What Would Lynne Tillman Do? (26 page)

‘“Sea Oak” is the sick tale of a man who works in a strip club but who doesn’t want to show his penis, even though he’d earn more in tips. After giving the ladies (almost) what they want, he returns home to his dysfunctional family. Saunders mocks that overused generalization in stupefying exaggerations that recall Theodor Adorno’s dictum, “Today only exaggeration can be the medium of truth.” The stripper’s sister, Min, and cousin, Jade, are barely literate single mothers who watch bizarre television talk
shows and converse in monosyllabic curses. Their Aunt Bernie, an optimist—or “optometrist,” as Jade calls her—acts as a foil to their sullen negativity. But when this Pollyanna dies, Saunders transforms their home into a neogothic haunted house. Aunt Bernie returns from the grave. “Why do some people get everything and I got nothing?” she asks. “Why? Why was that?” Through the undead Bernie, Saunders unleashes the fury of the unfulfilled, the yearnings of America’s damned.

In “The Barber’s Unhappiness,” an aging bachelor who was born without toes lives with his mother (in Saunders’s world, this always signals male abjection). He spends his time “ogling every woman in sight” and fantasizing about each one. An uncle’s cruel comments about his bachelorhood spark even more obsessive thoughts, which are both hilarious and miserable.

Saunders crosscuts between the lives of two anxious men in “The Falls.” There’s Morse, who is “too ashamed of his own shame,” and Aldo Cummings, “an odd duck who, though nearly 40, still lived with his mother.” To Cummings, Morse is “a smug member of the power elite in this conspiratorial Village”; to Morse, Cummings is a nut he fears will “collar him. When Cummings didn’t collar him . . . Morse felt guilty for having suspected Cummings of wanting to collar him.”

Saunders pulls out all the parodic stops in “The Falls.” Cummings, a secretive writer, concocts rhapsodies in his head and also corrects them, hoping to remember and write it all down later. Morse, a family man, carries Saunders’s version of the paradigmatic American disease. “His childhood dreams had been so
bright, he had hoped for so much, it couldn’t be true that he was a nobody.” Both wind up at the falls, witnesses to an accident, where they fear taking action and dream of heroism, two solitary fighters in an ethical boxing match. Uncharacteristically, both “The Falls” and “The Barber’s Unhappiness” end ambiguously—with hope, maybe. Given Saunders’s generally ironic stance, it’s hard to tell but intriguing to consider.

In all of his unsentimental stories, Saunders commiserates with the disspirited, the weak, the flawed. His engagement with have-nots is a kind of return, like Aunt Bernie’s, a visit to the worlds of John Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis, Thornton Wilder and the Theodore Dreiser of “An American Tragedy”—small-town, small-city, little-people writers. Impoverishment in Saunders’s work includes economic inequality, but he focuses more on deprivations that foreclose possibilities for expansive experiences, limiting perception and imaginative thinking. His eccentrically poignant fictions speak, in part, to the concerns Max Weber raised in 1921 in “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”: “In the United States, the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the character of sport. No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance.”

Saunders avoids righteousness and pleading. He understands Mary McCarthy’s observation in “A Charmed Life,” “Nobody can
have a permanent claim on being the injured party,” and his earnestness and seriousness propel him instead, as they did McCarthy, to satire and parody. Imagine Lewis’s Babbitt thrown into the back seat of a car going cross-country, driven by R. Crumb, Matt Groening, Lynda Barry, Harvey Pekar or Spike Jonze. That’d be a story Saunders could tell.

T is for What Would Lynne Tillman Do

The First Novel

I wrote a first novel. I spent years on it, and, when it came out, it was just a book. I had worried about its cover, but it was just a cover. When I went into a bookstore, I saw it was just a book among many others, or it wasn’t even there. Its dwarfed presence or absence made me think: Why add another book, I haven’t even read all the books here? Or, narcissistically: Why publish a book if even I can’t find it? When it was reviewed, the reviews were just words, often the wrong words. I spent months in bed, overwhelmed by my naïveté and folly. All my suppressed hopes acted like a tsunami and reduced me to nothing; my wishes were too big for any book, especially a first book. Later, I discovered it was the book that readers knew, if they knew any of mine, and no others. It was also the book whose existence made me realize that writing before publication was sweeter. Then I could think about my work the way I wanted: It didn’t exist for others, and nothing about it could be disputed, including its presence.

Write your first novel, put everything you know and don’t know into it, and stow it in the back of a drawer. Do this with your agent’s cooperation. Ask her or him to spread the word in the industry that your first novel is explosive, revealing, scandalous, so brilliantly written that you are the new Pynchon, Morrison,
Austen, Beckett, Joyce, Woolf, Burroughs. You have created—no, invented—an entirely new novel, whose time has not yet come; it cannot be exposed to the public. Instead, the manuscript on offer is your second novel, which is even better, as it is more mature.

Your second novel is not roman à clef or a bildungsroman, not thinly disguised or outright autobiography. It is not based on your terrible past, whose egregious trials mock the reality of childhood innocence. The protagonist is not you. If the secondary characters appear to be you, they are cleverly achieved. The reader will not look for you, the author. You have skipped all the troubles of the first novel by presenting your second, first. Let others wonder about the first. Someday, you suggest, you may allow it to be published. But only after everyone, including you, has died.

Doing Laps without a Pool

In the beginning, there seems just one way to write, the way it comes out, and then that way becomes a debate, contested, most essentially, in and by its writer. Hopefully, a writer reads and reads and will become more conscious of decisions in style and form. Some writers make these choices more consciously than others, the decisions mark differences in fiction, though whether they might be experiments can’t be assumed, certainly not by their authors.

The term “experimental” and others that characterize or categorize writing have, for me, lost their explanatory power. Mainstream, conventional, innovative, progressive, whatever value they hold or once held, the notions are vague, and they lack agreed-upon meanings among writers, readers and critics. Rather than being descriptive, the characterizations are predictive and can mark expectation, both writers’ and readers’. Also, they are outmoded and unhelpful, even as heuristic tools; still, they survive, like the human appendix, without usefulness. Lacking other terms, we writers are their hapless recidivists.

If a writer has an idea about how writing should act, or what a reader should experience, it can occupy the writing, which then might foreground the writer’s beliefs and a priori aesthetic preoccupations, which then might preclude a sensation, for a reader, of
its “newness” (even when writing is not technically “new,” as most isn’t). A writer’s discovering or discerning a way to write “it,” whatever that is, finding a style, structure, subject to realize “it” through his or her capacities and sensibilities, lies outside of proscription. It’s not that any of us can, with clairvoyance, recognize our ensnarement in and by language or in the grand, middling and small narratives that construct our lives, but it is a writer’s most essential work to be conscious of the act of writing, of enabling words to do as much as possible, for instance.

Our business is to see what we can do with the old English language as it is. How can we combine old words in new orders so that they create beauty and that they tell the truth. That is the question. . . . [Words] hate anything that stamps them with one meaning or one attitude. What is our nature, but to change. It is because the truth they try to catch is many-sided, they convey it by being many-sided, dashing this way and that. Thus they mean one thing to one person, another thing to another person.

—Virginia Woolf, from “A Eulogy to Words,” BBC Radio broadcast 1938

Sometimes finding the best word, best way of saying it, at least to the writer’s mind, can be less accommodating to a reader; difficulty is always relative. But how a writer’s trials, errors and successes add, or not, to a body called literature draws consensus in one time that might be denied in another. Believing in how it should be written, a way to write, also bedevils reasons to write; for me, the necessity to figure out how to accomplish a story or novel pushes me on. Many writers talk about sensing necessity in fiction, feeling it in a story, in its writing, which does not imply
subject, psychology, relevance or reason, since nonsense can have necessity in the way it’s written. Harry Mathews once remarked, and I paraphrase, It’s not what you write about, it’s how you write it. This is the ineffable which makes writing about writing so hard.

Unquestioned adherence to any dictates—about arcs, character development, fragmentation, dramatic tension, use of semicolons or adjectives, closure, character development or assassination, resolution or anti-closure—to any MFA workshop credos, or their antitheses, for a novel, story, poem, essay, will generate competent, often unexciting work, whether called mainstream, conventional, progressive or experimental; these products will have been influenced by or derived from, almost invariably and without exception, “established” or earlier work, their predecessors. In writing, “derivativeness,” except in extreme cases, is a cagey issue, since all things flow from others; discontinuities emerge from a writer’s objections, conscious and unconscious, to earlier literary approaches. But contemporary art and writing can be thoughtless or mindful re-inventions, dull or highly creative imitations, resonant and generative reworkings; new work can also glide, skip or jump off of culture’s secure bases and revamp them remarkably, keeping the racquet, just restringing it. It’s assumed there’s less conformity in “experimental fiction.” But what constitutes a genuine experiment in an “experimental” text? An argument might go: A true paradigm shift will model what follows, and these accumulate and accrete to the next. So, a convention results from earlier breaks or reformulations—Gertrude Stein’s, Jane Bowles’, Henry James’ with the novel—and, augmented over time and by practice, the “experimental novel”
becomes recognizable, no longer really an experiment but in the spirit or school of such. “Innovative” is used instead of “experimental,” and that’s often allied with “fresh,” “edgy,” “inventive,” “novel,” “groundbreaking.” Then there’s “unique,” but how many formulations can be? The “literary novel”—what is it? Uncommercial? Conventionally experimental? And, how is “literariness” measured? And then there’s “progressive.” What is progressive writing, is it in its subject matter, politics or style? Or all three? Can there be a measure for it, whatever it might be, in its own time or before readers experience it?

The indeterminate and indefinable, elemental to fiction, complicate any naming. Inexorably, all writing fits into genres, like the genre-bending novel, which has itself become a genre. Wishing for scientific and technological discoveries or an avant garde to save and advance society and culture is futile; it supports, in the sense Modernism did, the idea of more advanced and superior articulations in writing, of a loftier civilization, less bellicose, more civilized, and an expanded human consciousness—progress. But the machinations and machines of the 20th century should have eviscerated this understandable illusion, since, by midcentury, progress ate its babies alive. So, no progress in literature or art, only differences and changes, contemporary responses and aesthetic variations: Mrs.
Dalloway
is not better than
Middlemarch
, Zeno’s
Conscience
isn’t better than Augustine’s
Confessions
. And the other way around.

If the reader accepts, as I do, that no object has inherent value, that it is re-made by passing generations of readers and viewers—the erratic history of the worth and reputation of authors’ work
attests to this—no form can be privileged, no judgment eternal. Consciousness, in all its manifestations, will come to be represented variously by each generation for their different days and nights; since what is around people, what we see, hear, watch, exist in, affects our being and becoming, our reactions and what we make, as our psychologies shift within parameters of basic needs, new hungers and expanded wants.

Human beings are fantastic and horrifyingly adaptive creatures, fashioning tools or re-tooling, making nice, making war, building up and tearing down. Things change, they stay the same, the world changes and doesn’t, simultaneously. Writers rue rewriting old narratives, despair that there’s nothing new under the sun, except, say, a depleted ozone level, which will engender a plethora of apocalyptic myths. Still, an object can be shaken up and turned on its head, a word set beside another can create a shattering collision, like John Milton’s use of “gray” as an adjective in his poem, “Lycidas.” Still, fiction will thrive primarily through readers’ imaginative capacities, which means that how and what we read is ultimately more crucial than how and what we write.

Those of us who are practicioners live in interesting times. Writing now is like doing laps without a pool. Maybe we wail in an aesthetic void or shout in a black hole, life’s empty or dense; we can’t know what we’re in—fish probably don’t know they’re in water (who can be certain, though). But uncertainty is not the same as ignorance, it may point writers toward other registers of meaning, other articulations. Complacency is writing’s most determined enemy, and we writers, and readers, have been handed
an ambivalent gift: Doubt. It robs us of assurance, while it raises possibility.