My Interview with Verity La

Over the weekend, Alec Patric at Verity La posted an interview with me, which you can read here. Alec, much to his credit (and as his really interesting Verity La interviews always do), eschewed the normal writer-interview questions, and we got to talk about a lot of different topics, including being an expatriate seppo, the persistence of Modernism, Joyce vs. Hemmingway and the relationship between literary criticism and 'average' readers. Anyway, I enjoyed it--but whether or not you do is a separate question . . .

Book Review: Spurious

Spurious

By Lars Iyer

Melville House Publishing

Lars Iyer’s debut novel, Spurious, is about two British intellectuals who travel around Europe, drinking and talking about such topics as literature, continental philosophy and how they have failed to achieve their dreams—but if this description sounds dreary, it’s only an illustration of the inability of a plot summary to convey the actual experience of reading a novel. Spurious is a hysterically funny comic novel comprised almost entirely of conversations between its two protagonists, W., a sharp-tongued scholar who constantly bemoans his inability to understand complicated maths, and Lars, a portly, middle-aged academic whose apartment is slowly succumbing to an untraceable damp and who wastes much of his time writing down all of the things that W. says and posting them to a blog (and, indeed, Spurious began its life in a blog of the same name written by Lars Iyer, who is, of course, a scholar and an expert on the work of French author and critic Maurice Blonchot).

                For all of its intellectual references to Kafka, Blanchot, Kant and Schelling, the focus of the book is on the close-but-dysfunctional relationship of the two main characters (indeed the tone and form of Spurious isn’t entirely dissimilar to the film Withnail and I, and fans of that movie would almost certainly enjoy this novel). Most of their conversations begin with W. asking such questions of Lars as these: ‘When did you know you were a failure? When was it you knew you’d never have a single thought of your own—not one?’ and the joy is in watching their semi-serious attempts to answer these absurdities. W. and Lars belong to a long tradition of great comedic duos, from Laurel and Hardy to Vladimir and Estragon from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, but there’s also a good deal of fun at the expense of scholarly life in the grand tradition of academic satire, such as in this passage about the publication of W.’s most recent book:

                ‘W.’s book has come out, he says. His editor went down to dine with W. and brought him twenty copies of his own book . . . His book is better than him, W. and I both agree. It’s greater. What’s it about?, I ask him of a particularly difficult section. He’s got no idea, he says.’

                This book is full of wonderful, little comic scenes, most of them initiated by W.’s barbs at his friend Lars; indeed, this is suggested in the title Spurious, which technically refers to a false correlation or inference, but in this instance could similarly describe the book’s many verbal spurs—W. attacks and insults Lars in a way that’s only possible within the confines of a close relationship. And for all of its highbrow references, the novel is also written in a surprisingly plain and simple language and it’s not afraid to go lowbrow for a laugh (i.e. for a book that’s got a lot of references to philosophy, there are also quite a few dick jokes).

                Spurious is one of the funniest books I’ve read in years, and I can also say that I enjoyed reading Spurious more than any novel I’ve read this year—it’s just bad, unclean, mean-spirited fun in the best possible way. But Spurious also manages to find real warmth and humanity in the discourse of two marginal misanthropes without ever swerving into easy sentimentality. Buy one copy for yourself and extra copies for those friends you have who always end up talking about intellectual topics at parties—trust me, they need to read this book, if only to remember that the overexamined life is also not worth living.

Book Review: Night Soul and Other Stories

Night Soul and Other Stories

By Joseph McElroy

Dalkey Archive

Despite the fact that he’s been publishing books for over 40 years and has won just about every prestigious fellowship that exists in the United States, Joseph McElroy has never achieved the notoriety of his contemporaries, like Don Delillo, Thomas Pynchon, or even, for that matter, the still-criminally-underrated William Gaddis. In publishing circles, McElroy is often best-known for his 1192-page novel Women and Men (by all accounts, a masterpiece), which has the dubious distinction of allegedly being the most-remaindered novel of all time (indeed, I have a first-edition hardback of Women and Men that I picked up in an op-shop five years ago, and which stares out at me from my bookshelf like a dare). But for any reader looking for a place to start with McElroy’s fiction, his ‘new’ collection of short stories, Night Soul and Other Stories (which were, in fact, written over a period of 30 years), is an excellent way to become acquainted with McElroy’s unique and mesmerising style.

