Donna Tartt takes her time

Her debut novel The Secret History, published in 1992, is said to have taken her about 9 years to write. Her second novel, The Little Friend, came out in 2002. A third novel is said to be underway, publishing date seemingly somewhen in 2012. Between her novels, appearances are scarce. She has published less than a handful of short-stories in her career. The last thing published was an afterword to Charles Portis's True Grit, which she also narrated in the audio book version (both the novel and the afterword).

The Secret History was my first real literary love. (Wait, this is not true. The Catcher in the Rye preceded it and was a perennial companion through the early stages of my adolescence. I once gave it to a girlfriend hoping she would get a better, if not crystal-clear, understanding of the person that I was. I was 20 back then. It didn't make any sense to her. It was a long time before I read another novel.)
The Secret History falls well into the patterns that Salinger laid out for me. I discovered not only the beauty of written language but also what a perfectly crafted narrative could do. The novel still haunts me and only had to tie its #1 position when I discovered House of Leaves (both eventually lost it to Infinite Jest) a couple years ago. It was, after Catcher in the Rye, the first book that I would frequently draw from the bookshelf and start reading random passages out loud from. Sometimes I kept reading on for hours and way into the night before realizing that darkness had fallen around me. Its prologue is probably the piece of literature that I've read most often in my life. It still chills me to the bones. It starts:

"The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation."

And the situation is this: Richard and his new closely-knit circle of friends - eccentric and very reclusive classics majors at a prestigious New England Liberal Arts college; Richard always remains detached and an outsider to their minds, emotions, and actions - murder one of their own, Edmund "Bunny" Corcoran. Book I of The Secret History leads us from Richard's arrival at Hampden college and his integration into the group to their murder of Bunny. Book II is a painstaking examination of the psychological aftermath that the five of them have to deal with after the killing of their friend.

"I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell,"

closes the prologue and makes clear to everyone (who has skipped the book's motto's by Nietzsche and Plato) that this is also and foremost a story about storytelling itself. And for those who also skip prologues, Richard opens the first chapter:

"Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs."

And it is precisely this morbid longing for the picturesque that suffuses Richard's narration throughout the novel. A moi. L'histoire d'une de mes folies.

It was not until Tartt's second novel, The Little Friend, arrived on the scene and gathered some bad reviews - praising once more the brilliance of The Secret History - that I finally picked up her debut. And now, about nine years later, last week, I read The Little Friend. The reason I hadn't read it before was my conviction that it couldn't possibly surpass The Secret History in any way and why spoil my idolatry of Donna Tartt's writing, as some of the bitter reviewers did? But I see now clearly that she achieved pretty much what she set out for:

"After The Secret History I wanted to write a different kind of book on every single level [...] I wanted to take on a completely different set of technical problems. The Secret History was all from the point of view of Richard, a single camera, but the new book is symphonic, like War And Peace. That's widely thought to be the most difficult form."

I haven't read War and Peace, but I can see that The Little Friend is symphonic, and also a brilliant - and totally different from The Secret History - book. It starts out with a prologue in which we are told that nine year old Robin Cleve Dufresnes was murdered:

"He was hanging by the neck from a piece of rope, slung over a low branch of the black-tupelo that stood near the overgrown privet hedge between Charlotte's house and Mrs. Fountain's; and he was dead. The toes of his limp tennis shoes dangled six inches above the grass. The cat, Weenie, was sprawled barrel-legged on his stomach atop a branch, batting, with a deft, feinting paw, at Robin's copper-red hair, which ruffled and glinted in the breeze and which was the only thing about him that was the right color any more."

 As we are told,

"the Cleves loved to recount among themselves even the minor events of their family history - repeating word for word, with stylized narrative and rhetorical interruptions, entire death-bed scenes, or marriage proposals that had occured a hundred years before - the events of this terrible Mother's Day were never discussed [though]. They were not discussed even in covert groups of two, brought together by a long car trip or by insomnia in a late-night kitchen; and this was unusual, because these family discussions were how the Cleves made sense of the world."

