began reading, but quickly smacked up against a real problem, at least for me. The story is full of anachronisms. Jenkins was born in 1967 (the copyright page tells us), and her 1970 Cambridge is replete with events, phrases, and attitudes from the mid- and late eighties. The first example was so egregious (an early reference to a woman going out and "drumming in the woods") that, like a sting from the world's biggest bee, I developed an immediate sensitivity to even minor recurrences.

This alerted me to what I might not otherwise have noticed: that there were no references that were actually specific to the era (a woman who wanted to get away from her family and straighten her head out would find an "Encounter Group," not a drumming circle). Cultural references and allusions that were acceptable to 1970 all proved to be examples that were still in use well into the following decade. The author's specific knowledge of her chosen milieu seemed to be zero.

This really bugs me. The author has a Ph.D.; she has published a previous book of non-fiction. Presumably she knows how to conduct basic research. The book was edited, then copyedited, by people trained to look out for exactly this kind of thing. It comes lavishly praised, presumably not only by people younger than the author.

Do most readers shrug this off, or does it bother others as well?

I Grow Old . . . I Grow Old . . .

2005-03-03T19:49:00.000-08:00

I'm wracked with guilt for the drunks I've rolled.

My joi de vivre is green with mold.

My MSS molder, all unsold.

I wake, the tip of my penis cold.

My obit will run below the fold.

Too late to cruise "the realms of gold"!

Still can catch, but cannae hold.

Etc. Pardon me; I am having an Old day.

Titling Strategies

2005-03-02T17:05:00.000-08:00

I have long been interested in titles, their fashions over time, their evolving functions. (Early novel titles were simply labels, the name of the protagonist plus a descriptive subtitle. This persisted through the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth, when other fashions gained currency.) Strategies for giving a story collection its title are especially interesting, since the obvious strategy (name the book after the most famous story in it, or at least the one with the most memorable title) is so overwhelmingly popular that any others are worth studying.

James Tiptree always gave her collections offbeat titles of their own. Gene Wolfe goes for witty titles, and Harlan Ellison often comes up with striking titles for his collections. Maureen McHugh has titled her forthcoming collection Mothers and Other Monsters, which is more than slightly in-your-face. (Much more interesting than "The Lincoln Train and Other Stories," which one publisher wanted to call it.)

Last week I came across two striking collection title strategies in successive days. The first was Jenny and the Jaws of Life, a collection by Jincy Willett that I have read good things about. It isn't, on its face, a tremendously remarkable title, until you look at the table of contents and realize that there is no title story. Instead there are two: the final stories in the volume are "Jenny" and "The Jaws of Life." I have never seen a collection title take the form "A and B," when the volume comprised more than just those two works.

The next day I came across 13 Stories by Stephen Dixon, I writer I have long intended to try. Again, not a very striking title, until you turn to the Table of Contents. The first story is called "13 Stories" -- meaning that it is a volume with a title story, while seeming to be one that follows the strategy of Salinger's Nine Stories and Faulkner's These Thirteen. (I counted the number of stories in the book: fourteen. He does not intend an ambiguous reading!)

Dixon is being sneaky, but Willett's title seems bewildering. Both strategies are much more interesting than what you see with, say, Fire Watch and Other Stories.

If I Wrote for The Onion

2005-03-01T06:27:00.000-08:00

Like all well-informed Americans, I read The Onion regularly, and could recite off the top of my head my half-dozen favorite headlines. (Number One: "Commemorative Plate Industry Calls for Tragic Death of Barbra Streisand.") I admire particularly their conciseness: quite often the headline says it all, and you don't have to -- indeed, often shouldn't -- read the accompanying piece.

Since my days include a lot of mental downtime (idling at intersections; waiting for kids to get out of music lessons), I find headlines popping into my own head. If The Onion accepted freelance work (I am told they don't), I would not hesitate to send a few in. Usually they are just the headlines:

"It's Time to Put These Torture Scandals Behind Us"

"I Dedicate My Life to Restoring the Lost Honor of Ahmed Chalabi"

"I Think We Have Qualified for a War Crimes Exemption"

"Of Course Our Warlords Are Committed to the Democratic Process"

"Reinquist Treated for Cancer, Evil"

"Israel Calls In Strike On Arafat's Body"

"U.S. Charges Transitional Government Two Days' Interest for Early Delivery"

"You're Making Condi Angry"

Anyway, today's is: "What Am I Going To Do With All These Don't Blame Me, I Voted for Bush Stickers?"

