The Worst Ever

Longest Break Yet

I know you'll be devastated, but I've decided not to blog this summer. I'll miss reviewing the summer movies, but I want to do something else for a while.

This time, I'm not going on vacation. There are other projects that I need to work on -- projects that will, I hope, help me become a more serious and more imaginative writer. I need to concentrate on these. And because I'm an unbelievably slow worker, I won't have time to provide even the meager fare that I regularly offer here.

I'll check in on September 8, the Tuesday after Labor Day. Have a great summer.

A New, Old, Old, New, New Novel

When J.M.G. Le Clézio won the Nobel Prize in Literature last year, few Americans had heard of him, and fewer still had read any of his books. Only a couple of his titles, published by small presses, were in print in English at the time of the Swedish Academy's announcement.

Since then, more of his books have appeared or reappeared in English -- including his famous 1963 debut, The Interrogation, which won Le Clézio the prix Renaudot when he was only 23. Daphne Woodward's 1964 translation, long out of print, has been reissued in hardcover by Simon & Schuster.

It is a novel about a young man named Adam Pollo, an eccentric 29-year-old loafer who occupies a house near a beach in France. The home does not belong to him, and he fears its owners will return and have him arrested. He may have escaped from the army or from a mental institution. The Interrogation chronicles the various mundane activities with which he passes the time -- playing billiards, going to the zoo, following a dog around town -- and records his many ruminations and hallucinations.

It belongs to a phase of Le Clézio's work that, by most accounts, ended in the mid '70s, when his anguished, inward experiments in form and style gave way to a broader, more humane approach to his fiction, which now addressed the outside world in an accessible lyricism that many critics praised and others called middlebrow. The Interrogation, on the other hand, seems to have been written expressly for the literary vanguard of the 1960s. All the right influences -- The Stranger, Nausea, Robbe-Grillet, and Kafka, as well as the early films by Godard and Truffaut -- are apparent. It's full of opaque psychologizing and esoteric metaphysics; it is light on plot, has no interest in any characters outside of its protagonist, and includes the requisite typographical oddities (chapters are labeled alphabetically instead of numerically, for example).

Today, however, The Interrogation seems very much a period piece -- a pastiche of the dominant cultural forces of its time and place, lacking the creative spark that can make old novels seem forever new. Many of its predecessors live, but this novel belongs to a mode of fiction that has become extinct. It comes from an era when alienated, abstracted young men were considered far more interesting than they are now, when a youthful author could fill a book with the reflections that such people, "enjoying fear, idleness and the unusual," tend to have and, without placing them within a narrative, providing an alternate perspective, or even writing gracefully or coherently, win major literary awards for it. Today, a 23-year-old Le Clézio might just write a Xanga. I do not think there remains a large audience for the garrulous ennui of chain-smoking café patrons ("It's ridiculous how much time I waste doing nothing in particular," Adam brags). If Le Clézio had not won the Nobel Prize, The Interrogation would never have seen republication in English.

I have come to believe, moreover, that, if one is to write a novel about an alienated, abstracted young man, it may be better if the novelist himself is not an alienated, abstracted young man. It is useful to compare The Interrogation to The Catcher in the Rye. As a voice for disaffected youth, Salinger clearly was an inspiration for Le Clézio, and Adam Pollo borrows some of Holden Caulfield's madness, his zany whims and his troubled obsession with the atomic bomb. But Salinger gave Holden a story and a universe to inhabit, which helped Holden uncover aspects of himself that would have remained unrevealed without external prompts; Holden himself would not have bothered to invent Stradlater or Sally Hayes or the Edmont Hotel. The Interrogation, though written in the third person, seems not only to be about Adam Pollo but also to have been created by Adam Pollo.

