→ August 4, 2010
→ By

Scout, Atticus, & Boo.

New post on the draft blog for Insiders: Cape Cod League top 30 prospects for 2010. Also, no Klawchat this week due to the start of the Area Code Games.

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I’m a big fan of To Kill a Mockingbird, placing it at #4 on the Klaw 100, but unlike most readers I came to the book relatively late in life, reading the book for the first (and only, for now) time at the age of 29. It was never assigned in school – when I think back on the garbage we had to read for some English classes in lieu of important classics of American and British literature, I wonder what the hell my parents paid property taxes for – and I actually wasn’t an avid reader of fiction between graduation from college and the turn of the century*. When I shifted from non-fiction – and just not reading that many books to begin with – back over to novels, I decided to fill in the gaps in my cultural literacy by reading as many of those “name” books as possible. They didn’t all measure up to their reputations, but Mockingbird exceeded them, and was one of a handful of books that accelerated the renewal of my interest in reading non-comic fiction.

*The book that turned me back on to fiction, putting me on a decade-long tear that saw me read roughly 400 novels across ten years? Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone, of course.

Documentary writer and producer Mary Murphy seems to feel much the same about the only literary output of one Nelle Harper Lee and assembled a book called Scout, Atticus, and Boo: A Celebration of Fifty Years of To Kill a Mockingbird that comprises interviews with 26 writers, celebrities, a politican, and a few people connected with Lee herself on the book, its legacy and the enduring mystery of Lee’s silence, both in her lack of output and her four-decade-plus refusal to give interviews. (Needless to say, she’s not one of the 26.)

Richard Russo, one of my favorite writers, had for me the most interesting essay because of how he talks about the art of writing, not just in how Mockingbird influenced him, but in how a technical analysis of the book misses its greatness – “Great books are not flawless books” – and what aspect of the book hit him the hardest. James McBride, an African-American novelist and musician, offers a passionate defense of the book as great literature, one of the questions Murphy must have posted to every interview subject, while also drawing parallels to John Coltrane when answering the question of why Lee might have chosen to stop writing after one book.

The most fun interview of all of them is Alice Lee, Nelle Harper’s older sister who, at the time of the book’s writing, was still working in her law office every day at the age of 98. With the author herself unwilling to give interviews – she reportedly was upset that one or more interviewers misquoted her in the 1960s and put words or even thoughts into her mouth, but has also indicated that she believes the author should be more or less invisible behind her works – Alice gives some insight as to Harper Lee’s childhood and what aspects of the book are grounded in real people or places.

I was surprised to find that one of the most enjoyable interviews in the book was Oprah Winfrey, whose responses may be the most personal, from her identification with Scout to an encounter with Gregory Peck (“he will always be Atticus to me”) to her plan to persuade Harper Lee to come on the show (fail). Her quote from her lunch with Lee is too priceless for me to repeat here, but it’s quite telling about the author’s attitude towards the celebrity she has so consistently declined. If you want to bounce around Scout, Atticus, & Boo, Andrew Young, James Patterson (really), and Anna Quindlen also offered interesting or insightful comments on the novel.

The introduction, written by Murphy, includes heavy quoting of the 26 essays that follow, and I found that reading it first scooped a number of the most interesting quotes from the interviews; if you pick this book up, skip straight to the first interview, with the actress who played Scout in the film version. If you haven’t read To Kill a Mockingbird, you should do so, and then watch the film, and then read this book if you enjoyed those two works as much as I did.

Next up: John Derbyshire’s Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics, about the still-unproven (or disproven) hypothesis that bears Riemann’s name.

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→ July 26, 2010
→ By

Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?

My Dan Haren analysis is up for Insiders, and I’ve got another post up on Omar Vizquel’s Hall of Fame case with some other notes and links.

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Who actually wrote the plays attributed to William Shakespeare? Is it possible that an uneducated moneylender and son of a Stratford glover could write over thirty plays that display the knowledge of a world traveler and the vocabulary of an alumnus of Oxford or Cambridge? This question has interested critics and scholars for two centuries, a story recounted in Columbia professor James Shapiro’s book Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, a thorough and surprisingly balanced look at the controversy and the cases for the two major alternative candidates, Francis Bacon and Edward de Vere.