And thus it comes that 12 years later, when the story sets in and no murderer has been found, twelve year old Harriet, Robin's sister, sets out to make her own sense of the murder against a wall of silence from her family. And here you can see, again right from the first page, that this novel is also about storytelling. And the story that it tells is not so much about the death of Robin or who the murderer is, but about a whole town, Alexandria in Mississippi, in the late 1970's, and the people that live - and die - in it. And it is about that one long, hot, idle Southern summer that changes everything. And because it's a long, hot summer for a twelve year old, the narration is also, well, not long and hot, but exuberant, invasive and spreading out like the kudzu - the vine that ate the South - that overgrows, and connects, so many places, and, metaphorically, people, in the novel. If you think plot, there are many loose ends. If you think characters, they are as three-dimensional as they get, even the two-dimensional ones.

Until her third novel arrives, I will pass the time listening to Tartt's great Southern voice, narrating The Secret History and The Little Friend herself, and, considering her True Grit essay I think I will start with her interpretation of Mattie Ross and Rooster Cogburn. I liked the book, the Coen movie not so much, but I'm pretty sure I will love Donna Tartt reading it out loud to me.

World of Leaves

Enjoying literature is not an easy thing to do. At least not if you try to lead a normal life, that is, whatever that is. Because there is so much of it around. Nothing but letters in endless combinations. Sometimes I wonder if I would go mad or start a philosophical or armed war in Borges's Library of Babel, engage in bare-knuckle-fights, bludgeon the skulls and smash the brains of fellow searchers with uncreased spines of books that have never been opened. Would I take a pencil with me and scribble in the margins, multiplying the already infinite number of possible texts further or would I stab my own eyes and pierce my tongue and throat with it to free myself from the curse of written and spoken language? I would have to pierce my eardrum as well as my own brains, too, writing my last unreadable message with lines of dripping blood.

Having just finished Cosmopolis, I am confronted with choices that I can hardly grasp. Every step from now can lead me in the wrong direction. What should I read next? Should I go back to DeLillo's beginnings and read him in chronological order or rather go directly to Underworld? What about Pynchon? Gravity's Rainbow or start with V.? What about the still not finished Barthelme and Barth? Robert Coover's Universal Baseball Association, because DFW mentioned it in some interview? And DFW himself. Besides Infinite Jest and The Pale King and some of his journalism, I haven't read anything else. What about rereading Infinite Jest? And Don Quixote, the new 70,- € German translation is still waiting for me, as well as Bolano's 2666 and Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Paul Auster after The New York Trilogy, another round of House of Leaves, Catcher in The Rye or turn to Franny & Zooey and Salinger's other writings? Donna Tartt's The Little Friend is waiting on my bookshelf for the last 6 years or so. Maybe 8. I was a totally different being back then (well, not so radically different as I wished I would be.) The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay or some more Vonnegut or Safran Foer's Tree of Codes, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, what about Proust and Nabokov and every single Sherlock Holmes story? William Gibson, James Ellroy, William Gaddis, Zadie Smith and Flannery O'Connor. Toni Morrison. I could go on for days, literally, and weeks, losing much of the precious time I would otherwise spend reading some of that (or other) novels. One thing at least seems to be pretty clear to me: After finishing Franzen's self-indulging The Discomfort Zone, he will be off my reading list for a long, long time.

The Tree of Life, The Pale King and Enter The Void

Some of you (who, actually?) might wonder what I think about Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life and DFW's The Pale King, because I fell pretty silent after having watched and read those works.

