He’s been “subbing over at Ta-Nehisi Coates”:http://www.theatlantic.com/ta-nehisi-coates for the last few days. Which reminds me that I’ve been meaning to post reviews of both _Gentlemen of the Road_ (aka: Jews with Swords!) and his lovely _Maps and Legends_ for at least two years.
In lieu of either of those, an observation. The first essay in _Maps and Legends_ is one of the few that hasn’t been published elsewhere, and is a manifesto for boundary-crossing ‘trickster’ literature. Chabon mentions a variety of novelists who are ‘drawn, inexorably, to the borderlands’ – on his list, ‘literary’ authors such as Byatt, McCarthy and Fowles rub shoulders with John Crowley, Kelly Link, Elizabeth Hand and China Mieville with no great distinction drawn between them. He refers to a “sample” of encounters drawn from his career as a reader of:
bq. the engagement of the interior ear by the rhythm and pitch of a fine prose style; the dawning awareness that giant mutant rat people dwell in the walls of a ruined abbey in England; two hours spent bushwhacking through a densely packed argument about the structures of power as embodied in nineteenth-century prison architecture; the consumnation of a great love aboard an Amazon riverboat or in Elizabethan slang; the intricate fractal patterning of motif and metaphor in Nabokov and Neil Gaiman’s Sandman; stories of pirates, zeppelins, sinister children; a thousand-word-long sentence comparing homosexuals to the Jews in a page of Proust
and ever upwards and on for another several semi-colons. This is lovely – its tumble of images and ideas is as beautiful a depiction of the delights of the many ways in which one can read for pleasure as I’ve seen.
And yet. The book which follows only depicts a quite particular subset of those reading pleasures. The only ‘legends’ that Chabon writes about at length are those that have found respectability through age, or are comic books or children’s literature. The individual essays are excellent (I particularly liked his piece on M.R. James) but the books he writes about belong to a far narrower and more sharply defined set than the books that he reads. Crowley, Link, Mieville and the rest are left behind in the introductory essay, never to be mentioned again.
This arguably makes his attempted task of expanding the borderlands – harder than it needs to be. But it also robs us of what I imagine would be some wonderful essays. Chabon writes of Israel.
bq. I did not experience the stereotypical moment of endogamous rapture reported by so many Jewish visitors to Israel, the stunned encounter with a world peopled entirely by Jewish postmen, Jewish cops, Jewish cab drivers, Jewish junkies and punks, Jewish pedophiles and the Jewish prosecutors who sent them away to prisons guarded by Jewish screws. For one thing, I saw Arabs everywhere, heard Arabic spoken in cafes and on the street and in the desert by Bedouins, visited vast cool mosques where pigeons wheeled high among the shadows and the arches. Every morning in Jerusalem we were awakened by the melismatic call of the muezzin. So all right, I’m perverse; it was the Arab side of Israel that I loved. Or rather I loved the imperfection of the joint between Jewish and Arab, the patches in the fabric where the reverse showed through. I loved it; but God knows I didn’t feel I had come home.
I’d love to see what he made of Mieville’s _The City and the City,_ which is just about those joints. Chabon mentions in passing Jack Vance’s “melancholy reiteration of the depleted catalog of a once-vast library of magical texts and spells.” I’d give a lot to read what he might say about Vance if he were given the opportunity to do so at length. And so on. Where I loved _Maps and Legends_, I loved it for just those places where the reverse – Chabon’s secret history of a literature where people skip back and forth between genre and literary fiction – showed through the patches.
It is almost certainly not Chabon’s fault that there were not enough of those moments for my liking. When one is busy, one writes when one is asked to write, and one is usually not asked to write about exactly the topics that one would have chosen on one’s own. The _New York Review of Books_ surely should ask people to review John Crowley and Gene Wolfe, but (with very rare exceptions) it does not. When it looks at popular fiction, it usually treats it as an intriguing cultural phenomenon rather than something that is to be taken seriously in its own right. Which is all to say that a review of _Maps and Legends_ seems to have snuck up on me without realizing. Which is to say that I imagine that Chabon would write about very interesting things indeed if he were given free rein to do so. Which is to say: someone give him his own permanent blog already.
