My story, “Lovesick Blues” is in the fall issue:
“Rusty Galloway sat in his corroding Bronco on a hill near a cemetery, overlooking the apartment complex and waiting for his wife to take off with that tree cutter so he could go in and get his children.”
Elections are this week, and the big race in Virginia is between Republican Bob McDonnell and Democrat Creigh Deeds. McDonnell has been endorsed by the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and Deeds has been endorsed by the Washington Post.
I think Deeds ran a great primary, but he’s run a fairly disappointing race against McDonnell. The turning point came when the Washington Post ran an article on McDonnell’s 20-year-old master’s thesis, in which McDonnell apparently wrote a right-wing, moralism kind of argument that said working women and homosexuals were a detriment to the family. Scary, yes, but that 20-year-old thesis became the main thrust of Deeds’ campaign – “Boo on McDonnell because of that thesis” – which I don’t think has really spoken to voters. Voters don’t even remember one year ago when Bush was running up our deficit and inconsistently bailing out banks so he could pass the buck to the next guy. Deeds has come off looking grumpy and stubborn, whereas McDonnell has appeared in commercials with his working wife and daughters, thrown a football around with his son, and said, “I’m a good guy and I’ll do right by Virginia.”
You can see evidence of what I’m talking about in last week’s Style Weekly interview with each candidate. Here was their last question:
17. Can you name one good reason that someone should vote for your opponent?DEEDS: [Long pause] You know, I can name you a thousand good reasons why they should vote for me. I’m the best-prepared person to be the next governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia. … Bob is a guy that I’ve always gotten along with, but I get along with most people. I work hard to get along with people. I don’t agree with Bob on a great deal.
McDONNELL: He’s a good family man. He’s worked hard to represent his district well for 18 years. To me, he’s a good story of somebody living and accessing the American dream. You know, he tells the story about … first guy in his family to go to college with four $20 [bills] in his pocket and now he’s competing for the job held by Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry. To me, that’s a great story. I think there’s a hundred reasons why I’d be a better governor than him, but for the way, and this is his own personal life story, the way he has told it — it obviously happened because of tremendous hard work, tremendous perseverance to be able to get to the level that he is at, and I think that’s very admirable.
I predict McDonnell has it, and I predict that next weekend the big news across the country will be how Virginia, who went for Obama, is now swinging Republican again. Pundits will be arguing Virginia is a litmus test for the country as a whole. They’ll be saying the Democrats are doomed in 2010, and they’ll use this race as evidence that Obama is a failure. Last week Obama did come to campaign with Deeds, so look for pundits to say, “Obama campaigned for the Chicago olympics and lost, and Obama campaigned for Deeds and lost. Obama’s a failure.” I do think the Democrats are probably doomed in 2010, but I don’t think that means Obama has failed, nor do I think it’s a bad thing. Even Milton Friedman, in Capitalism and Freedom, suggested a good political balance was to have a Democratic president and a Republican Congress because they would keep each other in check. Consider Clinton’s years from 1994 to 2000, not bad years for our country.
What it is:
This is another critical survey, this time of Robert Stone. Like the McCarthy survey I read a few weeks ago, this one traces Stone’s work chronologically with a fairly clear structuralist and biographical method. The one shortcoming is that it was published in 1994, so it doesn’t include anything about Stone’s most recent books, but Solotaroff does a good job of discussing Stone’s first five novels.
Why it’s interesting:
I’m completely cast under the spell of Stone right now. I think he’s interesting for his themes (the promise and failures of the American dream, the universe either exhibits Gnostic indifference or downright malevolence) and for his style, which some critic or another called “as precise as the crosshairs of a rifle.” Some elements of Stone’s life: He was born in New York, never knew his father, and had a schizophrenic mother. He spent a few years in a Catholic boarding school while his mother was in some kind of asylum, and then, when he was 10, she got out and they drifted around from New York to Chicago to New Mexico to Montreal and back. In the 50s, he joined an Irish gang, convinced some classmates they should be atheists, and got expelled from his Catholic high school. He then joined the Navy and sailed off to Antarctica, came back and went to college for long enough to find a wife, then drifted down to New Orleans to be a Bohemian. He worked odd jobs around the country (once, while working for a newspaper, he went to Madison Square Gardens to cover a wrestling match after he’d taken peyote). All I can really say about Stone is that his novels are more interesting than his life.
Further Reading:
I don’t know anything about Stone criticism. I don’t think there’s that much out there. Despite winning the National Book Award in the 70s, he seems to be flying under the critical radar right now. I don’t know why that is.
Now available. In addition to the usual articles, they’ve added a publication of hate mail, which is always fun to read. Check out my friend Mark Powell’s essay, “Selling the Apocalypse: The Rise of Premillennialism from Fringe Belief to Growth Industry.” You ask what is the future of American literature, and I reply that his name is Mark Powell.
