Winter 2006 Quarterly Conversation
Basking in Hell: Returning to The Tunnel
Essay by Stephen Schenkenberg
When William H. Gass's 650-page novel The Tunnel was finally published in 1995, following nearly three decades of labor by the critically esteemed author and essayist, it was called a lot of things. Two critics used the word "monster," and they weren't simply referring to the abhorrent narrator, history professor and Nazi specialist William Frederick Kohler, who most certainly fits the bill; those critics were describing the book itself. While "Bookworm" host Michael Silverblatt deemed The Tunnel "the most beautiful, most complex, most disturbing novel to be published in my lifetime"--a claim he renewed last year--James Wolcott scored the novel's long-awaited landing a "bellyflop." For Steven Moore, writing in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, the work was "a stupendous achievement and obviously one of the greatest novels of the century." For James Bowman: "a load of crap." In The New York Times Book Review, Robert Kelly called The Tunnel an "infuriating and offensive masterpiece," ending his 2,600-word review by essentially--and perhaps bravely--throwing up his hands: "It will be years before we know what to make of it."
For anyone who still cares about this book, it's been a great year. Dalkey Archive Press, which has published The Tunnel since 1999, has given us two valuable offerings: last spring, Dalkey's low-profile journal CONTEXT published a two-page document called "Designing The Tunnel," excerpts from Gass’s 12-point instructions to the book's designer about layout, type, and the overall visual goals as they related to the book's themes; and a month later, the publisher released an unabridged audio book of the novel, recorded by the 83-year-old author last year near his home in St. Louis. One is two pages; the other, 45 hours. Both provide compelling ways to re-experience this disagreeable and stunning novel.
New Clichés: How Mulligan Stew Uses Old Lines to Slam Pretentious Authors
Essay by Scott Esposito
What's amazing, however, is that Mulligan Stew is not a rant, or a mere satire, but a literary masterpiece. Amazing because Mulligan Stew, considered by many to be Sorrentino's greatest novel, is also probably the one in which his anger most powerfully dictates content. Publishers, editors, book reviewers, and other authors all receive a harsh, sarcastic beatdown. Yet Sorrentino remains in control. His satire remains secondary to his literary aims, and it is for that reason that Mulligan Stew succeeds as literature.
World Cinema: The Independent Spirit of the Toronto International Film Festival
Essay by M.S. Smith
If the space for innovative cinema has shrunk over the course of two decades, unconquered territories still remain, perhaps even thrive, in the early twenty-first century. International film festivals allow cinephilia to exist, if to smaller degrees; cinephiles who attend, or at least read about festivals, still debate the achievements of contemporary filmmakers and the current state of cinema. In covering film festivals, the cultural press (albeit a minor portion of it) still gives much-needed attention to promising filmmakers from across the globe.
But festivals do something more. As the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival proved, such events are the major open territory for vanguard cinema of all kinds; even if many of the films do not receive wide distribution (or any) in a place as cinematically influential as the United States, their very appearance at festivals is a significant boon to the medium. The great "conversation" of cinema, involving filmmakers who rework the formal and visual languages of their predecessors and cinephiles and critics who argue about cinema, continues.
The Value of Religious Diversity
Essay by J.C. Hallman
Is it correct to accept religion and science as squaring off across a red-blue scrimmage line? Cracks in the wall of fundamentalist Christianity appear to be widening, politically. And the latest book to claim that science has finally killed God--Richard Dawkins's un-subtitled The God Delusion--was met with a hammering, led by Marilynne Robinson in Harper's.
That religion would find defenders on the left is hardly new, and three recent books about William James, whose The Varieties of Religious Experience set about defending religion from just that perspective, may indicate another trend in modern publishing.
Howdy Neighbor
Essay by Barrett Hathcock
John Updike is my neighbor. He lives just across the park, in the half-block of brick condos, each urbanely fused to its neighbor, each yard a tight rectangle of sod. John Updike has a little white dog, one of those lap dogs. I think it's a Westie.
He sits out on a bench in his front yard--the bench occupies practically the whole yard--and surveys us across the street, in the park, where we, the young, let our dogs mingle. The park is this half-bowl that leans into a hill, and from us with our dogs there is a straight sight line to where he sits on the bench. I have not talked to John Updike. He seems rather vaguely pissed off at me.
What is Appropriate
Essay by Matthew Cheney
Another teacher wanted to use the book with her 12th grade students, but had been taken aback by a scene in which two teenagers discuss oral sex. She showed the book to the head of the English department to see if teaching it would get her in trouble, and the head of the English department photocopied the scene to hand around at our department meeting.
