Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
The Booker Prize winner will be announced later today, seemingly depriving scores of British culture beat writers of a livelihood. What will they write about? Meanwhile, Moorish Girl links to an outspoken piece in the Scotsman by Booker chairman John Carey about an ascendant genre of fiction.
He calls it the moral indignation novel (MIN), and he says the hell with it. Seems like Carey and Tony Kushner have a lot to talk about.
“The world was different–whether for worse or for better–from her rudimentary readings, and it gave her the feeling of a wasted past. If she had only known sooner she might have arranged herself more to meet it.”
Henry James, The Wings of the Dove
When the cat’s away, the mice will bask happily in his reflected luminosity. That’s how it felt Monday, anyway, what with Terry away and unplugged in St. Louis, and OGIC left to gape all alone at the awesome traffic-generating power of referrals from the likes of Bookslut, Mark Steyn, and especially Instapundit. These are a few of the kind bloggers who recently linked to Terry’s piece from last week about the demise of middlebrow culture. The result? A record day at About Last Night by a longshot, with more than 2,800 page views for the day. Whew.
Terry will be back in the saddle Wednesday, after one last speaking engagement at Washington University. In the meantime, it’ll be an OGIC kind of day around here. Check back for updates, please; I’m saving some of my best links for later.
Jessa Crispin at Bookslut helpfully provides a link to this recent interview with the outrageously talented young writer Adam Johnson. His short story collection from last year, Emporium, is a book I just can’t shut up about. I have not yet gotten my hands on his new novel Parasites Like Us, and have not read much about it.
As far as splashy fiction debuts, last summer sometimes seemed to be the summer of Adams: Johnson and Haslett. It was easy to get them confused at first, but soon this one was grabbing most of the attention, topped off with a National Book Award nomination. I liked Adam Haslett’s stories, but the media fuss seemed misplaced. To my mind there is something just a little showy, and less than fully felt, about the stories in You Are Not a Stranger Here. They’re inventive, diverse and impeccably crafted, beyond any argument. But–and I know this is a highly subjective criterion–to me Haslett’s stories feel decisively less urgent, less necessary. They may be too diverse; as a group they feel oddly professional in their intent, like a portfolio of work samples designed to demonstrate mastery of a range of modes and subjects.
I think Lost in Translation is going to be a touchstone for all of my thinking about art and storytelling for a while. What it has in common with the amazing stories in Emporium, and what distinguishes them from Haslett’s fine, but finally sterile, performance in You Are Not a Stranger Here, is hard to put your finger on precisely. It’s in the vicinity of conviction or purpose–whatever all that lovely craft is serving. Encountering Coppola and Johnson’s work, I experienced something very like what Terry described here.
The UK Observer has posted its selection of the 100 greatest novels ever.
Of course there’s much to disagree with (Roald Dahl? Atonement?). It’s in the nature of these exercises to be pretty rote in the early going (chronologically) and somewhat scattershot toward the end. But my biggest quarrel is that this list comes bubble-wrapped in enough caveats and preemptive defensive gestures to very nearly take all of the fun out of the proceedings. If you’re going to do something bold like make a canon, do it boldly, please.