Blog of a Bookslut's Journal

http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2014_01.php#020468

Image: Pompeii Fresco of Mercury

There was an article or a roundtable or something going around, and it kept coming up in conversation. I never searched the thing out, but it apparently was asking whether American women writers were working in the shadow of the supposed 20th century greats, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, John Updike, etc. "So, are you?" asked the fella at some point.

"How could I be? I never read them."

Enter several moments of sputtering disbelief. I walked it back a bit, remembering that I have read two Roth novels, Goodbye Columbus, which I found boring and self-involved, and then The Plot Against America, which I liked briefly but then, when I started to think about it, thought nonsensical and with that awful, lazy ending that Saves the Day! because why bother thinking that through at all. But no, definitely no Updike and definitely no Mailer, unless you count the first chapter of a couple of his books, which never made me want to keep reading.

What on earth have you been reading, then? he asked. Well, by 18 I had read every book by Kathy Acker, starting with Pussycat Fever. I did read Infinite Jest and found it emotionally and intellectually empty. I read all of the Brontes and the Hardys and Ulysses and the female modernists like Barnes and HD and the others who have been forgotten over their male counterparts. I went on a South American writer spree, mostly revolving around Cortazar. I read a huge amount of science fiction, but not fantasy, because of elves and whatever. I read Lanark, that was pretty great. It's not like if you decide not to read any John Updike, because it just sounds like being trapped in a car with a narcissist with his dick out, it's not like you run out of books.

For a while I thought I should read everything, back when I was trying to be a book critic. So I read that dreadful Franzen, I read that dreadful Messud. I had opinions about Dale Peck reviews! God help me, why did I do that. And then I remembered again, that one could decide not to read things. It meant your hire-ability as a critic would be limited, if you were outright refusing to read certain things, but one could do things like read tarot cards for money instead, which is way more fulfilling. And I'm beginning to think that this stance of non-participation might be a more important one than, you know, this bores me I don't want to read it.

As Charles and I mentioned in this interview, you are only as good a writer as the books you are reading. The stuff you put in your brain, that is what is used to make out what comes out of it, like ideas and thoughts and prose. And that's important. (Is this why there are no really good regular dayjob critics turned novelists? I mean, we all agree that James Wood thing was not so good, right? We can say that without being afraid of his wrath?) But now I'm reading Ioan Culianu's Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, and allow me for a second to be wildly simplistic. But we live in magical states, despite our post-Enlightenment belief that we are rational creatures. Our society sets up certain ideas and loads them with magical thinking, like success means XY&Z, that these are the things that will make you happy, that these are things you absolutely cannot live without. Take the suburbs as an example very quickly, this idea that this is what you work towards, to live in an environmentally unsustainable, physically lonely, transportationally (not a word!) inconvenient, and you have to drive two miles in your privately owned automobile to go get milk. It is the story we have told ourselves about success and families, about what we need. Single unit families all snug and married and separated out from everyone else, is also a story we tell ourselves about what will make us happy. It's how advertising works, it's The Century of the Self.

And yet it's also in every story we tell. We reinforce these ideas and objects in the novels we read, the television we watch, the music we listen to. And just by being around it, we absorb it and get snagged on it. And the only way to tell other stories is by getting those other stories out of our heads by staying the hell away from them. Which sounds paranoid! And if you start talking about this, like I am now, you sound like a nutter. And yet when I slip, when I self-indulgently pick up Elle magazine or try to watch Pretty Little Liars or Bunheads because people -- grown adults! -- swear it is a good show, I start to feel that weird, gross pull.

The role of the writer is to be the outsider. Writing is under the domain of Mercury, the trickster. And yet I increasingly see American writers deep in this pull, with the MFA culture and the snug domesticity and the atheism and the insularity and the dismissal of radical voices and the nostalgia and the lack of any deep philosophical or emotional or historical views. It's all rooted in the Self, and pretending like that Self is not in the grips of these unconscious, magically-loaded stories that go unquestioned. And we get so caught up in words, the importance of using exactly the right words and not using the wrong words, without looking at the stories we are telling with those words.

So I've given up trying to be a book critic in that traditional mode. I have always liked that Bookslut tries to uncover neglected stories, provide an alternative canon, and use its power to ignore Franzen, to be the one place you can pretend he doesn't exist. And we'll be unveiling new issues of Bookslut and Spolia next week, doing our best to find other stories to tell.