I also had a look at John Steinbeck’s Nobel acceptance speech on youtube in which he takes to task the learned professors of literature, who would have us view the novel as a form of high art. 

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As the prologue, cribbed from Don Quixote, indicates, Eddie is on a quixotic journey to establish his personal recipe, braised brisket of beef in mole poblano, as the one true chili. The remainder of the book is written in the author’s original style, a kind of road-hugging, hillbilly hip-hop. If a financial crisis novel is of interest to you, please enjoy. 

Tim Parks in the New York Review of Books, asks Do We Need Stories?

If one starts with the assumption that we read novels merely to see our lives reflected in them, then the purpose of reading is solipsistic and pointless. But if you wish to enlarge your experience, by way of vicarious adventures, then stories are useful and wonderful tools. To me, it is all about contemplating life and culture from different points of view, enjoying the original use of language, experiencing rare emotions, and pondering something more than the getting of my daily bread.

I don’t want to live like a wild animal, concerned only with feeding my belly. I want to feed my mind even more. An original literary style, an eccentric way of seeing the world that speaks to that need for intellectual sustenance is absolutely essential to me. If it isn’t to others I am sorry for them. But, why then, even bother to write about it in the pages of a book review? Perhaps the author simply hasn’t read anything original lately. That would not surprise me. Our mass-produced practitioners of academic “literary fiction,” all of whom sound exactly alike and write the same banal and inoffensive stories, couched in polite and prettified prose for proper middle-aged ladies’ book clubs, have been euthanized by marketing orthodoxy.

That, and the stuff concerned primarily with the lives, loves, and neuroses of contemporary academicians — chock full of allusions to canonical works which, thanks to the literary theorists, nobody bothers to read anymore — which nonetheless constitutes the zenith of literary fiction today, and is often taught in the classroom in place of canonical works, thus leaving students with a bad impression of serious literature.

Are there no writers left out there who capture the vicissitudes of normal life in voice people living outside the classroom might want to listen to? Something that isn’t suburban realism, which has already been done to death by three generations of forgettable hacks.

Or perhaps he plays devil’s advocate here, to get us to think about the value of fiction.

The blithe spirit, Eddie, whose youthful loss of faith in himself led him to join the family firm and commit all manner of financial crimes on the way to blowing up their hedge fund, must come to terms with having destroyed what several generations of his family built, and the consequences of that.

His impotence no longer stems from a failed love affair in his youth, but from his knowledge that a casual love affair kept him from a 9/11 meeting at the World Trade Center, in which his only son, who covered for him, died in his stead.

Cheyenne, who represents reality coming to slap him silly, is a snarky, gutsy, butterfly knife wielding mama who embodies equal measures of paranoia and skepticism. 

Good on De Niro for telling the joke. To me, what it says is that Michelle has been such an admirable first lady that people might find an elitist Republican, like Romney’s wife, who doesn’t think of herself as rich with 240 million in the bank and four luxurious houses, a little harder to take. I don’t know much about Santorum’s wife, but she seems a bit of a nullity. 

I don’t see it as something he should have to apologize for.

An excellent article on male novelists and how they write for female readers. As Jacob comments:

“With Franzen and Wallace, despite their brilliance there does often seem to be a kind of pandering political correctness, one that perhaps means well but often makes me feel they’re too self-consciously trying to differentiate themselves from less enlightened men. I’m glad this essay takes the time to try to tease this out. In these writers, at least for me, the self-consciousness always feels somehow connected with the lack of convincing physicality in their writing, a lack of kinetic or lyrical awareness.”

“Pandering political correctness” I like that phrase. I can’t read either one of those guys. Nor Updike. Nor Mailer. Among other subjects, I believe that men need to write honestly about what it feels like to be a man; in oneself, and in society, and about how we measure ourselves, how society measures us, how women measure us. The roles we are able to play today are very different from what they were half a century ago, when Mailer and Updike were writing. The economy was booming then, men had jobs that supported families, kept their wives at home with children. All of that has changed. Radically. Quite possibly by design. But I’ll refrain from value judgements about it.

The people who run things in this country have decided they don’t need us anymore. Men are increasingly embattled. The roles of men and women are changing. The balance of  power is shifting. Once it was women who had to cringe. Now, it seems to be men.

Pandering political correctness speaks, to my mind of cringing. But it does not speak to me as a male. Our male authors need to say, How dare you judge me that way? What do you know of what I’ve been through? What makes you think you know my depths?