Well, the reason is that both of em pretty much leave me speechless. There is not much to say about The Tree of Life other than: Go watch it. Wherever and whenever you get the chance to see that movie on a big screen, do it! This is a cinematic experience that you will rarely encounter in your life. If you plan to see it but don't feel the urge to do so in a movie theater: Don't. By which I mean, rather never see it in your whole life than not on the big screen. You would not want that. You will want to avoid your emotions of regret and loss for having avoided it in the theater. A couple of weeks ago I strained an ankle because I tried to get the best possible seats for a one-time screening of Kubrick's 2001 in a local theater. The pain kept me from being able to watch the darn thing. But nevertheless, 2001 on the big screen is exactly the thing you want to be willing to strain an ankle for. So is The Tree of Life. (As well as Gaspar Noé's radically visionary Enter The Void, of which you can see the trailer here, the opening credits here and the first 10 minutes here, just to make you want to watch it on the BIG SCREEN. This is a physical experience that "essentially flips the brain-off switch for you"). I've seen The Tree of Life two times already and will do so a third time next week. Anyone with an interest in cinema will want to see this visual masterpiece. Again, on the big screen. It does not work in any other way. It makes no sense at all to watch it any other way.

Regarding The Pale King: I do not dare put my words to anything, really, that DFW put on page but, again, read it (this time not on screen though, not even a big one, whether it is standard Kindle, IPad or 24" wide-screen sized, but on page in a published book). His writing and ideas are far from boring. It is true, yes, that The Pale King is unfinished, and you will notice it when you arrive at the last pages, especially at the appended notes and asides found with Wallace's manuscript. From the feel of it, with its about 560 published pages, about the same amount is missing. But what is actually there between the covers, is still among the best literary achievements you will be able to find by any living (or dead) American writer.

desperately needing a new haircut?

I just finished Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis and once again discovered that he's a tremendously good writer. After encountering him with Falling Man (which I really didn't like too much; maybe I just wasn't ready for him, then) and giving him a second chance with the brilliant White Noise I thought, why not putting in between that self-indulging Franzen blabber the as-of-then unread 209 pages of Cosmopolis which I hadn't read for a seminar two years ago?

Just to lead you in on this: Multi-billionaire Eric Packer decides one morning that he needs a new haircut, gets into his limo on First Ave and orders his driver to make a cross-town trip to Manhattan's far West Side for his favourite barber. Due to a presidential visit to Manhattan, anarchist riots, the public funeral of a famous rap-star (I'm having a déja vu right now, remind me to read White Noise again) and other NYC hassles, this trip takes the whole day, during which he meets various business associates in his car and loses all of his money. Eric has an asymmetrical prostate and is about to be killed at the end of the day.

This novel is dedicated to Paul Auster and since I haven't read anything by him but the New York Trilogy I cannot fail to notice why this is so. At the core of Cosmopolis is language itself:

'There's a rumor it seems involving the finance minister. He's supposed to resign any time now,' she said. 'Some kind of scandal about a misconstrued comment. He made a comment about the economy that may have been misconstrued. The whole country is analyzing the grammar and syntax of this comment. Or it wasn't even what he said. It was when he paused. They are trying to construe the meaning of the pause. It could be deeper, even, than grammar. It could be breathing.'

Here's another one:

I thought I would spend whatever number of years it takes to write ten thousand pages and then you would have the record, the literature of a life awake and asleep, because dreams too, and little stabs of memory, and all the pitiful habits and concealments, and all the things around me would be included, noises in the street, but I understand for the first time, now, this minute, that all the thinking and writing in the world will not describe what I felt in the awful moment when I fired the gun and saw him fall. So what is left worth the telling?

Paragraphs like this reveal the true power of DeLillo's writing method. Consider this answer from his Paris Review Interview:

When I was working on The Names I devised a new method—new to me, anyway. When I finished a paragraph, even a three-line paragraph, I automatically went to a fresh page to start the new paragraph. No crowded pages. This enabled me to see a given set of sentences more clearly. It made rewriting easier and more effective. The white space on the page helped me concentrate more deeply on what I’d written. And with this book I tried to find a deeper level of seriousness as well.

