Is Claire Messud Wearing Any Clothes?
This is a question I have been sleeping on, fitfully. I finished The Emperor's Children last night and I really wanted to be able to post a wholly enthusiastic assessment of it here, but I can't. First, let's get rid of business. This is a book that has to appear in the epilogue of my dissertation, which discusses literary reactions to the Sept. 11 attacks. My primary focus in this epilogue is going to be on how in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close Jonathan Safran Foer uses the figure and style of "the child" as a way of modeling what he takes to be an ethical or appropriate literary response to an event which, it seems clear, reminds him of the Holocaust, Dresden, Hiroshima, and All Manner of Bad Historical Thing. Messud approaches Sept. 11 more directly, making it a crucial hinge around which her handful of plots turn. Sept. 11 changes her characters. In short, it does the work that she ought to be doing herself as a novelist.
But before dealing with its problems, I should admit I really enjoyed the first three parts of the novel, approximately the first three hundred pages. Messud is good at writing one kind of sentence--a sort of Henry James Lite sentence--but it's a beautiful sentence and can achieve impressive effects at the level of the paragraph and the chapter. Some of the novel's early chapters are really terrific, scathingly ironic in the best way. Their satirical edge, and enormous energy, was partly what compelled me to buy the book in the first place. Unfortunately Messud becomes a victim of her own success; she flails when she tries to deviate from her standard style. Efforts at writing fake newspaper columns or at miming styles other than her preferred one creak awkwardly. This is also a symptom of the fact that Messud has problems writing characters with depth and dimension. Everyone speaks like everyone else, thinks like everyone else, experiencing the world through the prisim of her Henry James Lite style, which at first seems as if it's an ironic commentary on how the minds of these characters work but turns instead into an inadvertently commentary on Messud herself.
What differentiates her two female protagonists, Danielle and Marina, are their relative levels of beauty and their jobs. Her two main gay characters, Julius and David, though supposedly very different sorts of gay men, end up seeming like catty clones of each other, stereotypes incarnate. Murray Thwaite, the intellectual luminary at the center of the narrative--the "emperor" of the title--is also paper-thin. His intellectual pedigree and his esteem in the liberal community are often referred to but never persuasively demonstrated; he manages not to say even one smart thing in 470 pages, which may be part of the novel's point about him, but Messud doesn't do nearly enough to build him up before she tears him down.
Only Booty, Murray's nephew, rises above the words on the page that describe him. Only he makes a meaningful choice when confronted with the terrorist attacks--and a hilarious one at that. The rest of her characters are constitutionally unable to make meaningful choices because their personhood has not been sufficiently developed in the pages that precede the moment of the attack. Danielle becomes depressed. Murray remains more or less the same. Marina and Julius are only superficially scarred. I came to this novel prepared to like it--hell, even to love it--and for about three hundred pages I did, on its own terms, in its own style. Once September rolled around, the whole thing fell apart for me. Which does not of course mean I won't write about the book in my dissertation. I will.
Is Claire Messud Wearing Any Clothes?
This is a question I have been sleeping on, fitfully. I finished The Emperor's Children last night and I really wanted to be able to post a wholly enthusiastic assessment of it here, but I can't. First, let's get rid of business. This is a book that has to appear in the epilogue of my dissertation, which discusses literary reactions to the Sept. 11 attacks. My primary focus in this epilogue is going to be on how in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close Jonathan Safran Foer uses the figure and style of "the child" as a way of modeling what he takes to be an ethical or appropriate literary response to an event which, it seems clear, reminds him of the Holocaust, Dresden, Hiroshima, and All Manner of Bad Historical Thing. Messud approaches Sept. 11 more directly, making it a crucial hinge around which her handful of plots turn. Sept. 11 changes her characters. In short, it does the work that she ought to be doing herself as a novelist.