Auspicious Signs? for Arabian Wine

2005-02-28T05:02:00.000-08:00

My novel Arabian Wine will not be published for a few more weeks, but early reviews are appearing. Publishers Weekly, a trade magazine whose reviews are followed by librarians, says this:

Feeley (The Oxygen Barons; Spirit of the Place ) delivers an elegant, low-key historical fantasy about a young Venetian merchant's efforts to create a market for coffee in the early 17th century. Venice's fortunes, and those of its once powerful merchant families, have suffered as Dutch and Spanish traders gain control of markets and trade routes, bringing spices, silks and other exotic goods to Europeans hungry for new luxuries. But merchant Matteo Benveneto is determined to reinvigorate Venetian business by introducing Europe to fresh brewed "arabian wine," or caofa, as the Turks call it, "the elixir that brought fixity of purpose and clarity of mind." Eventually, Matteo's efforts draw the attention of Venice's Inquisition and the Council of Ten, providing some dramatic tension. Aficionados of quirky, understated speculative fiction will be rewarded. (Mar. 31)

This would be an odd review for book-buyers -- "low-key" and "understated" don't exactly induce one to run out to the store -- but it is intended for library purchasers, who are interested in accurate descriptions and unconcerned with blurb-like phrases. Save for the suggestion ("historical fantasy"; "speculative fiction") that the book is somehow fantastic, this is a perfectly serviceable review. That it was reviewed in PW at all -- no venue has room to cover everything -- is the real good news.

Amazon.com has had a page for Arabian Wine for some time, and checking it, I discovered that the novel is on Amazon's "Early Adopter Science Fiction & Fantasy" list. ("These are the newest and coolest products our customers of Science Fiction & Fantasy are buying. This list, updated daily, is based entirely on purchase patterns.") And not only did it make the list, but as of this weekend, it was #1.

This is definitely an unnatural situation, and can't last. But I'll take it as auspicious.

Most Underrated Beatles Song

2005-02-12T19:37:00.000-08:00

I am hellishly busy, but don't want to neglect this patch for too long, so let me pose a Fun Question. What is your candidate for most underrated Beatles song?

"Underrated" is an unquantifiable term, and even if most people can agree on a ballpark definition, some will resolutely decline to Get It. (If I asked a large group for everyone's Most Underrated Fantasy Novel, someone would propose "The Lord of the Rings.") So don't ask for a nuanced definition -- I can't give one, except to say that it must include a measure of genuine obscurity. (I.e., if you believe that "Hey Jude" is the greatest song written in the twentieth century, then you would have to consider it underrated, but please don't propose "Hey Jude.")

And my choice? Several of my favorite Beatles songs are down in the bottom fifth in name recognition, so I could come up with a different title on a different day, but right now I will go with: "And Your Bird Can Sing."

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

2005-02-10T06:46:00.000-08:00

I reviewed Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead for The Weekly Standard last month. Robinson's eerie and beautiful first novel Housekeeping is well-known, and her second novel was long awaited, so it isn't a work whose virtues are likely to go unnoticed. Reviews have been prominent and laudatory, and I'll bet Amazon.com has dozens of reader comments by now. Still, I make a few observations about the novel I have not seen elsewhere, so my piece may have its little value.

You can click on the published review at http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/156kkzxt.asp

or else read the author's cut below. (The edit, done with my permission and input, wreaked no violence to the piece, but I prefer my slightly different version.)

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 247 pp., $23.00

By Gregory Feeley

Gilead, Marilynne Robinson’s second novel -- her first since Housekeeping appeared in 1980 -- begins in gentle retrospection and affirmations of family love, but quickly turns to questions of moral responsibility and conscience, which it frames with Old Testament severity. Housekeeping, which won Robinson a celebrity that remains undiminished after the quarter century her readers have spent waiting for another novel (she has meanwhile been writing non-fiction), is a mysterious, lyrical work that resists all but the most reductive summary. Walker Percy called it “a haunting dream of a story told in a language as sharp and clear as light and air and water,” and his brief remark catches both the novel’s odd way with narrative mimesis (it seems less a story than a dream of one) and the pervasive, shimmering water imagery that every reader comments upon. Water may be “sharp and clear” but it also refracts and distorts, and Housekeeping -- a novel whose every beautiful paragraph seems as limpid and sharp as a glimpse of pebble on a lake bottom -- ripples and wavers, a book one can love without claiming, even after multiple readings, to understand.

Like Housekeeping, Gilead is a first-person narrative, a voice speaking from a small-town America of some decades ago. Four of its characters are named John Ames, of successive generations, and it is the third who narrates it, born in 1880 and a near lifelong resident of Gilead, Iowa, from which he now writes at the age of seventy-six a long letter to his young son (who is not the fourth John Ames: things are more complex than that), which his son is to read only as an adult, long after his father, suffering from heart disease, is dead. We are, perhaps, reading along with that son, a generation after 1956, the words of one long dead, who indeed writes as one long dead.

Son of a minister whose life was dominated by the legacy of his own father, a fiery abolitionist who came from Maine to Kansas in the 1830s, the narrator -- himself a minister -- spends many pages discussing the conflict and final estrangement between the first John Ames (“In course of time I learned that my grandfather was involved pretty deeply in the violence in Kansas before the war”) and the second (who once cried to his father, “I remember when you walked to the pulpit in that shot-up, bloody shirt with that pistol in your belt. And I had a thought as powerful and clear as any revelation. And it was, This has nothing to do with Jesus”). The present John Ames claims to be writing to offer his son various insights he will not live to relate in person, but ends up repeatedly returning to these nearly century-old matters. They prey, of course, on his own mind, for reasons the reader must try to work out.

