How Literature Saved My Life (16 page)

I turn fifty-seven later this year. Is it true for me now? Would seem so. I fear so.

T
HERE WAS A BLOG
, then a Twitter feed, then a mega-selling book, and then a TV show, which I didn’t see before it was canceled. It sounds too easy—someone just collecting the one-off wisdom of his father—but Justin Halpern’s
Shit My Dad Says
is, to me, hugely about Vietnam (Samuel Halpern was a medic during the war), and on the basis of a single crucial scene, it’s not inconsiderably about him still processing that violence, that anger. The book is also very much about being Jewish in America, about the father teaching the son how to be Jewish
and male in America, which is a contradictory, complicated thing.

Each entry is 140 characters or fewer—the length of a tweet—and all of the subsections and minichapters are extremely short. The book is a tape recording of Sam’s best lines, overdubbed with relatively brief monologues by Justin. It’s not great or even good, probably, really, finally, but above all it’s not boring. Which is everything to me. I don’t want to read out of duty. There are hundreds of books in the history of the world that I love to death. I’m trying to stay awake and not bored and not rote. I’m trying to save my life.

In
Shit My Dad Says
the father, Samuel, is trying to convey to his son that life is only blood and bones. The son is trying to express to his father his bottomless love and complex admiration. Nothing more. Nothing less. There are vast reservoirs of feeling beneath Justin’s voice and beneath his father’s aphorisms.

The only mistake (a major one) occurs in the final chapter: the mask comes off and everything goes badly sentimental. It’s a terrible move—almost certainly the result of editorial ham-fistedness. In many ways it ruins the book.

Halpern’s instinct was to make a blog first. The book seems to be a secondary recasting of the blog. It was the blog that people kept telling me about. I like that you can be an unemployed screenwriter in San Diego (originally,
Halpern was just collecting notes for a screenplay about his dad) and six months later a bestselling writer.

Can social networking/blogging generate good books? On very rare occasions, such as this, yes.

Books, if they want to survive, need to figure out how to coexist with contemporary culture and catalyze the same energies for literary purposes. That cut-to-the-quick quality:
this is how to write and read now
, or at least
this is the only way I can write and read now
.

The undergraduates I teach are much more open to a new reading experience when it’s a blog. I know there have to be a hundred complex reasons as to why that is, but none of them change the fact that un- or even anti-literary types haven’t stopped reading. They just don’t get as excited about the book form. The blog form: immediacy, relative lack of scrim between writer and reader, promised delivery of unmediated reality, pseudo-artlessness, comedy, naked feeling.

Another example: seventeen years ago, David Lipsky spent a week with David Foster Wallace, then fourteen years later Lipsky went back and resurrected the notes. The resultant book,
Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself
, pretends to be just a compilation of notes, and maybe that’s all it is, but to me it’s a debate between two sensibilities: desperate art and pure commerce. Lipsky, I hope, knows what he’s doing: evoking himself as the quintessence of everything Wallace despised.

The book as such isn’t obsolete. Inherently, it’s less
immediate and raw, going as it does through the quaint labyrinth of the publishing industry, and even when the book is printed and ready to go, you have to either get it at a store or have it shipped or downloaded to you. Print is, of course, on the verge of becoming an artifact. Simply the physical act of holding a magazine or a book doesn’t have anything like the same psychic pull it had in the past. It has the feel of a self-conscious reenactment, as if I’m trying to imagine myself in the old West in ersatz Tombstone. For now, this is a constraint I can work around. I take it as a challenge: to give a book a “live,” up-to-date, aware, instant feel. There will always be a place for, say, the traditional novel that people read on the beach or chapter by chapter at bedtime for a month as a means of entertainment and escape. There is, though, this other, new form of reading that most books being published today don’t have an answer for. Even achieving a happy medium between the new and old reading experiences is an advance.

Efficiency in the natural world: the brutal cunning of natural selection as it sculpts DNA within living organisms. DNA is always pushing toward the most efficient path to reproduction. Water always finds the briefest, easiest path downhill. Concision is crucial to contemporary art—boiling down to the bare elements, reducing to just the basic notes (in both senses of the word). The paragraph-by-paragraph sizzle is everything.

Elif Batuman: “A lot of the writers I know are incredibly
good email writers. I often find their emails more compelling than the things they’re writing at the time. Everyone has two lives: one is open and is known to everyone, and one is unknown, running its course in secret. Email is the unknown life, and the published work is the known life.”

A former student wrote me, “For years I’ve been taking notes for a book that I hope will materialize at some point, but every time I attempt to turn the notes into the book, I hate the results. Really, what I’ve built is a database of quotations, riffs, metaphors. I find even my notes on how the book should be structured to be full of energy, because they’re an outline of my massive aspirations, most of which I have no hope of actually pulling off. It feels almost as if my book wants to be about the planning of a book: a hypothetical literature that can’t exist under earth’s current gravity.”

“The notes are the book,” I wrote back, “I promise you.”

I promise myself.

T
HE MOVIE DIRECTOR
Bryan Singer, the friend of an acquaintance, sat in first class next to George Bush
on a flight home from Korea. Asked by my acquaintance what they talked about, Singer said, “I began to understand why everybody liked him, and I liked him, too.”

“Really?” my acquaintance asked.

“Yeah, I did.”

“Did you challenge him on anything?”

“No, ’cause everyone was really nice. Bush got up and talked to everyone in first class for a long time—‘Whaddayou do?’ ‘What are you up to?’ That sort of thing. He was a great guy, very gregarious.”

A Korean dentist pulled out his camcorder and panned from
King Kong
on a large screen over to Bush reading on his Kindle, then over to Singer’s assistant, who pointed and said, “It’s George Bush!” Then back to Bush. Back to
King Kong
. The Korean dentist was more interested in the director of
X-Men
than in Bush, who sensed that Singer was gay and made what Singer perceived to be a friendly joke: “Let’s introduce our assistants and maybe they can have sex!” Bush said he was going to take a nap and asked Singer if he wanted an Ambien. When Singer said he was off Ambien now, Bush replied, “Well, I’ve been using it for years. It keeps me on schedule.” My acquaintance said Singer said Bush simply understands how the world now works; with his friendly manner he gets what he wants, and he’s at peace with everything. Singer said the camcorder video was the best film he saw all year.

What I would give to see this film.

T
HE ISOLATION
of the widely spaced sans serif characters on the hardback jacket of my novel-in-stories,
Handbook for Drowning
, is the isolation of the characters in the book. The clean lines on top contrast with the water bleeding. The T-shirted boy’s eyes are covered and thus he is Everyboy. The title is a kind of impossibility (for whom would such a manual be intended? who would bother to compose such a gloomy guide?), as is the photograph: unreadable, paradoxical. Is he sinking or ascending or, somehow, perhaps, doing both simultaneously? People in bookstores couldn’t abide the endlessly falling figure and tended to turn the book “right side up”—upside down (this edition is long out of print). Who knows how to write about happiness (which, famously, is white and doesn’t stain the page)? I took my largely happy middle-class life and pulled out all the consolations. I had no wisdom, so I faked it by sounding dire (still the case? Maybe …).

The liner notes of many grunge rock CDs contained heartbreaking photos of band members as little kids. All that hope and energy and innocence in photos of Kurt Cobain at age eight were an implicit rebuke to what had happened to the lead singer–protagonist by age twenty-seven. I was and am interested in that contrast—where did all that light in my eyes go?

Not only do so many films have a real-life basis to them, but almost every film is promoted by having the stars and director pretend that the film set reproduced the very psychodrama that the film supposedly explores, e.g.,
The Beaver
, which in many particulars echoes Mel Gibson’s real-life meltdowns. Harrison Ford says about his
Cowboys and Aliens
costar, Daniel Craig, “See how he has my back?” In other words, there’s no fiction: it starts as fact and ends as fact and in between is just a little semi-imaginary construct, which is the vehicle to get us from one fact (the originating episode) to another fact (the gossip about the set). This is very different from how people responded to
Gone with the Wind
.

I noticed this ambivalent embrace of autobiography first, I think, when visual artists I met at artists’ colonies talked about the factual and the real in a way that was related to autobiography but clearly different, more ironic, more ontologically inquisitive. The sources of the trend seem varied and complex: Metafiction’s existential questions recontextualized in a minimalist, i.e., factual, mode. The twitterization of the culture, turning personality into a cult and gossip into the only acknowledged platform. The nonfiction novel of the ’60s, only turned sideways now, so not poetic reporting about the march on the Pentagon, but taking the traditional material of modernist fiction—the interior self—and conducting a kind of art criticism or high journalism on it. All the
deconstructive questioning of the existence of the self as anything other than text. The writers I like tend to present the ambiguities of genre as an analogue to the ambiguities of existence. Two things that Spalding Gray did so well—place himself in harm’s way and reveal the process by which each work got made—are crucial to me.

I think, too, that this whole theme of life and art has always been everything to me (for what I hope are, by now, painfully obvious reasons). And yet I’m also very skeptical of easy modernist claims of art’s refuge from life’s storms. I’m very drawn to the way in which a life lived can be an art of sorts or a failed art and a life-lived-told can be art as well. I often seem to be defending the ineluctable modality of the real.

W
HEN
I
CHAIRED
the nonfiction panel for the 2007 National Book Award, the other panelists and I got along perfectly well—for the first several months. We made the usual jokes about how we would make it up to our respective mail carriers, how the floorboards and Ping-Pong tables in our apartments and houses groaned under the weight of so many books, what in the world we were going to do with so many tomes. However, throughout
the final lunch at which we determined the winner, we quarreled, we tussled, we cajoled, we pleaded, we slammed phones, we left behind purses, we walked out, we walked back in. But so what? Ishmael Reed: “Writin’ is fightin’.” I’ve never felt more directly and vividly that books matter.

And yet, in 1987, after the fiction panel didn’t name Toni Morrison the winner, she approached the committee’s chair, my former teacher Hilma Wolitzer, and said, “Thank you for ruining my life.” If your life depends on winning an award chosen by a few people over lunch, there’s something wrong with your life.

M
ANY OF MY
favorite books contain numbered sections: to name just a few, Wittgenstein’s
Philosophical Investigations
, Sven Lindqvist’s
A History of Bombing
, Amy Fusselman’s
8
. The numbers gesture toward rationality of order; the material empties out any such promise. The exquisite tension of each work derives from these two competing angles of vision. So, too, I love the listlike pseudo-foundness, the extraordinarily artful “artlessness” of, say, Eula Biss’s “The Pain Scale,” Leonard Michaels’s “In the Fifties,” John D’Agata’s
About a Mountain.
The list evokes the randomness of the world, its heterogeneity and voluptuousness. Erasing the line between “art” and “life,” the list is the world, reframed as art.

A
M
I
MISSING
the narrative gene? I frequently come out of the movie theater having no idea what the plot was: “Wait—he killed his brother-in-law? I didn’t know he even had a brother-in-law.”

In the classic, epiphany-based short story, there is a text, or plot, beneath which plays subtext or subplot. By story’s end, the dominant image takes on metaphorical properties, i.e., becomes theme-carrying. Subtext penetrates the surface. The story’s “aboutness” outs: plot and theme come together.

Collage—in which tiny paragraph-units work together to project a linear motion—gets rid of this slow burn. Its thematic investigation is manifest from the beginning. As with action painting, new music, self-reflexive documentary film, and Language poetry, collage teaches the reader to understand that the movements of the writer’s mind are intricately entangled with the work’s meaning. Forget “intricately entangled with the work’s meaning”:
are
the work’s meaning.

A reviewer, overpraising an early, autobiographical
novel of mine, said, “Why do we read a book—only to escape on the wings of imagination, or to experience the deeper pleasure of actually entering the author’s mind? With this book, we experience the latter.” Nabokov: in a truly serious novel, the real conflict is not among the various characters but between the reader and writer. In collage, this is overtly the case.