Adam Langer on the state of modern literature

From the Wall Street Journal:"It seems almost like panic has set in the publishing industry and people are willing to try anything that works. Books are getting sold like they do in Hollywood, on a pitch. Or books are being sold based on a popular blog. Ultimately, readers would like to read a book, not a marketing scheme." I am so excited about his new book, THE THIEVES OF MANHATTAN, set in the publishing scene. It's not out till the 13th but if you haven't read ELLINGTON BOULEVARD or CROSSING CALIFORNIA yet, those should tide you over.

Another day, another "Office" book deal

And it's fiction! And it's epistolary?

Ellie Kemper, who plays receptionist Erin Hannon on The Office, and sister and writer on the show Carrie Kemper's MONDAY SESSIONS, a debut comedic novel comprising misplaced diary entries and patient progress notes belonging to single, thirty-something New York City therapist who becomes humorously and inappropriately involved with the lives of her clients, to Suzanne O'Neill at Three Rivers Press, by Erin Malone at William Morris Endeavor (NA).

Earlier: Mindy Kaling's nonfiction book

Moscow city officials are being pressured to take down murals of famous scenes from Dostoevsky books in a subway station, on the grounds that they may be too depressing. Don't lie, you love it! Русская душа!

Kalle Bastard

A few weeks ago the New York Times published a piece about the search for the next great Scandinavian crime series. The vacuum left by Stieg Larsson's death and the likely end of his series with THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET'S NEST (depending on whether you trust the rumors of the 4th in draft) makes execs everywhere say not, "We need to find the next trend in top-selling thrillers," but "Let's quick jump on this bandwagon before it speeds away."

Luckily for you, I am all over this trend like butter and sugar on lefse. Over Memorial Day weekend, I bought a copy of FACELESS KILLERS by Henning Mankell, one of the leading candidates to become the "next" Larsson, at Kaboom Books in Houston. Mankell might find it insulting to be classed as such, given that his 10-book series featuring detective Kurt Wallander began in 1997, has already been adapted into a BBC miniseries starring Kenneth Branagh and was recently brought to a close deliberately by its author... maybe the prospect of selling more books in the heretofore indifferent US market

It's too bad what I read wasn't more promising. FACELESS KILLERS is an obvious predecessor to Larsson's THE GIRL WHO... series, what with their using political currents to feed into crime at hand, the focus on tedium and routine, and the treatment of temporal space as a character. A double murder for which a group of immigrants seeking asylum become the prime suspects makes for a creepy opening but a clumsy development, with the "issue-y" chunks slowing down the suspense of finding the killers. And frankly, I didn't want to spend any more time around the good detective Wallander than I had to; he's basically a dirty, grumpy would-be womanizer who is deeply suspicious of everyone and thinks the world owes him something. Larsson's Mikael Blomkvist has been accused, perhaps with merit, of being a Mary Sue, but at least he's not racist. And without the counterweight of a Salander -- though FACELESS KILLERS does drum up a female D.A. whose time in the center of the plot is deeply appreciated -- we're with him all the time.

I'm not prepared to write off all Scandinavian thrillers because I was disappointed with the Mankell book, but I wonder if the search itself fails to give Larsson enough credit. His reliance on clichés is no worse than any others in his genre, and his character development I submit is much better. Sometimes the "next thing" is nothing at all.

First Chill -- then Stupor --

If you can bear to read them, the Guardian has a great round-up of 10 books about the credit crunch, with helpful notes as to whether the authors assign blame or offer solutions (or neither), including THE BIG SHORT and PAYBACK: DEBT AND THE SHADOW SIDE OF WEALTH. Speaking of neither, the paper is also carrying an article about Glenn Beck's book and its predictably abysmal reviews, for which it quotes from a Daily Beast article terming it "instructively bad." Heh.

Portrait of the Journalist as a Human Being

David Foster Wallace was not a journalist. He may have (legitimately) performed much of the investigation contained in his 1997 collection A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I'LL NEVER DO AGAIN with press credentials, under the aegis of 'reporting' on a tennis tournament or the shooting of a film, but as hard as he tries to wear that hat, he can't maintain it... and that's okay.

A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING was published the year after INFINITE JEST but comprised of magazine articles he wrote before and during work on his magnum opus. For readers at the time, the publisher was probably hoping for a "Guess what else he's got up his sleeve!" reaction, which was almost exactly my reaction when I first read the titular essay, in which DFW describes the experience of going on a Caribbean mega-cruise and the feelings it inspires in him. The feelings! Here come the feelings! (Back to those in a second.)