{ 31 comments }
Jonathan 01.13.11 at 11:43 pm
I’m a big Gene Wolfe booster, but has he published something recently that you’d like to see reviewed in the NYR recently? Not that I think that’s a determiner of quality or anything; it’s just that one would have wished it was The New Sun, Fifth Head of Cerberus, Peace, or the Island/Doctor/Death collection getting the nod rather than An Evil Guest or Pirate Freedom.
roac 01.14.11 at 12:12 am
I am moved to ask a question that has been vexing me more and more over the past few years: Do intelligent people really admire and/or take seriously the writings of H.P Lovecraft? Or is this some kind of William Hung thing that I am not cool enough to get?
I went through a period of weeks or months as a young teenager when I was enthralled by Lovecraft — then suddenly I woke up and said “Wait a minute — this stuff is ridiculous!” (I think it was discovering that the Elder Gods were giant squid that jolted me back to the waking world). But I hadn’t looked at any of his stories from then till the other day, when I got to the end of an anthology I bought at a yard sale. There was “The Rats in the Walls,” and boy, is it awful! (It is next-to-last and is followed by “The Dunwich Horror.” I didn’t read that, and I will never read another word of Lovecraft unless somebody ties me down and cuts off my eyelids.)
Here is the beta version of an aphorism I am trying out: If it isn’t scary after you take out the adjectives, it wasn’t scary to begin with.
(When I sat down to write this I intended to say “You know who knew how to write scary? M.R. James, that’s who.” But I see that the fact has already been adverted to. I need to get the Chabon book if only for that essay.)
Henry 01.14.11 at 12:36 am
Jonathan – agreed – you may mentally substitute the words “Gene Wolfe as he wrote between the mid 1970s and very early 1990s” for “Gene Wolfe” in the text. Fragments of his recent work are reminiscent of his greatness, but only fragments, sadly. I think he knows this – the “Best of Gene Wolfe” collection was surprisingly unindulgent of his later work. I am perpetually surprised by the willingness of SF critics to praise his more recent work without reservation.
roac – I don’t know that I take the work of Lovecraft seriously in that I would no longer be able to read it for pleasure, but there is still something _there._ I think it is best refracted through the work of other writers – Fritz Leiber (see e.g. ‘Smoke Ghost’) and others. Chabon’s “Gentlemen of the Road” is in part a very nice play on Leiber’s Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories – it has too much fun with what it is doing to be pastiche, but is riddled with references. Agreed on M.R. James. I also love Penelope Fitzgerald’s note-perfect James pastiche in “The Gate of Angels” (Matt Cheney wrote recently that she was a non-fantastic writer – this is the one bit that gives that claim the lie). Aickman is also very, very good when he is on form.
Vance Maverick 01.14.11 at 12:41 am
nominally genre authors such as Byatt, McCarthy and Fowles rub shoulders with John Crowley, Kelly Link, Elizabeth Hand and China Mieville
Isn’t this backwards? Or are you subverting the notion of “genre”?
Vance Maverick 01.14.11 at 12:44 am
Just to be clear, I think it makes sense to consider the first three with popular genres, but in fact they turn up in the NYRB and NYTRB without apology.
Tom 01.14.11 at 12:56 am
An Evil Guest is solid, recent Wolfe. So much subtler than other Lovecraft mashups.
Any chance of a Chabon seminar? That’d be mint.
Tom 01.14.11 at 1:15 am
@Vance the contrast would be between the “nominally genre” and the “card-carrying abso-fucking-lutely ghettoised genre” writers …
Ija 01.14.11 at 1:15 am
No way should he be blogging. It’s taken him years to finish each novel, if he starts blogging, he may never finish another novel. I value him more as a novelist. Bloggers are a dime a dozen, but a good writer is rare.
Henry 01.14.11 at 1:31 am
Vance – yes – thanks – hasty writing in order to get it up before I had to head home to take over the kids. Amended. But what I liked about the way that he did it is that he didn’t distinguish particularly between the different crowds of writers – they are all jumbled together. It is also interesting to me that a couple of the N+1 crowd (who I had high hopes of, and still do some good stuff) have specifically set out to deplore the nasty mixing of genre with litrature – I can’t help but think that this is partly a deliberate attack against the Chabon-Lethem generation whom they would like to displace …
Henry 01.14.11 at 1:33 am
And Tom – I have no contact direct or indirect with Chabon that could be mobilized. While we have a few events already in the pipeline, I agree that it would be fun and awesome to try to set up …
roac 01.14.11 at 4:25 am
Hmm — by coincidence I am currently reading a Fafhrd/Grey Mouser collection (Swords in the Mist). I guess I a see a tinge of Lovecraft in some of the names, but Lieber strikes me as a completely different kind of writer. He seems to be enjoying himself, most of the time. (I don’t know “Smoke Ghost.”)