"Oh my," someone says.
Someone else laughs.
"Appropriate for 12th grade?" the head of the department asks.
"I've used worse with 11th grade," I say. "I used American Gods a couple years ago and there's a scene in that where a guy gets swallowed by a goddess's vagina."
People ignore me. They're too busy reading about a blowjob.
A Day at Vollmann's Studio
Conversation by Terri Saul
William T. Vollmann appears at the door just as I turn in to his driveway. It's raining, so he helps me carry my camera bags in. I offer up a Christmas cactus and a box of tangerines. Vollmann has a Christmas cactus story, and after he first checks that I’ve locked my car, he tells it: as a child he saved one segment of a Christmas cactus, and it lived, soon to germinate in his rooftop garden.
Although Vollmann is best known for his writing, I am here to see his visual artwork. I'm prepared to talk art all day long, but with Vollmann the divide between the arts is always fluid: our conversation ranges from Noh theater to contemporary music to his novels and everything in between.
Whose Freedom? by George Lakoff
Review by Dave Munger
When I agreed to review George Lakoff's new book Whose Freedom?, there were many things I didn't know. I didn't know that Steven Pinker would review it in The New Republic. I didn't know that Lakoff would write an angry rebuttal to the review, or that a nasty exchange laced with ad hominem attacks would ensue. I didn't know that the debate would get extensive coverage in the science blogosphere.
But as I read the book, I watched with interest as the online discussion about it escalated into a frenzied uproar. Meanwhile, the midterm elections were also coming to a head--compared to the din surrounding Lakoff's book, the election rhetoric itself was actually rather dull.
Remeber Me by Lisa Takeuchi Cullen
Review by Brien Michael
Cullen expertly shows that death is in some ways a business, and a big one at that. Without cynicism, she explores the expanding market potential of funerals and their unique, sometimes bizarre wares that are geared towards the Baby Boomers and their buying power. One of Cullen's major questions is how this generation, one that has flouted cultural, social, and sexual morés over the last fifty years, might also defy tradition when it comes to planning their last rites. What are we to make of the growing demand for "green" burials, ecologically sound funerals that use things like biodegradable urns that houses the cremains along with a bevy of wildflowers or an urn shaped liked a seashell that disintegrates when tossed into water? (We assume this will be some swift-moving stream not a gurgling bathtub.)
Red the Fiend by Gilbert Sorrentino
Review by Scott Bryan Wilson
Red the Fiend is a standout in a career built on writing funny and depressing books that wouldn't be so funny if they weren't so depressing, and vice versa. It's the story of Red, a boy growing up in Brooklyn at the end of the Great Depression. He's a violent, idiotic, filthy, lonely, mean, wretched kid. Thankfully, the Dalkey Archive, which now keeps the majority of Sorrentino's fiction in print, has rescued and reissued this book, one of the top three or four American novels of the 1990s and one of Sorrentino's very best. They've brought it out in a nice paperback edition, one which should expose many new readers to this book in which Sorrentino's writing is even funnier and more depressing than usual.
Triangle by Katharine Weber
Review by Scott Esposito
Before September 11, 2001, the deadliest workplace disaster on U.S. soil was the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which took place on March 25, 1911 and killed 146 workers. Katharine Weber's excellent new novel, Triangle, is about both disasters, as well as (among other things) genetics, classical music, family, and history. What unites these threads is a desire to understand how humans try to pry out truth from uncertainty.
Suspension by Robert Westfield
Review by Brien Michael
Robert Westfield's first novel, Suspension, uses the Brooklyn Bridge to explore the spectacle of imagination. The bridge serves as a Juliet's balcony, a place where lovers whisper endearments to each other and to the city lights below. One character attempts a lover's leap from it, spurned by his lady but embracing the city he once despised. And it is the bridge's awesome armature and cables that suspend the romance of self invention that is at the heart of both the story and New York City.
Spanning the months preceding and just after September 11, 2001, Suspension follows the quotidian-cum-quixotic life of Andy Green. A question writer for an educational testing service, Andy delights in obscuring the right answers amidst wrong ones; he zealously obscures not for the consternation that it may cause college hopefuls but for the sheer pleasure of construction, the wordplay. Though a witty and attractive man, his life teeters toward the ordinary. In fact, it seems as straightforward and uncomplicated as an un-obscured multiple-choice question. But there is more amiss than middle-aged ennui.
The link to the Vollmann interview is broken from the main page.
Posted by: Terri Saul | December 04, 2006 at 09:17 AM