What it is:

This is Norman Mailer’s how-to-write book, published when he was 80 years old. Rather than being a book on craft, it’s more a collection of Mailer’s thoughts on what it means to be a novelist, and what his own work means in the canon of American literature.

Why it’s interesting:

Mailer is a real prick, and this book is not a well-crafted and sustained meditation on the art of fiction (he places interview excerpts in the middle of chapters, for instance, seemingly just to avoid having to turn those random thoughts into essay form). Nevertheless, The Spooky Art is interesting to read because it shows a true generational shift, what it means to be a novelist now versus what it meant to be a novelist in Mailer’s generation. Mailer believes novelists are important people, up there with politicians and actors and the very best cultural figures. He speaks about Picasso and Hemingway as old friends, and really seems to wrestle with what it means to be a novelist in the generation after Hemingway. Novelists now don’t mean as much as Mailer believes he and his contemporaries meant. The ego, the important opinions, the work itself, all meant something to Mailer. He believed himself a recognizable cultural figure, which he was. But today, how many people would recognize Philip Roth or Don DeLillo or Robert Stone if one of these guys walked into a coffee shop? How many people would recognize Junot Diaz or Jumpha Lahiri or Jonathan Franzen or Elizabeth Strout? How many people have even read Geraldine Brooks or Richard Powers or Louise Erdrich? It’s also interesting to see how the important writers of Mailer’s generation have faded off. Who on this list do we read: William Styron, James Jones, Truman Capote, Kurt Vonnegut, Bernard Malamud, Gore Vidal, John Updike, Arthur Miller, Joseph Heller? I think most of us have heard of these writers, but how much of them have we read? Mailer suggests the younger generation (Franzen, etc.) is tired of his generation, the same way his was tired of Hemingway and Faulkner, but is he right? Or is something else happening?

This is probably harder on Mailer than I mean to be. He has some interesting thoughts on craft, but part of my issue is I’m less interested right now in the kind of advice he offers. If you’re going to pick this book up, his chapter on Moral Vision is very much worth reading.

Further Reading:

I picked this up because I was looking at the Mailer shelf in the library. The Castle in the Forest is on my list. Hallie and Whit Burnett have a book on fiction writing from Mailer’s generation, which I think is interesting reading for the same reason as The Spooky Art, a way to gather a who’s who in the moment of that generation. Gardner’s books are also of that generation, but Gardner is less rooted in the WWII generation than Mailer and the Burnetts.

What it is:

Set in Mexico in the 1930s, in a region where religion had been outlawed, this novel is about “whiskey priest” on the run from a fascist police lieutenant.

Why it’s interesting:

Why isn’t Graham Greene read more often than he is? I had to read The Quiet American once for an independent study on Vietnam War literature, which was a good novel, but The Power and the Glory is great. It’s a man-on-the-run story with questions of faith at the forefront and questions of censorship in the background. What more do you want in a novel? If you’ve already read it, it would be worth rereading Part 2, Chapter 4.

Further Reading:

On my list of further reading are Brighton Rock, The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair (not a very good movie, but I suspect the book might be good) and Our Man in Havana. For on-the-run stories in Mexico, The Power and the Glory would pair well with McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, Lowry’s Under the Volcano and Ford’s The Ultimate Good Luck. Also shares some themes with Stone’s A Flag for Sunrise.

For when you’re bored at work: here.

What it is:

This short novel is mainly about a woman, raised in Hawaii in the 1940s and married to a would-be politician. In 1975, a family member commits a terrible murder, which gets her and her husband in the news. She hooks up with this man in the intelligence community. It’s kind of hard to talk about the plot of this story, because it’s told as meta-fiction from Joan Didion the journalist, who wants to write a novel about this woman, Inez, so Inez’s story comes in these brief glimpses, like a series of journalist snapshots of her life.

Why it’s interesting:

Didion’s a good one to read for style. Her prose uses repetition to create this hypnotic effect: “Blah blah, Inez Victor said to him in the summer of 1975, and in the summer of 1975 he replied to Inez Victor…” I have limited patience with meta-fiction, so when Joan Didion the author started saying, “I wanted to write a novel about Inez Victor,” I was suspicious. But you get wrapped up in the story of the characters, and the form melds nicely with the content. One element of this story is that Inez Victor is a public figure, the wife of a famous man and something of a fashion model herself. The tension between the public and the private is key here, so it a makes sense that the narrative would be approaching the subject from an outsider’s perspective. Another element is this dude in the intelligence community – there’s a lot of him flying to Hong Kong or wherever for secret meetings, fake names, etc., so the nature of truth is also at the core of this novel.

Further Reading:

I prefer Didion in shorter doses. I loved Miami, and I was totally on board for 50 pages of Democracy, but then I started to get bored. Maybe there is something to the realist’s critique of metafiction. Once you figure out the gimmick, the story becomes less interesting. Democracy is worth checking out for style, but I think Didion is better at nonfiction, and would start there.

By Carol Sklenicka, reviewed at the NY Times and the San Francisco Chronicle.

At the Wall Street Journal.

I’m reading Robert Penn Warren’s novel for the first time (if you can believe it), and it’s great. I don’t want to jump the gun and say it’s going to be the best book I read all year, but in the first 20 pages we’ve got a larger-than-life character, and even though the novel came out in 1946, the story feels relevant today. (I’m a bit irked, though, because I’m working on this mill novel set in the 1930s, and I’m just not writing on the level of Robert Penn Warren.)

One thing I’m noticing is these elaborate descriptions of characters, which reminds me of Philip Roth:

“Then the Boss spied a fellow at the far end of the soda fountain, a tall, gaunt-shanked, malarial, leather-faced side of jerked venison, wearing jean pants and a brace of mustaches hanging off the kind of face you see in photographs of General Forrest’s cavalrymen…”

“Fate comes walking through the door, and it is five-feet ten inches tall and heavyish in the chest and shortish in the leg and is wearing a seven-fifty seersucker suit which is too long in the pants so the cuffs crumple down over the high black shoes, which could do with a polishing, and a stiff high collar like a Sunday School superintendent and a blue striped tie which you know his wife gave him last Christmas and which he has kept in tissue paper with the holly card (“Merry Xmas to my Darling Willie from your Loving Wife”) until he got ready to go up to the city, and a gray felt hat with the sweat stains showing through the band.”

There are other descriptions like these, and what I like about them is they’re vivid and precise, and do a great deal of characterizing, both the narrator and the character being described. (The narrator has this somewhat cynical voice, like Holden Caulfield, and the tone is disdainful of “your Loving Wife.”) I’m only on page 30 or so. More later.