            McElroy’s work—like the work of those writers he is often compared to—is indubitably difficult, but not in the way that most readers conceive of a book as being difficult; Night Soul and Other Stories won’t overwhelm you with big words, sentences that sprawl for pages at a time or overtly erudite allusions (although there are certainly erudite allusions). Rather, McElroy’s prose works by making language itself strange; he has a (wonderful) habit of using everyday words in unexpected ways that can make an otherwise grammatically straightforward sentence seem completely otherworldly. Moreover, his stories often jump quickly between different points in time and points of view with relatively little warning, forcing the reader to infer these shifts from the context.

            Yes, this takes work, but the tales in Night Souls and Other Stories are absolutely worth the work. Most of them have a slightly paranoid atmosphere that develops when two strangers are brought into contact with each other. In ‘Silk, or the Woman with a Bike,’ a young scientist is profoundly affected by a woman he meets briefly on a subway, who—without any explanation—offers him her bike as a gift. In 'Mister X’, an aging architect develops a complicated relationship with his acupuncturist, who may or may not also be involved in a foreign plot to discover the formula for a new building material he has developed (which is, by the way, a new form of water). In ‘Canoe Repair’, several strangers are drawn together by their mutual and inexplicable attraction to an antique canoe made of tree bark.

            Other fixations appear across the stories, including a variety of meditations on water and a deep interest in the furthest frontiers of science, such as bio-engineering and advanced physics like String Theory. Indeed, this should be no surprise, as McElroy has penned one science fiction novel—Plus a story about artificial intelligence published in 1977. McElroy also has one science fiction story here, called ‘The Last Disarmament but One’, a story about the sudden and complete disappearance of one country from the face of the earth due to unexplained physical forces, but it’s a science fiction written in McElroy’s deeply idiosyncratic style.

            Indeed, if you’re looking for an apt comparison for McElroy’s writing, you’d almost need recourse to a medium outside of prose; the 20th Century poet Wallace Stevens (whose poem ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ McElroy briefly references in a story by mentioning ‘thirteen ways of looking at a lake’) might be the closest stylist. Simply put, Night Soul and Other Stories is already easily my favourite new book I’ve read this year, and it’s a wonderful introduction to McElroy’s body of work, which represents one of the most important achievements in American literature over the last 50 years. Go buy it now.

Book Review: The Distant Sound

The Distant Sound

By Gert Jonke

Dalkey Archive

Despite being one of the most respected Austrian writers of the late 20^th Century, Gert Jonke remains largely unknown in the English-speaking world. In an excellent introduction to Jonke’s new novel, The Distant Sound, translator Jean Snook helps to explain some of the reasons why this is the case. Firstly, as Snook points out, translating Jonke’s unusual prose and sentence-structure is virtually impossible to render in anything like a truly faithful English version. The second reason, however, lies in the difficulty of Jonke’s novels; in Austria, novels like his are described as Gehirnjogging, which translates as ‘brain jogging’. While these difficult books are prized among German-speakers, they are typically marginalised and accused of wilful obscurantism in the English-speaking world.

            Unsurprisingly, The Distant Sound is not a novel that one reads for tight, conventional plotting, but, for all of that, it nonetheless has an interesting premise: a well-known composer (who has now ceased composing) wakes up in a mental hospital without knowing why he is there. He is told that he has attempted suicide, but has no recollection of this act and feels no desire whatsoever to kill himself. He soon falls in love with a young nurse in the hospital who is sympathetic to his plight, and after she suddenly disappears the composer plots his escape to go in search of her. But even after regaining his freedom, his every attempt to locate her is hampered by another absurd turn of events, which shows that the outside world is just as claustrophobic as the insane asylum. (In point of fact, The Distant Sound is actually a sequel to an earlier novel called Homage to Czerny: Studies in Virtuoso Technique, but ignorance of this first book isn’t likely to disrupt your enjoyment of The Distant Sound).

            Despite the seemingly dark, Kafka-esque nature of this material, The Distant Sound is also very much a funny book, filled with humour that recalls the work of absurdist writers like Eugene Ionesco. And it is fittingly full of often-surprising twists and turns that operate with a dream-like logic, resulting in the appearance of a tight-rope walker who can quite literally walk on air, a newspaper staff that spends all day in a train-station café reading newspapers, and the appearance of a horde of strange parasites that may well threaten the future existence of the human race, among many others.