Shapiro explains in the introduction that he believes that the plays attributed to Shakespeare were, in fact, written by the glover’s son, but he presents the cases for Bacon and de Vere thoroughly and fairly – I might even say a little drily – before providing his rebuttals to each. He also lays out the arguments for Shakespeare and explanations why the doubts about his authorship are likely unfounded, based on erroneous assumptions about Shakespeare’s life and the times in which he lived. Even though I’m only somewhat familiar with Shakespeare’s works – I’ve only read three of his plays and have seen stage or film adaptations of three others (including the impeccable Kenneth Branagh adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing) – I didn’t find that a handicap in reading or enjoying the story, which lays out a little like a mystery and a little like a psychological study of the people who so readily embrace conspiracy theories about why Shakespeare’s name appears on 33 plays and dozens of sonnets that he didn’t actually write. Along the way, Shapiro tells the story of the American Delia Bacon, of no apparent relation to Francis, whose support of her namesake became the monomaniacal focus of her life; of Sigmund Freud’s own obsession with the authorship question and belief that the Stratford man didn’t write his plays; and of the fact that Shakespeare collaborated with other playwrights on at least five of his plays, a point that poses many problems for proponents of alternative candidates.

One of the funniest parts of the case for Edward de Vere is the inconvenient truth that he died in 1604, yet as many of nine of Shakespeare’s plays didn’t appear until after that date, one of many problems with so-called “Oxfordian theory” (de Vere was the Earl of Oxford) that Shapiro says de Vere’s supporters handwave away or spin in a way that supports their man. There’s even a corollary to Oxfordian theory that has de Vere as both the son of Queen Elizabeth and her lover, and the two as the parents of the Earl of Southampton, which brings to my mind the funny image of a bunch of Elizabethan-era Britons running around with tin foil hats over their powdered wigs.

Despite Shapiro’s embrace of the glover’s son as the man behind the quill, he does acknowledge some of the aspects of the case that have led to the rise of alternative theories. There’s a lack of documentation of Shakespeare’s life; his books and manuscripts are gone, and much of what we do have about his life pertains to his work as a moneylender and investor. His plays have a worldly quality that he himself seems to have lacked, although that objection may arise from our own tendency to assume his world was far more like ours than it actually was. Difficulty reconciling what we do know of Shakespeare the man with what we see in his works has led to the search for other candidates, but Shapiro slyly demonstrates that such sentiments arise from conscious or subconscious class prejudices – how could an uneducated man, the son of a working-class father, have written such beautiful, erudite plays and poems?

Shapiro does mention some of the other proposed candidates for authorship of the play, but there are over fifty and the number seems to keep growing, so he focuses on the two with the strongest cases and most devoted followings. The argument for Bacon has lost steam over the last fifty years or so, and I found the lengthy explanation to get a little dry in spots, but the case for de Vere is more complex and unintentionally fun while also allowing Shapiro to delve more into the psychology of his supporters and the way that changes in how information is disseminated have allowed fringe theories to prosper, such as the “fairness” rules in media and the rise of sites like Wikipedia, where expert opinions and amateur opinions sit side by side without extra weight on the former. (For a funny, uneven, but thought-provoking polemic on this very subject, check out Andrew Keen’s 2007 book, The Cult of the Amateur.) I entered this book with no knowledge of the authorship question beyond the question’s existence, but Shapiro sets up the cases for Bacon and de Vere and knocks them down in a way that I imagine would make it hard for those candidates’ proponents to recover without adding another layer of foil to their headgear. He does veer a little too deeply into explanations of “textual analysis,” which seems like extremely dangerous ground that leaves the door open for almost any interpretation the interpreter likes, but as someone who enjoys analyzing meaning and metaphor in literature I found the explanation of how attempts to identify Shakespeare’s works as inherently autobiographical led scholars down the slippery slope into thinking that space aliens from Phobos wrote them sobering. It won’t change anyone’s enjoyment of the plays, but Contested Will is an intelligent look at one of literature’s most enduring controversies.

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→ May 5, 2009
→ By

The TIME 100 Q&A.

Quick admin notes: NYC 1050 AM hit moved back to 9:25 pm tonight. Podcast of my chat with Jeff Erickson is available here. Tentatively scheduled to appear on 101 ESPN in St. Louis Wednesday at 1:20 pm CDT.