And consider this from Paul Auster's Paris Review Interview ten years later, in 2003, just after Cosmopolis was published:

The paragraph seems to be my natural unit of composition. The line is the unit of a poem, the paragraph serves the same function in prose—at least for me. I keep working on a paragraph until I feel reasonably satisfied with it, writing and rewriting until it has the right shape, the right balance, the right music—until it seems transparent and effortless, no longer “written.” That paragraph can take a day to complete or half a day, or an hour, or three days. Once it seems finished, I type it up to have a better look. So each book has a running manuscript and a typescript beside it. Later on, of course, I’ll attack the typed page and make more revisions.

Okay, okay, you might say. All this is very nice and interesting but why the fuck do I have to bear that Twilight-fucker Pattinson's face in this post? The answer is very simple, my friends: Because he, like Eric, desperately needs a new haircut. And because he is too ambivalent about changing his style big time all by himself, he gets a little encouragement from David Cronenberg, who is filming Cosmopolis right now and chose Pattinson for the role of Eric Packer. And who else but Cronenberg could provide Cosmopolis as well as Pattinson's career and hairstyle with a surreal twist worthy of DeLillo's writing skills? Did I mention the video screens in Packers white limo? Note: Eric's haircut will also be asymmetrical at the end of the day.

report all obscene mail to your potsmaster

I don't particularly like Jonathan Franzen, as a writer and as a public persona, that is. Freedom was hyped over the top and yes, maybe it is the best social realist novel since The Corrections (which I have yet to read) and by any living American writer in a long time but I really couldn't care much about any of those characters. They were, by and large, pretty boring. And if you ever saw or read an interview with Franzen you might come to the conclusion that the only interesting thing about him was his close friendship to DFW. And this is the only reason why I'm reading his collection of essays and arguments "How To Be Alone" and some random interviews (his Paris Review 'The Art of Fiction' interview from the Winter 2010 issue is now fully available online) and articles like the New Yorker piece about him scattering some of DFWs ashes on an isolate island, Robinson Crusoe and a rare bird (pdf here). A wildly incoherent article, by the way.

But nevertheless, Franzen does have and is able to create a very nice and soothing narratorial voice, making Freedom mostly, despite the characters, a pretty pleasurable read. And also "My Father's Brain", the opening essay from "How To Be Alone" is a very immersive and nicely plotted piece of autobiographical writing that makes want for more. And so, a few essays into the book, I came upon "Lost in the Mail". And this one is also nicely plotted and told, about a 1994 breakdown of the U.S. Postal Service in Chicago where citizens didn't receive mail for weeks and postal workers either hid thousands of letters in their apartments or burnt them - over the course of several years - to obscure the fact that they didn't finish their routes. Some of them drank on duty and stopped in bars to watch sports tv for hours on end to collect overtime payment afterward, etc., etc. One citizen even reports "Mailman harasses us at night, asks for money." As Franzen tells it, this is USPS apocalypse, which makes for a good story (this seems to be his first ever piece for the New Yorker).

But then, at the very end of this essay, when Franzen sums up his nostalgic feelings and thoughts for the US Postal Service in general and the 1994 outrage in particular, he presents the reader with a sudden erratic, out-of-line and out-of-context statement:

"The burning of mail in a viaduct deals the same blow to our innocence as the pederasty of priests."

WTF?! Really? Yes. I checked it several times. There's no mention of priests or pederasty or the confluence of both anywhere before in the text. And to compare the burning of mail to priest's pederasty is the one really big twist in his going-postal narrative. What was he thinking (and re-thinking while proof-reading) or the editors at The New Yorker? Has this been commented on? I mean this essay is 17 years old and the very first thing that google returns when I type in "franzen priest pederasty" is a facebook group that is called "Father Franzen was the best priest ever. end of story." What's going on?

Two essays further into the book, "Sifting the Ashes": Franzen tells a neat story about the rise of the tobacco industry in the U.S. and about coming to terms with his own habit of smoking. Let's see if he deals another blow to our innocence as with the mail-burning child-fucking thing:

"My mother still speaks of cigarettes with loathing. I secretly started smoking them myself in college, perhaps in part because she hated them, and as the years went by I developed a fear of exposure very similar, I'm convinced, to a gay man's fear of coming out to his parents."

