Harry Potter and the Death of Reading
Ron Charles
Op-Ed – Washington Post
Sunday, July 15, 2007; B01
It happened on a dark night, somewhere in the middle of Book IV. For three years, I had dutifully read the "Harry Potter" series to my daughter, my voice growing raspy with the effort, page after page. But lately, whole paragraphs of "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" had started to slip by without my hearing a word. I'd snap back to attention and realize the action had moved from Harry's room to Hagrid's house, and I had no idea what was happening.
And that's when my daughter broke the spell: "Do we have to keep reading this?"
O, the shame of it: a 10-year-old girl and a book critic who had had enough of "Harry Potter." We were both a little sad, but also a little relieved. Although we'd had some good times at Hogwarts, deep down we weren't wild about Harry, and the freedom of finally confessing this secret to each other made us feel like co-conspirators.
Along with changing diapers and supervising geometry homework, reading "Harry Potter" was one of those chores of parenthood that I was happy to do -- and then happy to stop. But all around me, I see adults reading J.K. Rowling's books to themselves: perfectly intelligent, mature people, poring over "Harry Potter" with nary a child in sight. Waterstone's, a British book chain, predicts that the seventh and (supposedly) final volume, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," may be read by more adults than children. Rowling's U.K. publisher has even been releasing "adult editions." That has an alarmingly illicit sound to it, but don't worry. They're the same books dressed up with more sophisticated dust jackets -- Cap'n Crunch in a Gucci bag.
I'd like to think that this is a romantic return to youth, but it looks like a bad case of cultural infantilism. And when we're not horning in on our kids' favorite books, most of us aren't reading anything at all. More than half the adults in this country won't pick up a novel this year, according to the National Endowment for the Arts. Not one. And the rate of decline has almost tripled in the past decade.
That statistic startles me, even though I hear it again and again. Whenever I confess to people who work for a living that I'm a book critic, I inevitably get the same response: "Imagine being able to sit around all day just reading novels!" Then they turn to each other and shake their heads, amazed that anything so effete should pass for a profession. (I can see it in their eyes: the little tufted pillow, the box of bonbons nearby.) "I don't read fiction," they say, suddenly serious. "I have so little time nowadays that when I read, I like to learn something." But before I can suggest what one might learn from reading a good novel, they pop the question about The Boy Who Lived: "How do you like 'Harry Potter'?"
Of course, it's not really a question anymore, is it? In the current state of Potter mania, it's an invitation to recite the loyalty oath. And you'd better answer correctly. Start carrying on like Moaning Myrtle about the repetitive plots, the static characters, the pedestrian prose, the wit-free tone, the derivative themes, and you'll wish you had your invisibility cloak handy. Besides, from anyone who hasn't sold the 325 million copies that Rowling has, such complaints smack of Bertie Bott's beans, sour-grapes flavor.
Shouldn't we just enjoy the $4 billion party? Millions of adults and children are reading! We keep hearing that "Harry Potter" is the gateway drug that's luring a reluctant populace back into bookstores and libraries. Even teenage boys -- Wii-addicted, MySpace-enslaved boys! -- are reading again, and if that's not magic, what is?
Unfortunately, the evidence doesn't encourage much optimism. Data from the NEA point to a dramatic and accelerating decline in the number of young people reading fiction. Despite their enthusiasm for books in grade school, by high school, most kids are not reading for pleasure at all. My friends who teach English tell me that summaries and critical commentary are now so readily available on the Internet that more and more students are coming to class having read about the books they're studying without having read the books.
And when their parents do pick up a novel, it's often one that leaves a lot to be desired. True, Oprah Winfrey can turn serious works of fiction such as Jeffrey Eugenides's "Middlesex" or Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" into megasellers. But among the top 20 best-selling books on Amazon.com this week, only six are novels -- and that includes the upcoming seventh volume of He Who Must Not Be Outsold, James Patterson's "The Quickie," the 13th volume of Janet Evanovich's comic mystery series and a vampire love saga.
How could the ever-expanding popularity of Harry Potter take place during such an unprecedented decline in the number of Americans reading fiction?
Perhaps submerging the world in an orgy of marketing hysteria doesn't encourage the kind of contemplation, independence and solitude that real engagement with books demands -- and rewards. Consider that, with the release of each new volume, Rowling's readers have been driven not only into greater fits of enthusiasm but into more precise synchronization with one another. Through a marvel of modern publishing, advertising and distribution, millions of people will receive or buy "The Deathly Hallows" on a single day. There's something thrilling about that sort of unity, except that it has almost nothing to do with the unique pleasures of reading a novel: that increasingly rare opportunity to step out of sync with the world, to experience something intimate and private, the sense that you and an author are conspiring for a few hours to experience a place by yourselves -- without a movie version or a set of action figures. Through no fault of Rowling's, Potter mania nonetheless trains children and adults to expect the roar of the coliseum, a mass-media experience that no other novel can possibly provide.
The schools often don't help, either. As I look back on my dozen years of teaching English, I wish I'd spent less time dragging my students through the classics and more time showing them how to strike out on their own and track down new books they might enjoy. Without some sense of where to look and how to look, is it any wonder that most people who want to read fiction glom onto a few bestsellers that everybody's talking about?
In "The Long Tail," Wired editor Chris Anderson suggested that new methods of distribution would shatter the grip of blockbusters. Niche markets would evolve and thrive as never before, creating a long, vital line of products from small producers who never could have profited in the past. It's a cheering notion, but alas, the big head still pretty much overrules the long tail. Like the basilisk that terrorized students at Hogwarts in Book II, "Harry Potter" and a few other much-hyped books devour everyone's attention, leaving most readers paralyzed in praise, apparently incapable of reading much else.
According to a study by Alan Sorensen at Stanford University, "In 1994, over 70 percent of total fiction sales were accounted for by a mere five authors." There's not much reason to think that things have changed. As Albert Greco of the Institute for Publishing Research puts it: "People who read fiction want to read hits written by known authors who are there year after year."
So we're experiencing the literary equivalent of a loss of biodiversity. All those people carrying around an 800-page novel looks like a great thing for American literacy, but it's as ominous as a Forbidden Forest with only one species of tree. Since Harry Potter first Apparated into our lives a decade ago, the number of stand-alone book sections in major metropolitan newspapers has decreased by half -- silencing critical voices that once helped a wide variety of authors around the country get noticed.
The vast majority of adults who tell me they love "Harry Potter" never move on to Susanna Clarke's enchanting "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell," with its haunting exploration of history and sexual longing, or Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials," a dazzling fantasy series that explores philosophical themes (including a scathing assault on organized religion) that make Rowling's little world of good vs. evil look, well, childish. And what about the dozens of other brilliant fantasy authors who could take them places that little Harry never dreamed of? Or the wider world of Muggle literary fiction beyond?
According to Amazon, the best-selling book of 2006 was "Cesar's Way: The Natural, Everyday Guide to Understanding and Correcting Common Dog Problems," by Cesar Millan. My favorite was "The Law of Dreams," a first novel by a 56-year-old writer named Peter Behrens. It's the story of an orphaned boy who doesn't know why he survived the evil force that killed his parents -- and left him scarred. Set during the Irish potato famine of 1847, it's not a fantasy, and it's not for children, but there are plenty of monsters here, and Behrens writes in a style that's pure magic. As of this writing, it has sold 8,367 copies in the United States. It's enough to make a book critic snap his broom in two.
charlesr@washpost.com
Ron Charles is a senior editor of The Post's Book World section.
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Cafe Risque
I have been driving for more than seven hours straight when I saw that billboard sign that read “WE BARE IT ALL”. Early morning traffic can drive a man insane. That may have been the reason why I chose to pull over and stop in for a beer. What a place to end up in on a Tuesday morning, I thought to myself. About ten minutes south of the serene college town of Gainesville Florida, Café Risqué is a peculiar blend somewhere in between a local Denny’s restaurant and a sullied southern strip join. Stale white bread toast and worn down lettuce perfectly complimented those worn out bodies of beaten down women who were embracing those silver stage polls like the children of a neglectful mother. Small town America was always told the very same stories that most of us would rather ignore.
I ordered a light beer and a black coffee with no sugar. Despite Layla’s offer, I passed up on the all you can eat breakfast buffet that was situated not too far from those purple sofas were a man could get a lap dance for twenty dollars. Twenty dollars seemed excessive for this hole in the wall nudy bar diner but Sunshine later reassured me of the fact that anytime before six am and noon, the dances went for a mere ten.
I pulled a chair next to Randy.
