Where review, criticism, and analysis collide: "The Paper Artist" by E.K. Ota (O.Henry Anthology)

Although this blog will mix in plenty of review, I generally prefer criticism and analysis. Maybe these last two feel more like "real" literary work to me. Whenever I'm on one of those message boards where people discuss the meaning of song lyrics, I get irritated when the discussion veers from what lyrics mean to someone talking about how much they like or dislike them. Whether one likes something feels hopelessly subjective, more subjective even than an attempt to parse lyrics or explain imagery in a story or poem. Liking or disliking is what people resort to when they're too dumb or lazy to do the real work of understanding. "Real" literary work should illuminate, not just be a dead end about whether something happens to resonate. If you tell me how an egg's chemistry changes while it heats up, you've taught me something. If you tell me you don't like your eggs scrambled, the conversation ends there, because there's nothing I can really say about whether your preferences are right or wrong. 

That's how it has often felt to me, which is why I usually avoid the use of the term "review" when discussing literary work on this blog. But maybe there is a kind of review where the conversation doesn't end with a bald statement of preference. If so, then it must be one in which the review is intimately linked to both analysis and criticism. 

"The Paper Artist" by E.K. Ota is a skilled work of short fiction that for some reason doesn't resonate with me much. Something about it calls to mind a debate that's been going on for at least three decades. Has American literary fiction become homogenized, producing what Robert Olen Butler called "polished, bloodless prose"? Or skilled works without much to say that nonetheless state their nothingness well? With literature, this debate is linked to the rise of graduate writing programs, but there is a similar debate surrounding the work on streaming services, which is often good but not great, determined by algorithms to churn out massive amounts of content just good enough to keep people paying their monthly subscription fee. Either way, it's hard to point out exactly what's wrong with the work, except that maybe you feel like you've seen it before. 

"Paper Artist" strikes me as a very competent short story that sounds a lot like other short stories I've read in the last twenty years, one that passes muster with the creeds and preferences of workshops, but one that also doesn't read to me like anything that came from the forge of a hot and desperate human consciousness. Maybe this is unfair, though. Not every story has to be Moby Dick. There is probably a feminist argument to be made that favoring "raw and bloody prose" reflects a masculine perspective, and that a close examination of the quiet parts of the world and the human mind in that world are worth serious consideration. In the case of "Paper Artist," the discussion is more complicated, because the story's main character, Muneo, is an artist whose work, his wife notes, "swept through the mind, brushed the soul, and couldn't quite penetrate the heart." So if the story does something similar, is this perhaps not a success of form meeting content? 

To start a discussion of the story and whether its lack of "bloody" content is a success or a weakness, I'd like to start with an outline. This isn't quite what "formalist" theory means, but let's call it a watered-down kind of formalism, because I think looking at the story in this way can help us arrive at a more useful discussion of whether this story is good or just good enough. 

Is "Paper Artist" an example of art that cynically connects the dots based on what has worked before, or does it deserve a more sympathetic reading?

Outline

1.  Confrontation between Muneo (father) and Mana (daughter)

This is the strongest part of the story. It begins directly at the point of conflict. Mana is marrying a foreigner, and one who isn't much to speak of. She's already pregnant. Muneo wants her to get an abortion, ditch the man, and get back to serious study on the cello. She decides to stay with the man and go to America. So the father issues his edict: as long as you stick to this decision, you can never come home. 

We often talk about strong narratives presenting us with something a character wants, but they can also use a character's choice as a framework. Think of The Lion King, and how Simba chooses to run away out of shame when his father is killed. The rest of the narrative unfolds as we see how the decision plays out, at first seeming to succeed but then later showing its flaws. That's what's going to happen here. Scene one gives us the father's decision, and everything after that will come about from the challenges to that decision and whether he sticks to it or waivers. Muneo is described as a "master of control." He is seeking, through his decision, to exert total control over his daughter. Will it work? 

2. Counterpoint

Masako has not really emerged as a character with her own thoughts in Act I, but she springs to life in Act II, and when she does, it's to challenge Muneo's control. This is unexpected, as the narrative makes clear that for most of their marriage, she has indulged his desires and gone along with his view of how their marriage should work. Her first words in the story, though, are, "You were too hard on her." 

She won't push her opposition too ardently for most of the narrative. Life will continue on for them as it has, and when she finally decides to outright oppose his decision, she'll do it quietly, without him knowing. She does offer, however, the perfect counterweight to his "control." The end of Act II is Masako's question to him: "Do you think you know the twists and turns of a woman's heart?" She is presenting him with something beyond his control and suggesting it might foil his plans. Now we have a decision and an opposing force to the decision, and the plot works out from there.

3. Exposition!!

We see Muneo paying homage to his parents, which leads to backstory about his father having been a surgeon. Muneo, like his daughter, opposed his father's will, becoming an artist instead of a doctor. We then move from seeing "most mornings" to one particular morning when Muneo and Masako are eating breakfast together. During this particular breakfast, Masako will break with tradition by speaking during what is supposed to be quiet reflection time. There is more backstory and then yet another flashback of how they had gone to make amends with Muneo's father by offering him a dragon lamp Muneo had made. 

There is a lot of flashbacking and backstory going on here, and one of the strongest criticisms I have to offer is that the story thereby loses momentum. In a workshop, you'll offer hear the criticism/suggestion that a short story feels like it really wants to be a novel, and while I usually think that's a dumb comment made by someone who doesn't want to offer anything thoughtful, this story is starting to feel like it really does want to be a novel. Except it isn't. It's a short story, so all of those flashbacks are getting crammed in uncomfortably without organic introductions, and they're piling up faster than the forward momentum is. Also, perhaps because of the attempt to create a generational family drama feel within a short story, there is a tendency for characters to essentialize and openly reveal what other characters are thinking rather than let it be evident from their actions. "It was his pride on the line now, and it stung him that he had been disregarded," Masako summarizes of her husband. 

4. The revolt: Masako conceives of the secret visit

Masako sets up a visit with her daughter and granddaughter while Muneo is on a trip. There are some "Gee, different cultures are different" observations. Muneo has trouble concentrating because of his daughter, but he pushes through. 

5. Mana's updates subside

Mana's marriage ends. More backstory about how Masako accommodates Muneo by not eating out, even when she wants to, but she's going to break that when her daughter and granddaughter visit.

6. Status quo is upset by the visit

We don't see the visit anymore than Muneo does, but we see its impact. Something is off afterwards, although he doesn't know what it is. Another flashback to when Masako's mother died. Flashback to giving gift of hanten. That's four gifts total in the story now: Paining from daughter to dad, necklace from Muneo to Masako, hanten from Masako to Muneo, and dragon lamp from Muneo to his father. How each gives and receives tells us a great deal about their characters, and I feel like much of the backstory could have been ditched and just left us with what these four gifts tell us. Flashbacks to couple in their twenties, to moving into Muneo's parents' house, to finding out what happened to dragon lamp. 

7. Masako's cancer and further explanation of what she meant to Muneo

8. Daughter's death and finding of Mina

The final act begins with Muneo making his masterpiece, which tells us both that he has gone as far as his control can take him, and also, perhaps, that his art has finally brought him to a place of transcendence, and perhaps he will now realize something that will help him outside of his art. He believes that he has finally managed to put soul into his work.

All art is a balancing act between raw emotion and technique or craft. The goal is to channel energy in order to increase its power. Channel it too much, and it chokes everything off. Channel it too little, and it become dispersed slop creating a mess all over everything. If Muneo's art has leaned too far in one direction, it's been to channel too strictly, but now he seems to have learned to let the water of his art flow enough to create more spiritual power. He has given up some control and found that it has helped his art, not hurt it.

This artistic realization is linked to a key personal revelations for Muneo that come about at the end. There is the fact that his daughter died. There are facts about his daughter's life in America. There is the granddaughter who needs a home. Most of all, there is the fact of Masako's betrayal, that she went against his edict when she brought her daughter and granddaughter to Japan when Muneo was gone. 

Newly enlightened Muneo doesn't react with rage. He thinks that the three ladies must have had "fun without him." This is perhaps the strongest possible relinquishing of control possible for Muneo, one that isn't just about him becoming a chiller version of himself so others can enjoy their own lives, but in fact suggests that his presence might not be needed at all. We leave the story thinking that maybe Muneo's late-in-life understanding of his relative unimportance may be the key he needs to being the unlikely guardian his granddaughter needs. Maybe he'll do better with his second chance than he did with the first one. 

Okay, so with that out of the way...