            The Distant Sound is a book that sure to appeal to fans of writers like Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Max Frisch, and, most of all, the Argentinean author Cesar Aira, But whereas Aira’s books are typically brief novellas, The Distant Sound clocks in at close to 300 pages. It’s not that The Distant Sound is boring—indeed, it is never, ever boring—but many of its jokes intentionally take on a repetitive form (in which different characters offer mutually exclusive—and equally ridiculous—interpretations of the exact same phenomenon); while I liked this conceit, most readers’ enjoyment of the novel will depend on the degree to which they appreciate this style. But overall The Distant Sound is an extremely enjoyable farce, which shows that Gert Jonke is certainly deserving of a much larger English readership.

My Book Is an eBook

Buy it here.



Known Unknowns is now officially available as an ebook from Readings new ebook store, available for download globally (so you can get it even if you don't live in Australia). You can have a browse of the first three chapters above. The ebook is powered by a new Melbourne-based company called Booki.sh, which uses a reader based in your web-browser (exactly what you see in the sample above). If you have any questions about whether or not it will work on whatever reading device you use, look here.

Book Review: A Visit from the Goon Squad

A Visit from the Goon Squad

By Jennifer Egan

Knopf Doubleday

We could probably spend quite a bit of time discussing whether Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad is a short story collection or a novel (N.B. that’s an inclusive ‘we’ not a ‘royal we’). Sure, every so-called ‘chapter’ in the book could stand on its own as a short story, but at the same time these stories are very much interconnected in ways that form—if not exactly a novelistic narrative per se—at least an interconnected web of concerns (you know like that big web metaphor in Middlemarch that I can’t quite remember and am too lazy to look up on the interweb). And the concerns in the book are upfront—most of the people in this book are in some way connected with underground and/or punk music, and the book tracks how—over a period of forty years—their subcultural dreams are transformed and shattered by the burdens of ageing; indeed, the 'goon squad' of the title is precisely the spectre of ageing, which the book’s characters approach with varying degrees of grace and resentment.

            If this makes A Visit to the Goon Squad sound overly weighty and ambitious, there’s good news: it’s not at all (and in point of fact Egan’s actually pretty bad on the big picture stuff, on which more below). A Visit to the Goon Squad is ultimately a clever, funny book that feels like a novel but reads like a book of short stories. And most of the tales in this book have very clever premises, such as stories about an administrative assistant at a record label with a penchant for kleptomania, an aging rock n’ roll promoter on an African Safari, a down-and-out publicist charged with the duty of improving the image of a dictator who may be guilty of genocide, and a celebrity gala that goes so awry that hundreds of famous people end up permanently disfigured.

            But more impressively, Egan’s stories are often told in inventive ways, including a story written as a bio for a celebrity magazine (by an extremely disturbed interviewer) and another story that’s written entirely in the form of PowerPoint slides. This PowerPoint story—called ‘Great Rock and Roll Pauses,’ which is indeed about famous caesuras in rock songs—is a highlight of the collection, particularly in its ability to be deeply moving and even poignant despite its unusual formal conceit. And Egan is very, very good at stories that hit the spot between comedy and sadness. On a page-to-page level, Egan’s book is impressive, combining a talent for innovative and unusual forms with a deft sensibility that allows the reader to connect with its many characters in a very short period of time.

            Despite all these many impressive qualities, however, I was underwhelmed by the final story in the collection, which is a piece of speculative fiction set in a near future, and which doubles as a piece of cultural critique. In this semi-dystopia, people are increasingly dependent on electronic ‘handsets’ (which are basically pimped-out iPhones) for every aspect of their lives, forced to live in cramped apartments, and are constantly subjected to insidious forms of viral marketing. The problem here is that Egan’s critiques are just not very interesting and repeat a variety of well-worn contemporary cultural tropes, including the ideas that reliance on digital communications technology results in alienation, that corporate marketing is insidious and awful (which it is, but we already know that), and that young people are basically semi-autistic and technology dependent. We’re in the territory of Today Tonight headlines here.