But before dealing with its problems, I should admit I really enjoyed the first three parts of the novel, approximately the first three hundred pages. Messud is good at writing one kind of sentence--a sort of Henry James Lite sentence--but it's a beautiful sentence and can achieve impressive effects at the level of the paragraph and the chapter. Some of the novel's early chapters are really terrific, scathingly ironic in the best way. Their satirical edge, and enormous energy, was partly what compelled me to buy the book in the first place. Unfortunately Messud becomes a victim of her own success; she flails when she tries to deviate from her standard style. Efforts at writing fake newspaper columns or at miming styles other than her preferred one creak awkwardly. This is also a symptom of the fact that Messud has problems writing characters with depth and dimension. Everyone speaks like everyone else, thinks like everyone else, experiencing the world through the prisim of her Henry James Lite style, which at first seems as if it's an ironic commentary on how the minds of these characters work but turns instead into an inadvertently commentary on Messud herself.
What differentiates her two female protagonists, Danielle and Marina, are their relative levels of beauty and their jobs. Her two main gay characters, Julius and David, though supposedly very different sorts of gay men, end up seeming like catty clones of each other, stereotypes incarnate. Murray Thwaite, the intellectual luminary at the center of the narrative--the "emperor" of the title--is also paper-thin. His intellectual pedigree and his esteem in the liberal community are often referred to but never persuasively demonstrated; he manages not to say even one smart thing in 470 pages, which may be part of the novel's point about him, but Messud doesn't do nearly enough to build him up before she tears him down.
Only Booty, Murray's nephew, rises above the words on the page that describe him. Only he makes a meaningful choice when confronted with the terrorist attacks--and a hilarious one at that. The rest of her characters are constitutionally unable to make meaningful choices because their personhood has not been sufficiently developed in the pages that precede the moment of the attack. Danielle becomes depressed. Murray remains more or less the same. Marina and Julius are only superficially scarred. I came to this novel prepared to like it--hell, even to love it--and for about three hundred pages I did, on its own terms, in its own style. Once September rolled around, the whole thing fell apart for me. Which does not of course mean I won't write about the book in my dissertation. I will.
Enter the Snark
What should the critic of postironic fiction (i.e., me) make of this American Scholar article by Melvin Jules Bukiet?
You can see it from Manhattan if you look carefully across the East River. You can even go there if you follow a young couple (he’s got a goatee and she has a ponytail) onto the F train. But if you’re not blessed to reside within walking distance of Prospect Park, you can always read about Brooklyn in the work of the writers who live there or find inspiration there. Brooklyn principles can be found anywhere that young people gather to share their search for love and meaning, a search that they alone are qualified to pursue by virtue of their pristine vision of the deep oneness of things. Whereas physical danger or emotional grief leaves most people lonely or ruined or dead, they triumph over adversity.
To achieve this miracle, certain writers produce Brooklyn Books of Wonder. Take mawkish self-indulgence, add a heavy dollop of creamy nostalgia, season with magic realism, stir in a complacency of faith, and you’ve got wondrousness. The only thing that’s more wondrous than the BBoW narratives themselves is the vanity of the authors who deliver their epistles from Fort Greene with mock-naïve astonishment, as if saying: “I can’t really believe I’m writing this. And it’s such an honor that you’re reading it.” Actually, they’re as vain and mercenary as anyone else, but they mask these less endearing traits under the smiley façade of an illusory Eden they’ve recreated in the low-rise borough across the water from corrupt Manhattan.
I can't say that there is much of substance to agree with or critique here. This is a piece about taste. It is a salvo in a war of taste, of sensibility, of ethos. Bracketing my own tastes, I would point out that Bukiet becomes in his essay precisely the maligned figure the postironists themselves call "The Snark." Heidi Julavits sought to preemptively foreclose the legitimacy this critical stance in relation to the Brooklynite writers in her inaugural essay of The Believer.
Beyond these preliminary thoughts, I don't much to say about Bukiet's article, not yet anyway. I have to reflect some more on it, but it will inevitably find its way into my chapter on the figure of the "the believer," which as I've mentioned before analyzes Eggers's memoir, the publications he subsequently founded, and the Left Behind evangelical series, among other believer-related things.
Enter the Snark
What should the critic of postironic fiction (i.e., me) make of this American Scholar article by Melvin Jules Bukiet?
You can see it from Manhattan if you look carefully across the East River. You can even go there if you follow a young couple (he’s got a goatee and she has a ponytail) onto the F train. But if you’re not blessed to reside within walking distance of Prospect Park, you can always read about Brooklyn in the work of the writers who live there or find inspiration there. Brooklyn principles can be found anywhere that young people gather to share their search for love and meaning, a search that they alone are qualified to pursue by virtue of their pristine vision of the deep oneness of things. Whereas physical danger or emotional grief leaves most people lonely or ruined or dead, they triumph over adversity.