Robinson’s anguished but perhaps unreliable narrator circles back and forth, worrying about current problems -- including the return of the fourth John Ames, his godson and namesake, a prodigal son who now seems to be paying attention to his wife -- while refusing to let go of his tormenting past. At one point (it is perhaps the emotional center of the novel, although Robinson characteristically gives us no warning), he recalls a story his father once told him, of hearing sounds one night as a boy and going outside to see John Brown’s mule make its way down the steps of his father’s church. Several horses, one ridden by a wounded man, followed and disappeared into the darkness, and the boy spent hours cleaning blood and manure off the church floor, only to discover that a U.S. soldier had already come by and guessed the elder Reverend Ames’s involvement in Brown’s activities. The later events of that night created a rift between father and son that neither their later service in the Civil War, nor their shared ministry afterward, sufficed to bridge. It is this terrible divide, Biblical in resonance, that their son and grandson, come so late to fatherhood, must obsessively contemplate.

Gilead is a tale of sons as profoundly as Housekeeping is one of daughters, and in many ways seems its mirror opposite. Its imagery is overwhelmingly that of light: sunlight, lightning, fire, divine radiance, illumination and its lack. While Housekeeping’s eerie dreaminess precluded much of what must be called (for lack of a better term) social consciousness, Gilead -- anchored in a specific era, as the hovering, almost immaterial Housekeeping is not -- is charged with it. “Remembering and forgiving can be contrary things,” reflects Ames, on his way to an unwelcome self-recognition.

His voice is the novel’s texture: well-meaning, not entirely honest with himself, deeply troubled. The Reverend Ames begins a letter to his son, uncertain why he is doing so, and 245 pages later concludes it. This letter -- bereft of chapter divisions, titled sections, or any other traditional literary appurtenance -- is what we have, the entirety of a novel that discloses and withholds, dramatizing the swerves and evasions of an unquiet soul uneasy with his life even as it nears its end. In the sere beauty of its prose and the fierceness of its passion, Gilead is a work of startling power: a seemingly simple artifice that reveals more complex and finer structures the closer we approach it. It is a subtle, gorgeously wrought, and immensely moving novel.

"I Am Not Broken"

2005-02-08T13:36:00.000-08:00

I run a second-hand book sale at the local Unitarian Society, and an acquaintance there suffered a nasty accident at the beginning of autumn, which involved a collapsing folding chair and cost him the tip of his index finger. Since he plays guitar, this was especially unfortunate. I have never been especially close to this guy, who tends to be a bit self-dramatizing and has (I have always thought) a faintly disagreeable way of making events and stories turn into his story. Nevertheless I felt very bad for him, and asked how he was doing and commiserated with him whenever I saw him.

Things come around, and a few months later I found out that I had prostate cancer. Unitarians are a very caring (not to mention loquacious) bunch, and while I was in the hospital people were calling up my wife and telling her that they would bring supper that evening. This was very welcome, and I didn't mind (or evince surprise) that word had gotten around. The next time I saw this guy, he came up and gave me a hug.

We spoke during my most recent sale, and I asked him how he was doing. He told me about a support group he goes to, for people who have suffered some kind of injury from which they shall not fully recover. One of the things they say there, he reported, is: "I am not broken." He seemed to take some comfort in this, and thought that I might.

I agreed it was an interesting thought, but said that for my own part, I am definitely broken. "But I still work," I added.

He seemed startled by this, and I could see him trying the thought out. I am broken, but I still work. I'm not sure whether he decided to go with that message instead.

Interesting how we can be moved by phrases that possess rhetorical power. Say it figuratively or with great concision, and it sounds true.

Ranting in Others' Blogs

2005-01-22T10:24:00.000-08:00

My friend Madeleine Robins posted a comment in her blog about how an international language code system used by librarians now includes a coding number for Klingon. (See "The Library of Congress" at http://madeleinerobins.blogspot.com/) Mad presents this as kind of neat, or at least a bit cute, and I made a long curmudgeonly post that probably seems a bit ungracious. Imagine someone being asked in a friend's living room what he thinks of some gewgaw his host has, and appalling her by launching into an extended screed about how collecting those gewgaws
damages the ecosystem or encourages the further exploitation of a subjugated culture? You know: the guy may be right, but it wasn't exactly the place.

So let me move my post here, where people can comment at will. A critique of the political and moral implications of Star Trek may seem like shooting fish in a barrel, but I am convinced that treating this stuff as silly but innocuous simply gives it a free ride.

Here is the post:

The fact that this or that activity has now been done in Klingon is the cute furry creature of contemporary culture -- whenever you are told of it, you are expected to smile and say, "Aww." Hamlet has been translated into Klingon? Aww. There is now a Klingon Language Institute? Aww.