The persona DFW adopts here, for the most part (and which he can't ultimately maintain), is that of a wide-eyed watcher noting down exactly what he sees. I say that it's a persona, because while I don't doubt that his observations are genuine, he seems conscious in that voice that it is a construction. In nearly every piece here, he begins from a point of distance and eventually reveals that he's closer to the source than is apparent at first. "A Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley" is the most outwardly autobiographical, in that this moment practically opens the piece. In others, it takes a while to develop.

In "Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All," visiting the Illinois State Fair for Harper's, DFW introduces that angle by taking along with him his former prom date, tagged "Native Companion," who stayed in Illinois and settled down with husband and children. The Native Companion gambit teeters on the edge of stereotype -- how she's unafraid of the carnival rides while he quakes in his shoes, her down-home embrace of the mystery meats and objectification. (He does however steal one of my favorite lines from INFINITE JEST, 'less smitten than decapitated,' to describe her reaction to a cattle show MC.) And then every so often there's a flash of -- regret, and also wonder, as he observes her observing the fair, and observes himself, observing her, observing the fair. Perhaps a classic gambit in postmodern chess, but it works.

I had read two of its selections before ("David Lynch Keeps His Head" and the titular essay), and while the first time through I was all starry-eyed and overwhelmed, the second time I could approach with a more critical eye. I was still impressed, but I found myself disagreeing with the thrust of the Lynch profile, depicting the director as a pure artist who doesn't really care whether anyone gets his allusions or his 'point.' Even as some of the details on Lynch and his world are correct, he didn't sell me on that thesis, and in fact seemed like the essay with the strongest thesis to sell. With "A Supposedly Fun Thing...", though, I felt the second time around I was better able to judge and ultimately accept the author's argument; I could go big picture, instead of marveling at the details, and agreed with what I saw in the details.

"Real" "objective" journalists are taught to screen their opinions behind 'shaping' and editing, as we saw last month with the foofaraw around Lynn Hirschberg's M.I.A. profile.* The postmodernism is what puts the quotation marks in. Is Wallace's postmodern approach particularly novel here? No, there are some spectacular writers who have gone down this path (try the anthology THE NEW NEW JOURNALISM if you're looking). But for lovers of long-form magazine pieces, this book is a feast. Or, because I have to go out hokey like this, because it touched me too, a supposedly fun book that I look forward to reading again.

* Quickly: Hirschberg profiles singer M.I.A. in a not-totally-complimentary way, cemented with the detail that she blithely orders truffle fries while professing to care about political oppression; M.I.A. goes ballistic and distributes reporter's number, then produces recording of them ordering fries, which she thought was just fries and not the truffled ones (with all the aristocratic entailments thereof).

How to make yourself happy with books

I recently finished Gretchen Rubin's THE HAPPINESS PROJECT, a book whose overall cheeriness and array of applications snuck up on me a little. Rubin admits at the beginning that her life is pretty good overall -- working author, two happy children, nice New York apartment -- but that maybe she didn't appreciate how good it was, often enough.

Being a writer, reading played a part in Rubin's quest for happiness; here are her lessons that stuck out for me (in my words):

Abandon pretension and read what you really like. Rubin loves children's literature, so she decides to make a special effort to seek it out among her other, more "appropriate" reading choices. This decision went hand-in-hand with her choice to only listen to the pop music that she loved, rather than the jazz and classical music she felt she should be enjoying.
Buy the books that matter to you. Rubin describes her joy at finding a collectible set of books she had been looking for, even though her own husband points out that the books will sit on the shelf as largely a conversation piece. I think about something similar when I give away a 'classic' book to make room for something that will never be taught in college courses.
Share it with others. In keeping with her interests, Rubin started a children's literature book club that proved to be such a success she started a second club for people who didn't join the first one right away. (Check the acknowledgments to find out which other 'name' authors were numbered among those club members.)

I largely agree with these rules, although they share the book's bias overall towards the belief that its author has more money than time and the actions that stem from that. As long as I'm here, if I had to spell them out, a few of my own:

Ask people what they're reading. Ask everyone! People who do read are happy to tell you, and the ones who don't (or who act like it's a retrograde question to begin with) set themselves apart right away.
Keep a list. At the end of the year, I always put a list of all (or almost all) the books I read on this blog. But even if I didn't have a book blog, I would still keep that list for myself. It gives me a sense of accomplishment, and it allows me to look back and say, "That was the summer I read ____" and nostalgize a bit.
Stay up late. When I was a kid, the best thing was reading by flashlight and not getting caught, or even sitting downstairs with my dad and not being sent up to bed because I was "just finishing this chapter." Now I can stay up as late as I want, but I still enjoy that feeling of stealing time away from the end of the day.

You're probably here because books make you happy, but what are your rules?

Congratulations to Pete Hamill, who will receive an honorary high school diploma this weekend 59 years after dropping out of Regis High School on the Upper East Side. It pays to persevere...