In Le Clézio's self-conscious introduction ("I would like my story be taken as a complete fiction, interesting only in so far as it produces a kind of repercussion [however briefly] upon the reader's mind . . . I apologize for any slips or typing mistakes . . ."), the author confesses, "I have a stronger and stronger impression that there is no such thing as reality." This probably was a fashionable declaration at one point, but it may render one ill-equipped to write a novel, which traditionally hinges on the premise that life matters, that the fate of people matters. But Adam suspects more and more that he is "the one and only living creature in the world." He sees other people "all doing the same thing . . . all talking at the same time and telling one another the same things" -- to him, "the lives of individual men and women don't matter." For this reason, we learn nothing about Adam's only human contact, a girl named Michèle, who on occasional visits exchanges cryptic dialogue with him:

'I'm cold . . . I'm cold, I'm very cold . . .'
Adam did not shrink from the touch of the girl's body; indeed, he even took her hand -- a soft, slender, warm hand -- and repeated, as they walked on:
'You're cold? You're cold?'
To which Michèle replied:
'Yes.'

Instead, we hear the details of Adam's own idleness, learn more and more about his growing detachment from reality (he cannot remember if there has recently been a war in Europe, he imagines that he is a spider or a slug or a mouse, he makes love only "with his mind far away"), and read descriptions of phantasms, where, for example, the

sky seemed ready to break away and crash down on our heads. The sun, ditto. He looked at the ground and saw it suddenly melting, boiling, or flowing beneath his feet. The trees grew excited and gave off poisonous vapours. The sea began to swell, devoured the narrow grey strip of beach and then rose, rose to attack the hill, to drown him, moving towards him, to numb him, to swallow him up in its dirty waves.

There are pages and pages of this stuff. To Le Clézio, all of Adam's visions are fascinating, all of his monologues worthy of transcription. But Adam's is the sort of self-absorption that, because it is unaccompanied by a self-critical instinct or by an exterior counterpoint, does not illuminate much about the self. Le Clézio seems rather impressed by his hero's insanity, as if insanity were a natural extension of intelligence in the modern world. So when Adam's thoughts make sense, good -- and when they don't, even better:

All the components of the telephone are present in the rhinoceros. Emery paper and magic lanterns have always existed; and the moon is really sun and sun moon, the earth is Mars, Jupiter, a whisky and soda and that queer instrument that will soon be invented to create objects or destroy them, its structure known by heart already.

The Interrogation's dust jacket claims that French critics greeted the novel with an enthusiastic cry that "finally the real voice of the young" had appeared. Perhaps it had. Consider one long sentence that describes the protagonist's anomie:

Adam huddled on his stool; shut in by a strange old age, he was quietly resuming his place in the sun, in the deserted house at the top of the hill, taking no interest in the countryside, in the town or the sea, no interest in the aircraft that flew along the horizon, sometimes noisy, sometimes silent, no interest in ocean cruises or in the fine, realistic books people occasionally write after their military service, recording in meticulous detail that on a certain day in a certain month of June they were told to swill out the latrines directly after being made to peel forty pounds of potatoes; no interest in the many who are incapable of dying for love of a diadem spider, for the languors of nature, who cannot be brought to the verge of tears when the silence is rent by a drop of water falling into the waste-pipe of a washbasin.

Petulance and sentimentality notwithstanding, this is not bad, and you can, for a moment, see what the critics meant. But for a novel to succeed, it must be more than a voice, if the voice is as limited as Adam's. The Interrogation has very little else. Many of its pages are occupied by monotonously realistic description of the kind Adam apparently scorns, but this strikes me merely as filler:

A sort of cast-iron grating encircled the park. On the south side it bordered the main road, parallel to the sea, and there was a big gate half-way along; on either side of the gate stood a kind of wooden sentry-box, keeping the sun off a pair of women in their fifties who say knitting or reading thrillers. In front of each of the women, on a board that stuck out from the window of the sentry-box, lay a roll of pink tickets traversed at regular intervals by rows of perforations so that they could be easily torn off.

In fact, despite the author's obvious striving toward innovation, there is a good deal of earnest literary effort of this customary variety, with moments of halting lyricism (a postcard is said to be "translucent as sugar," though neither postcards nor sugar usually is particularly translucent) and heavy spiritual yearning, as when Adam hopes that "they'll sentence me to some kind of of punishment, so that I can pay with my whole body for the crime of being alive; if they humiliate me, whip me, spit in my face, I shall at last have a destiny, I shall at last believe in God." This is, after all, the sort of book in which, because the protagonist imagines that soon "there will be only one man, only one woman, left in the world," that protagonist must, with dreary significance, be called Adam.