I think that outline gives us a pretty good understanding of what the story is trying to do, how it succeeds and how it might struggle. I can't deny it's a good story, at least in the sense that it gives us a clear conflict with stakes and a character who is trying to navigate the conflict. It does all the things a good story should do. I think it's a little dense with flashback, but I'm not going to be too much of a stickler on that. Sometimes, the information in a character's past is too good not to let it interrupt the present. Digressions in an amiable speaker are an enjoyable indulgence, if you've got the time. 

What doesn't quite go down as easy for me is the way all those flashbacks and all that backstory seems to be aimed at filling in motivation. Just like there is a tightrope to walk with too much form and not enough in art, there is also a balance in a narrative between too much motivation and too little. Aatif Rashid has written persuasively on the danger of providing a surplus of it:

And so, writers end up clarifying their characters' desires with such precision that their narratives becomes perfect structures of cause and effect—this character left her husband because her mother never left her abusive father. This character is withdrawn because his mother never told him she loved him. This character is depressed because her brother drowned when she was young. It's Freud reduced to teleology, and it cheapens the complex reality of human experience.

If we knew nothing about Hamlet's past, we'd be at a loss to understand his motivations and why he's so damn moody. If we knew too much, we wouldn't be mesmerized by his struggles. Coleridge wrote of Hamlet that he is "a person of vast intellectual power, and his mind is a world unto itself." It's the inability to pin Hamlet down to a simple motivation that makes him Hamlet. 

Nonetheless, however unfathomable the human mind might be, most human actions do have at least some level of motivation, however fractured it might be. We tend to want some explanation of why our characters do what we do. I don't really object to the attempts to use backstory and flashback in "Paper Artist" to provide some of the motivation that fuels the conflict. What rubs me the wrong way is the too-intimate link between vocation and character of Muneo. His fastidiousness is unbroken between his profession and his personal life, and it manifests itself in the same way. His job becomes the biggest symbol of who he is, so much that it's the title of the story. Freud isn't reduced to teleology here; it's reduced to a middle school aptitude test. 

This is where I feel like this story, as excellent as it is, might be a little too familiar, and it could be seen as following something of a formula. Choosing the profession of a character as the title of a story has been done a lot, especially in the last thirty years. The "algorithm" here is to do some research on the profession, then extrapolate from profession to person. The short stories of Andrea Barrett, which I've had more than one go at, do this to a nauseating degree. You take a scientist who studies something,  and then you make their whole interior life mirror that thing. The story writes itself.

In reality, there is almost always some tension between vocation and character, some gap between a person's core qualities and the demands their profession puts upon them. Stories that make an artist as fastidious in their personal lives and they are about their work seem to me like horoscopes that say everyone born in 1972 share basic traits. Are all artists fastidious at home and at work? Would you write this about, say, all the workers in a steel factory? I worked in the same job for about twenty years, and while my abilities and personality fit it in many ways, I still found that I often chafed at it. You wouldn't be able to understand me from my profession. Moreover, I was different from everyone else I worked with, even though we all had the same job. 

A woman I worked with told me last year that she assumed I was a neat freak who liked everything in its place based on how fussy I could be about writing reports. If you've ever seen my house or my car, though, you'd see how wrong she was. I'm one person at work and another at home. Or I was when I still had a job. 

So writing a story called "The Dude with this Profession," including a bunch of lyrical descriptions of the work they do, and then tying that work into the character's choices in life and love seems too easy and too essentializing. By naming the story "The Paper Artist" and then making Muneo a near-complete embodiment of a fussy artist in every aspect of his life, the story ignores how much people's professional personalities can surprise us. 

Review, critique, and analysis revisited

Review is generally a commentary on the quality of an artistic work. Analysis is related to exegesis. It's an examination of how the work is put together, what its aims are and how it accomplishes those aims, as well as what its assumptions are and where those assumptions might be challenged. Criticism is something of a hybrid of the two, and it then takes those two and relates them to other issues in the world.  

When I think a work is excellent, I tend to skip past the review and dive right into the analysis, because the quality is assumed. You only dissect a work that's really worth thinking deeply about. When a work feels off to me, I don't end up wanting to think about what it's trying to do as much, because I haven't been charmed into caring. A work like "The Paper Artist," though, forces me to blend together all three disciplines, because I almost am charmed by it. It turns review into a more philosophical effort, pushing it out of preference and into the realm of aesthetics. I can't really answer questions about whether it's working without first answering questions about how it's trying to work. To me, this is a story with underlying good bones built around a decision and its consequences. That framework ends up taking on too much weight from a story bigger than the building code of  a short story will allow, and it also suffers from tipping too much in the direction of a "Freud reduced to teleology" direction. That tipping is especially noticeable because of the tie between profession and character that has become so prevalent in stories of the past thirty years. I won't give you the same list Gemini just gave me of novels, short stories, and movies where the title is the profession of the main character, but it's a long list. 

I realize nothing can ever really be new in art, and I wouldn't reject a story just because it's got a title that follows what other stories have used. If I did that, I'd have to reject all my own work. But you've got to earn your place, make me accept that this addition to the list deserves to be there. This story feels to me like a 6/10 Netflix original. It competently puts a character through development, but at the end, I don't feel like that development really touches the soul. It's a complicated way of having a trad father come across the rather pedestrian observation that maybe he shouldn't be such a dick. 

But maybe the way this story has made me think so much about why I find it to be competent mediocrity undercuts my argument. Because I really had to think about why I felt that way, and when art makes you think that hard, it can't be throwaway. I wouldn't spend two seconds thinking about why I feel like Happy Gilmore 2 is trash. A story that confronts me with questions about why I feel a resistance to it must be, on some level, more than a mere mediocrity. 

Pre-linguistic cognition: "Silverfish" by Rone Shavers

Disclaimer: I went to graduate school with Rone, so this isn't a completely unbiased analysis of the novella in question. Still, my policy with authors who are friends is to read the work and then only review/analyze the work if I liked it. If I don't, I just shut up about it and never tell the author I read it. I've actually done this before. Only once have I given a positive review of something when I didn't mean it because I knew the author, and that was for a very old person who had asked me to review the book and I just didn't see the harm and couldn't say no. 

A college professor began a class once by asking a question: Can you think without language? I mulled it over for a bit. There are certainly times I think using a very abbreviated linguistic system. Often, I'll be chewing on some problem, and it leads me to an argument I've had in my head before. My brain will then simply quickly register the results of the previous conversation I had in my brain about that subject without recalling the entire process that led me to that conclusion. This is one of the reasons people have such a hard time arguing for conclusions they reached a long time ago. They've been using an interior shorthand for a long time, one that simply remembers having come to a conclusion about something without all the steps that got them there. Often, I register this simply by remembering where I was when I came to the conclusion. There's no language in it, or at least there doesn't seem to be. 

You can see this, too, in a more dramatic fashion, when you have to make a series of quick decisions about something, like when you are driving a car or playing a sport. I don't just mean that there are instinctive functions we do that don't require language to accomplish, because after the split-second in which you make your decision and carry it out, sometimes, you find you are able to give a long explanation of why you did it, one that is so long, it's actually impossible you could have thought all of it while carrying out the action, but it actually does seem like all the things you are saying were really involved in the decision: "I wasn't sure if he saw me, and the guy behind me was coming kind of fast, but I thought that if I blew my horn, the guy merging might get scared and whip his car too fast back in the other direction and cause an accident, so instead of either braking or blowing the horn, I just changed lanes fast, because I'd seen in my mirror the other lane was empty." That's too many words to have thought in half a second, but it seems, somehow, as if that is really the rationale behind your decision. 

The answer I gave at the time in that class was that animals seem to think without using words, as far as we can tell, so yes, it must be possible to think without language.

Language and Langaj

Of course, my answer was only right if "language" means words. If language refers instead, though, to any system of conveying information, then it's quite possible no living thing thinks without using it. Internally, organs communicate with one another, and even cells can pass information of sorts within themselves. What's true at microscopic levels is also true at macroscopic ones. There are massive, eco-system-wide communications systems, such as when the roots of trees "talk" to one another across an entire forest. 

My bias toward thinking of language as equivalent to words is easy to understand. I'm a translator, so when I think of translating from one language to another, I mean take some words and replace them with other words that mean something similar to people in another linguistic system. Even the word "language" comes from the word for "tongue," meaning people have long had a bias toward thinking of language as the words one makes. 