Spotted on the subway

She was a nice old lady, not the kind you would think would be reading a book about the Antichrist. Even this one.

Some twit of a tweeter with the moniker of @hoopopinion wrote that as badly as LeBron had played for the Cleveland Cavaliers, it still wasn’t worse than the book we had written. Why was I being dragged into this mess?

SHOOTING STARS was far from the best book I had ever written; the compromises of such collaboration, written in the first person of James and subject to his approval, had always shamed me. I did it for the money, because all writers, or at least those who don’t want to die, also have to eat. But I also did it because it was an inspirational coming-of-age story involving LeBron and the four teammates who had become his brothers through high school. I took great offense to what this Twit twat said. So I wrote back: Fuck off.

Buzz Bissinger joined Twitter and developed a serious case of Get Off My Lawn, only he thinks the entire Internet is his lawn.

Overheard in the office

BOSSLADY 1: I was wide awake at 5AM, thinking, should I go to work, should I stay home...
BOSSLADY 2: Did you go to work?
BOSSLADY 1: No, I stayed in bed and read ULYSSES.

Baseball Week 2: The Vengeance

Between August 2 and 8 this blog will be all baseball books, all the time. It's late but it's longer than ever! Here's the lineup:

Aug. 2: Eliot Asinof, EIGHT MEN OUT
Aug. 3: Philip Roth, THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL
Aug. 4: Filmbook: "Eight Men Out" (John Sayles, 1988)
Aug. 5: Jim Bouton, BALL FOUR
Aug. 6: Jonathan Mahler, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE BRONX IS BURNING
Aug. 7: Jason Turbow and Michael Duca, THE BASEBALL CODES
Aug. 8: Open Forum

Read one, read a few, read them all.

I would like to get a second novel in there somewhere, but the only one that has caught my eye is the 600-plus-page THE BROTHERS K; I will keep looking but no promises.

Are You There?

Each lover has some theory of his own
About the difference between the ache
Of being with his love, and being alone:

Why what, when dreaming, is dear flesh and bone
That really stirs the senses, when awake,
Appears a simulacrum of his own.

Narcissus disbelieves in the unknown;
He cannot join his image in the lake
So long as he assumes he is alone.

The child, the waterfall, the fire, the stone,
Are always up to mischief, though, and take
The universe for granted as their own.

The elderly, like Proust, are always prone
To think of love as a subjective fake;
The more they love, the more they feel alone.

Whatever view we hold, it must be shown
Why every lover has a wish to make
Some kind of otherness his own:
Perhaps, in fact, we never are alone.

-W.H. Auden

Belated opening of park reading season

Park: Riverside Park (upper)
Book: David Mitchell's THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET, set in turn-of-the-19th-century Japan
Notes: Signed a ballot petition for State Senate. Have to write it down in case it comes back to haunt me -- I was so wrapped up in the book I didn't stop to quiz her about her credentials or aims. Bad citizen! (She handed me a flyer, but it is...vague.)

Photo: schuyler therese

How authors should be more like bands

Even your brother's garage band has a MySpace page with a list of upcoming gigs. It confounds me when authors don't have a website or a blog (or a MySpace page, okay) with at least a little news and a bio, and preferably a list of events they will be appearing at if they have some coming up.

With this morning's search, the author in question has a book coming out in the next 6 weeks and is definitely doing some appearances. I stumbled over one by accident while looking up something else, and thought, "Hey, I wonder if he's doing any other readings in New York." He has written for plenty of sites and has a lot of relevant search engine results, but no blog -- no Facebook page -- no site. His publisher's page doesn't even mention his second book, so that would also be considered an institutional failure, but it would be just as easy for him to buy MySecondBookTitle.com or MyName.com, throw up a list of book tour dates as they are confirmed, and walk away. (By the way, both those mock URLs appear to be available, so have at.)

I'm your audience and I can't show up unless you tell me where you are! Don't count on me to surf over to the bookstore's website in time. Don't assume I'll be walking past a Barnes & Noble with your photo in the window. Best to make it, if at all possible, so that if I Google you, I can click through to some kind of you-maintained Web presence where I can find out that you have a book coming out and that you're reading at the bookstore around the corner from me.

Publicity departments, if you think your author won't do this or isn't willing, you should update your sites too -- or help your author to set one up. If James Ellroy can be on Facebook, what is everyone else's excuse? (Yes, his publisher helps him, but that's my point -- a few hours a week for an intern, a high level of net attention.)

You as an author don't have to put up flyers or play bar mitzvahs or scary gigs in country bars. (And aren't you glad?) Just pick a platform for your online home... anywhere.

Earlier from my apparently ongoing series: Publishing, You're Doing It Wrong