Alloy wheel is what I sell. He told me. I get paid seventy-five dollars every time I fix one of them sons of bitches. But that is the price I charge the dealerships. If the man off the street hires my services, I charge that son of a bitch a cool hundred. The guy was on his fourth beer and already took Channel for two lap dances in the past twenty five minutes alone. That son of a bitch has a great pair of tits I tell you, I don’t mind that they are silicones, that makes the bounce that much more immediate. He lit up a cigarette and offered me one. I had to decline. I gave up smoking more than a month ago. Well, thirty-three days to be exact. Thirty three days and counting.
Men who hung out in titty bars before lunch time were always a unique bunch. I was just surprised to find my way in their midst These men shared a camaraderie that was not that much different from those of men who went off to war together, men who lost it all in the stock market or men who rooted for the New York Jets football team. We all shared a common sense of desperation that brought us closer together.
Randy had a thick southern accent. He drove his truck all the way from the Florida-Georgia state line. I was a Jew and did my best to blend in. There were not too many of us around these parts. None that I knew off in this resturant/bar. Jewish tradition failed to recognize the unique splendor of these cheap dives that were filled with cheap beer and genuine folks who lived their lives from one day to the next. When he asked me where I was from, I tried to change the subject. There was no way to rationalize how a university professor from New York city ended up in a southern truck stop nudy bar on such a strange Tuesday morning.
Let me guess, you are originally from Europe, am I right or am I right? You are right I told him. What are you Czechoslovakian? Russian? Italian? German? I nodded my head and looked for a way out. Luckily Naomi came around with those pointy nipples that one could sharpen an orange peel on. They extended beyond her white tank top as they offered me refuge. I pulled a ten dollar bill out of my pocket and gazed into the eyes of our nation’s first secretary of the treasury. Would Mr. Hamilton approve of Naomi’s profession? Would he approve of these bad choices that I kept on pursuing on a consistent basis?
She extended her reassuring hand and I collapsed my foolish fingers into her comfort. Her touch reminded me of Joanna’s familiar console in those days before she changed her mind. Don’t worry honey, Naomi told me, I promise not to bite, that is unless you want me to. She must have been about nineteen years of age. Poor white trash that wore a rich friendly smile.
What would ever posses a woman to bounce her breasts in the slippery mouths of perverted truck drivers, alloy wheel salesmen and university professors for a mere ten dollars a pop? She had the kind of a body that any man could only dream about knowing. A woman of her caliber could have had her choice of top sirloin cuts instead of picking from the bottom.
If she really wanted my opinion, if she seeked my advice, I would suggest that Naomi would drive up to the University of Florida’s law library were enterprising future tax attorneys and court room litigators spent lonely hours at the time. Any of these men would provide a brighter future than did Café Risque’s regular clients. Naomi must have not known about the lonely schmucks up at the university. She must have not realized just how difficult it was for many of them to find a woman, any woman and most of all a good looking woman with a tight young body and pointy nipples to go along.
How else would you explain her choice of careers?
When I came back to the table, Randy was all smiles. OOOOWEEEEEE he proclaimed. That fine little thing must have flossed your gums and in between your teeth with them pointy things.
I shook my head and ordered us both another round of drinks.
It was getting late, almost Eight o’clock when I finally walked into the Beth Israel synagogue. There was not a seat to be found. With my formal black suite on and my hair combed to the left, I placed an unsoiled yamaka on my head and located one of the few prayer books that were left on the wooden display.
I looked about the faces of my people who were celebrating the Rosh Hashanah holidy. Families sat together in an embrace of the high holidays. There was a real sense of spirituality in the air. When the Rabi told us to rise, I lowered my eyes towards the ancient Hebrew texts and said a silent prayor for my newly found friends Randy and Naomi. In their loneliness, I affirmed my own.
NYC Novels
I ordered a light beer and a black coffee with no sugar. Despite Layla’s offer, I passed up on the all you can eat breakfast buffet that was situated not too far from those purple sofas were a man could get a lap dance for twenty dollars. Twenty dollars seemed excessive for this hole in the wall nudy bar diner but Sunshine later reassured me of the fact that anytime before six am and noon, the dances went for a mere ten.
I pulled a chair next to Randy.
Alloy wheel is what I sell. He told me. I get paid seventy-five dollars every time I fix one of them sons of bitches. But that is the price I charge the dealerships. If the man off the street hires my services, I charge that son of a bitch a cool hundred. The guy was on his fourth beer and already took Channel for two lap dances in the past twenty five minutes alone. That son of a bitch has a great pair of tits I tell you, I don’t mind that they are silicones, that makes the bounce that much more immediate. He lit up a cigarette and offered me one. I had to decline. I gave up smoking more than a month ago. Well, thirty-three days to be exact. Thirty three days and counting.
Men who hung out in titty bars before lunch time were always a unique bunch. I was just surprised to find my way in their midst These men shared a camaraderie that was not that much different from those of men who went off to war together, men who lost it all in the stock market or men who rooted for the New York Jets football team. We all shared a common sense of desperation that brought us closer together.
Randy had a thick southern accent. He drove his truck all the way from the Florida-Georgia state line. I was a Jew and did my best to blend in. There were not too many of us around these parts. None that I knew off in this resturant/bar. Jewish tradition failed to recognize the unique splendor of these cheap dives that were filled with cheap beer and genuine folks who lived their lives from one day to the next. When he asked me where I was from, I tried to change the subject. There was no way to rationalize how a university professor from New York city ended up in a southern truck stop nudy bar on such a strange Tuesday morning.
Let me guess, you are originally from Europe, am I right or am I right? You are right I told him. What are you Czechoslovakian? Russian? Italian? German? I nodded my head and looked for a way out. Luckily Naomi came around with those pointy nipples that one could sharpen an orange peel on. They extended beyond her white tank top as they offered me refuge. I pulled a ten dollar bill out of my pocket and gazed into the eyes of our nation’s first secretary of the treasury. Would Mr. Hamilton approve of Naomi’s profession? Would he approve of these bad choices that I kept on pursuing on a consistent basis?
She extended her reassuring hand and I collapsed my foolish fingers into her comfort. Her touch reminded me of Joanna’s familiar console in those days before she changed her mind. Don’t worry honey, Naomi told me, I promise not to bite, that is unless you want me to. She must have been about nineteen years of age. Poor white trash that wore a rich friendly smile.
What would ever posses a woman to bounce her breasts in the slippery mouths of perverted truck drivers, alloy wheel salesmen and university professors for a mere ten dollars a pop? She had the kind of a body that any man could only dream about knowing. A woman of her caliber could have had her choice of top sirloin cuts instead of picking from the bottom.
If she really wanted my opinion, if she seeked my advice, I would suggest that Naomi would drive up to the University of Florida’s law library were enterprising future tax attorneys and court room litigators spent lonely hours at the time. Any of these men would provide a brighter future than did Café Risque’s regular clients. Naomi must have not known about the lonely schmucks up at the university. She must have not realized just how difficult it was for many of them to find a woman, any woman and most of all a good looking woman with a tight young body and pointy nipples to go along.
How else would you explain her choice of careers?
When I came back to the table, Randy was all smiles. OOOOWEEEEEE he proclaimed. That fine little thing must have flossed your gums and in between your teeth with them pointy things.
I shook my head and ordered us both another round of drinks.
It was getting late, almost Eight o’clock when I finally walked into the Beth Israel synagogue. There was not a seat to be found. With my formal black suite on and my hair combed to the left, I placed an unsoiled yamaka on my head and located one of the few prayer books that were left on the wooden display.
I looked about the faces of my people who were celebrating the Rosh Hashanah holidy. Families sat together in an embrace of the high holidays. There was a real sense of spirituality in the air. When the Rabi told us to rise, I lowered my eyes towards the ancient Hebrew texts and said a silent prayor for my newly found friends Randy and Naomi. In their loneliness, I affirmed my own.
NYC Novels
Monday, November 26, 2007
A Review of Exit Ghost by Philip Roth
October 7, 2007
From the New York Times
By CLIVE JAMES
EXIT GHOST By Philip Roth.
In a Mobius striptease, the disrobing stripper is always on the point of getting dressed again, and there is no resolution to the revelation.
A Mobius striptease in written form, Philip Roth’s new novel, “Exit Ghost,” is purportedly his long-running character Nathan Zuckerman’s new novel, narrated in the first person. During the course of Nathan Zuckerman’s new novel, Zuckerman raises the question of whether an author’s personal biography should ever be drawn into any discussion about his works of art. The answer seems to be that any reader who might want to do so must be a bit of a klutz.