Rone Shavers' Silverfish, though, tries to first break us down from our assumptions about "language" meaning words and then to build us up again. He begins with a prologue from the Yoruba trickster goddess Eshu, who invites the reader to "play language" with her. Her hope is to "break the brain" of the reader, as an epigraph by Vera Henross has it. "Confusion is good: It's the first step to understanding what's beyond what you already know." The novel equates "language" to "langaj," the esoteric, incantory utterances used in Hoodoo rituals, where language itself actually makes things happen. Unlocking language will also "make things happen" in the novel.

Once past the epigraph, though, we find Eshu to be a somewhat merciful goddess, because while the story bends the reader's brain, it doesn't quite break it. It's possible to rebuild a fairly coherent narrative from the broken pieces of the story.

A one-paragraph synopsis

Stories where the author really doesn't give a damn about being kind to the reader are almost impossible to summarize easily, but Silverfish isn't like this. The novel is set in a future "corporatocracy," one in which those with means use those without them as part of a mercenary army-for-hire to keep the stock market high and natural resources flowing. This world was brought about in part by the invention of "angels," a new and improved form of cyborg (although that term is considered passé in the future) with a mission to root out insurrection from "primitves" who aren't on board with the brave new world. Angels were invented by someone named Beagel. Beagel went rogue on his corporate sponsors, though, and created a way to stop the angels, that way being the voracious tech-eating silverfish of the title. The poor are eternally trapped by their corporate overlords, promised an opportunity to climb up by their bootstraps, but in reality having almost no way out of the poverty that dooms them to do the bidding of the masters. The main action in the novel consists of Beagel hijacking an angel and reprogramming it to undo the corporate-run world. 

Beyond the synopsis: how language is a shield from harm

Beagel notes, while re-programming the angel, that the apocalypse has already happened. It happened when people lost the ability to use metaphor and had to resort instead to hyperbole. This is something of an Orwellian understanding of the future, the idea that the powers that be, whether they are Big Brother or the Corporate Code of Civilized Nations, mostly control us through weakening the power of language. Because language is a sea we swim in without being aware we're surrounded by it, it's difficult for us to realize when we're being manipulated through it. We assume language is neutral, just there to communicate ideas which are themselves good or bad, but in fact, we are being manipulated all the time through the language we take for granted. The medium is the message. The contemporary fight over what facts even are is a good example of this. Maybe our current age is actually a good step in civilization's advance, because our brains are all being broken, hopefully to be remade better.  

The angel's brain, at least, is broken and remade. She is able to join in a giant meta-language, a system of systems or language of languages, which allows her, in turn, to then begin to reprogram humans. She convinces Clayton, the only human other than Beagel we get to know to any extent, to invest all his social credits into learning language. It will bankrupt him, but because of a convoluted series of rules I don't think we're meant to look that deeply into, Clayton will be able to go live with the "primitives." Society will send angels to kill him, but, because he has unlocked the angel's meta-language (and, if he's a really good student, the language of the silverfish as well), he will be able to survive. 

The brain-breaking only took 93 pages! 

One of the remarkable things about the novella is how much ground it covers in such a short space. The overall feeling I got from living in Shavers' dystopia was much like the one I had after reading Nick Harkaway's Gnomon, but Gnomon took well over 700 pages to do it. Shavers partly accomplishes a lot in a short time by letting form indicate function. ("The teleology of a work is expressed by its form" is the first thought we hear the angel have.) Shavers eschews quotation marks for dialogue, a long-time characteristic of his work. The novel doesn't feel bound to carry forward the customs of the past, which frees it to find its own manner of signifying. 

There is a good deal of what might be thought of as stream-of-consciousness as the angel "spools" through infinite thoughts, but that stream-of-consciousness isn't, as is often the case, terribly jarring. The trickster goddess was merciful enough to provide textual clues, such as brackets, braces, parentheses, and italics. 

There were a few places where I wished the characters, Beagel in particular, would do more interpreting of thinkers or concepts they mentioned rather than just referring to them and letting the reference do the work for him. And I honestly didn't realize some things the description of the book on Amazon told me about the book until I read the description after reading the novella. For example, I didn't know there was an "Incorporated States of America" in the story. If it's mentioned, it's a very fleeting reference, and one that's not returned to. I also didn't grasp the extent to which language itself was the means of control until the end. Although Beagel said as much, it was only a part of a larger philosophical discourse he had with the angel, and it didn't strike me at the time as the central issue of the novella. Beagel claimed that nobody could use metaphor anymore, but Clayton's ability to use phrases like "above my paygrade" indicates he could, in fact, use metaphorical language. (What is "above my paygrade" but an allusion to an imaginary ladder of responsibility? Decisions aren't literally "above" or "below" anyone. That's abstract language, which means the realm of metaphor.) 

But as I've said many times, I prefer something flawed that had high ambitions to a technically perfect attempt to do nothing. I like what Shavers called in his dedication a "beautiful mess." Shavers was swinging for the fences in this novella, and a missed swing here or there is just the price you pay for seeing him connect beautifully on occasion.

Nonplussed: the dazed protagonist in "I Am Here To Make Friends" by Robert Long Foreman

All the books on the craft of fiction warn writers not to have passive protagonists. Your hero can't just face a world that either she doesn't understand or which doesn't understand her, spend the length of the story immersed in that lack of understanding, and then end the story still dumbstruck by how strange and unfamiliar the world is. This is a hard lesson for writers to learn, and many a promising MFA candidate never gets past it. Maybe that's because the sorts of people who seek to tell stories in the first place really do spend a lot of their lives feeling alienated, misunderstood, and generally like the world is too much for them. But most eventually learn to make their characters want something, have that want be frustrated, and then cobble together enough of a conflict out of the quest to fulfill that desire that editors will publish the story.

We're so used to the cycle of want, followed by inability to achieve the wanted thing, followed then by some kind of epiphany that allows the character to achieve what he wants--the "tyranny of the epiphany" as Jim Shepard calls it--that it's entirely arresting to read Robert Long Foreman's short story collection I Am Here To Make Friends (Sundress Publications, 2020, 215 pages). Arresting, because most of the stories involve a protagonist who breaks the rules by not being sure what they really want, mostly being passive and misunderstood, and yet every one of the stories is a joy with more than enough forward momentum to keep the reader happily flipping pages to the end. Stories without clear stakes aren't supposed to work that well, but these do, and the reader is left shaking his head as one story or another works when it doesn't seem like it should, like walking through a hall of optical illusions.

No story exemplifies this dazed protagonist as much as "The Vinyl Canal," which is mostly about the narrator's annoying acquaintance who becomes obsessed with scratching grooves in the songs he doesn't like on his records so the record player will skip over them. There is some movement in the story to take the subject matter outside the interior musings of a pompous college kid more in love with his thoughts than his thoughts merit: police brutality and American love of the easy way out enter the narrative, but they never quite form a conflict. The kid disappears, it might have been the police who did it, and then the story ends. The narrator is observing a world that doesn't give up its secrets, and ultimately, it's too much for her to keep plumbing the depths.

This cycle is repeated in: "Appraisals," about a man who accidentally is mistaken for an appraiser at a convention who decides he will just tell everyone what they want to hear; in "Turkey of the Woods," in which an addict of some sort finds a brain in the woods he mistakes for a mushroom; and "Lost Origins," in which a slacker becomes obsessed with finding a code in a strange video he bought in a bargain bin at a thrift store. These characters crack jokes other characters don't find funny, and make discoveries nobody is interested in hearing about. Being misunderstood, though, doesn't make these characters crave understanding enough to do something about it. There is no overcoming of anything to achieve a goal. Instead, there is a direct refusal to confront challenges. When the main character in "Lost Origins" finds out his girlfriend wants to break up with him, he simply says, "Fine, I thought. I saw this coming." When he then starts a new relationship, his new girlfriend says something he disagrees with, but "I wasn't about to start an argument. I was in love."

So why does all this passivity work, contrary to all the rules writers have been taught? One reason is that the jokes really are funny. The people who hear the protagonists cracking wise may not get them, but the reader does, and it creates a sort of bond. We feel that we want to reach through the story and form a secret society with the main characters.

Much more than this, though, is the way these stories remind us how appropriate it is to feel disoriented. Maybe it doesn't always make for compelling fiction to be so uncertain what the point of life is that we don't even know what to wish for, but that is a totally normal reaction to realizing we've all been dropped off on this planet with no guide book. It's appropriate to feel nonplussed, a word Foreman uses a couple of times, and which means to be so confused by a situation, one doesn't even know what course of action to take. The etymology of "nonplussed"--and many of Foreman's characters are deeply interested in the etymologies of words--is simply "no more." It means there is really nothing else left to do, because something has left you so dazed, there's no action that makes sense.

No story exemplifies this more than "Awe," the opening story. (I am putting to the side two stories in the collection, both of which have to do with guns, and both of which are sort of oddballs compared to the others.) The narrator hears his friend talk about what a life-changing experience it was watching his child be born, so the narrator goes on a wild Internet adventure to find a couple or a mother who will let him watch their child be born. He tries to explain what he needs:

"So, you want to see me give birth out of--what--curiosity?"
"I heard about it from Gary--my friend. About what a mindfuck it is." I was paraphrasing. "I mean, how much it changes you to be in the room when someone's being born. Gary's a different guy now, in a good way."
"And you need that."
"Sure."

Of course he needs that. We all do. We all need "awe," which is the only thing any character in any of the non-gun stories in this book wants clearly enough his quest to achieve it can be called a conflict. When he achieves his goal of feeling awe, there is nothing else he needs to feel alive and to also have some sense of communion with other living beings. To be alive is to feel disoriented, to feel awe, to be so nonplussed that there is nothing left to add to the experience. These stories, which resist everything they will tell you in MFA programs, feel like they have exactly the right amount of what's in them, and I wouldn't want to add anything more.

An overdue review

Wayyyyy back in 2017, when my book was just coming out, my adviser from back in grad school hooked me up with a review in the American Book Review, which focuses on small market books. In return, I said I would review a book for someone else. I was assigned "Outside is the Ocean" by Matthew Lansburgh. I waited and waited for it to show up. The author's publicist contacted me a few times. I wrote my former adviser, asking if she could explain what had happened. She assured me that was just the pace they worked at.

I felt terrible, because I'd gotten my review, but hadn't paid the love back. It was bad literary citizenship on my part, or at least it seemed that way to me, even though I'd read the book as soon as I was assigned it and had a review off within two weeks. Turns out, the magazine just changed editors and they lost my review. The new editor was nice enough to include my review in the most recent edition, although it being two years after the author's book came out, it's probably far too late to do him any good.

The moral to me is that serious fiction outside the few stars selected for fame is a tenuous business, kept going by golden-hearted volunteers who nonetheless are overworked, doing it as a second or third or fourth job, and the whole thing is likely to be error-prone. If something goes right, count yourself lucky. If it doesn't, count yourself lucky anyway that you have a life free enough of real troubles that you get to worry about what happens with your writing.

Checkmate, theists: "Midwinter" by D. Nurkse

When a story is only one page long, like "Midwinter" by D. Nurkse, you'd think the author wouldn't have time to start off with what seems like a digression: a Sunday School teacher asks her children a religious trick question. But "Midwinter" is, in fact, entirely about God, and the opening is no digression, but leading us right into the main point. It's nice to have a story that's about the big stuff. I think most people, even if we don't like to admit it, even if we're pretty determined agnostics or atheists and unlikely to change, still think about God fairly often. It doesn't make sense to never write stories that clearly tackle subjects including God.

In "Midwinter," we start with a question from a religious teacher, "Could you love God in a world without death?" This question belongs to a school of reasoning in Christianity called theodicy, or the attempt to explain how evil can exist in a world governed by a God who is both all-loving and all-powerful. This question from the teacher is kind of a weak offering in this school. It's akin to the "if there were no evil, we wouldn't appreciate good" line of argument. A better argument for those who try to reconcile God and suffering is to appeal to free will, stating that God did not want moral slaves, because He wanted creatures capable of loving Him and obeying Him freely. Such freedom HAS to allow evil to exist, Christians argue, but the ability to love freely also means the ability to choose not to love. If nobody can hurt other people, then love is meaningless. There are downsides, like ALL THE SUFFERING EVER IN HUMAN HISTORY, but freely given love from an agent with free will is enough of a good that it outweighs all the bad that exists. (I'm intentionally kind of mangling the argument there, but even expressed well, it's not much more convincing, at least to me.)

I've always thought this made God seem like kind of a negligent parent. As human parents, we also want to allow our kids to grow up to make their own decisions, but we also understand we can't let them knock the bloody hell out of other kids "or else they will never really be free." I don't understand why free will has to be an absolute, such that God really could not occasionally stop talking and having wine with the other deities long enough to come back to the playground and break up a fight or two. Why can't God have the same sense a human parent does? Why do we have to allow for the fullness of human depravity in order for love to mean anything?

As Shakespeare put it, "There was never yet philosopher that could endure the toothache patiently." No matter how strong your philosophical argument for why suffering is possible with a loving God who has the ability to end it, it will never satisfy the existential feeling of suffering. Even those who don't directly experience suffering on this scale ought to have enough empathy to realize the universe doesn't make sense.  

"Midwinter" works as a fictional short argument against theodicy. The children are unable to answer the question their teacher poses to them. They are thinking of their uncles, away in Korea in "the winter after Inchon." That is to say, in the winter of 1950, the winter that would make David Halberstam call his brilliant history of the Korean war The Coldest Winter. Their uncles are carrying things: "a bazooka, canned peas, pictures of us." (And here, the callback to "The Things They Carried" was almost so hammy it broke the spell, but not quite.) Those "pictures of us" bring us an ironic parallelism. The uncles are away in a war that makes no sense, a war that challenges theodicy. But they attempt to hold onto their beliefs by thinking of their loved ones back home. Meanwhile, those loved ones back home are having the very beliefs the uncles need to hold onto challenged by thinking of what the uncles are enduring.

In spite of attempts to skirt around the question, such as the response of one class clown, "probably for half an hour," there is no getting around the fact that there just isn't a good answer to it. The students can feel this more than they can reason it out. That's the real problem with theodicy arguments, I think--they might have some power in an abstract sense, but they really do nothing to assuage the sense one gets while enduring suffering that this just isn't right. The story ends with the students wondering why nobody has fixed the squeaking heating system, which reminds them all of hamsters going around on endless wheels. We end with a mini-allegory of man and God:

Oil it!  We said under our breath. Who knows why it never happened--who skipped a day on the task chart, who was distracted, why that small trapped creature is still advancing, there in the darkest month, in the cage of a circular journey.

God is the negligent maintenance man, and all humanity is the hamster stuck on the wheel, uselessly going around in the middle of bleakest winter.

It's like Dusk 'Til Dawn, only good: "Spectral Evidence" by Victor Lavalle

Remember that old Richard Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino movie where about halfway through, it stops being a movie about bank robbers and becomes a vampire movie? That's what Victor Lavalle's "Spectral Evidence" reminded me of, except that unlike that movie, all the parts of Lavalle's story work, both in part and as a whole.

It starts off like an unsuspecting, regular-old literary fiction story. We've got a woman who runs a psychic business. She knows she's a fraud. She prepares for each customer by telling herself they all know she's a fraud, too. That's her life as it's introduced to us, but then we get the plot-moving complication: a girl comes in and wants to know if her mother, now a few years dead, is still alive somewhere. The girl, Abby, wants to know a little more than that, actually. The form her question takes is the question we'd all like to know: "Is there something...after all this?" The psychic is especially affected by this, because the girl makes her think of her own daughter, Sonia, and what it would have been like for her daughter if the psychic had died when Sonia was a girl.

That's a good start, but then it gets weird and better. The psychic goes home, flashes back to thoughts of her daughter, during which we learn that Sonia killed herself not too long ago. The psychic had been estranged from Sonia for four years prior to Sonia jumping off a building. That's an interesting story development, and one that helps explain why the psychic connected with Abby so much. But there's a much bigger twist coming. Turns out the psychic actually does hear from her dead daughter Sonia. The woman who knows she is a fraud when she talks to customers about communications from beyond death actually hears from dead people.

But the funny thing about it is that her daughter only says one thing to her psychic mother. It's the same thing, over and over: It's too dark in here.

In the third act, Abby's father comes to the psychic's business. He is distraught, and there is a hint of violence brewing. It turns out Abby killed herself not long after leaving the psychic's business. When the psychic answered Abby's question about "is there something after this" with a simple yes, that seems to have maybe been the impetus for Abby committing suicide. Having been reassured that she wouldn't end with killing herself, Abby decided to go ahead with something she'd been considering a long time. Maybe Abby hoped to be reunited with her mother.

It's not long after this that the psychic starts to hear from Abby, too. The message is no different from the one from Sonia: It's too dark in here. As with Sonia, the psychic can hear the message, but she doesn't know what it means.

