Archives for November 2004

“Barbara herself pretended to no illusions about Basil. Years of disappointment and betrayal had convinced her, in the reasoning part of her, that he was no good. They had played pirates together and the game was over. Basil played pirates alone. She apostatized from her faith in him almost with formality, and yet, as a cult will survive centuries after its myths have been exposed and its sources of faith tainted, there was still deep in her that early piety, scarcely discernable now in a little residue of superstition, so that this morning when her world seemed rocking about her, she turned back to Basil. Thus, when earthquake strikes a modern city and the pavements gape, the sewers buckle up and the great buildings tremble and topple, men in bowler hats and natty, ready-made suitings, born of generations of literates and rationalists, will suddenly revert to the magic of the forest and cross their fingers to avert the avalanche of concrete.”

Evelyn Waugh, Put Out More Flags

In the Times today, critic Caryn James has strong views about this year’s crop of National Book Award fiction nominees.

When the fiction nominees were announced, there was much grumbling about their sameness–all women, all living in New York City, all little-known names. But the minor resemblances of sex and city are nothing next to what really makes this one of the least varied lists of nominees in recent years: a short-story aesthetic. Not one of these books is big and sprawling. And not one has much of a sense of humor….

…all five are built on compressed observations that easily veer into precious writers’ program language, too woozy and poetic for its own good.

That claustrophobic sameness doesn’t help readers. Awards are inherently silly, but there’s a method to their silliness. Whether it’s the National Book Awards, the Tonys or the Oscars, contests become guides to what the public might want to catch up on, offering something-for-everyone choices. For the best-picture Oscar, there is an art house film and a popcorn movie, a “Lost in Translation” and a “Lord of the Rings.” At last year’s National Book Award ceremony, Shirley Hazzard’s eloquent novel “The Great Fire,” about memory and lost love in postwar Japan, won over T. C. Boyle’s “Drop City,” a raucous story of a 70’s hippie commune. It was a mismatched contest, but a competition that suggested the breadth and vitality of the year’s fiction.

This year’s list serves readers who like only a certain style–the style, say, of Rick Moody, the novelist and short-story writer who is chairman of the five-person fiction panel and who has been known to write some woozily poetic prose of his own. Whoever comes out ahead when the winner is announced on Wednesday, it defies logic to think that five such similar books just happen to be the best of the year–a year in which Philip Roth’s chilling historical fantasy “The Plot Against America” and Chang-rae Lee’s understated story of a suburban man’s life, “Aloft,” deserved their extravagant critical praise.

In that infamous Believer essay by Heidi Julavits that is remembered principally, and ad nauseum, for decrying “snark” in book reviews, Julavits also advanced the corollary–to me more interesting and creditable–that critical snark is frequently deployed to punish just what should be encouraged: literary ambition. I note with interest the compatibility of this claim with James’s misgivings about the set of novels nominated for the NBA. And it is as a set crowded into a narrow range that they give her pause. I found her essay honest, thoughtful, and especially informative if, like me, you haven’t read any of these books. The only shred of knowledge I have of these writers is of a previous novel by Joan Silber, Lucky Us, which I reviewed some years ago. That novel also operated on a fairly small scale, but it impressed me utterly. Here’s some of what I wrote then:

Seldom does a title encapsulate a book’s tensions and revelations as well as Joan Silber’s snappy, deceptively simple “Lucky Us.” As a scrap of arch commentary on the truly malignant misfortune that befalls this novel’s protagonist couple, “lucky us” is a pithy epithet that could have fallen from the lips of either of these congenitally irreverent New Yorkers. But Silber, deservedly celebrated as a vivid chronicler of modern manners and the urban everyday, gently strips away the irony from the title statement as her plot unfolds. By the end of the book, one of the main characters finds himself amazed to realize, “You can have good luck as well as bad.” This strikes him as “a complicated new truth, a beautiful and irrefutable fact.”

Ultimately, the apparently ironic “lucky us” proves just as true to the experience of this novel when read as a sincere statement of thanks for life and love. In Gabe and Elisa’s Manhattan love story, most of the usual romantic conventions are overturned or at least tweaked. Romance is unchained from conventionality in their unlikely pairing. Ruminative, selfless, centered Gabe is 50-something, with the lightly checkered past of a year spent in jail for dealing drugs as a young man. Now content with the modest lifestyle of a camera salesman, he stands as the serene, solid center around which Elisa, half his age, flutters rakishly.