But we get that answer only if we decide that Zuckerman is speaking for Roth when he, Zuckerman, seems to endorse the opinion of Amy Bellette, now old, gray and diseased but once the young mistress, helpmeet and nurse of Zuckerman’s mentor and hero E. I. Lonoff, that there is something crassly illiterate about any attempt even by scholars, let alone journalists, to trace the inspiration of her erstwhile lover’s works to his actual life. And what if Zuckerman doesn’t endorse her opinion? He quotes her at length, but without explicitly agreeing, even though the long letter in which she expresses her objections to biographical reductionism suggests that she can write an essay nearly as well as, say, Philip Roth.
Maybe Zuckerman is withholding judgment. He may well have reason to do so, because in Roth’s early Zuckerman works, notably “The Ghost Writer” (first published in 1979, and hey, there’s the ghost already), Zuckerman was probing the secrets about the connection between Lonoff’s work and his real life even as a character in this new book, Richard Kliman, is hoping, by revealing the facts about Lonoff’s real life, to win for the neglected Lonoff the fame he has always lacked, and thereby get his works republished in the Library of America (the same distinguished imprint, we alert readers will note, that is currently republishing the complete works of none other than Philip Roth — no victim of neglect he). Hoping to? Insisting. There is no getting rid of Kliman. He just keeps on coming back.
As portrayed by Zuckerman, Kliman is irredeemably obnoxious. But room is left for the possibility that the young Zuckerman might once have been a bit less altruistic — a bit more ruthlessly ambitious all round — than he once reported himself as being in the first person, or was reported to be by Roth in the third person. (If you want to go back and check this out, the early sequence of Zuckerman novels are now published as “Zuckerman Bound: A Trilogy and Epilogue, 1979-1985” in a single, typically sumptuous volume from, you guessed it, the Library of America, $35: but a warning — the name Zuckerman has the word “sugar” loosely buried within it, and once you give that old hunger a chance to burn again, you may not be able to stop.) What if the decaying Zuckerman, by heaping imprecations on the repellent Kliman, is simply refusing to recognize his pristine young self reborn? Complicated enough for you yet? We’re just getting started.
If Zuckerman ever decides that he was once, under his show of Chekhov-loving sensitivity, crassly illiterate to stalk Lonoff, then we might decide that we are crassly illiterate to ask whether Zuckerman’s state of health in this new novel has any connection to Roth’s in real life. In “Exit Ghost,” Zuckerman, whom we have known since he was young and potent, has had prostate surgery that has left him impotent, not to mention incontinent. (We may not mention it now, but we’re going to have to soon.) There is a beautiful young woman in the novel, Jamie Logan, who is willing to be made love to by the avowedly decrepit Zuckerman, but he deliberately fails to keep the appointment, or seems to. (By then he is talking about himself as if he were a character in a play. Maybe he nailed her, but rigged the dialogue to suggest he didn’t. See my forthcoming paper “How Unreal Was Thereal McCoy? Strategic Female Fantasy Figures in the Disguised Biography of Philip Roth.”)
Is Roth saying, through Zuckerman, that the only reason he, Roth, might fail to show up for such a date is that he is no longer capable of going through with the consequences? Are we allowed to ask whether the real-life Roth, who once had to stave off accusations of providing the model for his character Alexander Portnoy, is no longer in thrall to his virile member, if he ever was? (After all, he never actually said he was. He said Portnoy was.) In the last rumor I heard on the subject, one of the most luxuriantly beautiful young Australian female film stars had thrown herself at Roth’s feet lightly clad — I mean she was lightly clad, not Roth’s feet — and demanded satisfaction.
This rumor might have had no more substance than the one about the famous actor and the gerbil, but it traveled at the same speed, and for the same reason: it fitted the legend. Roth has been catnip for upmarket women all his life, and never not renowned for it. In London, when he lived there, Roth would enter a fashionable drawing room with Claire Bloom on his arm and you would wonder how he had got into the house without a band striking up “Hail to the Chief.”
Roth might never have been Alexander Portnoy, but the inventor of Alexander Portnoy, unless he was a studious lizard from outer space with limitless powers of telepathic imagination, was a male human being well schooled in carnal relationships with women. It is true that Zuckerman, even when all the books of his saga are taken together, falls short of being a full case of Portnovian satyriasis. Zuckerman lusts after many women, but he does not get to make them all. He gets to make notes on them all. He is a writer. In just such a way, Jay McInerney might have invented an alter ego who was a dietitian, and who lured all those fashion models up to his apartment in order to weigh them. How can we fail to ask whether or not Roth still has what it takes, if he presents us with a central character based on himself who has it no longer? But is the character really based on himself? Let’s go back to the beginning.
Before we do, we should note that there is no question of abandoning the quest for clarification. “Exit Ghost” is just too fascinating to leave alone. It was designed that way, like the Tar Baby. Actually — leaving aside all questions about authorial identity for the moment — this book is latter-day Roth at his intricately thoughtful best, and a vivid reminder of why a dystopian satirical fantasy like “The Plot Against America” was comparatively weak. Roth has no business making up the world. His business is making up his mind, in the sense that his true material for inventing a pattern is self-exploration, not social satire.
Tom Lehrer once said that when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize it was time to give up on satire. But for Roth it was always time to give up on satire. The world is too obviously out of whack for a writer of his quality to give it the best of his attention. He should reserve that for his own psyche, which is only subtly out of whack, but still would be if he were living in paradise. Unlike the world, his mentality can’t be fixed, so a self-assertive rage is inappropriate. Only self-analysis will serve, and to pursue that without solipsism is the continuing challenge. Roth gets as close as anyone ever has to being clinically detached about spreading his own brains all over the operating table. But hold it there. We were going to start again.
And we have to start with the absorbent pads stuffed down the shorts. Zuckerman is leaking yellow water. Doing so, he has run for harbor. To change the metaphor, he has run for cover. He is somewhere up in the Berkshires near Tanglewood, not far from where none other than E. I. Lonoff once holed up to keep the inquisitive literary world at bay. When Zuckerman comes to New York to see the doctor, he avoids ground zero. He no longer wants to keep up with the news, even that news. (“I’ve served my tour.”) But he’s still not done with Lonoff.
At the Strand bookstore, Zuckerman puts together, for under $100, a complete spare set of Lonoff’s first editions. (There was my chance to meet Zuckerman. I could well have been in the Strand at the same time, adding to my row of Philip Roth hardbacks. If they had been first editions, they would have cost me thousands. Was that Zuckerman, the tall, grizzled patriarch in the rare-book section on the fourth floor who was going through that stack of New Yorkers with the original Roger Angell baseball articles? But wait a second: Zuckerman is a ghost.)
In Saul Bellow’s first post-Nobel novel, “The Dean’s December,” mortal fear centered on the colon. (“It’s serious enough for me to be wearing the bag.”) In Roth’s “Exit Ghost,” it centers on the prostate, or anyway on where the prostate used to be. The bearer of the wound can reach no accommodation with his loss. If I can speak for the outside world, which is where I come from, this is the area where the current generation of magisterial American male writers who are now making the last preparations for their immortality — Roth, Vidal, Mailer, Updike — come closest to evincing a common national characteristic.
This glittering crew, a Team America that not even Henry James and Edith Wharton put together could possibly have foreseen, is the most commanding bunch of representatives American literary culture has yet had, but there is something about American culture that doesn’t want to accept death as a fitting end to life. They are so incorrigibly energetic that the white light of their expectations bleaches even their pessimism. In that respect, they could all take a tip from, say, Joan Didion, who at least has never imagined that the Grim Reaper gets into the tournament only on a wild card.
But this isn’t even a quibble. It’s just an observation from someone standing awed and stunned on the sidelines. In my own country, Australia, “Portnoy’s Complaint,” first published in 1969, was a banned book for the first five years of its career. Having exiled myself to London, I was able to read it, but even in London there was no mistaking that the Americans were leaving the old British Empire looking not just superseded but mealy-mouthed.
American English had become the dominant language of modern reality. There was still a lot to be said for a version of English that wasn’t dominant (the British and ex-colonial writers would go on to prove that postimperial confusion was at least as fruitful as imperial success had ever been), but you couldn’t mistake the shift of cultural power. Even today, decades later, a British professor of American studies at a provincial university is in the position of someone with the free run of the PX at the local United States Air Force base: he has access to goods whose quality is hard to match locally. As for the homegrown literati, listen to Martin Amis talking about Bellow, and Ian McEwan talking about Updike. Try to imagine the same relationship in reverse. It might happen one day, but not quite yet. For my own part, I can only say this much: Of the two funniest books I have ever read in my life, “Lucky Jim” made me laugh loudest, but “Portnoy’s Complaint” set me free.