To achieve this miracle, certain writers produce Brooklyn Books of Wonder. Take mawkish self-indulgence, add a heavy dollop of creamy nostalgia, season with magic realism, stir in a complacency of faith, and you’ve got wondrousness. The only thing that’s more wondrous than the BBoW narratives themselves is the vanity of the authors who deliver their epistles from Fort Greene with mock-naïve astonishment, as if saying: “I can’t really believe I’m writing this. And it’s such an honor that you’re reading it.” Actually, they’re as vain and mercenary as anyone else, but they mask these less endearing traits under the smiley façade of an illusory Eden they’ve recreated in the low-rise borough across the water from corrupt Manhattan.
I can't say that there is much of substance to agree with or critique here. This is a piece about taste. It is a salvo in a war of taste, of sensibility, of ethos. Bracketing my own tastes, I would point out that Bukiet becomes in his essay precisely the maligned figure the postironists themselves call "The Snark." Heidi Julavits sought to preemptively foreclose the legitimacy this critical stance in relation to the Brooklynite writers in her inaugural essay of The Believer.
Beyond these preliminary thoughts, I don't much to say about Bukiet's article, not yet anyway. I have to reflect some more on it, but it will inevitably find its way into my chapter on the figure of the "the believer," which as I've mentioned before analyzes Eggers's memoir, the publications he subsequently founded, and the Left Behind evangelical series, among other believer-related things.
Spooky
I finished reading William Gibson's newest novel, Spook Country, a few days ago and have been trying to figure out how I feel about it. It is one of the few books I have eagerly scooped up in hardcover, I loved his Pattern Recognition so much. The promise of another book set in what can only be called the "extreme contemporary" moment was too much for me to pass up or wait for paperback to experience.
Unfortunately, Spook Country does not rise to the level of its predecessor. The main problem, in my view, is that there is a lack of harmony between its plot and its people. In Pattern Recognition, the quest to find the maker of the footage was intimately tied to the nature and capabilities of the novel's protagonist, Cayce Pollard, and to the existential situation of our moment, which allows for the possibility of anonymous internet authoring. Cayce was, indeed, the right person for the job, perhaps the only person for it, and the footageheads were a genuinely new kind of social arrangement whose newness will quickly fade but whose novelty has been captured via Gibson's trendspotting style.
In contrast, Gibson here gives us a cast of interesting characters whose position in this imagined present has little, in the end, to do with what happens at the level of plot or in terms of their historical moment, its specificity and existential terror. Does Hollis Henry's having sung for The Curfew affect the plot? Only vaguely. Does Tito's being from a Cuban-Chinese boutique crime family really matter? Though the idea is a terrific one, no. And Milgram, what is his ultimate purpose in the narrative? Why his trip to D.C.? Why does so much of the novel take place in transit between places? Or in restaurants, for that matter?
In the end, after 300 pages of passivity, we get little narrative reward for having gotten to know Milgram; he feels like filler, a third plot thread Gibson couldn't figure out what to do with. And don't get me started on my love of but ultimate disappointment in the concept of locative art. Gibson has hit upon a fascinating idea, but he has not taken enough time to develop its implications or tease out the relationship between this new medium and the nature of the contents of the "Flying Dutchman" shipping container. This leaves the last thirty pages of the novel feeling something like a tacked on effort to tie up loose threads (admittedly, the last chapter of Pattern Recognition fails in the same way).
All that said, let's make no mistake: Gibson writes many amazing, observant sentences and the Union Square action sequence is fantastic, the best part of the book, rising to the level of the best he's written. My disappointment stands largely in relation to my extreme admiration for what he accomplished in his previous novel, and for what I see as his power and potential as a writer. If I were going to give Gibson advice (never a good idea), I would say this: take an extra year or two to perfect the next novel in this trilogy, which undoubtedly will concern China, if the ending of this novel is any clue. Novels of this sort should stand as monuments, finely crafted explorations of the unknowable present, standing up to scrutiny from any angle, unimpeachable.