Since one of the most ethically offensive things about Star Trek was its assumption that everything can be judged by our culture's values, a supposedly alien language that in its structure and syntax resembles modern European languages more closely than most non-European languages do is a pretty clear sign that its creators don't wish to conceive of anything in their fictive universe that our cultural mindset doesn't allow us to readily comprehend.

To shift franchises, do you remember the Ewok song that is played over the credits at the end of The Return of the Jedi? It's just a dumb little song, but despite the nonsense lyrics (its syllables comprising western European phonemes and intonation), the song sounds a lot less alien than, say, a Balinese one. This may sound priggish, but I find this refusal to dramatize anything as truly strange (even if something is supposed to be unfathomable and scary, it is presented in familiar terms) a piece of moral and ethical complacency, to put it nicely. (Less nicely, its racist ethnocentrism, used to justify imperialism.)

The original Star Trek was all about how funny foreigners (aliens) are, how silly their inability to run their own societies, which the Federation (essentially all white male humans) must step in and fix for them. Star Trek: The Next Generation was a bit less overtly imperialist: in perfect Eighties manner, it was all about validating one's feelings. The inferior societal values of the aliens (Klingons especially) were to be treated with compassion, rather than a punch in the face from James T. Kirk. That really doesn't make it much better.

So, yes: Klingons? Aww. But I can't join in the general fuzzies.

"A Poem is Never Finished, Only Abandoned"

2005-01-17T11:14:00.000-08:00

The proofs of Arabian Wine sat on my desk for a week before I began to look at them, which was a mistake. Proofread closely, they disclosed dozens -- eventually a couple hundred -- of needed fixes, from a (very) few errors introduced by converting files into page proofs to grammatical and other errors that nobody caught and stylistic revisions that, seen in the proofs' attractive design, seemed quite urgent. When I consider the many drafts and dozens of careful readings, it is disconcerting how many obvious glitches would suddenly leap out at me, as though they had been clever enough to hide all this time.

I asked to see the final pdfs -- those with the last stage of corrections incorporated -- and in addition to finding a few slips in the corrections process, I was eliminating anachronisms and infelicities right at the very end.

Today the book is out of my hands, and I will return to the novel in progress tonight. (Too many kids underfoot on this holiday to get work done before then.) I hope I don't see more errors in the finished book.

Jacket Copy

2005-01-11T23:14:00.000-08:00

I received the proposed jacket copy for Arabian Wine. It seemed a bit flat, so I rewrote it, producing this:

It is 1609, and the great Republic of Venice is showing unmistakable signs of decline. Matteo Benveneto, younger son of a once-powerful merchant family, plans to restore his city to glory by cornering the market in caofa, the hot beverage enjoyed everywhere in the Muslim world but still known in Europe only as “Arabian wine.” While his business associate seeks to develop a steam-powered engine before the Turks and the Dutch makes increasing inroads on Venetian trade, Matteo unleashes the wonders of coffee on the citizens, cultural arbiters, secret police, and foreign visitors of Venice, where everything goes except when it doesn’t, and negotiating the line between triumphant innovation and social disruption is fraught with unusual peril.

An exhilarating novel of caffeine appreciation, scientific upheaval, domestic surveillance, and the shock of the new, Arabian Wine offers a lush and sensuous portrayal of a world in transition -- a witty, high-spirited and ultimately moving tale of brave resolve and entrenched resistance in a world where East meets West and the future of civilization seems, as always, up for grabs.

My publisher, however, says "Nice try."

Bound for Glory

2005-01-11T08:37:00.000-08:00

I have been correcting page proofs of Arabian Wine, an interesting process. Long ago -- though within memory of this middle-aged writer -- proofs (I can even remember galleys, but never mind that) were full of misprints because they had been set in type (or, later, keyboarded in) by someone working from one's copyedited manuscript. Now they are always taken directly from one's computer files. You may find conversion errors -- em-dashes seem especially prone to transferring wrongly -- but no printer's errors.

This means that you largely use the opportunity to catch your own infelicities or make tiny revisions. It is probably good that you can do this, because books set up directly from the author's files tend increasingly not to have been adequately copyedited, often (especially with small presses) not at all. My text has been read carefully and repeatedly by a dedicated publisher who loves the book, but he isn't a trained copyeditor -- neither am I! -- and I found tiny slips and inconsistencies (such as a pronoun mixup in a scene of coffee preparation regarding which servant was grinding the beans and which was setting out the cups) in scenes I had drafted and read carefully dozens of times.

Mostly, though, one makes tiny revisions -- what used to be called AAs, author's alterations, and frowned on by managing editors, who wished the author only to fix misprints on the galleys. Too many AAs and you would be charged for them; old book contracts specified this. I have been making lots of small improvements, essentially (I know) because it is no longer in my power to make large ones. Each pass through the book takes longer, because I am trying to fix things too subtle or difficult to manage the previous time.