But in culture as in military strength, preponderance has its drawbacks. The big guns get a sense of mission, and their very confidence invites questions about their vision, even about their ability to gaze within. Just as Bellow, in his factual writings, never asked himself the awkward question about divisions within Israel, so in his fictional writings he stifled a question that would have multiplied his range: he never made a subject out of his succession of discarded wives, when you would have thought — must have thought — that for a writer otherwise so brilliantly introspective, there lay the essence of his subject. Similarly, Mailer, unceasingly writing advertisements for himself, never delved far enough into his own psyche to make a subject out of his complicity in the death of Jack Abbott’s victim: the great writer could face every embarrassment except the one that pierced to the center of his responsibility as a public writer.
Vidal has never admitted, let alone explored, the question of whether his criticisms of the American power elite might not be compromised by his membership in it. Does he really think, when he argues that F.D.R. tricked Japan into World War II, that the Japanese right wing, currently making a comeback, will not take this as an endorsement of its views? And does Updike think we will never ask how his basketballing Rabbit can have the sensibility of Proust, or whether Bech, the character he created to embody his fame as a writer, was not calculated to increase it?
Finally it is only Roth who takes himself entirely to pieces. Has he been cruel to leave recognizable the outlines of discarded loved ones? Yes. Has he made a subject of that? Yes again. That’s why his father keeps on coming back. Even less inclined to be shaken off than the awful Kliman, the fathers of Roth’s leading men walk the platform by dead of night. But does even Roth complete the peeling of the artichoke? To look for the answer, we must go back again to the beginning of this new novel and try, this time, to finish up somewhere beyond the start. For Zuckerman, if not for Roth, potency is gone. Has desire gone with it? You bet your life it hasn’t. Listen to this:
“And so I set out to minimize the loss by struggling to pretend that desire had naturally abated, until I came in contact for barely an hour with a beautiful, privileged, intelligent, self-possessed, languid-looking 30-year-old made enticingly vulnerable by her fears and I experienced the bitter helplessness of a taunted old man dying to be whole again.”
But she’s been there since “Goodbye, Columbus,” and as long as he can imagine her, he is whole again. The wholeness is in the style, which even now, as he (wait a second: as Zuckerman) prays for the collagen injection to take effect on his slack urethra, proceeds with the delicious complexity of dream baseball. “I write a sentence and then I turn it around,” Lonoff once said. “Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch.” Roth can still do that. It’s still all there. Only the big jokes are gone. He doesn’t laugh that way much anymore. The style that sprang from sexual energy has moved up too far into the head to permit any more gut-busting inventions like Thereal McCoy. She’s still lurking in the bathroom in “Portnoy’s Complaint,” waiting to blow the minds of the next generation of horny male adolescents, but the man who thought of her has moved on. A long way from the entrance now, he is near the exit: or he says he is.
When the Ghost exits, he leaves us asking whether he is real. But he is real as long as Macbeth thinks so. Lonoff was the ghost of Zuckerman’s father the way that Portnoy’s father was the ghost of Roth’s father, who, we may deduce, was pained by the way his brilliant son won fame. But we deduce it from one of the son’s novels. In “Zuckerman Unbound,” Zuckerman emerged as the author of “Carnovsky,” a book as scandalous to the older generation of Jews as “Portnoy’s Complaint.” Zuckerman went on to become further established as a writer with a career path very much like Roth’s, except of course, it isn’t. Or what if “isn’t” isn’t the word? Only the stage directions confirm that the speaker was ever there.
“Exit Ghost.” Great title. The book of a great writer. A great book? Maybe it’s just another piece of a puzzle. A great puzzle, and true to life in being so. In these strange and wonderful books that he writes under or about another name than his, Roth has been mapping the geography in an area of life where only his literary heroes — Kafka, of course, is one of them — have ever gone. The labyrinth of consciousness is actually constructed from the only means by which we can find a way out of it. It’s a web that Ariadne spins from her own thread. You don’t get to figure it out. You only get to watch it being spun. And if you are Nathan Dedalus (it was Zuckerman’s name for himself in the running heads to the second chapter of “The Ghost Writer”), you are in love with her for life, even if it kills you.
From the New York Times
By CLIVE JAMES
EXIT GHOST By Philip Roth.
In a Mobius striptease, the disrobing stripper is always on the point of getting dressed again, and there is no resolution to the revelation.
A Mobius striptease in written form, Philip Roth’s new novel, “Exit Ghost,” is purportedly his long-running character Nathan Zuckerman’s new novel, narrated in the first person. During the course of Nathan Zuckerman’s new novel, Zuckerman raises the question of whether an author’s personal biography should ever be drawn into any discussion about his works of art. The answer seems to be that any reader who might want to do so must be a bit of a klutz.
But we get that answer only if we decide that Zuckerman is speaking for Roth when he, Zuckerman, seems to endorse the opinion of Amy Bellette, now old, gray and diseased but once the young mistress, helpmeet and nurse of Zuckerman’s mentor and hero E. I. Lonoff, that there is something crassly illiterate about any attempt even by scholars, let alone journalists, to trace the inspiration of her erstwhile lover’s works to his actual life. And what if Zuckerman doesn’t endorse her opinion? He quotes her at length, but without explicitly agreeing, even though the long letter in which she expresses her objections to biographical reductionism suggests that she can write an essay nearly as well as, say, Philip Roth.
Maybe Zuckerman is withholding judgment. He may well have reason to do so, because in Roth’s early Zuckerman works, notably “The Ghost Writer” (first published in 1979, and hey, there’s the ghost already), Zuckerman was probing the secrets about the connection between Lonoff’s work and his real life even as a character in this new book, Richard Kliman, is hoping, by revealing the facts about Lonoff’s real life, to win for the neglected Lonoff the fame he has always lacked, and thereby get his works republished in the Library of America (the same distinguished imprint, we alert readers will note, that is currently republishing the complete works of none other than Philip Roth — no victim of neglect he). Hoping to? Insisting. There is no getting rid of Kliman. He just keeps on coming back.
As portrayed by Zuckerman, Kliman is irredeemably obnoxious. But room is left for the possibility that the young Zuckerman might once have been a bit less altruistic — a bit more ruthlessly ambitious all round — than he once reported himself as being in the first person, or was reported to be by Roth in the third person. (If you want to go back and check this out, the early sequence of Zuckerman novels are now published as “Zuckerman Bound: A Trilogy and Epilogue, 1979-1985” in a single, typically sumptuous volume from, you guessed it, the Library of America, $35: but a warning — the name Zuckerman has the word “sugar” loosely buried within it, and once you give that old hunger a chance to burn again, you may not be able to stop.) What if the decaying Zuckerman, by heaping imprecations on the repellent Kliman, is simply refusing to recognize his pristine young self reborn? Complicated enough for you yet? We’re just getting started.
If Zuckerman ever decides that he was once, under his show of Chekhov-loving sensitivity, crassly illiterate to stalk Lonoff, then we might decide that we are crassly illiterate to ask whether Zuckerman’s state of health in this new novel has any connection to Roth’s in real life. In “Exit Ghost,” Zuckerman, whom we have known since he was young and potent, has had prostate surgery that has left him impotent, not to mention incontinent. (We may not mention it now, but we’re going to have to soon.) There is a beautiful young woman in the novel, Jamie Logan, who is willing to be made love to by the avowedly decrepit Zuckerman, but he deliberately fails to keep the appointment, or seems to. (By then he is talking about himself as if he were a character in a play. Maybe he nailed her, but rigged the dialogue to suggest he didn’t. See my forthcoming paper “How Unreal Was Thereal McCoy? Strategic Female Fantasy Figures in the Disguised Biography of Philip Roth.”)
Is Roth saying, through Zuckerman, that the only reason he, Roth, might fail to show up for such a date is that he is no longer capable of going through with the consequences? Are we allowed to ask whether the real-life Roth, who once had to stave off accusations of providing the model for his character Alexander Portnoy, is no longer in thrall to his virile member, if he ever was? (After all, he never actually said he was. He said Portnoy was.) In the last rumor I heard on the subject, one of the most luxuriantly beautiful young Australian female film stars had thrown herself at Roth’s feet lightly clad — I mean she was lightly clad, not Roth’s feet — and demanded satisfaction.
This rumor might have had no more substance than the one about the famous actor and the gerbil, but it traveled at the same speed, and for the same reason: it fitted the legend. Roth has been catnip for upmarket women all his life, and never not renowned for it. In London, when he lived there, Roth would enter a fashionable drawing room with Claire Bloom on his arm and you would wonder how he had got into the house without a band striking up “Hail to the Chief.”
