Giving the Mundane its Beautiful Due

The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and that the novel as a narration of the fantastic and the adventurous is usually an escapist plot, that aesthetically the ordinary, the banal, is what you must deal with. So I tried to make interesting narratives out of ordinary life by obscure and average Americans.

One of America's greatest authors has passed away yesterday, aged 76, after battling lung cancer. John Updike was that rare animal - a best-selling author who enjoyed literary acclaim winning the Pulitzer twice. His novels include the four novels in the Rabbit series, featuring onetime basketball star Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom who becomes a car dealer in a small town. Perhaps though his most widely known novel was The Witches of Eastwick which was turned into a film. His most recent novel is a sequel : The Widows of Eastwick, which came out last year. A collection of short fiction My Father's Tears and Other Stories is due out in June. The BBC has a list of Updike quotations (from which I took the one above), and here's another lovely one about being a writer:

There's a kind of confessional impulse that not every literate, intelligent person has. A crazy belief that you have some exciting news about being alive, and I guess that more than talent is what separates those who do it from those who think they'd like to do it. That your witness to the universe can't be duplicated, that only you can provide it, and that it's worth providing.

Meanwhile, the tributes flow in. Mitchiko Kakutani in The New York Times calls him :

... arguably this country’s one true all-around man of letters. He moved fluently from fiction to criticism, from light verse to short stories to the long-distance form of the novel ... a literary decathlete in our age of electronic distraction and willful specialization, Victorian in his industriousness and almost blogger-like in his determination to turn every scrap of knowledge and experience into words.... (But) It is as a novelist who opened a big picture window on the American middle class in the second half of the 20th century, however, that he will be best remembered. In his most resonant work, Mr. Updike gave “the mundane its beautiful due,” as he once put it, memorializing the everyday mysteries of love and faith and domesticity with extraordinary nuance and precision. In Kodachrome-sharp snapshots, he gave us the 50’s and early 60’s of suburban adultery, big cars and wide lawns, radios and hi-fi sets, and he charted the changing landscape of the 70’s and 80’s, as malls and subdivisions swallowed up small towns and sexual and social mores underwent a bewildering metamorphosis.

I'll put in links to other interesting pieces as I find them. Postscript : The Guardian has Updike's life in pictures and a whole list of authors including Richard Ford and Toni Morisson pay tribute. I like what Zadie Smith says :

Updike's example seemed the model of a real writer's life, in that this was an existence spent not in talking about writing, promising to write, boasting of having written or telling other people how they should write, but simply in the act of writing, every day, for decades.

There's another piece here by Martin Amis - and I impressed to learn that Updike had four studies in his house, each for a different type of writing! John Mulland and John Sutherland suggest the best titles to begin with, if you're embarking on your own voyage of Updike discovery. The Telegraph has an interview with the author from last year.

Updating the Syllabus

On The Millions blog [found via] a high school English teacher called Gene writes in to ask for suggestions to update his syllabus (which already includes great reads like Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and essays from the likes of David Foster Wallace.

The blog's contributors and other blog readers weigh in with their suggestions, making this a very useful guide to what's best in American C21st fiction. Enjoy!

(And doesn't one actually envy Gene's students with this literary diet? They didn't make school syllabuses like this when I was at school.)

Ignorant and Insular?

The US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining. ...Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can't get away from the fact that Europe still is the centre of the literary world ... not the United States ... what I said expresses a conviction resulting from more than 10 years of assiduous labour.

Permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy (which awards the Nobel prizes), Horace Engdahl, who is also a professor of Scandinavian literature and a literary critic.

The prize for literature is to be awarded within the next few weeks, and of course the bets are on :

Ladbrokes' frontrunner is currently the Italian scholar Claudio Magris, who is 3/1 favourite to take the SEK10m prize, trailed by the Syrian poet Adonis at 4/1. Joyce Carol Oates and Philip Roth are the highest placed Americans, at 7/1, while Don DeLillo is at 10/1 and Thomas Pynchon at 20/1; Ladbrokes is also offering 40/1 odds on the generally reclusive Pynchon both winning and attending the prize-giving on December 10.

Postscript :

You can't say something like this and get away with it!

John Litchfield collects some reactions from the other side of the Atlantic. Sam Leith posts an excellent rebuttal at the Telegraph. And see also this very balanced post at The Literary Saloon.

75 of the Best ... And Then Another 75

When Esquire magazine put up a list of 75 Books Every Man Must Read (which you can find here in the form of a rather lovely slideshow) Jezebel.com found the list "extremly myopic" relying as it does on the "old white dude cannon" with the token great Russian thrown in and only one female author (Flannery O'Connor). So they invited readers to help them compile a list 75 Books Every Woman Should Read.