Little Jon, who will tell everybody (those who ask about it + those who don't) about his happy and unspoiled High-School time, becomes a little rebellious and smokes a cigarette or two and believes, honestly, he feels the same (well, very similar) dread of exposure of a gay man of coming out to his parents. This is from 1996. Jon Franzen, who grew up in Webster Groves, a St. Louis suburb of 23,000 people. So much about where his sense for social realism comes from. Considering how he built up smoking as a very bad thing indeed before, he seems to say that homosexuality is a) a bad habit, b) something addictive, c) something that makes you sick d) and over the long haul kills you, e) in its function similar to the ending of the world, a personal apocalypse.

I'm really looking forward to read the other pieces in this book.

magnolia

...talking about emotion....

I am still in the nostalgic aftermath that brought me back in time, pretty much exactly 8 years ago, with the help of a bottle of very fine red wine, humming Aimee Mann's "Wise Up" and "One" alternately. These were actually my high school years, or at least that one summer that I definitely think of as my high school years, to get past the embarrassment and humiliation that usually goes well along with the remembrance of high school as such. And it took me back to a homework assignment that I had to do for a film class, where I did something on Magnolia, by Paul Thomas Anderson, which was my favourite movie for years, around that time.

And I YouTubed it. And I got goosebumps. It passed the test of time. It is still a perfect movie.

It is not only that I love the narratorial introduction, which frames the movie in a realm of possibilities, or the following exposé (for lack of better words) with Aimee Mann's "One" on the soundtrack setting the tone and mood for the movie while the camera is in a constant move to introduce all the main characters that the film will be circling around, examining every and each one of them in short bursts of congenial revelation, or that I LOVE Julianne Moore in this flick and think she really ought to have gotten the Oscar for her performances ever since (I just checked, she wasn't even nominated, but in general this movie lost all its categories to VERY inferior movies, and it wasn't even nominated in all the right categories, though, which were: Best Actor in a Supporting Role for Tom Cruise, which he should have definitely won, because this is his most believable performance that I've ever seen, he is so brilliant! (granted, it is also the least attributable "acting" I've ever seen, because he simply (and genially) plays himself but with such a natural grace that it blows your mind; an award that rather went to Michael Caine for "The Cider House Rules", a movie I always didn't want to see) and Best Music, Original Song for Aimee Mann's "Save Me", which is right here

and lost to Phil Collins's "You'll Be in My Heart" from the "Tarzan" soundtrack (for all American Psycho Fans: This is Collins at his best!) and also it didn't get the award for Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen, which went to American Beauty (I can't be angry about this one, although Anderson should have won, because American Beauty's Screenplay Award for Alan Ball kicked off the (insert incompatible and most superior adjective) Six Feet Under HBO series). The other Oscars Magnolia should have gotten in 2000 were: Best Picture (American Beauty), Best Director (Sam Mendes, American Beauty), Best Cinematography (American Beauty) and Best Editing (Matrix), that makes 6 Academy Awards total that this very fine and perfect movie was denied. I lost track of all the parentheses here, but think this should be ok.
No, it is also that I first took notice of later Academy Award winner Philip Seymour Hoffman and the incredible Willam H. Macy and John C. Reilly and a very fine Luiz Guzmán who plays himself.

