The New York Literary Life

A few years ago -- before the crash, back when everything seemed to me moving forward more or less fine -- I went to New York to interview three youngish writers with first novels due. I asked:

Is it possible to lead a dedicated literary life in the billionaire-filled, media-crazed New York of today? To be heedless of the material world as you burrow into novels and ideas the way the old Partisan Review gang did in the '40s and '50s, to come up with notions that rock the intellectual landscape? And if so, who exactly is still paying attention?  

The three novelists -- Nathaniel Rich, Keith Gessen and Ed Park -- all had slightly different answers. You can find my story here. I'm still unsure how the changed economic/literary/journalistic landscape changes all this.

And these days, Rich has a new novel coming -- fresh off a burst of journalistic activity and a profile on him and his bro in NYT Styles. Gessen had a recent piece in the New Yorker and continues to write for  N+1, which he helped found. And Ed Park, a longtime editor at The Believer, was recently hired by Amazon to acquire new fiction.

Look forward to more from these three gents.

USC Historian Discovers Witches (and Vampires)

WHEN I heard that a USC professor had written a bestselling vampire novel I thought, This sounds like what the English call a train-jumper -- someone who latches onto a trend, half-heartedly and after the fact.

Boy was I wrong. Deborah Harkness is the real thing, and her novel, A Discovery of Witches, comes out of her scholarship on the shift from the supernatural medieval period to the rational, Newtonian Enlightenment. The book is set in contemporary Oxford, but has this -- and many other -- currents running through it.

HERE is my LA Times profile of Harkness, who is working on the second book of what's conceived as a trilogy. Lovers or Tolkien and Pullman, don't say nobody told you.

Her wine blog, Good Wine Under $20, worth checking out too.

Steve Erickson Novel Coming

LONGTIME Los Angeles writer Steve Erickson will have a new novel next year, These Dreams of You, his publisher, Europa Editions, just announced. 


Erickson is the writer I point to first when I'm arguing about a difference in East Coast and West Coast literary sensibility. He grew up in a Granada Hills neighborhood wiped out for the freeway, and that sense of spatial dislocation and a disappearing past -- central to life in the Southland -- runs through all his work. He was hot to Garcia Marquez and Philip K. Dick before they were cool.

HERE is my profile of Erickson on the publication of his last novel, Zeroville. That struck me as a real return to form, with a new note: The book was accessible but didn't give up any of the old Erickson weirdness. (His interest in experimental fiction is expressed in the Cal Arts journal he edits, Black Clock.)


"It's not a Hollywood novel," Erickson said of the book set among, kind of, the '70s generation of maverick filmmakers. "Those tend to be about how movies get made. I wanted to write about how movies have become part of the modern nervous system, the dream language we all converse in from time to time."


For what it's worth, I began reading Steve's work as a teenager back east, and it both puzzled and fascinated me. Some of the specifically Californian tone makes more sense to me now, after 14 years in LA, but the sense of things not being quite what they seem remains: I'd say his work continues to puzzle and fascinate me.


The new novel's title, presumably, comes from one of Van Morrison's best songs. In any case, always a pleasure to get a new novel by Erickson.

The Wide World of David Mitchell

If there's a more inventive, most linguistically alive mid-career writer than David Mitchell, I've not read him. Best known as the author of the century-jumping, continent-hopping cult novel Cloud Atlas, he'll be appearing at Skylight Books on July 23 to read from his new novel, set mostly in the late 18th c., The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.


I was able to speak to the English-born, Japan-obsessed, Ireland-dwelling novelist for my first LA Weekly piece. Struggling artists take heart: During the early '90s recession, Mitchell was not able to land a fast food job.  "I got known as the guy who couldn't make the grade at McDonald's," Mitchell told me. "If you had that to deal with, maybe you'd go off to Japan, too."


Mitchell talked to me about Japan, the best and worst qualities of Philip K. Dick, the meaning of the word "literary," his love of the Talking Heads, and other subjects.


I reached the author as he was getting ready for a "tidy towns competition" in his rural stretch of the Cork coastline, which he described as being about "well-cut flower beds and cleanly cut grass." I got the sense of someone who was modest and deeply internal, who lives mostly in his head and puts the rest of his energy into his family. The stutter he had as a kid drove him inward.


Here he is on genre fiction: "Genre is a possibly underused but perfectly valid range of tints and shades and textures in the narrative paintbox. Use them as you wish. It's good because they bring along their own baggage, their own sense of expectation, their own cliches. You need to tweak them a bit. Inside every old chestnut of cliche you find a kernel of originality there."

On Philip K. Dick: "Fantastic ideas man, but his prose... you really have to wade through it. But what a mind -- there are only one or two of him a century. To come up with the idea for The Man in the High Castle," in which the Germans and Japanese win World War II and carve up the U.S., "is good enough. Then you've got a science-fiction writer writing a book in which the Allies win the war -- that's the Philip Dick touch. It makes me green with envy."


And on taste in music as a kid, some of which is chronicled in the bittersweet coming-of-age novel Black Swan Green: "Narrative pop music, really, which was really uncool. Rush. And I was into Yes. I'll argue that the cool-uncool thing is a circular spectrum that doubles back on itself." 


As for Rush: "They play with such aplomb, with such indifference to rockstar cliche... If you are referring to Coleridge in a pop song and singing in a high falsetto -- I don't think that's uncool."


More in this week's LA Weekly.

Jonathan Lethem to the Southland

Novelist Jonathan Lethem, though firmly associated with New York bohemia and a kind of Brooklyn renaissance, will be coming to Pomona College to take over David Foster Wallace's old job.

The author of the Brooklyn-childhood novel The Fortress of Solitude and, more recently, the Upper East Side-set Chronic City is well known to readers of The Misread City: He's among the site's core writers, along with Ursula K. Le Guin, Philip K. Dick, Michael Chabon and Ross Macdonald. Of this esteemed group, he is the only one not lucky enough to have spent the majority his career on the West Coast. But that begins to change this fall, when Lethem arrives at the liberal arts school based in Claremont, where he begins teaching in January. Here is Pomona's release on the position.

I've gotten to know Lethem slightly in our discussions about various authors, including his college classmate Bret Easton Ellis and his literary hero Philip K. Dick, whose Library of America volumes he has edited. Lethem is among the sharpest, intellectually rigorous and most culturally omnivorous people I know, and he's made an important push in the war to rehabilitate genre fiction. He's also a zealous Dylan fan.

Of course, despite representing a kind of post-Auster, vaguely indie-rockish spirit of Brooklyn writing, Lethem spent the first decade of his writing career in California. He lived in Berkeley from '85 to '96, working at Moe's Books and Pegasus bookstore and helping pioneer rock critic Paul Williams run the Philip K. Dick Society. Raymond Chandler and Macdonald are powerful influences on his early novels especially, and in '07 he set a slender comic novel, You Don't Love Me Yet, in Silver Lake, where he lived while putting it together.

So in some ways he's long been a California writer by osmosis.

The Misread City will speak to Lethem in the next few weeks about his imminent arrival and his thoughts about West Coast culture. Until then, all we can say is, Welcome, homes!

Portrait by Julie Jo Fehrle from Jonathan Lethem: Writer

Magical Prose and Rethinking Literary Realism

On Saturday I led a panel at UCLA with three writers who work in what we might call slipstream, literary fantasy, conceptual fiction, surrealism, or some other school still to be named. While the specific label isn't particularly important, the emphasis on rethinking realism, on embracing the best of genres like fantasy and science fiction, and moving into what Michael Chabon has called "the borderlands" between literary categories is at the center of much the best fiction these days, I think.

HERE is a Jacket Copy blogger's coverage of my panel, which I described as about the Gen-X rebellion against doctrinaire realism, and which included the writers Aimee Bender (The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake), Lev Grossman (The Magicians) and Victor LaValle (Big Machine).

My favorite moment was when LaValle was asked if he'd drawn from any myths or legends in developing his literary style and he mentioned how he had read the Bible all the way through -- a volume, he said, drawn from so many previous ancient sources that if functions like an anthology.

The Jacket Copy post includes a pretty sharp summary of the stakes of the conversation as well as a reasonable unflattering photo of yours truly mid-syllable.

I quoted Chabon's excellent book of criticism, Maps and Legends, praised the work of Ursula Le Guin, and referred to Ted Gioia's blog, Conceptual Fiction, which is dedicated to these very issues. I also name-dropped my first "favorite writer," J.R.R. Tolkien, whose family monogram is pictured.