I’m working my way through a half-dozen greatest books lists, from the Novel 100 to the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel/Fiction winners, but I think the most successful one for introducing me to books I liked or loved has been the TIME magazine list of the 100 greatest English-language novels published from 1923 to 2005. (Details on all the lists I use are on the FAQ.) On a whim, I contacted Lev Grossman, one of the two critics behind the TIME 100, and he and co-conspirator Richard Lacayo agreed to answer some questions I had about their list. Lacayo wrote about the process behind the list’s construction when it first appeared, and that essay may be useful background for those of you unfamiliar with the list itself.

Lev, you mentioned in your first response to me that you didn’t care for Tropic of Cancer, yet it’s on the list. How much did literary influence or academic value weigh against readability or trivial things like plot?

LG: I wasn’t that interested in academic value. I’ve spent some time in academia, and I feel like I have a good sense of what that’s good for it, and what it isn’t. As for readability, I’m a major backer of it. It was the fashion in the earlier part of the 20th to write very challengingly and elliptically and occasionally boringly. Which was a mode that was appropriate to its time. But not all those works are still worth the tremendous trouble they put the reader through.

I am however very interested in literary influence — works that changed the literary landscape through their sheer force and power and visionary newness. I’ll forgive a book a lot I would say I weighed those heavily.

RL: That was my pick, and one that I re-read for the list to make sure I still liked it. As I mentioned in that essay I wrote to introduce the list and explain how we made it, we didn’t agree on every title, and we decided not to, because we thought it would be more interesting for the list to include non-consensus choices. As for Tropic, I love the shaggy dog quality of that book. I don’t care whether it goes anyplace in particular. That willingness to blow off the “responsibility” to provide much of a plot is part of Miller’s personal ethic. The book is a demonstration of its own philosophy.

I was aware of the book’s history as the object of a landmark obscenity trial in the U.S., but it didn’t play any part in my judgment. And as for academic value – is Miller much read in “the academy”?

Unlike most lists of this ilk, yours was unranked. Why? If you had to choose a top 5 from your 100, what would it include?

LG: Oh, you know how it is. Lists are arbitrary enough as it is, without bringing ranking into it. You start splitting hairs, comparing apples and oranges … it started to seem absurd.

Top 5, off the top of my head?

Brideshead Revisited
Mrs. Dalloway
The Sound and the Fury
The Sun Also Rises
The Great Gatsby

RL: I just don’t think that’s possible. There’s no rational unit of measurement. You can do that with a poll of numerous critics by counting up which titles got the most votes, the way Sight and Sound magazine does every ten years with the greatest films. But I couldn’t claim with a straight face that Pale Fire is 22.5% better than Appointment in Samarra.

But if I had to pick a top five, it would probably be To the Lighthouse, Pale Fire, The Crying of Lot 49, 1984, Midnight’s Children but ask me a year from now and I might choose five others.

Your list was limited to novels first published in English. Why exclude works from other languages as long as they were eventually published in English? Did you consider, at the time or afterwards, creating a parallel list so that Franz Kafka and Gabriel Garcia Marquez could be similarly recognized?

LG: We did consider creating a parallel list. But the body of work was just too vast — how could we pretend to have read all of world literature, even in translation? We needed ways to narrow the field. That was one.

RL: We weren’t belittling “foreign” literature by not including it. We were paying it our respects. We felt we could not plausibly tell readers we had sifted the fiction of every nation. There’s simply too much of it – French, Japanese, German, Italian, Scandinavian, Latin American. Halldor Laxness may have won the Nobel Prize, but never made it on to my bookshelf. Lev and I both have English lit. degrees and have been reading for decades and were comfortable claiming to know enough of the range of English language work to make what we hoped were useful evaluations of it.

Also, I can never find the umlaut on my keyboard.

The Modern Library’s list, which covered the entire 20th century, was criticized for its lack of female and minority authors. Did you consider the authors’ genders or ethnicities at all in assembling the list? Should those be factors?

LG: I think it’s worth considering those things, along with everything else. There is a subjective dimension to the idea of ‘literary value,’ a big one, and Richard and I were conscious that the people making this list were two white men. We did our best to ensure that a broad range of points of view was represented.

RL: Lev speaks for both of us when he says we were aware that we were both white men drawing up this list, but I didn’t find it necessary to worry about that too much. For starters there were always going to be plenty of women on the list. Virginia Woolf is one of my favorite writers. Likewise Muriel Spark. Beloved? Death Comes for the Archbishop? These are no-brainers. In the end I think there are 19 titles by women.