But the deeper we venture into the novel, the deeper Le Clézio descends into modish incoherence, with Adam raving in long paragraphs about philosophy, psychology, and even geometry, and into textual gimmicks, where we find words crossed out, pages from a newspaper (not just those articles relevant to the novel) bound into the book, and sections missing.

Perhaps it's silly to expect much from a novel written by a 23-year-old, even if that 23-year-old caused a sensation in French literary circles and, 45 years later, won the Nobel Prize. (Truman Capote was 23 when he wrote Other Voices, Other Rooms, but never mind.) But Le Clézio's Desert, which received the 1980 Grand Prix Paul Morand from the French Academy and to many marked the author's breakthrough as a mature novelist, was published in English a few days ago. I won't write off Le Clézio before I've read it. Even a wonder boy, an overnight sensation, can have a slow start.

The Lost Boys

Last year, Keith Gessen's All the Sad Young Literary Men provoked an unusually divergent response from critics and readers -- pans from the Independent, the A.V. Club, and the Village Voice; reserved admiration from Joyce Carol Oates in the New York Review of Books; a condescending thumbs-up from Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post; a nearly opinion-less summary from Andrew O'Hagan in the New York Times; and overweening praise in a number of places from Jonathan Franzen. For the most part, the blogosphere seemed to shake its head -- another semiautobiographical debut novel about white, navel-gazing, Harvard-educated, urban twentysomethings? -- with a disgust that varied perhaps according to each commentator's feelings about n+1, the brash literary journal that Gessen founded with three friends in 2004.

This spring, All the Sad Young Literary Men appeared in paperback, and I think it's just almost good enough to recommend to those who missed it in hardcover. It is as myopic, as narcissistic, as predictable in its concerns and its tone, as it sounds, but it also has a fun, observant sense of humor; an intelligence that, amidst the usual, poserish name-dropping of famous thinkers, seems substantial and engaged; and fluid, sensitive prose that renders unnecessary Gessen's nervous intrusions -- pictures of Hegel and Lincoln, a screenshot of an e-mail inbox -- upon the text. In its satirical treatment of bookish neurotics and their muddled love lives, there's a bit of Woody Allen, while its bursting, earnest emotion recalls A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Gessen's twee arch-nemesis, Dave Eggers. Its sonorous dips into the past emulate Philip Roth, but its most persistent model, as the novel's title (which comes from All the Sad Young Men, a 1926 story collection) hints, is F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose delicate, wise, expressive lyricism Gessen attempts to transport to a milieu whose primary components -- coffee shops, cell phones, Internet pornography -- do not easily accommodate it. He does this perhaps to counteract the irony-soaked glibness that boyish, well-educated writers, no matter how feeling, never can avoid entirely. The tactic is not wholly unsuccessful, but usually Gessen ends up with the lyricism of This Side of Paradise and not of The Great Gatsby.

All the Sad Young Literary Men follows, in rotating chapters, three would-be litterateurs through their twenties. Mark is a divorced graduate student in Syracuse, working on a dissertation about the Menshiviks. Sam, a child of secular Jews, wants to write "the great Zionist epic." Keith's chapters, which, unlike the others, are narrated in the first person, recollect his undergraduate days and his Russian family. Our heroes' stories are barely connected, but the three characters have much in common. Each is thoughtful, a bit prickly and worrisome, well-read, interested in politics and history, highly self-conscious but not quite self-aware, and extremely articulate but not quite sure what he wants to say. Each has ambitions of achieving intellectual renown but feels trapped in slackerdom, with its romantic catastrophes, money-saving schemes, and impotent ideological meandering.