Los Angeles Times Festival of Books

THIS Saturday I am quite honored to be moderating a panel with three very fine novelists of my generation at the LA Times Festival of Books. The panel -- "Writing the Fantastic" -- takes place at 2, in Moore 100 on the UCLA Campus.

One of my obsessions the last few years has been the move away from realism -- and in many cases toward genre -- by writers born in the late '60s and early '70s. I sort of associate the issue with Michael Chabon, who has written so well about the matter and exemplifies it in his own work -- here for more on that -- but he's hardly the only one. Recently I've been interested, for instance, in the lead essay on Ted Gioia's Conceptual Fiction site.)

(A year or so ago I wrote about the phenomenon in a Guardian piece called "How Ursula LeGuin Led a Generation Away From Realism," here.)

In any case, my distinguished panelist include:

Aimee Bender: Known to many readers, esp Angelenos, for her debut story collection, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, Bender has a novel coming in June called The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, which continues her blending of folklore and whimsical surrealism. (Or is it folkloric whimsy -- I'm not quite sure, but I think of Chagall when I read her.)

Victor Lavalle: His novel Big Machine, which came out last summer, is my can't-put-down favorite right now. I came to this book cold, and don't want to spoil it for others, as the unfolding of a mystery that begins in a train station rest room is part of the delight of Big Machine. But this guy has a great touch. Lavalle grew up in Queens and is the youngest of the panel, born 1972. His novel drew raves from both the Wall Street Journal and Mos Def.

Lev Grosssman: I've admired Grossman's criticism, much of it in Time magazine, for quite a while now -- he's one of the most astute readers I know. His novel The Magicians has been a sensation, scoring The New York Times bestseller list, acclaim from the New Yorker and Junot Diaz. The novel superficially resembled the Harry Potter cycle in its school for magicians, but takes a much darker and more, um, adult turn.

Each of the authors has a blog, linked above, and I hope readers of The Misread City will check these three out whether they can attend the panel or not.

And remember: Though Lavalle and Grossman did not grow up on the West Coast, it was not their fault.

Nordic Noir Finally Arrives

SOME called 1991 – a decade and a half after the rumbles in London – “the year punk broke.” If so, 2009 is shaping up as the year Nordic Noir finally arrived.

Stieg Larsson – a Trotskyist sci-fi fan now, inconveniently, dead – is the movement’s Nirvana, and “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” a mystery novel with Nordic Noir’s coolest heroine ever, his “Nevermind.” The book’s recent sequel, “The Girl Who Played With Fire,” which continues the adventures of a tattooed hacker and crusading reporter, also kicks ass.

The Exene and John Doe might be Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, the Swedish husband-and-wife team whose classic ‘60s and ‘70s-era policiers – “The Laughing Policeman,” “The Man Who Went Up in Smoke” – are being reissued on Black Lizard.

What makes this grim, snowy stuff, with its umlauts and suns hidden for months at a time, so irresistible? You get, in Henning Mankell’s Wallender books, an existentialist detective who resembles “Point Blank”-era Lee Marvin, dropped into a Bergman movie. (Three of these were just ably adapted by Masterpiece.) With Norway’s Karin Fossum, penetrating glimpses into the psychology of killers. And with Iceland’s Arnaldur Indridason, storytelling so epic it’s almost medieval.

Modern crime hardboiled fiction first came out of California in the ‘20s and ‘30s, in newish cities where it was easy to fake a past, and where fog and dark alleys kept everything shadowy.

Scandinavia is an old land, overrun for centuries by Vikings swilling mead. But it’s got contemporary problems – drugs, immigration, global organized crime – that make these books feel pressing and urgent. That fact that it’s usually overcast doesn’t hurt.

“It’s the frontier independence frontier self sufficiency and frontier stoicism, combined with frontier weather, frontier isolation and frontier violence that makes these Nordic books so familiar to a US reader,” Junot Diaz of “Oscar Wao” told me. ”And yet the extremities of all these tendencies (and the almost alien history of these nations) are what gives them their unique compelling and ultimately terrifying tenor."

If 2009 is the year of Nordic Noir, then, we say it’s about damn time.

Photo credit: chatirygirl

Eight Decades of Ursula K. Le Guin

TODAY one of the most innovative and intriguing writers in the english language marks her 80th birthday. there aren't many novelists who i enjoy as much today as i did when i was in elementary school; ursula le guin is one of them.

here is the recent LA Times piece i wrote on her after visiting her in portland and re-immersing myself in her body of work and the debates around it. she was a very sharp, wide-ranging conversationalist i wish i could have spent more time with.

and here is a guardian piece in which i discuss her role (alongside berkeley high classmate philip k. dick, among others) in leading my generation of novelists away from realism.

le guin is best known for her "earthsea" books, which are inspired by tolkien and carl jung and in turn inspired the harry potter novels. her two consensus science-fiction masterpieces are "the left hand of darkness" and "the dispossessed," which grow in rereading. but her last novel, "lavinia," which pursues a minor character from virgil's "aeniad," is wonderful as well.

(here is a birthday note from the SFWA, and a characteristically wry note from sf writer robert silverberg.)

looking forward to many more years of productivity from this american original.

Steve Erickson's West Coast Dreams

THE recent release of "a new literary history of america," has gotten me thinking again about longtime LA writer steve erickson. this fascinating volume, edited by greil marcus and werner sollors, includes a brilliantly counter-intuitive essay by erickson, which manages to wrap thomas jefferson and john adams around the songs of stephen foster. (he was born on the day in 1826 on which those two died.)

here is my profile of erickson, around the publication of his novel "zeroville." the book is one of my favorites of his -- set around the time of the manson killings and the emergence of the "easy riders, raging bulls" generation of american filmmakers, and both captures and undermines the myth of the 1960s and '70s.

as a novelist, of course, erickson is often likened to thomas pynchon, tho his work is more obviously anti-realistic. he was drawing from some of the techniques of magical realism before that style became overexposed, and he was an early champion of philip k. dick.

erickson tells me he is hoping to finish his next novel in 2010.

the question of why erickson is not better known outside california has interested me for two decades. his work may simply be too rooted in the clash of reality and surrealism, the confusions of artifice and a disappearing past, that baffles the rest of the world but that we angelenos take for granted.

Lydia Millet vs. Domestic Realism

ONE of the key impulses of my generation -- what we used to call generation x -- has been the move away from old-school psychological realism into fiction's "borderlands." that's michael chabon's term, and he's generally talking about the wild frontier between literary fiction and fantasy, pulp crime, sci-fi, lovecraftian horror and comics.

but lydia millet is less interested in those fan-boy genres and more committed in her own weird soup of caricature, psychological extremity, obsession, and calvino-esque possibilities. (anyone who's lived in LA knows that those can actually be categories of realism here, but that's another conversation.) her characters are rarely likable, they're sometimes not even feasible, but they're often compelling.

here is my interview with millet from last year, when her bracing short novel "how the dead dream was released on soft skull press, then run by richard nash. millet is also an alum of what i call "the school of flynt," as in hustler: various porn and ammo magazines were her MFA program.

millet has a new story collection, "love in infant monkeys," which is getting good notices -- here is a review from the new york times book review.

this is a writer whose assumptions differ from some of my own, but who thinks in truly original ways.

Michael Chabon, Genre and Literary Criticism

READERS of this blog probably need no urging on what a fine novelist michael chabon is -- and i direct anyone who doubts over to "kavalier and clay" or a number of his other excellent works of fiction.

but literary criticism, even by as esteemed a talent as mr. chabon, tends to fly under the radar, and that's why it gives me great pleasure to highlight his essay/criticism collection "maps and legends" -- note the nod to great/overlooked early REM song -- which collects pieces from the new york review of books and other pubs. the book recently came out in paperback.

some of the essays provide the background to his life and fiction -- fascinating essay on columbia, md. (about 20 minutes from your humble blogger's hometown), yiddish and jewish identity, golems, etc.

but my favorite work in the book are his pieces of criticism -- on philip pullman ("his dark materials"), cormac mccarthy's "the road," comics god howard chaykin, the sherlock holmes stories/novels of arthur conan doyle, and why norse myth is better than the greek and roman variety. (yeah!)

here is an interview i did with MC on the book and its argument. (and here is the interview i did with him around the time of "the yiddish policeman's union.")

the collection's guiding idea is that the literary and cultural gatekeepers have been wrong about what matters and what endures. chabon's preferred metaphor is what tolkien called the "cauldron of story," in which folkloric materials can transform into "literary" and pop work and back again. it's all bubbling in the same pot.

my only regret is that now it will be harder to find the original mcsweeney's hardback -- with a cover by jordan crane that may be the most beautiful jacket of any book last year.

Photo credit: Flickr user 34