That is what the blues does for us. Sharecropper music. Increasingly, it speaks to me, as an upper-middle class Anglo who wasn’t needed anymore. That is what our novels need to do for us, too.

He’d picked her up near Baton Rouge, after some disabused trucker fobbed her off on him. She was glacially white, like him, doubled down on luck, like him, and working her way across country. Just like him. He had the car, she had a thumb, yet thought of herself as better than him. She’d made a job of letting him know it all the way through bayou country before they stopped for supper at a take-out Creole joint called Jake’s.

Continue reading: Karma

It’s so hard to find worthwhile fiction anymore. There’s Richard Powers and then what? Literary Fiction? Franzen? DeLillo? To me, they’re soporific. Steve Erickson writes interesting novelties that at least don’t put me to sleep.  Tom Robbins wrote some fabulous stuff but, because of his popularity, he doesn’t get critical recognition. 

I came across a review of Dogma on an aggregator’s site and hoped it might be something new. But it’s more like defeated post-modernism. Nihilism all over again and not as interesting as say, Lermontov, or the Theatre of the Absurd from the fifties. I played Mr. Smith from The Bald Soprano when I was in fifth grade. It was one of my formative experiences.

Lars’s work is like Becket’s. All over again. It seems to happen in cycles. But he lives in England. Despair is probably right for his situation. But I don’t recognize defeat. I don’t do despair anymore. That was me in my thirties when I was totally hamstrung. But he’s published and I’m not. So somebody saw something there that hasn’t yet been seen in mine.

What do you mean by defeated post-modernism? 

Post-modernism is different things to different people, depending on whether it’s a theory of history or a certain sensibility in the arts. There’s a huge difference between them. The first time I ever heard the term, it applied to the architecture of people like Robert Venturi, who used classical forms for decoration. People say Pyncheon and Heller and Vonnegut were doing it back in the fifties, with their distant, ironic stance on things. They were writing about the horrors of war. But I doubt they ever saw themselves as writing the first post-modern novels. Aside from Catch-22, I never paid much attention to them. I was reading the classics at the time. Then came the second wave. People who had read Deleuze and those guys, like Kathy Acker, who did it more self-consciously. But artists shouldn’t listen to camp followers. And artists are starting to push back. That’s a good thing.

If you accept it as a theory of history, in which power forever accumulates at the top of the pyramid and only the urine trickles down, and you’re a nihilist, then you’re defeated.

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I wanted to write a sort of blues, a story of loss and disappointment that would, nonetheless, be a joy to read. I visualized a former President, broke and on the road, attempting to live in the world he’d wrought, just like the rest of us. The character stands for a class of people in need of a real comeuppance. Once he gets it, though, it leads to something positive. 

What influenced you? 

My years in Italy, when I was in my twenties, were probably my formative experience. I lived in Naples, and there was poverty all around me. Corruption and extortion were endemic. I remember going with a friend to witness his marriage license. The bride’s parents had an envelope full of cash to pay off the clerks and bureaucrats. Anything you wanted to do, you had to see the right people, you had to bring the payola. There was a whole class of otherwise unemployed men whose business was to know those people and make those introductions for you. That’s the way it functioned. It was a sewer. Americans have no idea. But people survived nonetheless, lots of mom and pop businesses that were probably just getting by. Tiny restaurants and tourist homes that operated on the thinnest of margins, but served wonderful food, and gave adequate service. Lots of individual artisans and small family run factories, because no one could trust their underpaid employees. Black markets for almost everything. Every transaction was done in cash and always under the table. No one paid taxes taxes because they had to pay the bribes. They had to pay the bribes because they wouldn’t pay taxes. It was a snake eating its own tail. But, as a foreigner there, with a bit of money, what a life. Splendid is the only word for it.

When I came back to the States everything seemed so unreal to me, like living in Oz, and there was the Wizard, Ronald Reagan, saying government was the problem. He had no idea. He’d never lived in a dysfunctional system. But did he ever help to create one. The wicked witches are running rampant. I shudder to think we’re becoming like Naples, but that is the way we are headed if we keep cutting taxes and starving the beast and letting the big money crowd dictate legislation and regulation. 

How did you manage to turn the recession into something so entertaining?