Similarly with black authors, You don’t put Invisible Man on the list to be “correct”. You put it there because it’s so obviously brilliant. James Baldwin? Zadie Smith? We didn’t have to go searching for them. The only book by an African-American writer that I picked up because I hadn’t been introduced to it before and felt I needed to know it was Their Eyes Were Watching God, which I loved. Along with Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates that book was the fun discovery of this whole process for me. (Re-reading Portnoy’s Complaint was also a nice surprise. I had forgotten how good it was. Not just funny. Good in many ways.)

As I mention in that introductory text, there were writers who almost made the cut but didn’t quite — Dawn Powell is in that category for me. And as I also there, there are a number of women writers whose greatest work is in stories, not novels. Flannery O’Connor is a genius, but her novel, Wise Blood, doesn’t do it for me. Likewise Annie Proulx, The Shipping News notwithstanding, who once said to me herself that she considered stories her real forte. Close Range is my idea of a masterpiece, but it’s a story collection. Karen Blixen, Katherine Anne Porter, Shirley Jackson, Eudora Welty – same thing.

What I didn’t do was include a book simply because it represented any kind of social or political breakthrough. I love Christopher Isherwood’s novel A Single Man, about a gay man living in California after the death of his lover. It was published in 1964 and really is a breakthrough book in terms of introducing a gay character who’s not troubled by his own sexuality, just carrying on with his life. But good as it is, as a book it doesn’t measure up for me to The Berlin Stories.

If I had an agenda of any kind it may have been British novels of the 20s, 30s and 40s. I like Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green, the novels of Aldous Huxley beyond just Brave New World. Waugh. Graham Greene. It’s not the Masterpiece Theatre aspect, it’s just something about the ease with which they practice the conventions of novel.

Richard wrote at the time that you agreed on roughly 80 titles more or less off the bat. What book that made the list sparked the biggest disagreement? How about one that missed?

LG: It’s been a while since we formulated the list, and I’m trying to remember. Richard is a staunch Pynchonian, which I definitely am not — I’m sure I rolled my eyes at putting two Pynchon novels on the list. But I did it quietly. Likewise I expected resistance to some of the science fiction entries on the list — Dick, Gibson, Stephenson — but got none. Likewise the YA novel (Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret) and the graphic novel (Watchmen). I wish I had stories for you about shouting matches and fisticuffs, but it was a pretty civilized process. I think Richard’s essay has all the dirt there is in it.

RL: Not to sugar coat the thing, but there weren’t that many, partly because we had this agreement that there would be titles we just wouldn’t agree on. Lev likes graphic novels. It would never occur to me to put Watchmen on the list but he loves it. Meanwhile, I really enjoy a lot of what you might call classic modernist writers, the ones who play around with the conventions of the novel, from Woolf to Pynchon. That stuff bores some people, including sometimes Lev. It’s ice cream to me. As he mentioned to you, I would have put a third Pynchon title on (V.), but there wasn’t room. (And I’m not somebody who pats Pynchon on the head for everything he does. I pretty much panned his last book in the magazine.

Have you reconsidered – or regretted – any of the entries since the list was published?

LG: I haven’t.

RL: Only the books there weren’t room for, but that’s list making for you. As mentioned, Dawn Powell. Elizabeth Hardwick’s novel Sleepless Nights. Maybe The Wapshot Chronicle by (John) Cheever. E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel. (Saul) Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift.

Are there any works published since 2005 that you would place on a revised list?

LG: Yes, one. Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

RL: Oscar Wao, definitely.

KL: It’s on my to-be-read shelf and just moved up in the queue after that response.

Did you consider other lists or awards, such as Pulitzer Prizes, as criteria for inclusion or even as “bonus points” for specific books?

LG: We really didn’t. I’ve sat on enough awards committees to know how arbitrary they are. I don’t give them much weight.

RL: Did we care whether a book had won prizes? Not at all. The Nobel didn’t get Patrick White on the list. And The Pulitzer has gone to many dreary books.

*KL: Concur.

One inclusion that confused me at the time that I read it was Watchmen, which is really a short story stretched to novel length by illustrations. To me, it offers none of the complexity of even a short novel like Red Harvest. Tell me about the decision to include a graphic novel in a list of prose works.

LG: There are plenty of things to complain about in Watchmen, but a lack of complexity? I couldn’t disagree more! I’m a great believer in the power and importance of graphic novels — or comic books, as I prefer to call them — and I think they’re one of the most exciting things to happen to the novel in the 20th Century. To me the list would have had a hole in it without them.

