Step Right Up

James M. Cain is dead enough. I read Postman and now Double Indemnity. I’ve been thinking about how to make a good gutter-American novel with a fastbuck bastard protagonist, so I read Cain. His short stories are great, as I wrote in the last post, but I really wanted to read the two first-person pov novels to learn, I hope, something about how he did it. I also chose Cain, I suppose, because he’s dead.

He’s dead and people still read him. There are plenty of popular writers now living to choose from, of course. Nora Roberts had 5 simultaneous New York Times bestsellers, last I checked. I’m not so sure people will read her books long after her death, though.

Everybody wants to sell. I want to sell. More important for me, though, would be to write books one could read twice or more without becoming bored. I could read Double Indemnity again, no problem. The ending is so beautifully weird. So nasty and poetic.

The patron saint of American writers who toil in obscurity, St. Nathaniel Hawthorne, wrote literature is “news that stays news.” I love that definition. My litmus for books, the ones I read and the ones I write, is always the same: if I can read it twice, and it’s just as interesting the second time, it’s good work. After revision, by my standard, I actually like about 1% of my own work. And I have my doubts about that 1%.

Cormac McCarthy has a bestseller at the moment—The Road. Once I’d finished reading it, all I wanted to do was read his previous novel, No Country for Old Men again. No Country seems a better novel to me than The Road. I want to read it again with greater urgency. Blood Meridian is better still. I read it in one day and night, then got up the next morning with the equivalent of a literary hangover and had the hair of the dog—I read it straight through a second time. I’ve read it twice more in the intervening years, and it’s still as interesting, or more so, each time. I know I’ll read it again in a couple of years. That, to me, is a very good novel.

So I want to write novels people will want to read over again. This much I know for certain. But of course, I have little positive idea what others will want to read once, let alone read again. Do people buying all those Nora Roberts vampire or romance novels read them over and over? Will people read them over and over in 20 years? I have my doubts.

Stephen King, when he complained about the little journals to an audience in San Francisco (see last post), said the writers of the fiction in those journals did not seem to care very much about catching a reader’s attention. He seemed to detect a sort of subtlety for subtlety’s sake that got in the way of writers grabbing a reader by the nostrils and yanking her forward. Ok, so there is a carnival-barker aspect to the kind of writing that sells. “Step right up, laidees and gentlemens, see a world of sex and violence you’ve never seeeen beeefore!” King sure knows about that. But some of his novels are clearly worthy of a second reading, I think. Some of them will last after King is in the ground. Of course, maybe after 50 novels, the odds are simply with him. How does one write novels that not only buy groceries, but turn into gold?

Ah, the alchemist’s stone. What is it? Being prolific, perhaps. Kinging out dozens of novels and getting some of them really, truly right. John Updike falls into that camp. I do not care for Updike’s work, myself, but I know he has written a hell of a lot of fiction and some of it will survive after he’s dead. But then, of course, there’s the J.D. Salinger scenario—only three novels and a book of short stories in fifty years, and everybody still knows his work, and they will continue to know it. William Gass, too. He doesn’t exactly roll them out every year.

The alchemist’s stone—what is it, what is it?

Little Journals are Killing Me--a rant

I read The Postman Always Rings Twice yesterday. I love the film noir with John Garfield and Lana Turner, and I enjoyed Cain's novella more (I know, I know--you can't judge the same story rendered in different artistic media, blah blah blah). If Cain is a hack, he is an American hack in the tradition of Edgar Poe. I mean he maps the hardscrabble terrain of alluring psychotics from the first person point of view better than most anybody. To get into the American psyche is to understand a certain type of psychotic (in this case, the fast-buck killer). And, like Poe, Cain definitely makes literature out of a hack's story.

These days I am writing about a (fictional) murder, so I thought Cain would be a helpful detour. I have been having this horrid doubt, however, that the story I am working on will not be "literary" enough. However, I think I traced the source of this peculiar insecurity.

One of the major problems with much of the "literary fiction" being published in the usual little journals (i.e. GlimmerTrain, Zoetrope, and the others Stephen King recently referred to as, "the shit nobody reads") is that the writers are not trying very hard to engross an ordinary reader. What I mean by that is they are trying only to engross other writers of "literary fiction." Gentle humor underlies either a) lyrical intensity (conventional fiction), or b) clever prose styling (metafiction, also known as conventional fiction). Yawn. With subtlety and nuance, fully formed characters make dinner, go shopping, and discuss food in Paris or New York City (I'm looking at the current issues of the two journals named above). Yawn, *stretch*.

Of course, in the shit most people do seem to be reading, in the novels with pink covers and pictures of Renee Zellweger on them, unmarried female characters make dinner, go shopping, and discuss food in LA, London, New York, or Paris. Hm. I guess that makes it "chick lit" and not "literary lit." I haven't read any chick lit other than Jane Austen, so maybe some of the new stuff is literary. It would surprise me if it weren't. Whether it is or not, it won't make it into the little journals.

It is as if a narrative in danger of sliding into any genre whatsoever might not get the dubious prestige of being identifiable as "literary." There are, of course, great stories in which almost nothing happens in the sense of a plot (Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style is a personal favorite), but now it seems that if anything were to happen, it wouldn't be called "literary fiction." It's hard not to blame James Joyce. (Goddamned Dubliners!) Of course, the problem is the strange negotiation publications in the late capitalist era are making to try to capture the diminishing market. The little journals seem to be carving out their niche—something they call "literary fiction." They are, of course, merely smaller businesses identifying a market they want to capture. Zoetrope has the tagline, "The New Generation of Classic Short Stories." Hilarious! Can you imagine a story such as Cain's "Baby in the Icebox" making it into Zoetrope?

I guess one of the problems is the drive on the part of publishers, even publishers of the little "literary" journals unread except by other writers, to market their product. What is "literary fiction" as distinct from all other genres supposed to mean, anyway? Can you imagine dear Ray Bradbury trying to get his start now? He'd be pegged as hopelessly inconsistent for the marketplace: "Sunlight and Shadow," literary fiction; Dandelion Wine, lad lit; The Halloween Tree, children's lit; Fahrenheit 451, current affairs. I can hear the query letters dropping unceremoniously in editors' trashcans. Thank god large-market magazines like Playboy (which first published the short version of Fahrenheit 451) still published good fiction when Bradbury "emerged," as they say in the little journals.

Truly, who wrote the law that a horror story, for example, can not be "literary"? What about Stevenson, Poe—even Henry James (a writer of ghost stories)? I know there has always been market pressure in fiction, but sweet Jesus! Look in the Writer's Market and you will see publishing houses of all sizes and, even worse, scurvy agents demarcating their interests along extremely restrictive lines. Interesting writer? Don't care. Easy to define? Easy to peddle? Okey dokey! RIP Marion Boyars.

Of course, reading culture itself now has been taken off life support. How many of you not married to K-12 teachers know that silent reading is now banned in a growing number of school districts around the country? Don't believe me? Check it out. It seems silent reading is deemed not conducive to raising test scores. Teachers are no longer allowed by their administrators to have their pupils sit silently enjoying a book in school. No wonder writers are left as the only readers of the cramped little journals. No wonder the little journals print cramped little literature.

When the most successful, the very top, literary mags have a readership of ten thousand in a country of over 300 million, we are screwed. When the ten thousand readers are all trying to write the same way to garner the "literary" label so they can recruit agents representing "literary fiction," literature is screwed.

And yet, I write. What the hell is wrong with me?