And here 'tis. Enjoy!

[Found via Conversational Reading]

And The Next Big (American) Writer Is ...

The guys at Granta magazine bring their crystal balls out of the cupboard every ten years to predict the most important writers of the future. They've done it with British writers with a great degree of success: a glance at the lists for 1983, 1993, 2003 reads like a Who's Who of the British literary scene.

And now, for the second time they are doing the same with American writers, the Guardian reports.

They didn't do a bad job last time with Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, Lorrie Moore and David Guterson making the list. But most of the writers, I still haven't heard of, despite a more than average ear to the ground. (It's probably something to do with my Britlit bias: apologies to my American friends.)

These then are the chosen ones, and if you want to read more about them, there's a biodata of each on the Granta website.

Daniel Alarcón
Kevin Brockmeier
Judy Budnitz
Christopher Coake
Anthony Doerr
Jonathan Safran Foer
Nell Freudenberger
Olga Grushin
Dara Horn
Gabe Hudson
Uzodinma Iweala
Nicole Krauss
Rattawut Lapcharoensap
Yiyun Li
Maile Meloy
ZZ Packer
Jess Row
Karen Russell
Akhil Sharma
Gary Shteyngart
John Wray

How many have you heard of? If you said "All of them", sorry, you're bluffing. Seven have not been published yet and make their debut in the latest edition of the magazine.

A.L.Kennedy (herself Granta listed twice) on the Guardian blog admits she's only heard of one them.

I feel nicely smug because I've heard of Jonathan Safran Foer, have bought Uzodinma Iweala's novel, and have read (and loved!) Yiyun Li and Rattawat Lapcharoensap. (Come to think of it, it seems that some good writers from elsewhere have been conveniently appropriated. Poor Yiyun Li probably doesn't even have her green card yet!!)

The age limit for "young writers" has now apparently been lowered from 40 to 35. Says Granta editor Ian Jack:

People seem to be writing (and publishing) fiction sooner ... they have, at least in theory, a head start on their predecessors and should be getting better, quicker.

In the introduction to the current issue of the magazine which brings together samples of the writing, Ian Jack points to a changes in focus: writers' interest in social class has "ebbed" and in its place is "a concern with death, uncertainty and the outside world". He also observes that nearly all of the writers on the list have attended creative writing courses.

But won't be all sunshine and roses for listed writers from hereonin if Kennedy's own experience is anything to go by. She described the dubious pleasures of:

... touring the country for readings, largely to tiny audiences, and sitting in a cupboard with my fellow authors to sign so many copies of Granta that by the end of it all, my signature was so permanently mangled I had to notify my bank. And it meant I attended a party at the Saatchi gallery and got to see the Blood Head and Patrick Stewart.

But come to think of it, the first time I heard of A.L.Kennedy was on a Granta list, and I have, since, bought her books.

I think I will make my predictions about the most promising young Malaysian writers, but hey, I'm going to seal up the paper and bury it in a time-capsule ... and blog about it ten years hence!

American Born Books

The graphic novel really is getting respectable. So respectable in fact that for the first time one was shortlisted for a major literary award. Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese was nominated for the 2006 National Book Award in the Young People's Writing category. Writes Edward Guthman in the San Fransisco Chronicle:

That pride of identity is the overriding theme of "American Born Chinese," which tells the story of Jin Wang, a son of Chinese immigrants who moves to the suburbs from San Francisco's Chinatown and struggles to assimilate at a mostly white school. Yang interweaves Jin's journey with two other stories: the legend of the Monkey King, a Chinese folk hero; and a sitcom starring Chin-Kee, a gross Chinese stereotype with buck teeth and a habit of interchanging his r's and l's. ... It's easy to imagine, while reading "American Born Chinese," that Yang based Jin Wang's story largely on his own childhood. The author says that's true: "I was Asian and I wore glasses and I was really skinny, and I knew that I was stereotyped as a nerd. So there was part of me that kind of rebelled against that."

The National Book Awards began in 1950 when a consortium of book publishing groups sponsored the first ceremony and dinner at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City to highlight exceptional American writing, and increase the popularity of reading in general. The awards recognize achievements in four categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Young People's Literature.

The overall winner in the fiction section was The Echo Maker by Richard Powers, with runners up:

Mark Z. Danielewski - Only Revolutions
Ken Kalfus - A Disorder Peculiar to the Country
Dana Spiotta - Eat the Document
Jess Walter - The Zero

The poetry award went to Nathaniel Mackey for Splay Anthem. Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl took the award for non-fiction. And Yang was beaten to the main prize for Young People's Literature by M.T. Anderson's The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume One: The Pox Party (now that's a title!). The complete shortlist is archived here.

(Thanks, Kamal, for your notes and recommendations in the e-mails you sent and if The Worst Hard Time really is better than The Grapes of Wrath, I must buy it!)

All American for Animah?

If you read the comments posted after the entry about House of Sand and Fog, you will have seen Animah's request:

... why don't you ask your readers to provide a list of their favourite American writers. I'll try reading some of them, and hey, it may even change my bias. It's an uphill battle though - I am so prejudiced!!!

as well as the passionate ding-dong with fellow reading group member, Krishna. (This is the kind of conversation we have in real-life too ... you really can't put passionate booklovers together without some sort of a scrap, it seems!)

Anyway, a list for Animah seems to me to be a very important mission to embark on.

Like me, Animah want to feel that the books she read have value beyond being simply for ... well, entertainment: we need books to furnish our heads and nourish our souls.

I start the list with some of my recent favourites: Middlessex by Jeffrey Eugenides, Underworld by Don de Lillo, The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible and Raymond Carver's collection of short stories Cathedral. I'll also add The Little Friend by Donna Tart, even though I'm not very far through it. And Philip Roth and E.L. Doctorow as writers I know I must read as soon as possible and feel incredibly ignorant not having read. (Guilt!)

Greenbottle added Kurt Vonnegut, and Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (which I recently bought but haven't yet got round to).

I'll add anything Toni Morrison for Chet, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas for The Visitor.

I'll add anything Alice Hoffman for Third Chimp.

And what else? Let us know! But remember, Animah does not want to feel she is wasting her time!!

Seeking The Great American Novel

When the editor of the New York Times Book Review:

... sent out a short letter to a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages, asking them to please identify "the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years" -

- Toni Morrison's Beloved emerged as winner. The runner's up were Underworld by Don de Lillo, Blood Meridian by Cormac Mc Carthy, John Updike's Rabit Angstrom: The Four Novels and Philip Roth's An American Pastoral.

The complete list is here with links to the original NYT reviews of the books. (Also well worth reading is A. O. Scott's essay about the search for the Great American Novel.)

I'm dreadfully badly read in American fiction. I've read other novels by Toni Morrison (most recently Jazz) but not Beloved. I have read no Philip Roth (though I accidently watched the film of The Human Stain on TV and thought it had a great cast but was clumsily handled).

I have had Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses (which also apparently received multiple votes) sitting on my to-be-read shelf for a couple of years.

I read the first two books in the Rabbit tetralogy when I was in my teens (more than three decades ago - ouch!) and far too young to appreciate them.

It's interesting looking at the reader reviews on Amazon - great literature is not always the most popular reading. Underworld is particularly controversial. Readers love it or hate it totally. Give it one star or five.

I thought this story of ordinary lives lives in the shadow of the cold war one of the most satisfying books I've ever read.

Like the film The Red Violin or Annie Proulx's Accordian Crimes, much of the plot comes from the passing from hand to hand of a physical object - in this case a baseball. But otherwise there is no real plot: scenes and incidents fit together like a chinese puzzle and the reader is left to discover all the interconnections.

But I've never come across a book that was harder to get into. (The opening section describes a baseball game and you just have to imagine that you are the eye of the camera panning around the auditorium.)

You know, I've never met anyone here in Malaysia who has managed to read Underworld, so if you have, let me know. And if you are a determined reader who loves a challenge, go for it!

Meanwhile, I have to go hunt out Philip Roth ...

Postscript:

The Elegant Variation argues that "The absence of literary bloggers from the list of consultees has much to do with the staid nature of the results."

Related Posts:

The 100 Greatest Novels (23/10/05)
1001 Books You Must Read (19/4/06)

Football Season is Over

"No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun -- for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax -- This won't hurt."

That was Hunter S. Thompson's suicide note to his wife, Anita, written in black felt-tip five days before he shot himself. The note was published in Rolling Stone, according to CNN.

The author was in pain from hip-replacement surgery, and depressed about the failing state of his health. The last straw was indicated by the title of the note: "Football season is over". He was an avid football fan and it would be months before another game.

Thompson was known as the godfather of gonzo journalism, which blurred the distinction between fiction and non-fiction, reporter and subject. His most famous work is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas which has been called the "best book on the dope decade".

On August 20th, in accordance with his wishes, Thompson's ashes were blasted from a 153ft cannon of his own design (in the shape of a double-thumbed fist) into the night sky of Woody Creek, Colorado, while fireworks popped and Bob Dylan's Mr. Tambourine Man played. Johnny Depp apparently finaced the funeral.

Now that's closing the book in style.