I’ll throw some titles at you that I thought should have made the list or at least been considered. Tell me whether they came up at all, and if so, why they didn’t make the cut.

Cry the Beloved Country
Tender is the Night
A Confederacy of Dunces
Something Wicked This Way Comes
Empire Falls
The Dud Avocado

LG: Now we’re really going to expose the ugly underbelly of subjectivity in this list. A Confederacy of Dunces – I’ve always felt this book was rather heavy-handed and unfunny and hence over-rated. I know it’s beloved by many, and I’m buying myself some serious ire by saying that, but if there’s one rule I have as a critic, it’s never lie. And I couldn’t in all honesty put that book on the list, because I just don’t feel it’s great.

Tender is the Night was a tougher decision, it’s a beautiful novel with reams of great writing in it, but I think ultimately it’s slightly overstuffed and ungainly and melodramatic, especially when you put it next to the jewel-like perfection that is The Great Gatsby, which I think is better suited to represent Fitzgerald on the list.

I could go on slagging the classic works you’ve listed, but you get the general idea. I’ll just add that, to my shame, I had never read or heard of The Dud Avocado. There’s that ugly underbelly I was talking about.

RL: I read Cry the Beloved Country long ago, but wasn’t moved to re-visit it. I like Confederacy, but wasn’t in love with it. Tender is the Night was on my short list – an adolescent favorite, adolescents love doom. But Fitzgerald’s problem is that he wrote one book so perfect it makes everything else he wrote look a bit dim, even the good things.

The Dud Avocado – I’ll have to go looking for that one.

Awesome stuff. I’ll even forgive you for trashing Tender is the Night, which is my favorite novel by an American author. My readers will enjoy you taking me to task over Watchmen, although I stand my ground – it was thinner than a sheet of phyllo dough.

Thank you both for your answers and for the great list.

Filed Under: Literature, Media, TIME 100, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ September 24, 2008
→ By

On lit lists.

So reader ajd posted this in the comments on my Vanity Fair review, a follow-up to his question of whether I ever read lesser-known works by great authors:

My original question was, in part, based on criticism in works like Myers’ _Reader’s Manifesto_, i.e. that certain “great” literature is only considered great because it is deemed so by the keepers of the kingdom. I’ve always wondered how useful certain lists of great books are for this very reason — do the authors pick the best books, or do they pick the books that make them look the most intelligent and the most in tune with what other literati value?

Obviously this is moot to some extent, as one simply has to start somewhere. And some of your less-favorable reviews seem to indicate that you agree with this general premise above; I’d just wondered if, once you’ve read other works by authors on these lists, you’d found you preferred them over the best-known books.

I’m with Myers and ajd to a point; there is no question that some books are considered great because they’ve always been considered great, and I think there are a few books that are considered great because they’re incredibly hard to read. There’s also the whole stream-of-consciousness movement started by Joyce – like a viral infection through the world of fiction – that gets praise from academics but that leaves most readers cold or on the outside altogether. I admit I haven’t read Pamela or Clarissa, but their greatness has to be almost wholly derived from their influence on contemporary or near-contemporary authors, since they’re scarcely read today.

However, there’s a limit to this absolute-contrarian view. Some books are considered great because they’re actually great. One Hundred Years of Solitude (in the top 20 of the Novel 100) is one. Most of you who’ve read The Master and Margarita (which is in the honorable mentions for the Novel 100) agree that it’s phenomenal. I don’t hear anyone saying that Don Quixote (#1 on the Novel 100) isn’t anything special.

I also run into a fair amount of disagreement on the rankings of novels by prolific authors. What is Charles Dickens’ greatest novel? In high school, we read Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities. The Novel 100 includes the former, but adds Bleak House and The Pickwick Papers (the latter being my favorite). Some cite Hard Times for its blend of comedy and biting social commentary. And when the Guardian did its list, the only Dickens novel on it was David Copperfield.

Part of why Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited is typically considered his best book is that it’s his most serious, and there is absolutely an academic/critical bias against comic novels. (That said, Modern Library put A Handful of Dust over Brideshead Revisited, while the Bloomsbury 100 includes the former but omits the latter.) It is almost as if a comedy has to be very old (Fielding, Austen) or the author’s only great work (Heller’s Catch-22) to be taken seriously.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , ,