Alan Cheuse's Blog

http://www.npr.org/2015/07/07/4185974...

Kim Stanley Robinson's fine new novel, about a generation ship heading for the near stars which takes a new turn...

Time is continuous in this book, which means nothing that happens in the course of events will be incidental. Addie dies and the family loads her coffin in their wagon and sets off for Jefferson. At this point the reader may realize that it is a habit of some family members to see things as something other than what they are. It is Darl, the major narrator of the novel, who most often is given to this : “Below the sky,” he says ”sheet-lightning slumbers lightly ; against it the trees, motionless, are ruffled out to the last twig, swollen, increased as though quick with young.” Or his mother, Addie, just having died, he sees “her peaceful rigid face fading into the dusk as though darkness were a precursor of the ultimate earth, until at last the face seems to float detached upon it, lightly as the reflection of a dead leaf.” It is poets who make transformative observations that intensify life. Darl’s gift, his language of thought being far beyond the capability of his father or his siblings, suggests why they think he is touched. And Faulkner may be saying that Darl requires that diagnosis, or else how can he, Faulkner, get away with verbiage in such contrast with the diction of the common tongue . For the other speakers, family members and neighbors, with the exception perhaps of the little boy Vardaman, have only country speech – serviceable and even primitively eloquent, but hardly with the gift of metaphor:”We never aimed to bother nobody,” Anse says to a town marshal. Dewy Dell says “I’d liefer go back.” The oldest son, Cash, looking at the swollen river they need to cross says: “If I’d just suspicioned it, I could a come down last week and taken a sight on it.” The remarkable thing is that the book’s two modes of discourse – its literary thinking and common speech — are complementary. The inner and outer life run together on this perilous family journey — it’s as if the words themselves are shadow- lettered and given dimension.

E.L. Doctorow

REMARKS AT THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS CEREMONY ON RECEIVING THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD MEDAL FOR DISTINGUISHED CONTRIBUTION TO AMERICAN LETTERS