Some critics have referred to the book as a roman à clef, and indeed several characters are transparently based upon real-life figures: For example, Lauren, the Harvard princess who awes Keith when his roommate brings her back to their dorm room, is Al Gore's daughter Kristin, and Lomaski, "who'd made a few groundbreaking discoveries in his late twenties before moving on to the comparatively glorious task of protesting American involvement in Vietnam, and then the significantly less glorious task of protesting its involvement everywhere else," is Noam Chomsky. For this reason (and the other, even more obvious reason), it's tempting to assume that the character Keith is based upon the author Keith, and in many ways this obviously is true (they both are writers of Russian heritage, educated at Harvard). But Gessen gives pieces of himself to all his protagonists, including Sam, the aspiring novelist, and Mark, the recipient of Gessen's early divorce and graduate school years at Syracuse. As a result, they all have roughly the same voice -- Gessen's -- and so it's easy to lose track of which anxieties, which desires, and which failed relationships belong to which character, because they're all described in the same way.

Fortunately, the guys don't blur together nearly as much as their girlfriends do. Because Mark, Keith, and Sam each have multiple love interests, it would be difficult enough to keep them straight even if their personalities were more diverse, but each is intelligent and pretty, with a soul somehow less tormented than Mark's, Keith's, or Sam's. Gessen sometimes invents a good detail or two for his female characters -- one "had such control of tone, in her text messages, she was the Edith Wharton of text messaging" -- but he never gives them his full attention, and they mostly remain faceless.

Among the males, Keith, less bumbling than the other two, stands out in that, although he can make jokes, he himself is not comic like Mark or Sam. While they blunder, he reminisces, sieving from his experiences in late adolescence some of the knowledge that, with any luck, comes with growing up. Keith's first section, which recalls his four disappointing years at Harvard, highlighted by his roommate's flirtation with Al Gore's daughter and by an unsuccessful term paper about Abraham Lincoln, is my favorite, despite an unattributed gag taken from The Simpsons. The remembrance ends nicely:

In my secret dreams of Harvard, of what Harvard would mean for me, it was of course I who slept with, or almost-slept with -- that would have been fine! -- the Veep's handsome daughter. But to have a roommate who did -- well that is also something. And to realize this, that it is something, may just be the beginning of wisdom -- or almost-wisdom, as the case may have been. Sometimes you end up in bed, was the idea -- but sometimes you're just the guy on the couch, writing your Lincoln paper, smiling at some of the things that have been said, and half hoping you'll fall asleep.

Afterward, Keith continues to make pronouncements, in the Fitzgeraldian manner, about youth and its inevitable death -- "it was the last time I'd ever feel that strange, expectant, hopeful, pleading way" and then "we would not be so beautiful as we were, and our teeth would not be so bright" -- and even meets an older writer who channels The Crack-Up and tells him that, despite his plans and his promise, "one day you look up and you've done all the things you said you were going to do but somehow you forgot something, something happened along the way and everyone's gone, everything's different, and looking around you see you have the same screwed-up life as all those other idiots."

But when he's working in this mode, Gessen occasionally gets a little too excited and zeitgeist-hungry, like Eggers does ("What if it was happening, in New York, not a few blocks from them, what if they knew someone to whom it was happening, or who was making it happen -- what if they were blind to it? What if it wasn't them?"), and, when anguished, his soulfully sincere speechifying becomes heavy-handed: "We hurt one another. We go through life dressing up in new clothes and covering up our true motives. We meet up lightly, we drink rosé wine, and then we give each other pain." This last revelation concludes that our displays of affection for one another "merely postpone the moment when we'll push these people off, and beat forward, beat forward on our little raft, alone," borrowing not quite subtly enough from the most famous line in American literature. It can be dangerous to follow even Fitzgerald too closely.

Meanwhile, Sam and Mark stumble about humorously in Boston and upstate New York. Mark likes to compare his love life and personal problems to events in Russian history, and these comparisons sometimes work, and sometimes they seem like labored, pointless displays of erudition: "If meeting Celeste post-boyfriend was like arriving in March of 1917, hopeful March after the tsar's abdication, the appointment of the provisional government, the short-lived democratic process, then they were well into anarchic June or even forbidding July. Was Gwyn his Kerensky? His Kornilov?"

In what is intended to be the novel's comic piece de resistance, Sam frets over his shrinking Internet presence, as Google finds fewer and fewer pages containing his name every time he searches. This leads him to call up Google to ask if they'll alter their algorithm so that his name will yield more hits, and when Google refuses, he tries to convince a friend to hack into the search engine and alter the algorithm for him. It's a funny, manic chapter in the style of The Corrections, but it's not really plausible; it feels out of context and imitative here, and maybe this sort of frenzied comedy is never really that plausible anyway. But the book does have laughs, and Gessen blends his skill as a cultural commentator seamlessly into the narrative, making amusing remarks about contemporary life. Witness Mark at the gym, when a friend asks why he uses only the StairMaster:

"I don't trust the ellipticals," he managed, even as his interval training took him into the higher exertion brackets. "I haven't seen the studies. It's like the number of peasant deaths during collectivization." He tried to take a breath. "No reliable statistics."

"And the treadmills?"

"The treadmills are a menace! You're not doing anything, you're just lifting your feet up. It's a big lie."

Eventually, Sam takes a grave journey to Israel and then to the Palestinian city Jenin in the West Bank, where, in a novel that flirts with issues of worldwide importance but mostly addresses them parenthetically in order to describe the belittling angst and careerist covetousness they inflict upon the book's comparatively puny characters, perhaps the book's ultimate seriousness should come to light, but the segment seems disjointed, and not enough happens.

The novel as a whole, in fact, is somewhat unsatisfying in this way. All the Sad Young Literary Men is, I think, less than the sum of its often clever parts. Its triptych structure seems, in the end, like a deliberate avoidance of the complications of a single, longer narrative's composition; the book comes across as a series of entertaining but inconsequential sketches, appended with a conventional novelistic conclusion that might shine a ray of hope upon the universe its story has created, but there is no universe here -- just three characters and their brief, disconnected adventures.

Yet there is powerful material about growing up, about our wish to be important and substantial and how to manage all the petty forces and the distractions -- dating, parking tickets, beer pong, evil politicians, the Web -- that, compounded with our own uncertainties and silly vanities, seem to prevent us from the becoming the sort of adult human beings we'd like to be. I think that Keith Gessen will write some very good novels, if he's set upon being a novelist -- if he's not merely an editor and intellectual ringleader who has decided here to memorialize the coming of age of his coterie. I think that, like his characters, he still has some growing up ahead of him.

Right now, even his fine prose depends too much upon preset cadences. He likes, for example, to pause in the middle of a clause as if to take a breath, repeat its subject, and then resume.

To be poor in New York was humiliating, a little, but to be young -- to be young was divine.

Jillian, my fiancée, was visiting her family in California, and I, I had raced up to New York in our car.

She was going to med school, and I -- I was going to write.

But the Israelis -- well, the Israelis were fuckers.

And that -- he wanted to explain this to her somehow -- that may be all you were going to get, in this life.

That last one suffers from an unfortunate mixture of tenses as well. And Gessen also likes to end chapters with pithy sentences that start with conjunctions:

But that doesn't make it one long party.

But he could not fall asleep.

And outside already it was growing dark.

I suppose Gessen must learn to trust his own voice. It is, after all, a witty, graceful voice. But this rather typical first novel leaves us with the typical hopes for next time around -- that the fledgling novelist will expand his focus, occasionally work his way into a consciousness that is not his own, brave a more complicated and demanding structure, advance his style, and create a fuller, deeper work of fiction. Keith Gessen can't remain young forever.

OK, That Was Fun

Real content tomorrow!

Last Words: #13 in a Series

From Snow (2002) by Orhan Pamuk (translated by Maureen Freely):

I bought my ticket and a sandwich for the little dog my friend had mentioned in his poem. The dog wagged his curly tail happily as he approached me, and I was still feeding him the sandwich when I saw Turgut Bey and Kadife rushing into the station. They'd only just heard from Zahide that I'd gone. We exchanged a few pleasantries about the ticket agent, the journey, the snow. Turgut Bey reached shamefacedly into his pocket and pulled out a new edition of First Love, the Turgenev novel he'd translated from the French while he was in prison. Ömercan was sitting on Kadife's lap, and I stroked his head. His mother's head was wrapped in one of her elegant Istanbul scarves, and the snow it had collected was falling from the edges. Afraid to look too long into his wife's beautiful eyes, I turned back to Fazil and asked him whether he knew now what he might want to say to my readers if I ever was to write a book set in Kars.

"Nothing." His voice was determined.

When he saw my face fall, he relented. "I did think of something, but you may not like it," he said. "If you write a book set in Kars and put me in it, I'd like to tell your readers not to believe anything you say about me, anything you say about any of us. No one could understand us from so far away."

"But no one believes in that way what he reads in a novel," I said.

"Oh, yes, they do," he cried. "If only to see themselves as wise and superior and humanistic, they need to think of us as sweet and funny, and convince themselves that they sympathize with the way we are and even love us. But if you would put in what I've just said, at least your readers will keep a little room for doubt in their minds."

I promised I would put what he'd said into my novel.

When Kadife saw me eyeing the station entrance, she came toward me. "I hear you have a beautiful little daughter called Rüya," she said. "My sister isn't coming, but she asked me to send warm wishes to you and your daughter. And I brought you this memento of my short theatrical career." She gave me a photograph of herself with Sunay Zaim on the stage of the National Theater.

The stationmaster blew the whistle. I think I was the only one boarding the train. One by one, I embraced them. At the last moment, Fazil passed me a plastic bag; inside were copies he'd made of the videos and a ballpoint pen that had once belonged to Necip.

By now the train was moving, and it took some effort to jump into the car with my hands so full of presents. They were all standing on the platform waving, and I leaned out the window to wave back. It was only at the last moment that I saw the charcoal-colored dog, its pink tongue hanging from its mouth. It ran happily alongside me, right to the end of the platform. They all disappeared into the thick-falling snow.

I sat down and as I looked out the window through the snow at the orange lights of the outermost houses of the outlying neighborhoods, the shabby rooms full of people watching television, and the last snow-covered rooftops, the thin and elegantly quivering ribbons of smoke rising from the broken chimseys at last seemed a smudge through my tears.

Last Words: #12 in a Series

From Invisible Man (1952) by Ralph Ellison:

I'm shaking off the old skin and I'll leave it here in the hole. I'm coming out, no less invisible without it, but coming out nevertheless. And I suppose it's damn well time. Even hibernations can be overdone, come to think of it. Perhaps that's my greatest social crime, I've overstayed my hibernation, since there's a possibility that even an invisible man has a socially responsible role to play.

"Ah," I can hear you say, "so it was all a build-up to bore us with his buggy jiving. He only wanted us to listen to him rave!" But only partially true: Being invisible and without substance, a disembodied voice, as it were, what else could I do? What else but try to tell you what was really happening when your eyes were looking through? And it is this which frightens me:

Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?

Last Words: #11 in a Series

From The Master of Petersburg (1994) by J.M. Coetzee:

It takes him no more than ten minutes to write the scene, with not a word blotted. In a final version it would have to be fuller, but for the present purposes this is enough. He gets up, leaving the two pages open on the table.

It is an assault upon the innocence of a child. It is an act for which he can expect no forgiveness. With it he has crossed the threshold. Now God must speak, now God dare no longer remain silent. To corrupt a child is to force God. The device he has made arches and springs shut like a trap, a trap to catch God.

He knows what he is doing. At the same time, in this contest of cunning between himself and God, he is outside himself, perhaps outside his soul. Somewhere he stands and watches while he and God circle each other. And time stands still and watches too. Time is suspended, everything is suspended before the fall.

I have lost my place in my soul, he thinks.

He picks up his hat and leaves his lodgings. He does not recognize the hat, has no idea whose shoes he is wearing. In fact, he recognizes nothing of himself. If he were to look in a mirror now, he would not be surprised if another face were to loom up, staring back blindly at him.

He has betrayed everyone; nor does he see that his betrayals could go deeper. If he ever wanted to know whether betrayal tasted more like vinegar or like gall, now is the time.

But there is no taste at all in his mouth, just as there is no weight on his heart. His heart, in fact, feels quite empty. He had not known beforehand it would be like this. But how could he have known? Not torment but a dull absence of torment. Like a soldier shot on a battlefield, bleeding, seeing the blood, feeling no pain, wondering: Am I dead already?

It seems to him a great price to pay. They pay him lots of money for writing books, said the child, repeating the dead child. What they failed to say was that he had to give up his soul in return.

Now he begins to taste it. It tastes like gall.