I may be making a mountain out of a molehill, but while these problems are local to this story, they highlight a larger problem for the book: A Visit from the Goon Squad is great at telling clever, little vignettes that conclude with beautifully poignant moments, but these little revelations don’t add up to much beyond a series of slightly dull platitudes, like that getting older is hard to deal with, long-term relationships are difficult to maintain and youthful dreams are often overrun by the vicissitudes on the world. I don’t want to pick on Egan; A Visit to the Goon Squad is really a very, very good book, and has rightly been nominated as a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, but it also strikes me that the problem here is one endemic to the contemporary U.S. novel more generally.

[Warning: digression on the problems of contemporary mainstream U.S. literature, which has relatively little bearing on whether or not most people will enjoy Egan’s generally very good book.]

Egan occupies a slightly odd cultural position—but it’s a strange position that’s shared by a whole swath of U.S. writers who are clearly influenced by the ‘experimental’ U.S. writing of the 1960s (e.g. Barthelme, Brautigan, Coover, Pynchon) on the one hand, while still being very much ‘mainstream’ authors on the other. We could include various other U.S. writers in this strange trajectory, including Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers, Rick Moody, Gary Shteyngart, Adam Levin, and even David Foster Wallace, for that matter. What’s common to all of these writers is a desire to occupy two often contradictory positions: 1) a ‘high art’ imperative to write unusual and ‘experimental’ prose on the one hand (despite his more recent, populist aw shucks-isms, Franzen’s The Corrections still has some pretty innovative writing in it) and 2) a populist will to do so on terms that will speak to the broader American public about their lives.

As a result of 2), all of these writers have, at some point in their careers, attempted to write books that double as social novels that investigate the problems of the contemporary U.S. And given the vaguely left-wing orientation of the above writers combined with the swing to the right (to put it very mildly) in U.S. politics over the last ten years, these types of books seem to be appearing with more and more frequency. The result—of which A Visit to the Goon Squad is ultimately an example—is what I am calling the ‘how we live now’ novel (N.B. I wrote this last week and in the interim Laura Miller has published an article on ‘the way we live now’ novel, which you can read here. It’s unrelated to my point, though.).

These ‘how we live now’ novels attempt to wrestle with contemporary issues, but more often than not simply reproduce the kind of banal, sentimentalised platitudes that A Visit from the Goon Squad seems to suggest. And I think I know why. The reason is that these U.S. ‘how we live now’ novels are entirely formed by the liberal-democratic mode of thinking. This is a particular limitation in the U.S., which hasn’t had a legitimate socialist movement to speak of since Eugene Debs and lacks anything like a true left-wing tradition of critique. When these otherwise intelligent writers try to formulate something like a critique of their culture, they fail for the simple reason that they are too much a part of the very culture they would like to critique. The result is not a political novel at all, but rather a narcissistic novel that, in its obsession with the present, is unable to gain the kind of self-reflexive purchase needed for critique (indeed, it is the incredible self-reflexivity of David Foster Wallace’s work that has enabled him to bridge these two desires without falling into an uninterrogated, sentimental desire for the ‘universal truths’ of literature).

For my part, I wish that many writers of ‘how we live now’ novels would jettison their larger aims for the simple reason that they just aren’t very good on political maters. This, of course, is not to say that writers cannot write novels without express political content—and the developing world, in particular, has seen an explosion of great novels with explicitly political content, probably for the reason that in such places ‘politics’ means a lot more than what Pundit X has said on Fox News. I suspect that the reason that most of the U.S. writers I’ve mentioned above haven’t been very successful with political novels is that, quite simply, they don’t have a politics beyond the liberalism that has (unconsciously) shaped them. I also note that, from my point of view, often the books that are the most interesting in their ‘political’ content are precisely those in which the political is often not explicitly addressed (Evan Dara’s The Lost Scrapbook, which I’ve been raving about for months, is one of the best political novels written in the last twenty years, but you don’t even know it’s a ‘political’ novel until you are 400 pages into it.).

Anyway, as I noted, this is all a bit unfair to Egan, who has managed to write a funny and inventive book that is really, really good—and contains some individual stories that are actually great. A Visit from the Goon Squad is an excellent work of literature, but it’s a book that would actually be better if it tried to do less, since it falters precisely in the moments where it tries to tackle ‘big issues’.

Quote of the Day: Theodor Adorno

"Poetry in philosophy means everything that is strictly not relevant." -- Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic