Announcing Postmodern Mystery

HERE at The Misread City we’re longtime fans of Ted Gioia, whose book West Coast Jazz recreated the worlds of Dexter Gordon, Chet Baker, Dave Brubeck and others, reframing the way we looked at postwar California music.

Ted, who also writes on the blues and runs the blog Conceptual Fiction, which looks at the intersection of literature with fantasy and science fiction, has just launched Postmodern Mystery: New Angeles on an Old Genre.

He’s already posted on Borges’ Ficciones, Pynchon’s Lot 49 (!!), Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman and Nabokov’s Pale Fire.

This week, Ted writes about one of our favorite contemporary novels – Jonathan Lethem’s Lew Archer-with-Tourette’s novel Motherless Brooklyn.

Here’s what Ted Gioia tells The Misread City about the impetus behind the new blog.

There is a disconnect going on in the literary world when it comes to genre fiction.  These books have traditionally been marginalized or ignored by literary critics, academics, and even book reviewers.  Yet some of the most creative works of modern fiction draw on genre elements, either openly or subversively. 

When I launched my Conceptual Fiction web site two years ago, my aim was to celebrate some of the finer works of science fiction and fantasy, both straight genre works as well as literary fiction that drew on genre elements.  But I realized that the mystery genre was also widely misunderstood.  It had inspired a large number of intriguing, and often explicitly experimental works in recent decades -- books that turned genre formulas upside down and inside out.  For the last 18 months, I've been working on my new site Postmodern Mystery (www.postmodernmystery.com), which finally launched on October 7.

My Postmodern Mystery site looks at unconventional and experimental stories of crime and suspense.  Readers might be surprised to learn how many of the leading fiction writers of recent decades have drawn on elements of the mystery genre for their works.  My site has essays either published or soon-to-be-published on books by Jorge Luis Borges, Paul Auster, Vladimir Nabokov, Robert Bolano, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Leonardo Sciascia, Thomas Pynchon, Friedrich Durrenmatt, Flann O'Brien, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jonathan Lethem, Thomas Bernhard, Truman Capote, Haruki Murakami, Gilbert Sorrentino, Witold Gombrowicz, Michael Chabon, Miguel Syjuco and a dozen or so other authors.  Soon I will be publishing a complete reading list and survey essays tying together the various threads of this body of literature.

I hope the site will spur a few people to read some fine books they might otherwise have missed.  But also I'd like to challenge conventional views of what constitutes important literature.  I believe that a shift is already underway.  Strange to say, the writers already understand what is happening.  If you have any doubts, just look at the works of a Jonathan Lethem or a David Mitchell or a Michael Chabon.  They understand that the longstanding division between literary fiction and genre fiction is both arbitrary and misguided.  I'm aiming to make the same point, but via a body of criticism.   

Happy Birthday to Philip K. Dick

This blog has drifted into Africa and Italy recently, so let me return for a moment to our West Coast home ground: Today would be the birthday of one of America's most intriguing, frustrating and brilliant writers -- Philip K. Dick.

It's hard to know where to start on a figure like this, but let me defer to David Gill, a Bay Area lecturer who runs the clever and instructive Total Dick-head site. Check out his new posts.

Most of you need no introduction to PKD (who lived, sometimes erratically, primarily in the Bay Area and Orange County) or his body of work -- novels like "The Man in the High Castle," "Ubik," "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" and movies like "Blade Runner," "Total Recall" and "A Scanner Darkly." He was an important inspiration for everything from "Brazil" to "The Matrix" to "Being John Malkovich." And the careers of many important novelists of my generation -- Jonathan Lethem is the clearest case -- were shaped profoundly by him.

Even the mighty Thomas Pynchon bears his stamp.

These days I am reading and rereading a lot of the work of this author who LA's Steve Erickson helped save from obscurity, Art Spiegelman called the Kafka of the late 20th c., and who Ursula Le Guin called "our own homegrown Borges." So I'll leave the rest of my thoughts to a piece I think will drop next month -- which I hope will be the first of several.

I read some of Dick's work as an SF-loving teenager. Not all the stuff I read then stands up -- Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land" seems to wrap a wonderful premise around endless libertarian rants, and the characters in Asimov's Foundation books seem even flatter than than were when I was 13 -- but Dick's work, for all its flaws, has only grown in my estimation. (I won't quite class him with Beethoven, but enjoy the coincidence that the composer and this dedicated fan of Austro-German classical music were both born on Dec. 16.)

On what would be PKD's 81st birthday, I'm struck, as is everybody else, by how clearly he seemed to get where our culture was going -- in books written as early as the early '60s. I'm not talking about literal prediction (of, say, technological gadgets) but a broader understanding of human nature and society and religion that makes his vision far more prescient than that of the more optimistic, often militaristic Golden Age writers who preceded him.

For now, I'll leave my readers with a wonderful piece by Laura Miller with the title "It's Philip Dick's World, We Only Live in It." For better and worse, that is.

"After the End of History"

IT'S the kind of phrase, however memorable, that the speaker probably wishes he could take back. when francis fukuyama responded to the fall of berlin wall -- the close of the cold war -- by calling it "the end of history" it seemed to make sense, and it fit into an argument by postmodern scholars -- fredric jameson especially -- that we were living in a context-free epoch that had no use for history either in its literature or popular culture.

but history continued to happen, and this week the berlin wall moment is back in the news. i'm also reading an intriguing new book in which samuel cohen, an english professor at the university of missouri, argues that history did not disappear from our literature either. cohen sees the 90s -- the period between "the end of history" and 9/11's "end of irony" -- as "an interwar decade," and looks at six of the best novels the period produced and two that came right after.

those novels are by thomas pynchon, philip roth, toni morrison, tim o'brien, joan didion, jeffrey eugenides, jonathan lethem and don delillo, all hefty books well worth the study.

i know cohen only slightly, from speaking by phone for two stories on updike, here and here, and i like his gen-x perspective. updike himself doesnt much figure in the new book, but he offers this delicious epitaph from "rabbit at rest": " 'i miss it,' he said. 'the cold war. it gave you a reason to get up in the morning.'"

so i'm enjoying cohen's tightly and clearly written "after the end of history: american fiction in the 1990s" -- and not just because it's the kind of study i might have written had i stayed in the academy.

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.

Denis Johnson vs. The Reclusive Writer

ALMOST exactly two years ago i was walking through Book Expo America in ny with the galley for denis johnson's then-new "tree of smoke." at least half a dozen people who saw his name on the oversized spine stopped me and asked, with some excitement, where they could get one. i've never had a similar experience with another writer. 

(the vietnam-set book, of course, went on to win the sometimes noirish, sometimes epic author a long overdue national book award.)

that palpable sense of anticipation -- and my sense that johnson would once again refuse to do press or appearances for the novel -- led me to write THIS piece on the phenomenon of "the reclusive writer." as someone who's loved salinger in high school and pynchon since college, it was a subject i'd been thinking about for years.

as luck would have it, FSG has just released the new johnson novel, "nobody move," which is an expanded version of his monthly installments for playboy last year. (the magazine is trying a similar trick with a james ellroy memoir right now.)

johnson's "nobody move," is a stripped down crime novel that resembles jim thompson or early tarantino.  “What the —? Where’s the literary?" johnson asked when he read part of it in greenwich village not long ago. "I thought I put something literary in my suitcase, but this is just cheap pulp fiction.” 

your humble correspondent, of course, is a lover of cheap pulp fiction. this -- approvingly reviewed here -- is neither at the level of thompson, hammett, etc. nor as good as even overlooked johnson novels like "already dead" or "rescusitation of a drowned man." but it's brisk and appealing in its own way: johnson certainly writes about lowlifes better than anyone i know right now.

as for recluses, i see salinger is still cranky today.

and did anybody remember that pynchon (that's him in the navy cap) wrote "likes pizza; dislikes hypocrites" in his hs yearbook? i cannot think of a better statement of purpose for any writer.

Photo credit: intersection for the arts