And of course Lieber was a parodist, among other things. I have a collection of his that includes a screamingly funny takeoff of a Heinlein juvenile, called “My Saucer Vacation.”
Vance Maverick 01.14.11 at 6:54 am
roac, I believe Joyce Carol Oates has singled out “The Color out of Space”. I confess I enjoy a fair number of the other stories too, but not quite seriously.
ejh 01.14.11 at 10:04 am
I read The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and wasn’t entirely impressed. A little too much hommage for my taste.
julian f 01.14.11 at 10:32 am
Wikipedia credits Lovecraft with inspiring all the cheesy “ancient astronaut” TV documentaries they used to show when I was growing up — not just on TV, but also in the public schools my friends and I attended (What were our teaching thinking?)
Those “Elder Gods” still give me the willies thirty years later, and I don’t think it’s just because they’re driven to exterminate humankind.
Their vastness certainly scares me — when these critters hatch, it’ usually out of something the size of Earth’s moon.
In the end, though, it’s not the Gods who freak me out the most; it’s the ancient *people* that meet them. The naivety of their construals, and their failure to recognize the horrors to come. Self-deception is terrifying..
Platonist 01.14.11 at 12:31 pm
I was going to make an irritable comment about how forgettable Kavalier and Clay was, but I’ve already forgotten the comment, and what author or book it was about.
So, I hear Fitzgerald sucks?
Hidari 01.14.11 at 1:11 pm
‘Do intelligent people really admire and/or take seriously the writings of H.P Lovecraft?’
The answer to that question would very much depend on whether you would class Michel Houellebecq as an intelligent person or not.
Henry 01.14.11 at 2:23 pm
bq. (I don’t know “Smoke Ghost.â€)
It’s in “Night’s Black Agents” and is excellent – the seed of his novel “Our Lady of Darkness,” which also has Lovecraftian tones. “The Dreams of Albert Moreland,” also in “Night’s Black Agents” is similarly Lovecraftian, but merely very good.
novakant 01.14.11 at 4:20 pm
My first book review was on “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh” and I still think it’s a very charming debut novel.
James 01.14.11 at 5:34 pm
The problem with Wolfe lately is that he has gotten very good at making the reader think he is reading one thing, one type of novel, when actually something else is going on. The Sorcerer’s House was very like his short story Seven American Nights.
His short story collections would be very likely choices for a NYT review. I can’t imagine them reviewing The Book of New Sun when it was coming out. It took a while for people to realize that they reading something quite different. And that is the problem with Wolfe: You can’t really decide if what he’s written is good or not until you read it two or three times, and by that time it is old news.
So his Short Story collections are a better choice. So, why shouldn’t the NYT review The Best of Gene Wolfe? Incidentally, The Very Best of Gene Wolfe contains a newer story: “The Christmas Inn” that is in the same world as “An Evil Guest”.
Al Harron 01.14.11 at 5:44 pm
Why do you assume that, instead of you simply not understanding or appreciating Lovecraft (a matter everyone’s perfectly entitled to), it must be some sort of tongue-in-cheek camp value on the part of the intelligentsia that has thus far eluded you? I’d say a great deal of intelligent people genuinely admire Lovecraft, and take his work seriously, and that you simply don’t care for his writings.
If you can’t understand the appeal of Lovecraft, maybe it’s just that: you can’t understand the appeal. You’re allowed to. Art is subjective. Just don’t assume “well since I don’t get it, no intelligent person can either – but if supposedly intelligent people do like it, then it must be a William Hung thing!” You don’t need to justify your distaste for an author others appreciate.
Doug K 01.14.11 at 8:01 pm
thank you for the link to Houellebecq’s essay on Lovecraft. I was a tremendous enthusiast for HP as a teenager, though also can’t read him with the old pleasure. Perhaps there is a symmetry here with HP’s abandonment of his childhood garden..
“Gentlemen of the Road” was great fun, shall have to try Maps and Legends.
Gene Wolfe’s books are indubitably very clever, but not very enjoyable: I find the accumulation of uncited references oppressive, and the constant presence of authorial tricksiness is wearing.
Sam H. 01.14.11 at 11:23 pm
In general, I don’t think HPL gets the respect he deserves as a stylist. He’s easy to mock only because he’s so distinctive and still he managed to influence and shape a genre that has flowered into something worthy of sincere study and appreciation. You can turn up your nose at a man’s lifework if you choose, but I should be so lucky to leave a legacy only fractionally as great as Lovecraft.