Spooky
I finished reading William Gibson's newest novel, Spook Country, a few days ago and have been trying to figure out how I feel about it. It is one of the few books I have eagerly scooped up in hardcover, I loved his Pattern Recognition so much. The promise of another book set in what can only be called the "extreme contemporary" moment was too much for me to pass up or wait for paperback to experience.
Unfortunately, Spook Country does not rise to the level of its predecessor. The main problem, in my view, is that there is a lack of harmony between its plot and its people. In Pattern Recognition, the quest to find the maker of the footage was intimately tied to the nature and capabilities of the novel's protagonist, Cayce Pollard, and to the existential situation of our moment, which allows for the possibility of anonymous internet authoring. Cayce was, indeed, the right person for the job, perhaps the only person for it, and the footageheads were a genuinely new kind of social arrangement whose newness will quickly fade but whose novelty has been captured via Gibson's trendspotting style.
In contrast, Gibson here gives us a cast of interesting characters whose position in this imagined present has little, in the end, to do with what happens at the level of plot or in terms of their historical moment, its specificity and existential terror. Does Hollis Henry's having sung for The Curfew affect the plot? Only vaguely. Does Tito's being from a Cuban-Chinese boutique crime family really matter? Though the idea is a terrific one, no. And Milgram, what is his ultimate purpose in the narrative? Why his trip to D.C.? Why does so much of the novel take place in transit between places? Or in restaurants, for that matter?
In the end, after 300 pages of passivity, we get little narrative reward for having gotten to know Milgram; he feels like filler, a third plot thread Gibson couldn't figure out what to do with. And don't get me started on my love of but ultimate disappointment in the concept of locative art. Gibson has hit upon a fascinating idea, but he has not taken enough time to develop its implications or tease out the relationship between this new medium and the nature of the contents of the "Flying Dutchman" shipping container. This leaves the last thirty pages of the novel feeling something like a tacked on effort to tie up loose threads (admittedly, the last chapter of Pattern Recognition fails in the same way).
All that said, let's make no mistake: Gibson writes many amazing, observant sentences and the Union Square action sequence is fantastic, the best part of the book, rising to the level of the best he's written. My disappointment stands largely in relation to my extreme admiration for what he accomplished in his previous novel, and for what I see as his power and potential as a writer. If I were going to give Gibson advice (never a good idea), I would say this: take an extra year or two to perfect the next novel in this trilogy, which undoubtedly will concern China, if the ending of this novel is any clue. Novels of this sort should stand as monuments, finely crafted explorations of the unknowable present, standing up to scrutiny from any angle, unimpeachable.
The End (of the Summer) is Nigh
I'm back in San Francisco--blogging from the Que Tal cafe on Guerrero and 22nd. My long summer of traveling is finally at an end.
This has been perhaps my craziest and busiest summer on record. I spent two weeks in Singapore, two weeks in Jakarta, more than three weeks at the Ransom Center at UT Austin, two weeks back in San Francisco, and finally two weeks in New York visiting family and friends. During this time, I've managed to be amazingly productive on numerous fronts. That part of my brain that focuses on tasks-at-hand has spontaneously mutated a new ability, apparently, to generate some Ritalin-like chemical that keeps me going. Maybe the life of a self-starting (graduate student) freelancer suits my work habits better than anything I've tried before. It beats taking classes and writing seminar papers that do not link up to larger projects.
I found lots of useful material at the Ransom Center. My photocopies of Pynchon, Wallace, Franzen, and Safran Foer letters have come in the mail. I officially began drafting my hipster chapter yesterday (with an aim of having a 60-70 pp. draft by the end of the year).
On top of this official work, I've completed a full revision of my novel-in-progress, Pop Apocalypse. I should not discuss the novel here in a space dedicated to my academic pursuits, but it suffices to say that it's much improved, sentence by sentence. My writing has grown in lots of ways over the last three months, a new plateau among hopefully many more to come. I also have a few possible leads on the next few steps: finding an agent and publisher. If anything happens on the novel-publishing front I may consider starting a dedicated novel-blog or, alternately, converting this blog into something more general, using tags to differentiate among types of content.