Roth might never have been Alexander Portnoy, but the inventor of Alexander Portnoy, unless he was a studious lizard from outer space with limitless powers of telepathic imagination, was a male human being well schooled in carnal relationships with women. It is true that Zuckerman, even when all the books of his saga are taken together, falls short of being a full case of Portnovian satyriasis. Zuckerman lusts after many women, but he does not get to make them all. He gets to make notes on them all. He is a writer. In just such a way, Jay McInerney might have invented an alter ego who was a dietitian, and who lured all those fashion models up to his apartment in order to weigh them. How can we fail to ask whether or not Roth still has what it takes, if he presents us with a central character based on himself who has it no longer? But is the character really based on himself? Let’s go back to the beginning.
Before we do, we should note that there is no question of abandoning the quest for clarification. “Exit Ghost” is just too fascinating to leave alone. It was designed that way, like the Tar Baby. Actually — leaving aside all questions about authorial identity for the moment — this book is latter-day Roth at his intricately thoughtful best, and a vivid reminder of why a dystopian satirical fantasy like “The Plot Against America” was comparatively weak. Roth has no business making up the world. His business is making up his mind, in the sense that his true material for inventing a pattern is self-exploration, not social satire.
Tom Lehrer once said that when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize it was time to give up on satire. But for Roth it was always time to give up on satire. The world is too obviously out of whack for a writer of his quality to give it the best of his attention. He should reserve that for his own psyche, which is only subtly out of whack, but still would be if he were living in paradise. Unlike the world, his mentality can’t be fixed, so a self-assertive rage is inappropriate. Only self-analysis will serve, and to pursue that without solipsism is the continuing challenge. Roth gets as close as anyone ever has to being clinically detached about spreading his own brains all over the operating table. But hold it there. We were going to start again.
And we have to start with the absorbent pads stuffed down the shorts. Zuckerman is leaking yellow water. Doing so, he has run for harbor. To change the metaphor, he has run for cover. He is somewhere up in the Berkshires near Tanglewood, not far from where none other than E. I. Lonoff once holed up to keep the inquisitive literary world at bay. When Zuckerman comes to New York to see the doctor, he avoids ground zero. He no longer wants to keep up with the news, even that news. (“I’ve served my tour.”) But he’s still not done with Lonoff.
At the Strand bookstore, Zuckerman puts together, for under $100, a complete spare set of Lonoff’s first editions. (There was my chance to meet Zuckerman. I could well have been in the Strand at the same time, adding to my row of Philip Roth hardbacks. If they had been first editions, they would have cost me thousands. Was that Zuckerman, the tall, grizzled patriarch in the rare-book section on the fourth floor who was going through that stack of New Yorkers with the original Roger Angell baseball articles? But wait a second: Zuckerman is a ghost.)
In Saul Bellow’s first post-Nobel novel, “The Dean’s December,” mortal fear centered on the colon. (“It’s serious enough for me to be wearing the bag.”) In Roth’s “Exit Ghost,” it centers on the prostate, or anyway on where the prostate used to be. The bearer of the wound can reach no accommodation with his loss. If I can speak for the outside world, which is where I come from, this is the area where the current generation of magisterial American male writers who are now making the last preparations for their immortality — Roth, Vidal, Mailer, Updike — come closest to evincing a common national characteristic.
This glittering crew, a Team America that not even Henry James and Edith Wharton put together could possibly have foreseen, is the most commanding bunch of representatives American literary culture has yet had, but there is something about American culture that doesn’t want to accept death as a fitting end to life. They are so incorrigibly energetic that the white light of their expectations bleaches even their pessimism. In that respect, they could all take a tip from, say, Joan Didion, who at least has never imagined that the Grim Reaper gets into the tournament only on a wild card.
But this isn’t even a quibble. It’s just an observation from someone standing awed and stunned on the sidelines. In my own country, Australia, “Portnoy’s Complaint,” first published in 1969, was a banned book for the first five years of its career. Having exiled myself to London, I was able to read it, but even in London there was no mistaking that the Americans were leaving the old British Empire looking not just superseded but mealy-mouthed.
American English had become the dominant language of modern reality. There was still a lot to be said for a version of English that wasn’t dominant (the British and ex-colonial writers would go on to prove that postimperial confusion was at least as fruitful as imperial success had ever been), but you couldn’t mistake the shift of cultural power. Even today, decades later, a British professor of American studies at a provincial university is in the position of someone with the free run of the PX at the local United States Air Force base: he has access to goods whose quality is hard to match locally. As for the homegrown literati, listen to Martin Amis talking about Bellow, and Ian McEwan talking about Updike. Try to imagine the same relationship in reverse. It might happen one day, but not quite yet. For my own part, I can only say this much: Of the two funniest books I have ever read in my life, “Lucky Jim” made me laugh loudest, but “Portnoy’s Complaint” set me free.
But in culture as in military strength, preponderance has its drawbacks. The big guns get a sense of mission, and their very confidence invites questions about their vision, even about their ability to gaze within. Just as Bellow, in his factual writings, never asked himself the awkward question about divisions within Israel, so in his fictional writings he stifled a question that would have multiplied his range: he never made a subject out of his succession of discarded wives, when you would have thought — must have thought — that for a writer otherwise so brilliantly introspective, there lay the essence of his subject. Similarly, Mailer, unceasingly writing advertisements for himself, never delved far enough into his own psyche to make a subject out of his complicity in the death of Jack Abbott’s victim: the great writer could face every embarrassment except the one that pierced to the center of his responsibility as a public writer.
Vidal has never admitted, let alone explored, the question of whether his criticisms of the American power elite might not be compromised by his membership in it. Does he really think, when he argues that F.D.R. tricked Japan into World War II, that the Japanese right wing, currently making a comeback, will not take this as an endorsement of its views? And does Updike think we will never ask how his basketballing Rabbit can have the sensibility of Proust, or whether Bech, the character he created to embody his fame as a writer, was not calculated to increase it?
Finally it is only Roth who takes himself entirely to pieces. Has he been cruel to leave recognizable the outlines of discarded loved ones? Yes. Has he made a subject of that? Yes again. That’s why his father keeps on coming back. Even less inclined to be shaken off than the awful Kliman, the fathers of Roth’s leading men walk the platform by dead of night. But does even Roth complete the peeling of the artichoke? To look for the answer, we must go back again to the beginning of this new novel and try, this time, to finish up somewhere beyond the start. For Zuckerman, if not for Roth, potency is gone. Has desire gone with it? You bet your life it hasn’t. Listen to this:
“And so I set out to minimize the loss by struggling to pretend that desire had naturally abated, until I came in contact for barely an hour with a beautiful, privileged, intelligent, self-possessed, languid-looking 30-year-old made enticingly vulnerable by her fears and I experienced the bitter helplessness of a taunted old man dying to be whole again.”
But she’s been there since “Goodbye, Columbus,” and as long as he can imagine her, he is whole again. The wholeness is in the style, which even now, as he (wait a second: as Zuckerman) prays for the collagen injection to take effect on his slack urethra, proceeds with the delicious complexity of dream baseball. “I write a sentence and then I turn it around,” Lonoff once said. “Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch.” Roth can still do that. It’s still all there. Only the big jokes are gone. He doesn’t laugh that way much anymore. The style that sprang from sexual energy has moved up too far into the head to permit any more gut-busting inventions like Thereal McCoy. She’s still lurking in the bathroom in “Portnoy’s Complaint,” waiting to blow the minds of the next generation of horny male adolescents, but the man who thought of her has moved on. A long way from the entrance now, he is near the exit: or he says he is.
When the Ghost exits, he leaves us asking whether he is real. But he is real as long as Macbeth thinks so. Lonoff was the ghost of Zuckerman’s father the way that Portnoy’s father was the ghost of Roth’s father, who, we may deduce, was pained by the way his brilliant son won fame. But we deduce it from one of the son’s novels. In “Zuckerman Unbound,” Zuckerman emerged as the author of “Carnovsky,” a book as scandalous to the older generation of Jews as “Portnoy’s Complaint.” Zuckerman went on to become further established as a writer with a career path very much like Roth’s, except of course, it isn’t. Or what if “isn’t” isn’t the word? Only the stage directions confirm that the speaker was ever there.
“Exit Ghost.” Great title. The book of a great writer. A great book? Maybe it’s just another piece of a puzzle. A great puzzle, and true to life in being so. In these strange and wonderful books that he writes under or about another name than his, Roth has been mapping the geography in an area of life where only his literary heroes — Kafka, of course, is one of them — have ever gone. The labyrinth of consciousness is actually constructed from the only means by which we can find a way out of it. It’s a web that Ariadne spins from her own thread. You don’t get to figure it out. You only get to watch it being spun. And if you are Nathan Dedalus (it was Zuckerman’s name for himself in the running heads to the second chapter of “The Ghost Writer”), you are in love with her for life, even if it kills you.