Alive with “dizzy, selfish sweetness,” Elisa styles herself a bright young pro at desire–at cultivating and satisfying longings of her own and at planting them in others and basking in the attention that results. “I thought of myself as a lavish bit of bounty I was gifting him with,” she says of her initial courting of Gabe. She’s just self-aware enough to make a virtue out of vanity. The world is her oyster, and she finds it very much an aphrodisiac.

In he-said-she-said fashion, Elisa and Gabe narrate alternating chapters of their story. The first chapter is Elisa’s, and she imbues it with all her sunny, lusty blitheness. So her diagnosis as HIV-positive near the end of the chapter, just as she and Gabe are planning their wedding, is a dark shock and the the first, most tremendous blow of bad luck that wallops the couple. It sets off a chain of reactions that threaten to sabotage her relationship with Gabe as Elisa struggles to see herself in the new light cast by the virus. Elisa is left picking up the pieces of a dismantled identity and inhabiting a body suddenly strange to her….

Why Lucky Us was never reprinted in paperback is beyond me. Perhaps the NBA nomination of Ideas of Heaven will change that.

UPDATE: I was curious whether googling a phrase from the above review would lead resourceful readers to my identity. A test run led instead to the delightful revelation that the review was lifted a short time after it ran, chopped in half, and was attributed to somebody named Lee Hall. Charming! OGIC, in case you are wondering, is not Lee Hall….

A boy must peddle his book, and I’ll be making two public appearances next week to flog All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine, the first in New York City and the second in Connecticut.

Here’s the scoop:

– I’ve mentioned this before and probably will again, but Robert Gottlieb and I will be appearing next Tuesday, Nov. 16, at the Barnes & Noble on Union Square (the address is 33 E. 17th St.) to discuss the life and work of George Balanchine with Robert Greskovic, the dance critic of The Wall Street Journal. Gottlieb, the dance critic of the New York Observer, is the author of George Balanchine: The Ballet Maker, just out from HarperCollins. We’ll be conversing among ourselves, after which we’ll take questions from the audience and sign copies of our books. (If you’ve already bought All in the Dances, bring it along and I’ll be more than happy to do the honors.) All three of us are voluble and opinionated, which should make for a good time.

The show starts at seven o’clock. For more information, go here.

– On Friday, Nov. 19, I’ll be coming to the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford to talk about Balanchine and his legacy with Francis Mason, dance critic of WQXR-FM and co-author of Balanchine’s Complete Stories of the Great Ballets.

The show starts at six o’clock, but come early so that you can see “Ballets Russes to Balanchine: Dance at the Wadsworth Atheneum,” a major exhibition that documents a great museum’s involvement with dance in the Thirties–an extraordinary tale in and of itself. The galleries close at five p.m., which will give you plenty of time to grab dinner, come back, and watch us perform.

For more information, go here.

I’ve been rereading John Canarina’s Pierre Monteux, Ma

Dear WML Fan: I got your package today. Wow! Alas, your e-mail address got swallowed up by my hard drive, and I don’t yet have enough voice to carry on a comfortable telephone conversation.

I woke up yesterday morning and realized that I’d finally gotten the better of the bug that bit me. Needless to say, that’s all the more reason for me to continue taking it easy for as long as I can, since I have a lifelong habit of jumping the fences. Still, I’m sure that I’ve turned the corner, and just in the nick of time, too: I went to see Brooke Shields in Wonderful Town on Tuesday night, and tonight I’ll be going to a press preview of ‘Night, Mother, followed by The Good Body on Friday and Democracy on Saturday. Yikes!

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Did I get the same New York Times as everyone else today? I can’t help feeling that some of my fellow book bloggers are waxing a bit Julavitian about Caryn James’s group review of the National Book Award nominees (see next post down). James is pretty even-handed in her piece, offering persuasive praise for each book as well as critiques of what she seems to have soberly and reasonably–if, by other readers’ lights, incorrectly–judged their limitations. Nothing in the piece seems to me remotely like an assault, like an attack, or angry (let alone angry, angry, angry). Sure, it had to have been a challenging piece, giving James such limited space to review five books as well as offer an overview. But despite the built-in limitations of the assignment, what she’s written looks to me (and to CAAF) not like a declaration of war but like honest criticism.