Humor is said to be despair that doesn’t take itself seriously. That’s what the blues is all about, too. Feeling good, in spite of it all. I’d seen hard times myself and managed to keep my spirits up, so I lent that spirit of optimism to my main character. He has great faith in his pot roast chili and his bounteous gift for gab. Feckless as he is, he is determined to make it. His enterprising spirit is something people should identify with, even if he is a trust fund baby and a narcissistic prick.

To me, that’s what makes it so much fun, all the bravado and hard knocks, the grandiose schemes that come to naught, the ongoing inflation/deflation of Eddie’s self-image.

Narcissism runs in the family, so I’m pretty familiar with how it works and much of the joke is on me. I went through a 12-steps program shortly before I started writing, and was reading a lot of self-help books. The one that made the biggest impression was Iron John.

You mean the book by Robert Bly?

Exactly. It’s all about the humbling of the arrogant prince, making him do the dirty work until he becomes a mensch. I realized what I was going through was something that was necessary.

There’s a lot about political economy, some of it pretty controversial.

I don’t know about controversial. I’m sure it just advocates ideas that need to be recirculated. The way I envision Eddie, he’s like a court jester. He tells some light and amusing tales, but he also gets his digs in on some fundamental ideas, and gets closer to his own truths, as well. Not only has he lost his fortune but he suffers a crisis of conscience for all the financial shenanigans that made him as rich as he was. Now that he’s trying to make his own way, seeing the world from downside up is an enlightening change of perspective.

You took a lot of risks including both highbrow and lowbrow elements. What is that all about?

I think my generation, the boomers, was perhaps the last to be acculturated to the classical canon. Most of us rejected it, especially the music, for a culture that was just as alien to us, rooted, as it was, in slavery and sharecropping. We loved its authenticity that our lives in the suburbs lacked. We also rejected the literary canon, which is why Eddie’s stories are inspired by pulp fiction. As Eddie learns what the blues are about he becomes more empathetic, though he never quite manages to moult his ego. 

Why is it that your characters have so many identity issues?

Because so many of the people I’ve known have similar issues. People need something authentic in their lives, but our media dominated culture doesn’t produce anything like that. Mostly, what it churns out is safe, entertaining, market researched drivel, masquerading as culture, or worse, as youthful rebellion. If anything were better designed to keep youth away from the barricades than sex, drugs, and rock’n roll, I can’t imagine what it is.

That’s one of Eddie’s epiphanies in the novel, is it not?

Eddie sees that politics should be concerned with people’s livelihoods, regardless of the changes needed in the economic structure. Instead, we’re fighting over spurious issues of import only to small groups, while the rentiers rob us of our bacon and bread, and holler about class warfare, as if they haven’t been waging one for the last thirty years. The sort of identity politics we’ve practiced for the last generation, largely under the influence of post-modern theory, have ceded America’s future to the banking and real-estate cartels, while most of those who are being hurt are more likely to take to the barricades for the rights of their oppressors. That is something that needs to change, and I hope that the populist movements can find common ground and do it, as they do in my book. 

What is the reaction to it, so far?

It’s viewed as literary fiction, but not literary enough. Literary fiction, to me, is just another genre. Pretty writing for ladies’ book clubs than stays within the boundaries of permissible thought. What mine lacks is that lyrical MFA voice, which is inappropriate for it. It has its own style from the very beginning. There’s a cadence to the narrative suggesting a vehicle in motion. The story is character driven, but they reveal themselves in dialogue more than inner monologues. The character is broken, into fragments almost. He has public and private personas, as well as an alter ego, and each of those parts of him has a voice. He starts out as a false populist, but becomes more truly populist as the story progresses. Eddie is portrayed as a total loser, but he is also the real deal, who becomes a hero in the end, as he stands up to the powers that be and inspires a movement like the Arab Spring.  I prefer to think of it as imaginative literature.

What is your creative process like? Do you outline, write back story, do character studies and such?

I used to, but not this time. I found myself impeded by it when I did. I knew what certain elements were; the road trip, the chili, the blues aspect. Otherwise, I write organically. I sit down and write whatever comes to mind and let each sentence suggest the next. That’s what keeps the thread going. When I run into problems, such as where to go next, it’s because I haven’t made it clear to myself where I have been, so I go back and edit and rewrite, and the problem usually resolves itself, especially if I sleep on it first. It’s a process of self-discovery as much as of creativity. Once I have the skeleton, I flesh it out in the later drafts. 

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