The psychic resolves to quit lying to people, but this doesn't mean what we'd expect it to mean. For the psychic, it doesn't mean she's going to stop telling people about the messages from the dead. Rather, she's going to tell people exactly what those messages say. The story thus becomes the first step in her resolution to tell the truth, no matter how disturbing that truth may be.

We, the reader, can try to puzzle out along with the narrator what "it's too dark in here" means, but I think the point is that if there is a message for the living from the dead, the living either are too daft to understand it or it's too frightening to be fit for our ears. So it's best to ignore it. It's a rather life-affirming message, in the "there's nothing but this life, so you'd better pay attention" kind of way. In this sense, this quick-hitting little story with two suicides and messages from the dead turns out to be all about how important life is.

If you're going to write a satire, why be subtle about it? "All Politics" by Jessica Burstein

I was halfway through my master's degree in English at University of Illinois at Chicago in 2003 and had been accepted by the school to the Ph.D. program. Halfway through getting a master's, though, was enough for me to see that academia in the humanities was an insane asylum. Nothing I've heard from friends who continued on that route and are now working as professors has ever made me regret my decision. As much as my current work might be a bureaucratic mess, and as many head-scratching moments of "is this really what I want to do for a living?" it induces, it's a drop in the ocean to what my friends seem to face.

That's also the vibe I get from Jessica Burstein's "All Politics," included in the 2019 Pushcart Anthology. The title is misleading, because politics hardly figure directly in the story at all, but in another sense, it's right on the nose, because the entire point of the story is the political uselessness of humanities departments. As much as folks complain that the humanities have gotten "too political" or are "all about politics," in reality, they're so deep in their own dysfunctional cultures, they're hardly political at all. Or, to put it another way, if everything is political, then nothing is.

The first-person narrator, who only tells us her nickname of "Red DeMur," a name she is a little too proud to have picked up from black people at the gym-- "not the black guys who work at the university; the other black guys"--has gotten a fellowship to Oxford. She glibly reveals that the subject of her lectures that won the fellowship--"installation art, mostly earthworks"--is something she is only dabbling in, but dirt is somehow trendy, and she gets the gig. She's happy to escape the increasing budget cuts of American universities: "taking out the phone lines, restricting our access to the copy machines (professors still love to copy things), shutting down the library, merging the humanities with the new Diversity in Diversity Zion Protocols Center..." In Oxford, however, she finds that the humanities are equally impotent. The only difference is, as she puts it by way of how Brits and Americans work out at the gym, that "Americans grunt; the Brits just endure, quietly." Americans humanities departments might make more fuss about their growing irrelevance, loss of status and budgets, but it's happening to them just the same. (Of course, even Americans don't make that much fuss. As Red tells us: "...in these days of budgetary brouhaha, the university was getting it in the neck. And taking it, since basically, American professors are spineless. By basically I mean unequivocally. American professors are the worst. Or as we like to term it, the best.")

Along the way to discovering the differences across the pond, "Red" gives us the usual list of accusations against the humanities, although in such crisp and witty detail they feel fresh. She name-drops intellectuals, pop culture icons, and artists, both putting them into the mouths of her characters and also putting the actual famous people into her story to interact with Red. Red considers feeling empathy for a moment for humanities students, but then realizes they are "willfully oppressed," and therefore not in "actual need of empathy." This frees her as a professor to enjoy "being pandered to." Meanwhile, much of her narrative, far from being the insightful and revealing narrative we'd think it should be from someone who is allegedly an expert in culture, is full of banalities. These are the funniest part of the story. Burstein is really good at nailing these. For example: "So off I went to Oxford. It's in England. Long flight. Oxford was neat. They put me up in an apartment, or, as they say there, a 'flat.'" At least one-third of the story is Red talking about how she works out at the gym.

Much of the name-dropping is full of red herrings, an example of how in the humanities, it can be as important to make sure you signal that you are aware of the influential figures as it is to actually have original and intelligent thoughts about them. When Red wears a shirt where a woman is blowing her brains out with a gun, but the blood comes out as butterflies, the best she can come up with is to say that it's somehow "very symbolic." This was, by the way, the same thing one of her students had to say about the "Out of the Woods" video she saw while taking Red's Taylor Swift symposium.

Enough. Burstein did a good enough job beating the hell out of humanities departments that I don't need to keep explaining how she did it. It's a good reminder that I'm glad I didn't go down that route, and I'm happy to move on to the next story knowing I avoided at least one land mine in my life. 

Critique, review, or something else?

I've been following Karen Carlson's blog for six years now, since I first started reading the Best American Short Stories and Pushcart anthologies every year. Even though I've stolen her idea and started blogging through these two series, I still follow what she has to say on these stories, because she provides an unfailingly personal reading. There's zero artifice and no pretense in anything she writes.

Yesterday, she commented that she writes more "reactions" than "reviews." It might be helpful to differentiate between a review and other terms that are close to it, like reaction or critique.


---

A review is meant for others who might be considering reading the book. The chief focus of a review is whether the book/story is good and why.

A critique or "literary criticism" focuses on what the work means, both within the work itself and within the bigger context of the world in which the work was produced and also within the narrower confines of the world of literature. Criticism is nearly synonymous with analysis.

A reaction is not so much what the work means as what the work means to the person reviewing it. It's about the process of internalizing it and how it changes the reader's perspective on life.

---

All three are part of reading well. The three also bleed into one another somewhat. You can't talk about what a work means to you without at least talking a little bit about what it means, period. You can't explain what the work's significance is without at least giving people a guess whether you think it's good. And you can't explain why it's good without talking a little bit about what it means. I tend to combine all three of these elements into my discussions of literature, which is why I tag them as both review and criticism.

It occurred to me the other day that there is another genre out there that influences how I approach writing about literature. It's the sermon. My first introduction to reading a text seriously wasn't in school, it was in church. Pastor Russ would spend 45 minutes talking about a relatively small number of verses from John or First Peter, first trying to explain issues from the Greek, then giving the context, both within the larger work and within the history in which the work was written, and then we'd move into what the work meant for us, how we should all change our lives based on the work's message.

I don't think I've ever gotten away from thinking of reading as something that should impact how I live, however far I've gotten from believing the other things Faith Bible Church taught me. I think anyone who attempts to be a critic about American literature ought to have at least some familiarity with how some of the better sermons sound, because it's a form that's likely to resonate with a lot of Americans.

His repertoire was a bit limited, but this guy was a decent literary critic

A sermon isn't as scholarly as an article in a journal on Biblical studies, and neither are most of the things I write attempting to harness the full might of available literary erudition. I write the way it occurs to me to write, the way my actual thoughts usually play out when I read literature, and I hope that it registers with enough people that it's worth the effort.

I'd like it if there were more people doing criticism out there. No pastor can write a sermon without consulting at least a few serious scholars, and I'd be grateful if more actual literary professionals spent time blogging from a more learned perspective about these stories. But absent that--and it looks like we are absent that--I'm going to keep offering what I've got the only way I can offer it. But I'd like to warn readers (many of whom I suspect are students looking for help with stories they've been assigned) that although I will sometimes channel real literary analysis into my reviews, they're usually somewhat south of what you'd want to include in a paper on the story. They might point you in the right direction of what a work means, but you're going to need to follow those directions to some place where you can look at the meaning a little closer.

All in all, who isn't a brick in the wall?: "Kylie Wears Balmain" by Sarah Resnick

The Pushcart Anthology has a funny quirk I've noticed over the years. As the editors lay out the contents, which alter between fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction, only the fiction entries are specifically called out as fiction at the beginning. For example, the story I'm reviewing now has the title of the story on the first line, then "fiction by Sarah Resnick" on the second line, and finally the journal in which the story first appeared (n+1 in this case) on the third line. I can see why they don't specifically say that poetry is poetry. Poetry is set off typographically (so much that one college professor of mine said that the best way to tell if something is a poem is that "the lines don't go all the way to to end"), so it's easy to know when you're reading a poem. But nowadays, creative non-fiction tends to sound a lot like first-person fiction. So it's easy to get confused sometimes about what you're reading. Pushcart ONLY calls out the fiction as fiction. It's as if the non-fiction were the default, the assumed form, and fiction were the oddball that needs labelled. I doubt this would have been true fifty years ago in a literary anthology.

I bring this up because Resnick's "Kylie Wears Balmain" sounded a lot like to me like creative non-fiction, like a memoir. I had to keep going back to the beginning to be sure that what I was reading was actually a short story.