A Review of Auster's New York trilogy
By: Patrick McGrath
Saturday July 29, 2006
The Guardian
My reasons for moving to New York at the beginning of the 1980s were twofold. One was love. The other was the desire to become a writer. The city was then in a period of stagnation and decay. The middle classes were in flight to the suburbs, the tax base was eroding, there was racial tension, rioting, strikes, crime: the history is familiar. But that said, it was hard not to be aware of a certain electricity in the air, also a certain brazen hubris. You felt that this city didn't merely believe its own myth, it was actually better than its myth. I came to consider it a privilege to live here. So when I was invited to write a short book about the place, I accepted with alacrity. To pay homage to New York in 50,000 words struck me as a very attractive proposition, so much so it would barely feel like work.
I ran into difficulties almost at once. I discovered how very hard it is to say anything about New York that has not been said before. Everybody knows about the peerless architecture, the cosmopolitan elegance, the constant raucous din - "like the unbandaging of great giants in agony", Malcolm Lowry wrote about the city - and of course its extraordinary human density. Everyone has seen the old gravestones quietly crumbling among the downtown skyscrapers, and the ruins of the fever hospital in the middle of the East River. They know Bellevue, where Lowry was in detox for a while, they know the Tombs, they have been up to the Cloisters. They have heard the story of how the Fulton Street fish market, when the day's waste was tossed in the river, would attract dozens of sharks.
What, then, to say about New York? I abandoned the idea of the extended essay and considered instead the memoir. To my considerable distress I soon realised that my own story was no different from those of millions of others drawn here since the city began life as a Dutch trading colony. You arrive penniless, equipped only with your ambition and your talent, such as it is. You work hard, you compete ferociously, and you make it or you don't. If you do, you get to move from the Lower East Side to the Upper East Side. Or, if you prefer, to the lower west side, ie Tribeca. That is, if you can first get a toehold on the island at all, which these days requires serious bucks.
I had only one string left to my fiddle. There was a remote chance, I thought, that if I wrote fiction about New York then I might find something original to say. The idea came to me of a book made up of three novellas, each one set at a different moment in New York's history. I would start with the revolutionary war of 1775-83.
From 1776 to the end of the war, the British army was in occupation and trashed Manhattan. Does any army in occupation of a foreign city behave otherwise? The soldiers turned it from a thriving seaport into a military garrison. Foreign trade was closed down. The wharves and docks began to rot. Redcoats and their officers caroused outrageously. They raped the local women and murdered their men. They rode their horses into private homes to get them out of the rain, they commandeered property, hanged suspected patriots in broad daylight, and also in secrecy by night. Those who weren't hanged were shackled on prison ships in the East River, where they died of hunger and disease and were then tossed overboard stitched up in shrouds of old sailcloth.
In such a town the situation of a rebel, an American patriot, say, spying on the enemy forces occupying the city and carrying intelligence across the Hudson to General Washington in New Jersey, where he was encamped with his ragged citizen army, might provide good drama. If that patriot spy was a woman, the stakes would be higher still, and if she were then betrayed, say, by her son - and so it began.
The 19th century saw New York ascendant. It was Whitman's "mettlesome, mad, extravagant city", the city of Cornelius Vanderbilt and Stanford White. Powerful merchants, vast fortunes, immense volumes of trade. The city expanding rapidly. Immigrants flooding in. Take a prosperous merchant, give him a son - but one son only - have him groom the boy to take over the business. But the boy has no head for business. The boy wants to be, of all things, an artist. What's worse, he has fallen in love with an artist's model! And she's Irish!
And so the second story took shape.
The last would be written not out of historical research, but from my own experience of the weeks after 9/11. A shattered New York, reeling from the shock of the attacks, the smoke still rising, and a sense of horror and unreality almost overwhelming the traumatised populace as the sun shone from obscenely clear skies in the September and October of 2001. A man takes up with a prostitute, an instance of the "catastrophe sex" not uncommon in devastated cities, and reports to his therapist that he has fallen in love. The therapist, no less disturbed than her client by the attacks, reacts unwisely.
And so the third story began. As I was finishing it I noticed that in each story a ghost, or the idea of ghosts, was present. This was quite unintentional, but it did give me a title: Ghost Town, an unlikely sobriquet for this most animated of cities. It was also clear that in each of the three periods I had chosen, devastation on a grand scale had been inflicted on New York, specifically in the same few square blocks of lower Manhattan. In fact, New York has suffered serial catastrophe ever since the Dutch arrived in the early 17th century and built a wall across the island to keep the native Americans out. Fires, massacres, epidemics, riots, lynchings, bombings - New York's record is perhaps no worse than that of any other great city. But the insight does offer a deeper historical perspective from which to view 9/11: to regard it, I mean, as only the most recent of the multitude of assaults suffered by this glorious, resilient, unquenchable city.
Saturday July 29, 2006
The Guardian
My reasons for moving to New York at the beginning of the 1980s were twofold. One was love. The other was the desire to become a writer. The city was then in a period of stagnation and decay. The middle classes were in flight to the suburbs, the tax base was eroding, there was racial tension, rioting, strikes, crime: the history is familiar. But that said, it was hard not to be aware of a certain electricity in the air, also a certain brazen hubris. You felt that this city didn't merely believe its own myth, it was actually better than its myth. I came to consider it a privilege to live here. So when I was invited to write a short book about the place, I accepted with alacrity. To pay homage to New York in 50,000 words struck me as a very attractive proposition, so much so it would barely feel like work.
I ran into difficulties almost at once. I discovered how very hard it is to say anything about New York that has not been said before. Everybody knows about the peerless architecture, the cosmopolitan elegance, the constant raucous din - "like the unbandaging of great giants in agony", Malcolm Lowry wrote about the city - and of course its extraordinary human density. Everyone has seen the old gravestones quietly crumbling among the downtown skyscrapers, and the ruins of the fever hospital in the middle of the East River. They know Bellevue, where Lowry was in detox for a while, they know the Tombs, they have been up to the Cloisters. They have heard the story of how the Fulton Street fish market, when the day's waste was tossed in the river, would attract dozens of sharks.
What, then, to say about New York? I abandoned the idea of the extended essay and considered instead the memoir. To my considerable distress I soon realised that my own story was no different from those of millions of others drawn here since the city began life as a Dutch trading colony. You arrive penniless, equipped only with your ambition and your talent, such as it is. You work hard, you compete ferociously, and you make it or you don't. If you do, you get to move from the Lower East Side to the Upper East Side. Or, if you prefer, to the lower west side, ie Tribeca. That is, if you can first get a toehold on the island at all, which these days requires serious bucks.
I had only one string left to my fiddle. There was a remote chance, I thought, that if I wrote fiction about New York then I might find something original to say. The idea came to me of a book made up of three novellas, each one set at a different moment in New York's history. I would start with the revolutionary war of 1775-83.
From 1776 to the end of the war, the British army was in occupation and trashed Manhattan. Does any army in occupation of a foreign city behave otherwise? The soldiers turned it from a thriving seaport into a military garrison. Foreign trade was closed down. The wharves and docks began to rot. Redcoats and their officers caroused outrageously. They raped the local women and murdered their men. They rode their horses into private homes to get them out of the rain, they commandeered property, hanged suspected patriots in broad daylight, and also in secrecy by night. Those who weren't hanged were shackled on prison ships in the East River, where they died of hunger and disease and were then tossed overboard stitched up in shrouds of old sailcloth.
In such a town the situation of a rebel, an American patriot, say, spying on the enemy forces occupying the city and carrying intelligence across the Hudson to General Washington in New Jersey, where he was encamped with his ragged citizen army, might provide good drama. If that patriot spy was a woman, the stakes would be higher still, and if she were then betrayed, say, by her son - and so it began.
The 19th century saw New York ascendant. It was Whitman's "mettlesome, mad, extravagant city", the city of Cornelius Vanderbilt and Stanford White. Powerful merchants, vast fortunes, immense volumes of trade. The city expanding rapidly. Immigrants flooding in. Take a prosperous merchant, give him a son - but one son only - have him groom the boy to take over the business. But the boy has no head for business. The boy wants to be, of all things, an artist. What's worse, he has fallen in love with an artist's model! And she's Irish!
And so the second story took shape.
The last would be written not out of historical research, but from my own experience of the weeks after 9/11. A shattered New York, reeling from the shock of the attacks, the smoke still rising, and a sense of horror and unreality almost overwhelming the traumatised populace as the sun shone from obscenely clear skies in the September and October of 2001. A man takes up with a prostitute, an instance of the "catastrophe sex" not uncommon in devastated cities, and reports to his therapist that he has fallen in love. The therapist, no less disturbed than her client by the attacks, reacts unwisely.