In the middle of this last night I got a call from Henry Wessells, the book's publisher, who came home to find a box of bound galleys on his porch. Hey nonny! My corrections won't get into the version that will go out to writers being approached for blurbs (book production rarely allows that), but the idea of bound galleys -- they are actually bound proofs; there are no true galleys any more -- with the handsome cover gave me a small lift in those low-blood-sugar evening hours.

Finished book in March.

Liberals Aren't the Victims

2005-01-06T04:41:00.000-08:00

A link took me to the Tarantula Brothers Emporium (http://www.cafepress.com/tarantulabros), where left-wing bumper stickers and T-shirts can be bought.

I perused BUSH LIED, SOLDIERS DIED and HELP! I'M TRAPPED IN A RED STATE! and WAKE UP AND SMELL THE COFFINS (with an image of an American-flag-draped coffin) and I HAVE NO PRESIDENT, but felt finally unhappy with all of them, and wondered why.

Eventually it occurred to me: even the angriest of these messages are emphasizing American losses in Iraq, as though the measure of the calamity is number of dead U.S. soldiers. Even I HAVE NO PRESIDENT, which I like, speaks to American progressives's sense that they have been wronged.

The real victims of the Bush presidency's imperial ventures are not U.S. soldiers or domestic liberals. The real victims are Afghani and Iraqi civilians, dead by the hundreds of thousands.
If I designed a bumper sticker, it would say AMERICANS TORTURE PRISONERS or AMERICA HAS DEVASTATED IRAQ. The needless deaths of a thousand American soldiers -- and the maiming of many thousands more -- pale beside this greater enormity.

I feel very strongly about this.

Great Hamlet Dream

2005-01-01T13:57:00.000-08:00

I had a dream last night -- it may have been a half-dream, as it was actually morning and I was nearly awake -- in which Hamlet had a twin sister, and they were shipwrecked. Weird bits of Twelfth Night conflated with Hamlet, Illyria superimposed upon Denmark, and some entanglement of Feste and the Grave-digger -- not Feste tossing up the skulls, which would be easy enough to envision, but something more elusive (or perhaps just forgotten).

I don't know whether this is a million-dollar idea sent down as a gift from the Great Unconscious, or a bit of codswallop washed up by the oil slicks of sleep. I think I have actually had this dream or half-dream before, and I remembered or recreated it. Obviously it resonates with something in my head, but not necessarily anyone else's.

Return of The Silver Metal Lover

2005-01-01T07:30:00.000-08:00

I do not believe I have ever read anything by Tanith Lee. A friend of mine lent me her first novel, The Birthgrave, not long after it was published, and I thought its opening chapter so inept that I set it aside. She went on in the late seventies to become a prolific DAW author, whose books (in the late seventies you could still pick up and look at almost every SF title to appear on the newsstand) seemed to be aimed at a different readership than me. Probably I have read a short story or two, since they have been widely anthologized, but I don't remember any.

I know that her early novel The Silver Metal Lover found a large audience, and inferred that it was an SF novel (most of her fiction seems to be fantasy, perhaps sometimes with SF rationales) that also worked as a romance novel. Friends (all women) have told me that they had read it in high school or college, or that it was a guilty pleasure for them: a novel that got past their literary sophistication. I believe that Maureen McHugh has said that her Nekropolis was informed by the effect The Silver Metal Lover had on her.

Well, a few weeks ago Bantam sent me the galley of Metallic Love, a sequel to The Silver Metal Lover. (Forthcoming, it says, in March.) Evidently the original book, despite its popularity, eventually went out of print with DAW, and Bantam reissued it. I'm not going to read the new novel unless I read its predecessor (which I have no plans to do), but the galley is interesting. The back pages include an excerpt from The Silver Metal Lover, and the book's sell line is: Here is Jane's Story -- the Story that changed Loren's life. Now, let it change yours. It seems safe to say that such a line could only have been crafted with female readers in mind.

Here are the opening two sentences of Metallic Love, each its own paragraph:

"You're not going to like me.

"I apologize for that."

This seems to signal very strongly that the novel is aimed straight at an almost exclusively female readership, one whom it promises intimacy of a familiar kind, nothing surprising or disrupting. (The rest of the brief opening section, all told in quite short paragraphs, reinforces this.) Genre writing, in other words. A genre book that, in the manner of genre, is aimed at existing receptors, not at offering something new. And these receptors -- though I am very familiar with genre SF -- are all angled in a way that they just miss me.

Compromising Photos!

2004-12-24T06:47:00.000-08:00

I was talking with my friend Judith (not her real name), who helped me put the cover proof of my next book up on this blog. We were chatting about the vicissitudes of the literary life, and I mentioned that posterity, should it ever think to take note of me, will find only one photograph extent: when I served as consultant for the Grolier Electronic Enecyclopedia of Science Fiction (an excellent resource, now sadly out of print), the producer told the staff photographer to get a picture of me. So if you get that CD and look up my entry, you will see a decent-looking photo of me, no worse for being almost ten years old.