My difficulty being able to tell fiction (something that didn't happen) from non-fiction (something that really happened) turned out to be totally appropriate to the themes of Resnick's excellent story. In "Kylie," a woman (called "the woman" throughout) takes a job writing for a celebrity tabloid. She's tired of being poor and living in a crappy place, and she is already working two jobs. The magazine (called "The Magazine" throughout) offers good pay and a lot of nice perks, including great catered dinners for staff.

Immediately after taking the job, she has doubts about what she is doing. She went to school to do serious writing, but The Magazine is everything that's wrong with America: "fashion knock-offs, 'diets that work,' stratified wealth, divorce, couture latex, infidelity, single moms, countouring, God, fame, infamy."

She assuages the guilt in two ways. (Well, three, I guess. Guilt also goes down easy with a fancy catered dinner.) First, she tells herself she is just there to "check the facts." Although her friends chide her that a magazine like The Magazine doesn't contain any facts, there are actually a dizzying number of facts for The Woman to check up on. And unlike every serious journalism enterprise in America, The Magazine actually still employs enough fact-checkers to get its stories right. Reason being, The Magazine can lose the good will of its sources if it does something like misprint the age of a celebrity. So there are stakes for the magazine, and those stakes mean it's important to get the facts right. The facts might be about the most insipid things, but they're still technically facts.

The second way The Woman comes to terms with her job is that everyone else working as a fact-checker at The Magazine is a lot like her. They're all artists of various sorts: poets, novelists, the editors of a literary magazine who get no money printing literature, so they do this job to pay for the other one. There's even a Democratic candidate for city office working there. The Magazine is, without meaning to be, "a benevolent sponsor of the city's high-minded literary and arts communities."

It's easy to scoff, but what if this were how the next great American novel came to be? 

The Woman has come face-to-face with a reality almost everyone in the arts faces eventually: art doesn't pay. So she has to take a job in the world, and in her case, there's an extra perversity to it. As an artist, she's beholden to critique everything that The Magazine tries to push on people. But as a fact checker, she's forced to help protect The Magazine's ability to uphold the culture she should be deconstructing.

To add insult to injury, every day she checks facts about "artists" of a sort who are making money--scads of money--by being artists, which has to make The Woman question what is wrong with her and whether something was very wrong with her calculations of value in the first place.

Ultimately, The Woman is spared from having to go through an enlightenment that would allow her to walk out of the job, because the job walks out on her. Like all American consumer culture, it eventually consumes itself. The Magazine ends up broke, partly through bad business practices, and partly because the market has changed: celebrities no longer need to work with tabloids to stay relevant, because they can simply build their own brand through social media.

The Magazine's staff dinners get progressively more and more parsimonious, until finally, they consist of nothing more than a nutrition bar The Magazine is hawking on behalf of a celebrity publicist. When The Woman learns she's been fired, she takes one last nutrition bar and continues reading The Magazine on the way out. Far from finding a way to live without the worst of American capitalism, she has become content to drain every last drop she can from it.

I find this story "relatable," as they say

I never intended to end up in the job I'm in. If you'd told me in 1997 as I was getting out of the Marine Corps and headed off to college that I'd be where I am, I'd have laughed at you. But having no money when everyone else you know does has a way of changing your mind about things. I didn't want to be a burden on other people, and I hoped that maybe I'd even be able to help others if I got a job. So I gave in to the system, as the system expresses itself through market forces in the labor market.

That job has enabled me to support a family and also to help several people outside my family. It is enabling me to pursue writing as a passion. Like "The Woman" from "Kylie," I work with a lot of people who didn't dream of being where they are now, people who use their day jobs to try to follow what they really want to be doing on the side.

I don't think there's a solution to getting out of this situation. Any job you get is going to at least be supported by the worst of American capitalism, even if it doesn't directly feed into it. You might be a massage therapist (the job I dream of doing when I try to think of a job with no social downside), but all of your clients are going to be people who make money off the worst of American capitalism, unless you intend to specify "no robber barons" in your marketing. If the American economy went south, your job as a massage therapist would take a hit, too. If your ability to do your job depends on the health of another industry, then you are a part of that industry, no matter what you may think.

Anyone with a bank account can't really claim they don't support American capitalism, including its military adventuring side.

You could, I suppose, try to take extreme measures: move to the woods in Alaska, somewhere where you are allowed to just claim a piece of land and not pay for it. Use only what your hands can make, eat only what you can grow, gather, or catch. But what good is this? For one thing, if everyone did that, the wilds would soon disappear, making it impossible for anyone else to live that life. Secondly, I'd die in about twelve hours of that kind of life. I know no survival skills that don't pertain to civilized life. Finally, the biggest benefit from this kind of life would be a reduction in your consumption and footprint on the environment. But if that's your goal, the hard truth is that nothing you do to reduce your consumption will be as effective as suicide.

Is there any hope, then, for someone who wants to live a life that isn't co-opted? I think there is, and it lies in refusing to give in to the lies around us even while we are forced to give some level of support to those lies. The Woman, having helped fact-check a story on the short-lived romance between Taylor Swift and Tom Hiddleston, wonders whether they were ever really in love or if it was a con cooked up by their respective PR teams. She decides that it is "of little consequence as far as fact-checking is concerned."

"What matters, for her purposes, is that even if Taylor and Tom were not truly in love, they had still performed love for the cameras. Love or no love, there remains the fact of the performance. And in the fact of the performance, there is something one can call "truth," i.e., the performance happened. 

If there is a fiction in the story, it does not originate in The Magazine."

The Woman is lost at this point. And here we return to the difficult distinction between fiction and non-fiction with which we began, a distinction becoming all the more difficult every day as journalism struggles to keep up with the age in which we now live. 

The job of people is to know better and hope for better even while we work in a world in which better does not yet exist. It is to be "in but not of the world," as my Christian friends would have it. The Woman convinces herself that the lies she supports aren't lies because they contain so many facts. It's easier to believe this than to accept what the job really is. I propose that the superior route is to remember you are supporting a lie, even if you don't see much choice and this realization makes you unhappy.

The person who knows she is working for something other than the ideal can still push back, can still have small ways of influencing society. She joins an organization of people with no name, an international conspiracy fighting an ongoing guerrilla war for truth and a better way to live.

We will often fail to resist when we should. We will acquiesce when we shouldn't. But we mustn't content ourselves forever with living off the scraps the world throws us. I conclude with another Christian reference, this time, the words of C.S. Lewis:

Failures will be forgiven; it is acquiescence that is fatal, the permitted, regularised presence of an area in ourselves which we still claim for our own. We may never this side of death, drive the invader out of our territory, but we must be in the Resistance, not in the Vichy government.

The book isn't good, but come on, be nice: "The Absolved" by Matthew Binder

In November, I offered up some thoughts on a developing writer who wrote an opinion piece I mostly disagreed with. I can't call what I wrote a defense of his opinions expressed in Quillette, but maybe it was something of a defense of Matthew Binder, the person who wrote them, and his right not to be attacked personally for expressing an opinion.

To briefly review, Binder had a dream to write a novel, so he interrupted his life to travel and write one. He then moved to New York to try and break into the literary world, where he faced rejection for about two years before finding a publisher. His book  The Absolved dropped on December 4th.

In Quillette, he attempted to offer "a glimpse inside the ideological monoculture of literary New York." He did not quite outright say that a monocultural literary establishment kept him out because it was unwilling to accept political views divergent from liberal ones, and he didn't quite outright say that being a white man was a big obstacle to getting published, but he strongly implied both. He offered one anecdote to back up the second claim: He thought, based on conversations with an acquisitions agent, that he had landed a deal. But the agent got an email from his boss that the company wasn't "taking on unknown white guys this year." Binder claimed that he saw this email and those were the words in it.

Quite a few outlets caught wind of the story and unleashed a fury of scorn at Binder. None was tougher on Binder's article than this scorching attack from Robyn Pennacchia at Wonkette. I call it an attack on Binder's piece, but it was really an attack on Binder himself. The title called Binder a "terrible novelist," and then the opening paragraph goes like this:

Every so often on this here internet, we get a hate read that is so perfect, that so aptly encapsulates a particular form of douchebaggery that we all must collectively gasp at it's (sic) awfulness and revel in the general repulsiveness of the arrogant human being so lacking in self-awareness that they actually thought it would be a good idea to write such a thing. Today, I bring you such a hate read -- Matthew Binder's A Glimpse Into the Ideological Monoculture of Literary New York.

It got worse from there, and it never stopped being personal. There were a few moments when Pennacchia eased off how much she found Binder personally repugnant to refute points in what he wrote. She pointed out that it has always been difficult to get published, not just lately. She quoted from the novel, a passage which, I fully agreed, did not portend a great work. But she also just made a lot of ad hominem attacks, many of which were based on assumptions. She assumed, for example, that when he was asked to leave a party for expressing a differing opinion, that he was being obnoxious and grating, although it's equally possible the other party took offense without good reason. Pennacchia wasn't there, so she ought to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Soon after this happened, I wrote the post that argued that while he didn't make as strong an argument as he thought, and the novel didn't seem as promising as he thought, the way he was being attacked was unreasonable. Instead of calmly pointing out the weaknesses in his post, people made it about him. He's a terrible person. He's an entitled, pompous white man with more self-confidence than talent. They also assumed his novel was terrible, and this was why he had such a hard time getting published.

The sample passage from Binder's book didn't give me a lot of hope it would be great, but I decided, mostly to get a little more perspective on an incident I found interesting, to read the novel and see. I was sort of hoping that somehow, the novel might be really good, and then my argument would look a lot stronger.

I regret to report my findings

The novel is not good. I could just leave it at that, and I'm tempted to. I don't really want to spend time pointing out flaws in someone else's book. There's really only a point to that exercise when the book in question has sold well, and I'm offering an opinion on why the book's popularity isn't deserved. It's no fun to pick at another author who's struggling to get somewhere just like I am. It's also a real chore to go into why something is bad, because it makes you linger a long time in a work you don't enjoy. But I can't pretend to be honest as an observer of literary culture or as a critic without putting a period on this whole Quillette hubbub by reviewing the book.

What is right about it

There's a good premise to the whole thing.

 66 years ago, Kurt Vonnegut's first novel Player Piano was already looking ahead to a world in which automation and technology had robbed most people of the dignity that comes from meaningful employment. In Vonnegut's world, the majority of Americans without real employment were put into a TVA-like jobs program in which thirty men would sweep a single street for a day. Everyone was guaranteed a basic living, but only the elite technicians who could fix the machines really had a meaningful and abundant life. The restless masses, dubbed the "Reeks and Wrecks," eventually plotted a Luddite revolution. Dr. Paul Proteus, the novel's protagonist, starts off happy with society as it is, but gradually sympathizes with the Reeks and Wrecks and eventually joins the "Ghost Shirt Society" to fight the machines. But the revolution goes horribly wrong, and eventually everyone decides to go back to living meekly with the machines.

Binder offered what could have been an updating of Vonnegut's story. In 2036, most Americans have been put out of work by machines, and only a technical elite still have jobs. Instead of being on a jobs program, though, many Americans become "absolved," hence the title of the book, and no longer have to work. They have a guaranteed universal income and universal health care. They can do whatever they want with their time (except, for some reason, travel abroad). But naturally, the absolved aren't happy. They're listless and untethered. There is an undercurrent of Luddites who'd like to smash the machines and take us back to 1960 or 1860 or 60 B.C. Into this backdrop comes a presidential candidate who is, shall we say, a lot like a politician we're all familiar with today. He's stirring up the Luddite degenerates and railing against the current president, who wants to keep the status quo of socialized everything.

The Absolved's protagonist, Dr. Henri (does he have a last name?), is sort of like Vonnegut's Proteus: he starts off mostly happy with the status quo and then gradually becomes less so.

So it's an interesting premise. Every since The Atlantic ran "A World Without Work" a few years ago, I've worried about this very future. There's a lot of rich ore to mine there.

But inept writing means the promise of the premise is never realized

We never get anywhere near mining all that the story could offer. There are six weaknesses I can point to that kill any chance of this story having any kind of impact:

1) Voice: Henri's voice is relentlessly pompous. He comes off exactly like a mediocre intellect trying to sound smart. His narrative and even his dialogue are both weighed down with far more long adjective and adverbs than are necessary, and the sentence structure is convoluted. The nouns sometimes feel like they were the first choice that came up in a synonym search. Dozens of sentences labor under the weight of excess prepositional phrases when there was a more direct way to get the thought across. Examples:

• "While confident I will never fall in love with Taylor--for she is merely a dalliance, a charming and exquisite distraction from the everydayness of my regular life, an embodiment of amorous passion...
• "I've always found that a post-dinner amble never fails to help me work through and resolve the thousand small vexations that plague me."
• "Not unlike Davie Bowie of Paul McCartney, I had an almost mystifying gift for melody."
• "All around the mother are men and women in swimwear who witness this spectacle with shocked and grievous expressions. The rendering is so disproportionate and overly simplistic that I am made disturbed." (I am made disturbed?) 
• "After further coaxing, she tells a long and harrowing tale of misfortune and grief straight from Charles Dickens."

There are many, many more like this. It's an outdated way of speaking and even writing now. No man has conversed like this since the 50s. You could make the argument that Henri, as an "anti-hero," should actually sound pompous and long-winded. That might make some sense (although it would still be painful to read), except that EVERY OTHER CHARACTER IN THE NOVEL SPEAKS WITH THE SAME VOICE. Examples:

• "You're the one who's inspired millions of people to cast off all they know in favor of our glorious past!" (The guard at the jail who guards Henri)
• "...told her yes, and she said that some people develop a nihilist philosophy because they dislike the world around them but don't know how to go about transforming it." (Henri's SIX-YEAR OLD SON, who apparently is not thought unusual at all for talking like this)
• "...these generals and kings that you so highly esteem carried on in the most monstrous of ways!" (Henri's father)
• "Perhaps you would prefer the world to stand still? To make its inhabitants immutable?" (Henri's friend)
• "You never can tell the time or place when love will make itself known." (Henri's boss)
• "Henri's abject failure to summon even one convincing dramatic depiction of hay-fever left his audience cold. Not even with the aid of snorting black pepper did he conjure up anything more than a couple of trifling sniffles and a runny nose..." (Henri's wife)
• "Karl, it's okay, I'm dying for my country. It's a good death. Remember, America is a bastion of goodness in a world gone mad." (The fucking immigrant who dies in a story told by a guy Henri knows at the bar, meaning that's Henri's inane manner of speech maintained through the filter of two other people.)

The end result is that I'm left thinking everyone in the novel speaks like a annoying grad student because that's the only register the author has, not because it's an artistic choice. 

2) Cliches: 

• "The room gets so quiet that I swear I can hear my own heartbeat." 
• "Looking not like a woman but a vision of Aphrodite herself."
• "Hair as black as a raven's wing..."
• "...bloom like a desert rose..."
• "...as dry as the Sahara Desert..."

3) Show don't tell:

Granted, any rule can be broken, but you need a good reason to break it. In The Absolved, we get a lot of descriptions where you just have to take the author's word for it, because you're not going to see it for yourself. 

• "I'm not sure how, but I won Taylor's affections, evinced by her allowing me to rush her off to bed that very night." (It would have been much more convincing and told us a lot more about their relationship to see what it was he had that won her over.)
• "In today's society where many people feel more intimately connected to their VR-life than to their real life, VR sex is a far more flagrant offense..." (Could we not be given a chance to see a scene rendered in which people are really preferring their VR lives? Could we not get a much better chance to see the world of the future from that than simply being told about it?)
• "Our increasingly technological advances have driven greater and greater inequality." (A lot of the details of the world of The Absolved aren't shown us ever. So we never really get to consider the themes of the book, because we really don't know the world we've visited. We're just told, "It's like this.")
• "When compelled by a powerful emotion, there's not another person alive capable of such a demonstration of charisma and persuasion." (Much better to show us that person being charismatic and persuasive, no?)

4) A lack of focus on what matters:

This novel's promise depends on being able to paint realistically a future without meaningful work for most people. But it digresses for most of the novel into Henri's very uninteresting marital troubles and his not terribly profound thoughts on women. ("It's true--once a woman depends on a man for her sexual pleasure, she gives herself to him entirely.") He can't decide if he's a family man or if family life bores him so much he just wants to run off with the young woman he got to sleep with him without knowing why. It's fine to have a novel be about more than one thing, but Binder is clearly outmatched and not up for the challenge of writing convincingly about love. Every woman in the novel is a bitch. Henri's wife is a neurotic, relentless nagging bitch, his boss is a selfish bitch, his mistress turns out to be a bitch after first seeming like a cool chick who was DTF, the bartender is a bitch who first seemed like a righteous broad. 