As for Lieber, I’ve always felt “Gonna Roll the Bones” is as fine a piece of short writing as SF has produced. Lieber and Alfred Bester always seemed of a kind to me when I read the Golden Age masters back in the day. I presume somewhere back in the archives Bester’s received his due on CT.
No one’s mentioned Elizabeth Hand yet so I get to. The suite of Winterlong, Aestival Tide, and Icarus Descending were as distinctive in their way as Gibson’s first novels. I’ve only been mildly disappointed that here subsequent novels lack the far-future dystopianism (is that a word?). No matter the setting or plot, her language is luscious without being cloying and the principle pleasure of reading her.
roac 01.14.11 at 11:47 pm
A musician who is constantly off pitch and behind the beat, who produces an ugly tone, not for occasional dramatic effect but because he can’t do otherwise, is a bad musician. A writer who routinely produces sentences like those is a bad writer. (I didn’t exactly throw darts at “The Rats in the Walls” to pick those out, but I didn’t go hunting for the worst ones, either. It’s all like that.)
roac 01.15.11 at 12:19 am
In case anyone were to ask for an example of a good sentence by a good writer:
From “The Sailor-Boy’s Tale,” by Isak Dinesen, which is the story before “TRitW” in the anthology.
Also: I was thinking about Lovecraft’s “coarse vegetables,” and it made me think about the Revolting Snozzcumber. Which leads me to say that “The BFG” is funny, a concept completely foreign to Lovecraft AFAIK, and the nine wicked giants are a hell of a lot scarier than anything in Lovecraft.
Martin Wisse 01.15.11 at 9:43 am
roac:
ehh, I actually like these sentences and in general it’s even more difficult to tell bad writing from “a style of writing I dislike” than it is to tell bad music from same.
Lovecraft did have a particular style of writing, partially inspired by Edgar Allan Poe purple to the point of ultraviolent and with lots of quaint synonyms for “oblong” and if that grates on you than it is difficult if not impossible to appreciate his work.
But it is more than his style of writing. The core of Lovecraft’s importance as a writer is captured in this quote from The Call of Chthulu:
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
Lovecraft was writing at a time when Einstein’s theories of relativety were still new and only started to get digested by the public at large, quantum mechanics had undermined the very foundations of physical reality, while Edward Hubble had just shown that what we tought was the whole universe was in fact but one “island universe” or galaxy amongst billions — all of this and the Great War too.
Reality doesn’t exist, we’re insignificant ants in a vast uncaring universe and the dream of technological progress making a better world had crashed with WWI — that’s the mindset with which Lovecraft wrote his horror stories.
Substance McGravitas 01.16.11 at 6:27 pm
Here’s a Lovecraft documentary I found via MetaFilter.
Dwayne Stephenson 01.16.11 at 9:01 pm
I like Lovecraft, but then, I find myself occasionally pining for a defunct variety of purple prose that just wouldn’t make it in contemporary lit, and Lovecraft is an exemplar of the style. Lovecraft may not qualify in the “serious” category of American literature, but I tend to identify a little too much pretension and class striving in that category to begin with.
chris 01.17.11 at 2:56 pm
@25: But we ARE insignificant ants in a vast uncaring universe. So what? We always have been. Also, someday our entire world will be obliterated by a cataclysm of almost inconceivable magnitude, but it’s hard to write good horror about an event that predictably won’t occur for several billion more years.
ISTM that Lovecraft took the dethroning of human pretensions to cosmic significance a little too hard…
chris 01.17.11 at 5:46 pm
Also, the real universe doesn’t give a damn about us, but that’s because it doesn’t have a mind with which damns can be given, not because it contains *beings with minds* that don’t give a damn about us (the Great Old Ones).
Aside from that, though, Lovecraft wasn’t far from a kind of depressive realism about humanity’s real place in the universe (compared to the ego-feeding pablum of most religions about how we’re all so special and the universe was created just for us).
Roger Mexico 01.17.11 at 6:40 pm
Chris — It’s sort of weird that given your evident grasp on our current understandings of the universe and humanity’s place within it you nevertheless don’t seem to understand that Lovecraft was writing fiction. That is, his work is an aestheticized recasting of all the earth-shattering scientific and cultural events Martin Wisse listed above. Its “realism” is beside the point.
chris 01.17.11 at 9:45 pm
Of course Lovecraft was writing fiction, but don’t you think the outlook of his fiction was influenced by the way he saw the real world? At least, I understood that to be the point of the Lovecraft subthread.
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