Judith laughed bitterly. There are lots of pictures of her floating around, including a bunch of very unflattering ones that had appeared in Locus. Locus, a trade magazine for science fiction (once very influential, now rather eclipsed by the fact that people in the field can get their news online), is famous for running bad-looking photographs. The editor-publisher used to take the photos himself, but now uses professionals. Somehow the quality of the photos isn't really much better, even though the publisher is a terrible photographer and his professionals tend to be pretty good.

I was commiserating with Judith -- Locus will never run a photo of me, and we both know it -- when she suddenly said "No, that's not true -- I'm sure there are photos of you online." And I realized she was right. For the past several years, people who go to science fiction functions and take pictures of people have gone home and uploaded their photos. Anyone who has attended a Nebula banquet or a SFWA authors-editors party in the past half dozen years is probably featured in some group photo that somebody uploaded to a site, if perhaps only briefly.

Judith said we could go to Google and search on Images. I didn't know that Google had this feature (I am always one step behind the cutting edge), but while I was absorbing this, she executed the command herself and her quick DSL line brought up, yes, photos of Gregory Feeley. The nice one from the CD is available, to my surprise. Search on "Greg" rather than "Gregory" and you will indeed find me in a group shot.

So while we're talking, I search on Judith. And oh my gosh! There is a very nice image of her, from a recent just jacket, but there are also . . . awful Locus photos! (Which is why I won't use my friend's real name.) And not just Locus. A deeply unflattering photo put up by the university where she delivered a talk, writers' conference photos taken by supposed friends . . . this is awful. There is even a photo of a very overweight woman who isn't Judith; it was taken at some Women's Studies function described on a site where Judith's name is presumably mentioned.

Everybody knows that even nice-looking folks can be profoundly ill-served by an inept photograph, but this is really rubbing one's nose in the fact.

I have decided that Google Images is a tool of the devil. I will resolutely resist the temptation to look for embarrassing photos of people I don't like. (And I certainly won't look for photos of friends!)

Blog Legal

2004-12-22T04:52:00.000-08:00

A friend has told me how to do neat things like create italics on your blog. Had I known this kind of thing, my last post could have distinguished between "Neptune's Reach," my 1986 novelette, and Neptune's Reach, the novel in progress that it inspired. (Did that come out right?)

Soon I will be blog legal, and able to negotiate these mean streeets without having to consult my cooler friends on matters of punctilio and technique. (Yesterday my publisher sent me a PDF of the cover proof of my forthcoming novel, Arabian Wine. My moderately cool friend Maureen has a cover proof of her forthcoming book up on her blog, so I asked her how to upload one. Turns out I have to convert the PDF to a jpg, which requires more geeky expertise than I possess. (I lack in both coolness and geeky expertise, and perhaps should be taking supplements.)

Fortunately, I have lots of cool friends. Or rather, all my friends are cooler than me. How did that happen?

My Own Congeries Under a Tarp

2004-12-21T04:37:00.000-08:00

It will shock no one to hear that I have been working on a congeries novel for many years. “Neptune’s Reach,” a humble novelette, appeared in Asimov’s in 1986, and three years later (after writing _The Oxygen Barons_ and a few other things) I sat down and began constructing a novel from that initial seed.

Twelve parts of the large and ambitious _Neptune’s Reach_ were planned: five in Part I, four in II, three in III. (One must have a design, although tidily symmetrical ones are dull.) Over the next few years I wrote all of Part I, a piece of Part II, and took extensive notes for the rest. (The original story, thoroughly reworked, will make a modest appearance in the longest section of the book, “Six Records of a Floating Life.” That will constitute a mini-congeries of its own, six dense stories, like a whorl within a whorl.)

Two days before my daughter was born in November 1993 I did what would be my last day’s work on the novel for quite a while, coming within a few hundred words of the end of “On the Ice Islands.” I think it was three years later that I took it up again. It, and one final short section (“Ladies in their Letters”), appeared in Asimov’s around the end of the decade.

Since then I have written novellas -- a great way to condense a lot of time and effort into relatively few pages -- a short novel (“Arabian Wine,” coming out this winter), and commenced work on a very long fantasy novel. But I do want to return to _Neptune’s Reach_. On my hard drive sit about eight pages of “Cloud-Born,” which I like more than almost anything else in the series. With about 75,000 words already in print, I should certainly finish it someday.

Economics of the Congeries

2004-12-20T13:34:00.000-08:00

I am not such a dialectical materialist as to declare that all cultural activities are economically determined, but it is interesting to observe that the congeries novel seems to appear at times when the market for short fiction pays well relatively to that for books.