After first cramming so many facts (but not showing! Never showing!) about the year 2036 into the beginning that even the narrator has to apologize for digressing, we lose track of what's special about 2036 for a long, long time. 

Most of what ends up being there shows little thought and doesn't tell us more than what any wag at any bar could tell us: lack of physical labor makes you less of a man and unhappy; people need work to feel happy; nothing is free, and healthcare and basic income for all will eventually become untenable; socialism is bad and will make it so we aren't allowed to smoke and we have to kill anyone who is too expensive to keep alive; Christianity is treated like a backwards religion but Islam gets a pass; political correctness has run amok.

It's a thin story papering over hack political philosophy coupled with amateur economics. ("Rich people can only buy so many consumer goods, and when they run out of things to buy, they simply save their wealth, essentially removing that money from circulation.") Everything in the story feels like the writer knew, based on his political beliefs, what needed to happen, and then just moved some characters around and had stuff happen until he got that ending. We don't learn anything from the novel, because the author didn't learn anything from it, either. 

5) Errata:

I had errors in my own book (and every blog post I ever put out), so it's a little hypocritical of me to complain about typographical or syntax errors. I get that with a smaller press, you may not be able to hire a pro editor. But there were a lot of errors I found, and I wasn't even looking that hard. From mixing up "affected" and "effected" to sentences that obviously don't read right if you read them out loud to comma splices to misuse of reflexive pronouns, there were a lot of things that weakened the ethos of the book even more than just the amateurish composition. Most of the main story is told in the present tense, with earlier information in past or past perfect, but there are occasions where there are slip-ups, and the past tense makes it into the main narrative. The president's nickname is "bien hecho," said to be Spanish for "do-gooder," but I believe that means "well done," and the word he was looking for was one word, "bienhechor." 

6) No moral center and no identifiable theme

I think the author is something of a libertarian, but didn't want to be seen as one. The only mention of Rand in the novel is to make fun of her. I think Binder didn't want to push his political views down our throats too much, which is a good instinct. But it ended up that it's not really clear what the theme of the book is. If Henri doesn't have the right ideas, and his wife doesn't, and Serena doesn't, and the president doesn't, and the socialists don't, and the rebellion doesn't, then who does? The closest we get to someone with an answer is the old lady who believes in God and it comforts her after her husband dies. That's not really a theme worth writing about. By the end, Henri has thrown out a lot of ideas, some of which I think the reader is meant to take seriously and some of which I think we're meant to see as bunk from an unreliable narrator. But nothing emerges as the real winner. 

I thought in chapter 39 that we were getting close to a theme, when Henri tells us that, "Once a man has acquired the taste for tackling difficult things, he no longer has the inclination for matters of ease." That seemed like it might be Henri's awakening. But then two chapters later, he is expounding some long-winded and incredibly stupid theory on how men and women love differently, and in chapter 47, Henri has gone full-reversal on what he said in chapter 39. He now advises: "If it's the truth you want to stand before you, you must never be for or against anything. The struggle between for and against is our fatal flaw!" It's an outburst coming from nowhere and not really meaning anything, although maybe it does foreshadow what Henri will ultimately do (thirty minutes after deciding he will do the opposite thing). 

Ok, so the book was bad, but that's still not a reason to be mean

I feel pretty bad about this review, because I think Binder's been through enough. He wrote about what he experienced when trying to get his book published. His facts were not all correct. One anecdote about a guy saying he didn't want new white guys that year doesn't show that all of New York's writing establishment is anti-male or anti-white or anti-white male. But telling your story isn't always just about the hard facts. It can be about what your experience felt like to you. And just because he isn't mostly right doesn't mean he's all wrong. Publishing (and art in general) is fairly liberal. Pennacchia acknowledged this even while beating Binder with a club made of snark. The literary world can be closed off to ideas that aren't in its wheelhouse. I have never been anywhere at any writing gathering where anyone admitted to being a conservative.

There's strict logic, and there's the logic that happens to you when you're trying to do something you desperately want to do. Writers all over the world get upset and start looking for answers when they can't publish the work they put so much of themselves into. Against everything we were taught as kids, sometimes there can be some wisdom to making excuses rather than saying your failures are because you're bad. If you admit it's because you're bad, you might give up. If you make excuses, you might keep going. Binder did that. I've done it, too. And look what it did for him-- at the end of a long road, he got his novel published. It's selling okay. It's got a few good reviews--just not from me.

Eventually, Binder won't have to make excuses. But he's going to remember how he was treated during this, and that's going to make him a lot less receptive to what the people who attacked him have to say.

Those who saw the flaws in his argument could have just calmly pointed out those flaws. When you're right, you can afford to be calm, almost bored. They could have, like I did, read the story and shown how maybe the flaws of the book itself had something to do with the difficulty of getting it published. They could have restrained themselves to the facts at hand, instead of making it all about Binder's aggrieved white maleness. But they didn't. They made it a snark free-for-all against Binder. For all I know, Binder spends his free time building solar panels for orphans in Angola. So I'm going to keep my thoughts about his writing and his work separate.

I like snark. It has a place, but that place isn't against people who are just frustrated like we've all been or we all are now. Snark is for the powerful. They are supposed to be the butt of our jokes, not some poor dude with such a tender heart he gave up his day job to write a novel because of Anthony Bourdain.

The novel is pretty bad. It reminded me a lot of the film The Room by Tommy Wiseau. It has the same strange misogyny and the same buoyant belief in its own value, in spite of obvious flaws. I like how James Franco's The Disaster Artist chose to treat Wiseau. They saw his self-confidence and desire to tell his story against all common sense as something to celebrate. They noted how remarkable it is that we were still talking about his move years after he made it. And here I am, now, at the end of a very long post talking about Binder's book. To quote Binder's Henri, making art requires ego. I don't understand why we are surprised Binder had enough ego to think the fault wasn't his own. I very much doubt any criticism I or anyone else could raise against the book will change his mind about the merits of his work. And I wouldn't want it any other way.

The good story that I'll call great but for all the wrong reasons: "Lupinski" by Myron Taube

Normally, I try to ignore personal details about authors when reviewing their work. This is typically easy for me, since I'm so terrible at remembering names, I often really don't know anything about even an established writer. Once I'm done writing my review, I'll sometimes Google and take a peek at what's out there on the author, mostly out of curiosity. I also like to check just to be sure I didn't say something about a work that someone else already wrote.

For some reason, while reading "Lupinski" by Myron Taube, I decided to check up on the author before writing my review. I liked the story okay. Its use of significant detail, such as a well-timed meatloaf recipe, was particularly effective. I could teach a class on use of detail from this story. It's not technically innovative or anything, and the subject matter--an old man saying good-bye to his wife dying in the hospital--is the opposite of innovative. (I've seen stories get rejected just because they were about this very subject. It's been done. A lot.) But the story's craft--a word I normally hate, but will use here, because it struck me reading it that craft is really what held the story together--got me through it thinking it was alright. My guess--and this is what led me to look up the author--was that it had been written by some bright young MFA student making good use of the writing advice he'd been learning, but still struggling to find unique subject matter.

Instead, I found out that Myron Taube was a retired English professor who died in 2017, not long after writing this story. Moreover, his wife of many years died not long before him. This story wasn't a talented young writer searching for something to write about and landing on the well-worn subject of parting at the end of life; he was a guy who'd just been through the ordeal of saying goodbye to his wife and made it the last thing he left to the world.

Should that matter? Should I think more (or less) of a story because I know some small piece of the human background of the author who wrote it? In serious literary study, the answer is generally no. We are usually supposed to make our judgments based on the text. Extra-textual matters are interesting, but they're supposed to be left outside the discussion of the story itself.

But that's not always how it actually plays out. If I didn't know what made Eric Clapton write "Tears in Heaven," I'd think it was a fairly syrupy, sentimental song. But knowing it's what he himself wrote to try to cope with a terrible tragedy makes me think of the song differently. It really is a different matter when you are witnessing someone "perform" art in this manner, when they are using art publicly to survive some trauma, and we get to watch the performance.

"Lupinksi" starts out like one thing, changes to another, then shifts back to the original thing again, only worse. Life is running out for two people who lived full lives, who checked a lot of the boxes most of us would think you'd need to check to say you spent your time on Earth well. One is just fading away while the other is lost in a fog. There isn't much grace to snatch there, but what there is, the dying pair ineluctably find. It's true and raw and still not totally without hope. And it's far, far more powerful knowing it came from a guy who needed to share this rather than a guy who was just trying to find a touching subject for a story.