The 'Not-So-Rough' Guide

From Daniel Zalewski’s admiring essay on Ian McEwan, “England’s national author”:

“McEwan is a connoisseur of dread, performing the literary equivalent of turning on the tub faucet and leaving the room; the flood is foreseeable, but it still shocks when the water rushes over the edge. That’s how it is with the hounds that descend upon a woman in the 1992 novel ‘Black Dogs’; the orgiastic murder in the 1981 novel ‘The Comfort of Strangers’; the botched sexual initiation in ‘On Chesil Beach.’ At moments of peak intensity, McEwan slows time down—a form of torture that readers enjoy despite themselves. In ‘The Child in Time,’ from 1987, a man’s little girl is kidnapped at the supermarket, and his rising panic is charted with the merciless precision of a cardiogram. In ‘The Innocent,’ a 1990 tale of espionage in postwar Berlin, McEwan spends eight pages conjuring a corpse’s dismemberment. And ‘Saturday’ keeps the reader jangled for nearly forty pages, wondering along with Perowne if an airplane descending on London has become a terrorist missile. Martin Amis says, ‘Ian’s terribly good at stressed states. There’s a bit of Conrad that reminds me of Ian. It’s ‘Typhoon,’ when the captain is heading into this terrible storm and Conrad is in the position of first mate. Going into the captain’s cabin, he notices that the ship is yawing so that the captain’s shoes are rolling this way and that across the floor, like two puppies playing with each other. You think, Wow, to keep your eyes open when most people would be closing theirs. Ian has that. He’s unflinching.’

“Page-turning excitement has long been a suspect virtue in a literary novel, and some critics have disparaged McEwan as a hack with elegant prose. He does lean on noirish tropes—the climaxes of ‘Enduring Love’ and ‘Saturday’ both involve a deranged man, a trembling woman, and a knife. But McEwan believes that something stirring should happen in a novel. Though he is animated by ideas, he would never plop two characters on a sofa and have them expound rival philosophies. The opening to ‘Enduring Love’ offers a crisp illustration of game theory: when a balloon becomes untethered, each of the five men holding a rope is forced to make a decision without knowing what the others will do. But most readers enjoy it as a thrilling set piece. On our walk, McEwan twice cited Henry James’s dictum that the only obligation of a novel ‘is that it be interesting.’ Later, McEwan declared that he finds ‘most novels incredibly boring. It’s amazing how the form endures. Not being boring is quite a challenge.'” (more @ The New Yorker)

Related: James Wood writes about the manipulations of Ian McEwan

[McEwan’s essay “On John Updike” in The New York Review of Books, in which he describes Updike as having been as “troubled by science as others are troubled by God,” can be found here.]

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“Jack Kerouac‘s ‘lost’ novel The Sea is My Brother, which he wrote during his years as a merchant seaman, is to be published in its entirety for the first time.

“Described by Kerouac as being about ‘man’s simple revolt from society as it is, with the inequalities, frustration, and self-inflicted agonies,’ the 158-page handwritten manuscript was Kerouac’s first novel, but was not published during his lifetime. He wrote in his notes for the project that the characters were ‘the vanishing American, the big free by, the American Indian, the last of the pioneers, the last of the hoboes.’

“The novel follows the fortunes of Wesley Martin, a man who Kerouac said ‘loved the sea with a strange, lonely love; the sea is his brother and sentences. He goes down.’ By contrast another sailor, Kerouac continued, ‘escapes society for the sea, but finds the sea a place of terrible loneliness.'” (via The Guardian)

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The author David Foster Wallace, best known for his novel “Infinite Jest,” “a vast investigation into America as the land of addictions: to television, to drugs, to loneliness,” committed suicide on September 12, 2008 at the age of 46. Wallace, who suffered from depression for more than twenty years, struggled for more than a decade with his unfinished third novel, “The Pale King,” which he hoped would surpass “Infinite Jest.”

In the March 9th issue of The New Yorker, D.T. Max writes about Wallace’s twin struggles:

Although “depression,” writes Max, “often figured in his work,” Wallace “never published a word about his own mental illness.”

As to the public display of grief over Wallace’s death, it was “connected to a feeling that, for all his outpouring of words, he died with his work incomplete. Wallace, at least, never felt that he had hit his target. His goal had been to show readers how to live a fulfilled, meaningful life. ‘Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being,’ he once said. Good writing should help readers to ‘become less alone inside.'”

“From 1997 on, Wallace worked on a third novel, which he never finished—the ‘Long Thing,’ as he referred to it . . . His drafts, which his wife found in their garage after his death, amount to several hundred thousand words, and tell of a group of employees at an Internal Revenue Service center in Illinois, and how they deal with the tediousness of their work.” (more @ The New Yorker) 

An excerpt from Wallace’s unfinished novel can be found here.

The partial manuscript will be published next year by Little, Brown.

Related: For David Foster Wallace’s survivors, a paper puzzle (via LA Times)

[In 1999, Amherst [College] magazine writer Stacey Schmeidel interviewed Wallace by mail. The feature-length Q & A, titled “Brief Interview With a Five Draft Man,” ran in the Spring 1999 issue of the magazine, and is reprinted here.]

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Ahead of their publication later this year of six new short story collections, Harper Perennial has kicked off promotion of its “2009: Summer of the Short Story” campaign by launching a new blog, Fifty-Two Stories.

As reported by Publishers Weekly, the publishing house announced “that each week in 2009 it is posting a new short story. Some are new stories from Harper Perennial’s original collections or from upcoming hardcovers; some are original contributions never before published anywhere; and some are backlist classics. . . .

“Harper Perennial’s editorial director, Cal Morgan, selects a new story each week and posts it Sunday night. In January, Fifty-Two Stories featured stories by Mary Gaitskill, Tony O’Neill, Simon Van Booy and Tom Piazza. Last week, it posted a previously unpublished story from Louise Erdrich’s new collection, The Red Convertible, which Harper published in January. This week there’s a story by Willa Cather from The Bohemian Girl, a forthcoming selection of Cather’s greatest short works. Future selections include works by Katherine Dunn, Jess Walter, Mark Twain and Dennis Cooper.”

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