New York City, November 20, 2013

Before coming here this evening I thought to say something about what is lately on my mind—what is on all our minds, whether we know it or not—something that has swept through our lives and taken us up in ways that are useful and even spectacular, but also worrisome—and so ubiquitous and loomingly present in everything we do—the way we communicate, and take care of ourselves and find things out and look to be entertained—well, that would have to be the Internet. So to begin I want to congratulate those short-listed content providers here this evening. The World Wide Web was conceived as a somewhat academic resource some years ago but its years of realization and development since the Eighties have seemed to me the work of a moment, coming into being with the force of an astronomical event. And so here was this virtual world, a companion planet in orbital swing with our own. And its stuff, its substance not mountains and seas and deserts and melting icebergs, but information, data, knowledge in every form, of every kind, transmitted for every purpose, personal, governmental, commercial , educational, political. It is a companion world mined to create wealth, to educate, to bring news, to spy, to save lives, to make war. But my odd sense of it as something exploded instantly into being has to do with a population putting itself eagerly into its arcane service, as emigrants swearing fealty to a new world—the techies, the programmers, web masters, security experts, hackers—as if, with its appearance, it created the people necessary to maintain it. And you wonder what if there was no Internet, what would these people have done with their lives? It was as if they were born for the virtual, so promptly and efficiently did they bond with it, work out is kinks and deduce its possibilities. And this world of theirs is a world of simulation, clearly evidenced by its language. Never mind that text is now a verb. More radically a search engine is not an engine, a platform is not a platform, a bookmark is not a bookmark because an e-book is not a book, and a cookie is not a chocolate chip cookie. Cloud is something that may be somewhere in the sky though not to produce weather. Surfing, an activity with neither a surfboard nor waves to ride. So language has been stolen, or more charitably, metamorphosed. We in this room especially have to appreciate metaphor. We’re the descendants of writers who saw the sun as Helios’ chariot riding across the sky. Yet, and yet… when was the last time hearing the wordmouse that you thought of a small gray rodent? Or heard the word web and thought of a spider? Ralph Waldo Emerson, said “all that can be thought can be written… Man is the faculty of reporting, and the universe is the possibility of being reported.” So Emerson would appreciate the Internet. The universe as the possibility of being reported suggests endless ascription, infinite surprise. And he might after a drink or two think of global internet activity as a kind of Oversoul. For my part I think less mystically of an Overbrain. You will find in the relevant Wikipedia entry a visualization of routing paths through a portion of the Internet. What makes the picture uncanny is that it might easily be mistaken for a cross section of the human brain. So can we expect from the Internet’s meta brain infinite manifestations of human genius and human perfidy? I think so. It is a complex structure, available to all sorts of applications and misapplications. Like any web it can wrap itself around you. If there’s an algorithmic breakthrough that shows us how to reduce pollution, for example, there is an algorithm for the quantification of persons into data. Algorithm, algorithm, who could ask for anything more. Wherein everything we do, our predilictions, our relations with others, our physical qualities and psychic conditions, our political beliefs, what we buy, what doctors we see, what movies we watch, what books we read, if any—anything and everything about us broken down into data, the life substance of the companion world in cyberspace mined in invasive expeditions in the name of commerce and government surveillance—for the use of corporations and excited police departments. You can call it quantification—in the 1960’s we called it reification. A means of dehumanizing. And it turns out that the prophetic story for all of this is, oddly enough, that eviction story from the bronze age telling of the consequences coming from eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. So like all worlds, the virtual comes with its Heaven and its Hell. What does this mean for all of us in this room, we writers and our publishers? We don’t want to give up on the presumably inconvenient thing we do, something as old as paginated written narrative. We don’t want to lose heart as did Frank Norris, the author of naturalistic works of fiction in the late 19th century. Norris despaired of the Western Union telegram—the Twitter of its day. He feared it was the end of literary discourse. If people could express themselves adequately in ten words, the human mind would eventually be inaccessible to works of a hundred thousand words. But Norris also believed the typewriter was an enemy of creativity and how much more was imparted to a sentence as written by hand rather than by a machine. We don’t want to be today’s Norrises. Silly fellow that he was (as there are those today who think writing on a computer means the death of great fiction.) Writers thrive on adversity and always have, since God stopped writing and humans took over the task. But there are internet dynamics that do challenge us. In fact, as concerns interactivity, one of the web world’s waving flags—the techies don’t want to know that reading a book is the ultimate interactivity, where the reader’s life flows through the sentences, as through a printed circuit, animating those sentences, bringing them to life in the mind—so that it is only when a book is read that it is completed. Nothing else is as interactive as that. And a book is written in silence and read in silence, another advantage in our noisy world—an integrity of the mind is maintained with the ability to live in an extended discourse. No, that isn’t the major problem. Nor is it the digital undercutting of authors’ copyright and the pirating of texts, equivalent to what has happened to musicians… though that is a problem. You may have read a few days ago the results of a survey conducted by PEN: Not only that American writers worry about being the target of government surveillance, but that “a significant portion of writers are engaging in self-censorship by avoiding research on certain controversial topics, choosing not to engage in sensitive conversations, and declining to pursue particular topics and stories when doing so might lead to scrutiny by the U.S. government.” So it has begun. That slowly gathering ghostly darkness coming off the other world technology. A kind of China-like darkness, maybe. Or call it a first look into the internet world’s Hell. It’s hard to believe as we assemble here this evening, a flourishing example of Western democracy. But the struggle has begun as to who will rule that webby other world—government data miners and the corporations in step with them, or everyone else. We’ll have to pull ourselves together and, reluctantly or not, join that struggle. I don’t have to remind us that everyone in this room is in the free speech business. Thank you for your kind attention, and my congratulations again to the wonderful short listed writers here this evening.

One of finest voices in contemporary American fiction, now gone down. On June 19, 2015.

Here is what he said in a Paris Review interview about his masterly novel "Light Years"...

The book is the worn stones of conjugal life. All that is beautiful, all that is plain, everything that nourishes or causes to wither. It goes on for years, decades, and in the end seems to have passed like things glimpsed from the train—a meadow here, a stand of trees, houses with lit windows in the dusk, darkened towns, stations flashing by—everything that is not written down disappears except for certain imperishable moments, people and scenes. The animals die, the house is sold, the children are grown, even the couple itself has vanished, and yet there is this poem. It was criticized as elitist, but I’m not sure this is so. The two of them are really rather unexceptional. She was beautiful, but that passed; he was devoted, but not strong enough really to hold onto life. The title was originally “Nedra and Viri”—in my books, the woman is always the stronger. If you can believe this book, and it is true, there is a dense world built on matrimony, a life enclosed, as it says, in ancient walls. It is about the sweetness of those unending days.

Jami Attenberg's attentive and moving portrait in fiction of a real life twentieth century New York saint of the streets...

http://www.npr.org/2015/06/11/4129118...

A screaming comes across the sky...
Norman Lock's compact and powerful
new novel American Meteor...


http://www.npr.org/2015/06/14/4129119...

http://www.npr.org/2015/06/03/4112532...

Steve Stern's new novel, The Pinch, shows off his powers of language and imagination at their height, as he (re)creates a section of Memphis where the Torah trumps the King James Bible...

Saul Bellow, An Appreciation
April 08, 200512:00 AM ET


"I am an American, Chicago born — Chicago, that somber city — and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent..."

A lot of readers and writers have been quoting that sentence, the opening lines of the novel The Adventures of Augie March, this week, the week that its creator, Saul Bellow, left us to our own devices. Since Melville opened Moby Dick with that first great line of American fiction — "Call me Ishmael" — and Mark Twain opened The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in his own special way, no one but Bellow has fashioned an opening as memorable and as powerful, and as important.

This line that sprung open the padlock of American art language by using the pick of free-style diction. This line that announced that American writers didn't have to glove their knuckles anymore when they knocked at the door.

Saul Bellow published The Adventures of Augie March in 1953. It won him national recognition, a National Book Award, a major place at the American literary table. "The book just came to me," he wrote. "All I had to do was be there with buckets to catch it."

Bellow had prepared for this one, though. His first novel, Dangling Man, came out almost a decade before. The Victim, his second novel, published in 1947, opened with a line that was almost as memorable, if more conventional: "On some nights New York is as hot as Bangkok." And then the rest of that novel's opening paragraph, as beautiful as anything by any of his predecessors or peers in the sweltering art of the novel: "The whole continent seems to have moved from its place and slid nearer the equator, the bitter gray Atlantic to have become green and tropical, and the people, thronging the streets, barbaric fellahin among the stupendous monuments of their mystery, the lights of which, a dazing profusion, climb upward endlessly into the heat of the sky."

If Bellow hadn't upped the ante with the opening of Augie March, this passage alone would have been a great opening to remember him by: the allusion to a South Asian city, the geographical breadth of the imagery, the transformation of colors, gray to green and tropical, New York bustle presented in terms of the Arab street.

Bellow, a Jewish immigrant from Montreal at an early age, who spoke Yiddish as his first language, was, to be sure, the Poet Laureate of the modern American melting pot. After Hemingway, no writer did more to enliven and transform the American literary sentence, stirring mind and feelings, ideas and action, the premeditated and the unconscious, in a spicy mix of high and low speech.

His characters sometimes traveled to Mexico and Europe, to upstate New York and the western desert. But Chicago and New York were his Paris and his London, his cities where life emerged from the ruins of life. Where failed schemers weep at the funerals of strangers and angry men beat with baseball bats on the bodies of beautiful cars, and extraordinary women wear boots made for walking. And men afflicted — or gifted — with graphomania write letter after letter in their minds to the people they think can set things right when only they can take charge of their own lives.

The books Bellow wrote! Letter by letter, sentence by sentence. Seize the Day, the best short novel by an American. The stories, "A Silver Dish," "Looking for Mr. Green," "By the St. Lawrence," the incomparably beautiful and mournful and yet funny, funny coming of age story — set, of course, in Chicago, that somber city — called "Something to Remember Me By." All these novels to remember, stories to remember, characters to remember.

Though the stupendous monuments of our great mystery may one day crumble, Bellow's lines will, I think, live on a good long while — in Urdu, in Chinese, in the beautiful as yet undiscovered countries where heart and mind struggle together to live in peace.

Jami Attenberg's "Saint Mazie"
Steve Stern's "The Pinch"
Don Winslow's "The Cartel"
Ross MacDonald, "Four Novels from the Fifties"
"Emily Schultz's "The Blondes"

The Black Snow, a new novel by former Dublin journalist Paul Lynch, combines language and story in masterly fashion.

http://www.npr.org/2015/05/14/4059449...

Do read this if you care about such matters as craft and voice...