Again. This movie is perfect. It needs no exclamation mark. It is its own exclamation mark. And I would really enjoy watching it again. After so many years it's like meeting a long-ago lover you are still in love with. And here is my offer: The first person contacting me (via phone, email or direct verbal exchange) about wanting to watch it with me gets free snacks and beverages of choice (also it will reassure me that I don't write this blog into a mindless cybernetic vacuum) for the whole 188minutes that it lasts, assuming you pay full attention throughout this one dedicated time span (to the movie) or otherwise I'll heimlich you out of my fucking apartment until all of that snacks and beverages that were not thoroughly digested by the time I suspect you of not having payed too much attention to the movie are projectile-vomited out the window, which I will have checked to be open at the designated time, the time you didn't pay enough attention.
Here is the German Trailer. Sorry for all you international guys, but this is actually the best v/a quality I could find on Youtube and it is brilliantly dubbed in German. For all of those considering watching Magnolia with me: I have no problem at all watching it in German, because, as I said, it is perfectly dubbed. First Come, First Serve. Crank Up Your Volume! The screening will be on BluRay. Watch out for all the 8s and 2s.

emotion and irony in contemporary fiction

"What I'm mostly trying to talk about is what it feels like emotionally to be 34 in this country."

This is from a DFW interview from Spring 1997 that can be found here and it pretty much sums up what is going on and what has to be done in serious contemporary fiction, i.e. the turning-away from postmodern irony and the turning toward emotional truth. You can see it in DFWs work, most recently in The unfinished Pale King, you can see it in Alan Ball's Six Feet Under, it is what Bret Easton Ellis did in Lunar Park, what Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was all about, as well as Foer's Everything Is Illuminated and also recent TV-shows as Bored to Death - although sometimes they hide it very well -, it is what Terrence Malick does and what Jonathan Franzen's Freedom tries to do. Also Running With Scissors comes to mind, and quite strongly though, i.e. the movie version, I haven't read the memoir. And this is what an LA Times critic had to say about it :

"Murphy, who created the creepy, funny, lunatic "Nip/Tuck," is a master of mordant and macabre camp. But here he loses his teeth, seeming to lack any ironic distance from material that practically begs for it."

The critic herself doesn't seem to lack the ironic distance that she is actually begging for, though. I don't know where to find it right now, but Jonathan Franzen said it in one of the myriad of interviews he gave in the wake of Freedom. He said that in The Corrections he used irony also and especially to distance himself from certain ideas and emotions presented in the novel. You can basically say anything you want with irony and then easily back out of it if people disagree with you, thus you don't have to stand your ground on very intimate issues, issues that are and feel way too personal to let anyone attack or make fun of them. He said that he wrote a wholeheartedly unironic novel with Freedom, that he eschewed former techniques of irony to get closer to the emotional core of what he wanted to say. And that he is quite aware that exactly that makes him so much more vulnerable if people dislike his work because now the work is much closer to what being Jonathan Franzen really is like. Closer to the emotional truth that is Jonathan Franzen. But people might misread that for sentimentality and naiveté.

Here is something I found in an IRC chat transcript with DFW* shortly after the release of Infinite Jest (and if you are too young to actually have been in one yourself or are now like, my age, and want to get a nice pretty nostalgic trip into the early times of the internet and 90's chat-rooms, you have to read the whole thing (if it doesn't redirect you, click on the Impatient? link). This is pre-facebook stuff. There were actually online chat-rooms BEFORE the internet. Grab yourself a cup of coffee or your beverage-of-cozy-choice and travel into 1996's cyberspace):

"The worst thing about irony for me is that it attenuates emotion" and

"I don't think irony's meant to synergize with anything as heartfelt as sadness. I think the main function of contemporary irony is to protect the speaker from being interpreted as naive or sentimental."

Irony can be a lot of fun, no doubt. And as Dave puts it, we can't escape it because we breathe the stuff everyday. And that makes it actually hard to snap out of it sometimes. (Is the transition to this paragraph too rough? I had a hard time coming up with a coherent one after the quotes.) And I think that is exactly what happened to the LA Times critic a couple lines above. She sees the lack of ironic distance and wants her ironical borders restored immediately to not have to look too closely at something that intends to produce exactly this: a close emotional relationship with its audience. It is precisely not about irony, not about safe distance, not about making fun of everything. It is about emotion. And in the case of this critic, and a lot of others, I fear, about the misreading as being naive and sentimental.

*almost all DFW-related sources are found and taken from The Howling Fantods.