And so the third story began. As I was finishing it I noticed that in each story a ghost, or the idea of ghosts, was present. This was quite unintentional, but it did give me a title: Ghost Town, an unlikely sobriquet for this most animated of cities. It was also clear that in each of the three periods I had chosen, devastation on a grand scale had been inflicted on New York, specifically in the same few square blocks of lower Manhattan. In fact, New York has suffered serial catastrophe ever since the Dutch arrived in the early 17th century and built a wall across the island to keep the native Americans out. Fires, massacres, epidemics, riots, lynchings, bombings - New York's record is perhaps no worse than that of any other great city. But the insight does offer a deeper historical perspective from which to view 9/11: to regard it, I mean, as only the most recent of the multitude of assaults suffered by this glorious, resilient, unquenchable city.
Tropic of Cancer, a Review by Dan Schneider
There is truth to the claim that sometimes a bad writer can be closer to greatness than a good writer, because the bad writer may just be slightly off in all the areas he or she needs to be great in, while the good writer is merely solid in all areas, but never comes close to greatness in any area. This, however, is not the case with Henry Miller. He is a bad writer because he is virtually void of any writing talent. Let’s go down the checklist: Imagery - no. Narrative ability- no. Characterization - no. Depth - no. Insight - no. Dialogue - no. Poesy - no. Wit - no. I could go on, but you get the general drift. Instead, Miller was one of the earliest examples of a talentless badass who made a name for himself on reputation alone. Yes, he may have been well read, but he couldn’t write worth a lick. In this regard he was a prosaic Ezra Pound, save the talent, or an early Beatnik, sans the bongos. One might say he was America’s Parisian Rimbaud, except that there were glimmers of talent in that overhyped scatologist. Miller has nothing but books larded with banality, dullness, and the overuse of curse words. And, no, he does not use them creatively in the way, say, 1999’s ‘South Park’ feature film did.
I read both books on back-to-back days, and there really is not much to either. Imagine Pound writing fiction on a bad day at the asylum. Of course, I recall once having a conversation at a pizzeria with a drunken bisexual wannabe writer about the books, which I’d only glanced at at the time, and he raved over their brilliance. Why? Because talentless wannabe writers love to promote and ejaculate over material that any other talentless hack could have written. I don’t doubt that hack I knew could have equalled Miller’s garbage. But, the fact is that neither should have been published. Even the banal and lazy ravings of Postmodernists have more to offer than mere bilge. Not much more, but some. The out that defenders of such garbage - the forebear of execrable pissings like James Frey’s Oprah-endorsed ‘A Million Little Pieces’ - never rely on the actual work to defend it. No one ever points to gorgeous prose, wonderful moments, talk stolen from reality, for the obvious reason that there are no such things to recommend in the work. Instead, they haul out canards about ‘truth’, ‘honesty’, ‘pain’, and the like. And, being banned never helps create demand. As overrated as I think the later works of Joyce are – ‘Ulysses’ and ‘Finnegans Wake’ - both are more deserving of study than this bilge. Even Jack Kerouac’s droning ‘On The Road’ is a masterpiece by comparison to these two utter pieces of nothingness.
‘Tropic Of Cancer’ was written in 1934, and ‘Tropic Of Capricorn’ in 1938. They are his two most famous works - rivaled only by his ‘Sexus’, ‘Plexus’, and ‘Nexus’ trilogy. Had only Miller spent more time working on writing than his own most obvious talent, public relations, he may have been a greeting card writer in the offing. Here is his most famous quote from Cancer: “This is not a book. This is a libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty.’ Great, eh? Both books are basically the autobiographies of Miller, with the usual dash of braggadocio and bullshit thrown in. Of course, nothing much really happens in either book. Miller fucks, sucks, drinks and stinks. Yet, the work is not pornographic, as its detractors over the years have claimed. Porn actually induces a visceral reaction. This is just dull as sin. Miller was over forty when he wrote it, yet I have read the diaries of fourteen year olds that were more interesting. Boredom, not profanity, is Miller’s greatest sin.
Cancer goes on for 318 pages, while Capricorn drones on an even longer 30 pages more. There are no formal chapters in either book, but this makes sense. Does one consider the act of pinching off a log of shit an act of finality? Of course not. The French often rejoice in the fact that they can see talent where Americans cannot. While there is legitimate debate over the merits of Jerry Lewis films there really is none over Miller. Even the French don’t pretend any longer. Yes, the Germans still defend Bukowski, but give them another twenty years. The truth is that the pre-War Paris of the 30s was the epicentre of indulgent expatriate American prose writing. Hemingway and Fitzgerald, at least, had talent to begin with, despite their flaws. Miller needed to set himself apart. If he couldn’t do it with words, why not shit?
Miller’s writing is so puerile it makes D.H. Lawrence look senescent. Miller’s descriptions of sex are so absurd, unintendedly, that they one might actually believe the man never was conscious during the act. He both degrades and hypes it, rather than looking at it with dispassion and examining what may lay inside - figuratively and literally. He has not any idea what to do with narrative, nor even what it is, or can do. Of course, many defenders state that this sex obsession is a sign of Miller’s politicality, when really it is a sign of his dementia and stunted personal growth. Yes, Hank, women can be bitches and cunts, but coming from a dick like you, where’s the pejorative? Miller tries to make suffering seem chic, yet the lie is not only that it’s not, but those who are born poor know it’s not, and only a pansy bourgeois elitist who goes slumming would think it is. Every ten pages there’s a rare sentence or two that shows a glimmer of poetry, but the dull and unrealistic conversations, obsession with shit, vermin, drink, sex, and disease then reassert themselves, like a boner that needs an encounter with Lorena Bobbitt.
Let’s see, what else might you need to know? Oh, one book is set mainly in Paris, the other in New York. If I have not yet let slip which book is set in which it does not matter. There is no plot. Am I going in circles? This technique is known as recapitulation. Imagine me stating, There is no plot. Am I going in circles? This technique is known as recapitulation, over and again for three hundred plus pages, with a few fucks and cunts tossed in. There - now you need not even buy the Cliff’s Notes. Let me see - can one identify with the lead characters in either book? No, they are all repugnant, and, again, even more damningly - DULL! Yes, they’re racists, liars, anti-Semites, perverts, drama queens, misogynists, misandrists, wannabe artistes- in short, the perfect fodder for talentless hacks, for most of them share the same qualities.
The truth is that Henry Miller was the worst example of a writer who really needed an editor. Yes, David Foster Wallace had an editor prune three thousand pages of his ‘Infinite Jest’ down to a mere thousand, and still couldn’t find anything worthwhile, but here there was obviously not even an attempt. Perhaps the only thing that will stick in my memory about these books is that, in a weird way, they remind me of some of the sleazy and bigoted writings of the worst bloggers online. And, like the talentless hacks who like to praise talentless writing, those online hacks show that even their putrescent complaints are old, really old and formulaic. Miller even makes his famously narcissistic lover, Anäis Nin, seem deep, by comparison, with his stream-of-dullness writing. Of the two books, were I two choose which one would be the greater torture to reread, I would choose Cancer, for Capricorn is slightly more coherent, and a bit more mature. It’s relative, of course, and still mostly dull as….oh, hell, I deserve it, SHIT!, but it at least attempts to give you context for its garbage. Some critics have said that Miller was a man of attitudes, not ideas. Wrong again. Miller was a cipher as a writer, but a marvelous promoter - the P.T. Barnum of early 20th Century literature. And this should be acknowledged, for it was his only talent. Yet, to even attempt a deep analysis of what is clearly one of the premier put-ons in literature is waste of time and effort. And I’m hardly a prude. I simply demand quality. Henry Miller simply says less with more words than just about any writer that has ever been published.
If other critics did he’d be forgotten now. Let’s see….oh, a quote from the book. No, got that. Gotta end? Ah, shit! No, that didn’t work. Now I know how that talentless drunken bisexual hack at the pizzeria felt. I’m doomed.
Reviewed by: Dan Schneider (www.cosmoetica.com)
I read both books on back-to-back days, and there really is not much to either. Imagine Pound writing fiction on a bad day at the asylum. Of course, I recall once having a conversation at a pizzeria with a drunken bisexual wannabe writer about the books, which I’d only glanced at at the time, and he raved over their brilliance. Why? Because talentless wannabe writers love to promote and ejaculate over material that any other talentless hack could have written. I don’t doubt that hack I knew could have equalled Miller’s garbage. But, the fact is that neither should have been published. Even the banal and lazy ravings of Postmodernists have more to offer than mere bilge. Not much more, but some. The out that defenders of such garbage - the forebear of execrable pissings like James Frey’s Oprah-endorsed ‘A Million Little Pieces’ - never rely on the actual work to defend it. No one ever points to gorgeous prose, wonderful moments, talk stolen from reality, for the obvious reason that there are no such things to recommend in the work. Instead, they haul out canards about ‘truth’, ‘honesty’, ‘pain’, and the like. And, being banned never helps create demand. As overrated as I think the later works of Joyce are – ‘Ulysses’ and ‘Finnegans Wake’ - both are more deserving of study than this bilge. Even Jack Kerouac’s droning ‘On The Road’ is a masterpiece by comparison to these two utter pieces of nothingness.