Most interestingly, I wonder if in the long term my "official" pursuits (as a literary critic) and my "hobby" (as a fiction writer) may synthesize into some ideal commixture of critic and writer. After all, I was teaching creative writing in Singapore and Indonesia and, frankly, helping kids write their own fiction was the most enjoyable and successful teaching experience I've ever had, bar none. And also after all, there've been denizens of Academe's Groves who've successfully combined these two job functions into one person. Why not me? Whether or not this path will be part of my future remains an open question. To achieve this synthesis successfully would fulfill one of my most deeply-held dreams.
The End (of the Summer) is Nigh
I'm back in San Francisco--blogging from the Que Tal cafe on Guerrero and 22nd. My long summer of traveling is finally at an end.
This has been perhaps my craziest and busiest summer on record. I spent two weeks in Singapore, two weeks in Jakarta, more than three weeks at the Ransom Center at UT Austin, two weeks back in San Francisco, and finally two weeks in New York visiting family and friends. During this time, I've managed to be amazingly productive on numerous fronts. That part of my brain that focuses on tasks-at-hand has spontaneously mutated a new ability, apparently, to generate some Ritalin-like chemical that keeps me going. Maybe the life of a self-starting (graduate student) freelancer suits my work habits better than anything I've tried before. It beats taking classes and writing seminar papers that do not link up to larger projects.
I found lots of useful material at the Ransom Center. My photocopies of Pynchon, Wallace, Franzen, and Safran Foer letters have come in the mail. I officially began drafting my hipster chapter yesterday (with an aim of having a 60-70 pp. draft by the end of the year).
On top of this official work, I've completed a full revision of my novel-in-progress, Pop Apocalypse. I should not discuss the novel here in a space dedicated to my academic pursuits, but it suffices to say that it's much improved, sentence by sentence. My writing has grown in lots of ways over the last three months, a new plateau among hopefully many more to come. I also have a few possible leads on the next few steps: finding an agent and publisher. If anything happens on the novel-publishing front I may consider starting a dedicated novel-blog or, alternately, converting this blog into something more general, using tags to differentiate among types of content.
Most interestingly, I wonder if in the long term my "official" pursuits (as a literary critic) and my "hobby" (as a fiction writer) may synthesize into some ideal commixture of critic and writer. After all, I was teaching creative writing in Singapore and Indonesia and, frankly, helping kids write their own fiction was the most enjoyable and successful teaching experience I've ever had, bar none. And also after all, there've been denizens of Academe's Groves who've successfully combined these two job functions into one person. Why not me? Whether or not this path will be part of my future remains an open question. To achieve this synthesis successfully would fulfill one of my most deeply-held dreams.
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About Me
I'm a novelist, scholar of post-WWII U.S. fiction, and ACLS New Faculty Fellow at Princeton University. My first novel, Pop Apocalypse, was published by Ecco/HarperCollins in 2009. 
I co-edited (with Samuel Cohen) a collection of creative and critical essays, The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, which was released by the University of Iowa Press in 2012.
My second novel, Hamsterstan, was recently completed. 
I'm working on a literary history of countercultural irony from Ralph Ellison to David Foster Wallace, which is under contract with Harvard University Press. My writing has appeared in The Believer, boundary 2, io9, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. I blog pretty regularly over at Arcade. In the fall, I will become an assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Maryland, College Park. If this litany of interesting biographical tidbits doesn't slake your fact-thirst, please feel free to contact me at lee [dot] konstantinou [at sign] gmail [dot] com or via Facebook. |
@lkonstan
- San Francisco! http://twitter.com/#!/lkonstan
- RT @cohenss: @lkonstan @Dalkey_Archive @LAReviewofBooks #occupygaddis http://t.co/DvLq5ZL7 http://twitter.com/#!/lkonstan
- @blur_girl I'll have to buy one before I leave. Heading to San Francisco tomorrow for ten days. http://twitter.com/#!/lkonstan
- Apparently, I should have brought an umbrella to Chicago. http://twitter.com/#!/lkonstan
- #comicscon was really amazing. Like going on some kind of religious pilgrimage. Every session hit the mark. http://twitter.com/#!/lkonstan
- @PennyRed Are you in Chicago now? http://twitter.com/#!/lkonstan
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