This was certainly the case in 1934, when William Faulkner began writing a series of stories about Bayard Sartoris and his slave companion Ringo for the Saturday Evening Post. Faulkner was published by Random House but made little money from book publication of his work; a single magazine sale to a major slick could pay more than a novel advance. Faulkner liked to write short stories and later rework groups of them into novels, but you can see how writing a novel that would definitely yield magazine money (as, "Absalom, Absalom!" and "The Wild Palms," the novels he wrote immediately before and after "The Unvanquished," did not) would appeal to him.

Ditto, interestingly, for Ernest Hemingway, whose books were not quite as successful in the mid-thirties as they had been at the decade's beginning, but who was being paid a fortune by Esquire for anything he'd write for them. Soon enough he was writing the stories that went into "To Have and Have Not," which people (perhaps with the movie version lodged in their memories) do not recall as an example of this kind of novel.

Bernard Wolfe was another well-regarded novelist (he is best remembered for "Limbo") who made more money for his magazine fiction, and soon wrote a congeries novel. The novels he published in the fifties -- with Random House, Knopf, and Scribners -- made him little money, and the last of them ("The Great Prince Died," about the last days of Trotsky), failed to sell to paperback. But he had meanwhile become a regular contributor to Playboy, and he wrote his next novel, "Come On Out, Daddy," (1961) as a series of long stories for the magazine. I suspect that he made a lot more money with that project than any other, for in the mid-sixties he began two more such series. (They never appeared in book form; around that time Playboy got a new fiction editor who got rid of their regular writers -- of Wolfe's and Irwin Shaw's generation -- for a younger crowd, and Wolfe lost that market.)

And in the early seventies, when several of the finest SF congeries novels appeared, the same conditions obtained. The original anthology field paid four or five cents per word, which the best-paying magazines (Galaxy, mostly) would match for preferred contributors. Even established writers got novel advances of around $3,000 -- if there were paperback and book club sales, the author would eventually see a few times that, but you couldn't get a hardcover advance that would guarantee it. This began to change very rapidly around 1973, but for about half a dozen years before that, writing for Orbit or New Dimensions was financially a good deal.

I don't want to overstate this, but it is interesting. (The novel market was hugely more prestigious and renumerative relative to short fiction in the eighties and nineties, during which time, indeed, there were relatively few congeries novels in SF.)

And the Term is . . . Congeries

2004-12-18T05:32:00.000-08:00

I have decided to call the kind of novel I mean a “congeries.” The Random House Unabridged (2nd ed.) defines the term as “a collection of items or parts in one mass,” and derives it ultimately from the Latin congerere, to collect, heap up. Since the word connotes both a single unity and the distinct identity of dissimilar constituent parts, it’s in.

What distinguishes a congeries novel from a story collection that is set in a single imaginative universe (as John Varley and others have done) or from a sequence of stories that has continuing characters (like Spider Robinson’s Callahan series) is the combination of individual integrity of the parts -- they are not merely chapters -- and the unitary shape of the whole. The end result should be like a wall in the Barnes Museum, where each canvas is a discrete work of art, but their arrangement creates a unique and greater effect.

Hard and fast borders are impossible to draw. The sections of Isaac Asimov’s “I, Robot” all deal not only with emerging robot technology but with a single individual, Susan Calvin. But the sections deal with Calvin at non-continuous periods of her life; we don’t get a full portrait. The stories are told from slightly different points of view, and the reader is definitely left with a sense of a series of glimpses that leave questions unanswered. That sense of lacunae, a deliberate artistic tactic, is a sign of the congeries. “I, Robot” may be a borderline case, but I would say that it qualifies.

That, I think, is the truly distinguishing trait of the congeries novel, a first-rate one, anyway: the sense that its crucial constituents include the gaps between the existing sections, the tension in the field of force these disparate elements exert. Gene Wolfe’s “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” (a brilliant novel) does this, as does “Pavane” and “The Seedling Stars.” (“China Mountain Zhang” is a fine novel, but it does not greatly exploit these particular traits.)

So what characterizes the congeries novel is the disparate nature of its makeup, the tension between these levels of organization, and the sense that the intervals between sections possess a force and weight of their own. (Notice how all of these characterize, say, “The Waste Land.”) Which is to say, the congeries novel is a thoroughly Modernist phenomenon.

A Literary Form Without A Name

2004-12-17T09:40:00.000-08:00

The other prose form I particularly like, besides the novella, does not seem to have a name. In the early seventies, when good examples (like Gene Wolfe's "The Fifth Head of Cerberus" and Thomas M. Disch's 334) were appearing in science fiction, it was sometimes called a "suite novel," a term that has so utterly disappeared that I cannot find a reference to it with Google. Writing about Alice Munro's new book in 1976, John Gardner said that "Whether 'The Beggar Maid' is a collection of stories or a new kind of novel I'm not quite sure, but whatever it is, it's wonderful!" Gardner was being, as always, generous and wrong -- this kind of novel may lack a name, but it had been around at least since Faulkner's "Go Down, Moses" in 1942 -- but he was at least gesturing towards a gap in taxonomy.

The novel that comprises a number of seemingly independent stories -- usually of novelette or novella length -- appeared only with the advent of literary Modernism (the earliest example I can think of is Hemingway's "In Our Time," and that only if you don't declare it a collection), and has never been terribly popular, in large part because it seems to confuse publishers. (Random House insisted in calling Faulkner's novel "God Down, Moses and Other Stories" in its first edition.) But it is a form that affords great pleasures.

It is also a form that is particularly common in science fiction. John Clute once coined the term "fix-up," which he has since decided causes more problems than it solves, to describe novels that first appeared in independent sections in magazines. Early examples include A.E. van Vogt's early work, as well as Asimov's "Foundation" novels. The problem with "fix-up" is that the term can be used to describe a straightforward story series eventually published in volume form and called, perhaps for obvious commercial reasons, a "novel" rather than a "collection." Van Vogt's "The Voyage of the Space Beagle" is a fix-up by this definition, but it isn't at all a single, unified work. So "fix-up" doesn't help us, either.

Perhaps the first really good example in SF is James Blish's "The Seedling Stars" in 1957. The novel's five sections share no characters or locale, and each is set in a widely differing era. The volume is a unified novel, however, held together by forces other than the usual narrative continuities. You don't find too many artistically fruitful examples over the next dozen or so years, although some prolific writers -- Robert Silverberg, for one -- would bat out stories set in a single milieu until he had about a volume's worth and then published them as a novel. The only one I can think of that really made use of the form's peculiar resources is Keith Roberts's "Pavane" (1968).

The early seventies, however, saw a bunch of them. The Wolfe and Disch novels I cited, plus Disch's unfinished "The Pressure of Time," Roberts's "The Chalk Giants," and, I suppose, Asimov's "The Gods Themselves." This minor trend continued through the decade -- I remember examples by Joe Haldeman, Kate Wilhelm, Richard Lupoff, Pamela Sargent, plus one that Harlan Ellison never finished -- then seemed to trail off.

More later.

Yo, Novella!

2004-12-16T06:26:00.000-08:00

I take my title from the caption of a cartoon in the current (Dec 20-27) New Yorker. It depicts a small, slim volume, standing on the sidewalk with a nervous expression, being accosted by a bunch of big, hefty volumes that are plainly about to start shoving him around.

You don't have to tell me about novellas getting no respect! Lip service, yes: everybody remembers Henry James's line about the "blest nouvelle"; and if you say something at a party about the unique virtues of the novella, everyone will nod solemnly. It would be rude to add, "But of course, you never read them," because the person would be hurt, and retain a sense that you have been unjust to them that any sudden reflection that hey, he's right: I don't ever read novellas! would do nothing to allay. Novellas are like worthy foreign films: everyone is genuinely sincere in their approval of them, sincere in looking sad about what an endangered species they have become, and sincerely oblivious about how the fact that they haven't actually seen one in a theatre in three years may be part of the problem.

Early next year I am publishing "Arabian Wine," which is either a short novel or a novella, depending on where you draw the line. (Award rules in the science fiction world set the border at 40,000 words, about 120 pages in an ordinary book. "Arabian Wine" is something like 40,050 words long.) The works for which I am best known -- "Aweary of the Sun," "The Weighing of Ayre," "Spirit of the Place," "Giliad" -- are all novellas. Some of them have appeared in Best of the Year anthologies, although they are often too long. (Terri Windling wrote in the introduction of one of her volumes of her regret that she could not include "Spirit of the Place.") Novellas are hard to sell: they take up the space of four short stories, which means that the editor has to like one an awful lot.

And it's astonishing how little money you will make from one when you do sell it, or how many of the novellas that the field does make room for turn about to be sixty-page chunks of someone's enormous forthcoming novel. And when someone does speak about the splendors of the SF novella, they will usually cite as masters of the form somebody who isn't actually very good at it, such as Lucius Shepard, an amazingly sloppy writer. One could develop quite a litany of woe on the subject, if one was inclined.

But I'm not! I love novellas, in SF and elsewhere. The novella is my own Narrow Road to the Deep North, and I don't care if it has no cheering crowds lining the way and a big trophy at the end. There are some very nice views from up here.

Raison d'Etre

2004-12-15T08:27:00.000-08:00

This blog has been created for the most straightforward reason imaginable: I wanted to post a comment in my friend Maureen McHugh's blog -- it's at maureenmcq.blogspot.com; go check it out -- and you have to go the full join-up route just to do that. So in for a penny, I guess.

Like Maureen, I write science fiction (and other stuff) for a living. I have a few other things in common with her, about which I may be more forthcoming at a future time. I will aspire to a becoming unpretentiousness in this blog -- it has much to be unpretentious about -- but I cannot promise to meet expectations, especially if someone expects, say, a proper deference to the current Commander in Chief. "Ballast for My Gorge" once occurred to me as a good title for a memoir, which I do not propose to write anytime soon. If it doesn't strike you as witty, perhaps I will do better tomorrow.

Let my first displayed virtue be that of brevity.