‘Tropic Of Cancer’ was written in 1934, and ‘Tropic Of Capricorn’ in 1938. They are his two most famous works - rivaled only by his ‘Sexus’, ‘Plexus’, and ‘Nexus’ trilogy. Had only Miller spent more time working on writing than his own most obvious talent, public relations, he may have been a greeting card writer in the offing. Here is his most famous quote from Cancer: “This is not a book. This is a libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty.’ Great, eh? Both books are basically the autobiographies of Miller, with the usual dash of braggadocio and bullshit thrown in. Of course, nothing much really happens in either book. Miller fucks, sucks, drinks and stinks. Yet, the work is not pornographic, as its detractors over the years have claimed. Porn actually induces a visceral reaction. This is just dull as sin. Miller was over forty when he wrote it, yet I have read the diaries of fourteen year olds that were more interesting. Boredom, not profanity, is Miller’s greatest sin.
Cancer goes on for 318 pages, while Capricorn drones on an even longer 30 pages more. There are no formal chapters in either book, but this makes sense. Does one consider the act of pinching off a log of shit an act of finality? Of course not. The French often rejoice in the fact that they can see talent where Americans cannot. While there is legitimate debate over the merits of Jerry Lewis films there really is none over Miller. Even the French don’t pretend any longer. Yes, the Germans still defend Bukowski, but give them another twenty years. The truth is that the pre-War Paris of the 30s was the epicentre of indulgent expatriate American prose writing. Hemingway and Fitzgerald, at least, had talent to begin with, despite their flaws. Miller needed to set himself apart. If he couldn’t do it with words, why not shit?
Miller’s writing is so puerile it makes D.H. Lawrence look senescent. Miller’s descriptions of sex are so absurd, unintendedly, that they one might actually believe the man never was conscious during the act. He both degrades and hypes it, rather than looking at it with dispassion and examining what may lay inside - figuratively and literally. He has not any idea what to do with narrative, nor even what it is, or can do. Of course, many defenders state that this sex obsession is a sign of Miller’s politicality, when really it is a sign of his dementia and stunted personal growth. Yes, Hank, women can be bitches and cunts, but coming from a dick like you, where’s the pejorative? Miller tries to make suffering seem chic, yet the lie is not only that it’s not, but those who are born poor know it’s not, and only a pansy bourgeois elitist who goes slumming would think it is. Every ten pages there’s a rare sentence or two that shows a glimmer of poetry, but the dull and unrealistic conversations, obsession with shit, vermin, drink, sex, and disease then reassert themselves, like a boner that needs an encounter with Lorena Bobbitt.
Let’s see, what else might you need to know? Oh, one book is set mainly in Paris, the other in New York. If I have not yet let slip which book is set in which it does not matter. There is no plot. Am I going in circles? This technique is known as recapitulation. Imagine me stating, There is no plot. Am I going in circles? This technique is known as recapitulation, over and again for three hundred plus pages, with a few fucks and cunts tossed in. There - now you need not even buy the Cliff’s Notes. Let me see - can one identify with the lead characters in either book? No, they are all repugnant, and, again, even more damningly - DULL! Yes, they’re racists, liars, anti-Semites, perverts, drama queens, misogynists, misandrists, wannabe artistes- in short, the perfect fodder for talentless hacks, for most of them share the same qualities.
The truth is that Henry Miller was the worst example of a writer who really needed an editor. Yes, David Foster Wallace had an editor prune three thousand pages of his ‘Infinite Jest’ down to a mere thousand, and still couldn’t find anything worthwhile, but here there was obviously not even an attempt. Perhaps the only thing that will stick in my memory about these books is that, in a weird way, they remind me of some of the sleazy and bigoted writings of the worst bloggers online. And, like the talentless hacks who like to praise talentless writing, those online hacks show that even their putrescent complaints are old, really old and formulaic. Miller even makes his famously narcissistic lover, Anäis Nin, seem deep, by comparison, with his stream-of-dullness writing. Of the two books, were I two choose which one would be the greater torture to reread, I would choose Cancer, for Capricorn is slightly more coherent, and a bit more mature. It’s relative, of course, and still mostly dull as….oh, hell, I deserve it, SHIT!, but it at least attempts to give you context for its garbage. Some critics have said that Miller was a man of attitudes, not ideas. Wrong again. Miller was a cipher as a writer, but a marvelous promoter - the P.T. Barnum of early 20th Century literature. And this should be acknowledged, for it was his only talent. Yet, to even attempt a deep analysis of what is clearly one of the premier put-ons in literature is waste of time and effort. And I’m hardly a prude. I simply demand quality. Henry Miller simply says less with more words than just about any writer that has ever been published.
If other critics did he’d be forgotten now. Let’s see….oh, a quote from the book. No, got that. Gotta end? Ah, shit! No, that didn’t work. Now I know how that talentless drunken bisexual hack at the pizzeria felt. I’m doomed.
Reviewed by: Dan Schneider (www.cosmoetica.com)
The Henry Miller Library
Some things in life never made sense to anyone. For example:
Who would ever believe that Clara would be the kind of a woman who would spend her Sunday afternoons hanging around the Henry Miller section of the Miami-Dade County library? I mean, maybe, just maybe, if she lived in Fort Jackson, Arkansas or Muncie, Indiana, things would be more clear, would make more sense, but here she was, living in downtown Miami, less than 10 minutes away from the world famous South Beach district and Ocean drive. She could have spent her Sundays sitting around the News Cafe or Mangos. She could have had tall Latin men running around and buying her chocolate Martinis. A woman who looked so good always heard the same lines. They would promise her a free trip to the islands, a fancy dinner and drinks in the VIP section of the latest and newest club on Washington Ave. I meant those kind of VIP tables cost at least $1,000. That did not include tip. But instead she just hung around the library, picking up an old copy of Black Spring and slowly reading through Chapter 14 over and over and over.
Maybe it had something to do with that guy. Not that guy but rather that Guy. He told her he was a writer. He told her that Philip Roth or that drunken Bukowski character inspired him. But most of all he told her (right before they kissed), that Henry Miller was by far his favorite writer. That she would never be able to understand him unless she read through Henry's pages.
The Tropic series was good stuff, he told her, but if you really want to get a taste of it, you had to read the Rosy Crucifixion.That is what he told her right before he took her for a walk on the beach only a few miles from where he lived.
On a Sunday afternoon, Clara sat around and wondered why he disappeared on her. Everything was going so smoothly for the past few months and suddenly he disappeared. She read over Chapter 14 once again and then closed her eyes.
NYC Novels
Who would ever believe that Clara would be the kind of a woman who would spend her Sunday afternoons hanging around the Henry Miller section of the Miami-Dade County library? I mean, maybe, just maybe, if she lived in Fort Jackson, Arkansas or Muncie, Indiana, things would be more clear, would make more sense, but here she was, living in downtown Miami, less than 10 minutes away from the world famous South Beach district and Ocean drive. She could have spent her Sundays sitting around the News Cafe or Mangos. She could have had tall Latin men running around and buying her chocolate Martinis. A woman who looked so good always heard the same lines. They would promise her a free trip to the islands, a fancy dinner and drinks in the VIP section of the latest and newest club on Washington Ave. I meant those kind of VIP tables cost at least $1,000. That did not include tip. But instead she just hung around the library, picking up an old copy of Black Spring and slowly reading through Chapter 14 over and over and over.
Maybe it had something to do with that guy. Not that guy but rather that Guy. He told her he was a writer. He told her that Philip Roth or that drunken Bukowski character inspired him. But most of all he told her (right before they kissed), that Henry Miller was by far his favorite writer. That she would never be able to understand him unless she read through Henry's pages.
The Tropic series was good stuff, he told her, but if you really want to get a taste of it, you had to read the Rosy Crucifixion.That is what he told her right before he took her for a walk on the beach only a few miles from where he lived.
On a Sunday afternoon, Clara sat around and wondered why he disappeared on her. Everything was going so smoothly for the past few months and suddenly he disappeared. She read over Chapter 14 once again and then closed her eyes.
NYC Novels
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