Category Archives: books

The Sun­day Times Book Review has an arti­cle about a new book– a tran­scrip­tion, really, and I’ve read the advance copy, it’s well worth the read– of an inter­view between the late, great David Fos­ter Wal­lace and the Rolling Stone reporter and writer David Lip­sky as Wal­lace is doing his book tour after Infi­nite Jest had come out.

I have a con­fes­sion to make.  I have never read Infi­nite Jest, for no par­tic­u­lar rea­son except that I was in a Dou­glas Cou­p­land phase at the time it came out.  But– I have read (and re-read, and re-read) Broom of the Sys­tem, Wallace’s very first book, in an advance copy, because my aunt designed the book when she was at Crown or Har­court or whomever first pub­lished that book.  And I have a first edi­tion hard­cover copy of Broom, prob­a­bly lit­er­ally hot off the presses, because I raved to my Aunt about what a great book it was, how it blew me away because at age 14 or what­ever I was when I read it, I was blown away by the author’s refusal to pan­der, to not avoid dif­fi­cult things, intel­lec­tual things that might make the reader take pause to look up things with which he was unfa­mil­iar.  (I spent a whole after­noon look­ing up Wittgen­stein, for exam­ple, and went out and bought an Everyman’s Library primer to get myself more acquainted with his ideas, Wal­lace had so affected me with way he’d woven the ref­er­ences inside the book.)

This arti­cle brought it all back, and reminded me again of some of the things I’ve been learn­ing and decid­ing for myself as I try out this whole writ­ing thing.  I’d men­tioned a while ago I’ve been play­ing around with fan­fic­tion– though it’s not really play­ing, because I think any writ­ing deserves to be done seri­ously, even if I’m work­ing with some­one else’s orig­i­nal char­ac­ters.  But it’s given me a chance to work with voice and nar­ra­tive struc­ture in an envi­ron­ment where peo­ple tend to be mostly sup­port­ive and there­fore have given me the courage to write some­thing orig­i­nal of my own– and what’s ref­er­enced in the arti­cle– it’s funny.

The ten­sions there between “dif­fi­cult” fic­tion– the kind that pro­vokes the reader to think, to do some work, to be chal­lenged on an emo­tional level– and the allure of escapist or pop­u­lar fic­tion, the kind of pulp guilty plea­sure we all enjoy every once in a while–it’s some­thing I’ve even come up against in writ­ing in the fan­fic­tion world (which a lot of “seri­ous authors” scorn and treat as a bunch of abom­i­na­tion vile ripoffs), and while I’ve been lucky to become a semi-popular writer in the fan­doms I write in, I’m not the most pop­u­lar of all– because I don’t write the cute easy themes, and I tend to visit dark places in some of my sto­ries.  I use big words, I play around with chronol­ogy, I switch the nar­ra­tive stream– I don’t make it easy on read­ers, in short.

I took part in a several-months con­test of late, and while my entries always placed high in the vote with my team, gar­ner­ing lots of pos­i­tive com­ments, I never won.  I’m con­vinced it’s because I wrote things that while true to the par­tic­u­lar prompts, my sub­jects tended to be harder, more emo­tion­ally honest/brutal approaches to things than some read­ers really wanted to deal with.  And they rarely were fluffy or cute– and even when they were, there was always still some larger, dark point to be made.  It didn’t make me a “worse” writer than the peo­ple who won– just less “popular.”

““If the writer does his job right, what he basi­cally does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is,” he says. Wal­lace con­trasts lit­er­a­ture with the elec­tronic media, espe­cially tele­vi­sion, an amuse­ment that is his own per­sonal weak­ness, an actual addic­tion. “One of the insid­i­ous lessons about TV is the meta-lesson that you’re dumb. This is all you can do. This is easy, and you’re the sort of per­son who really just wants to sit in a chair and have it easy.””

That’s how Wal­lace describes the ten­sion at one point in the inter­view, and while it’s a bit reduc­tion­ist– some­times we’ve had a hard day and we deserve a light laugh– his point remains true.

Every day in the store, peo­ple come to me to ask for rec­om­men­da­tions, and half the time, they’re ask­ing me if I’ve read some­thing I think is absolute trash.  I mean– Twi­light?  Dan Brown?  Come ON.

There are romance writ­ers who write bodice rip­pers who still man­age to write female hero­ines who’ve got spine, spunk and brains who I can rec­om­mend with a con­science.  Fan­tasy and sci-fi writ­ers too.  Same thing with mys­ter­ies and action.  There are pulp genre mass-market writ­ers who gen­er­ate entertainment-type beach reads that are still good writ­ers, and by that, I mean, they work in some kind of emo­tional res­o­nance, try to make their char­ac­ters peo­ple who learn some kind of intel­li­gent les­son or do some kind of good in the world, whether or not most of it’s fluff.  But there’s so much trash out there that just turns my stom­ach, and I think of all the peo­ple who read this mind­less trash and think that it’s good or just don’t think at all and just keep buy­ing it over and over with­out pay­ing any atten­tion to all the real writ­ing out there, the things that might chal­lenge them, make them do some work in their lives, do bet­ter, be bet­ter, learn some­thing about the larger world that they’d never known before then.

Scary shit, hunh?

I was talk­ing with the hus­band when we were away for the week­end, and say­ing how I thought that in some ways, rec­om­mend­ing a book was an incred­i­bly inti­mate act.  You’re telling some­one about some­thing that was impor­tant to you– that influ­enced what you thought, how you felt (even if you don’t come right out and say so)– and you’re putting into their hands a tool that has the power to affect them the same way.  Whether it does, whether it doesn’t– well, there’s no power over that except their own recep­tiv­ity and per­haps the power of your con­vic­tion at the time of your rec­om­men­da­tion, but still.  Words have power, if the per­son read­ing them is in a place to see and read them.  And while you have no power over how a per­son inter­prets those words, the mere fact that they’re read­ing and may see them the same way you do– well.  I dwell in pos­si­bil­ity (poetry or prose.)

Next week’s my extra 10% on my employee dis­count “employee appre­ci­a­tion” week.  I’ll be adding the rest of Wallace’s works to my shelf.  And feel­ing bet­ter about not tak­ing the easy way out, even if it means it takes me a while to write hard, orig­i­nal sto­ries that may take a long, good while for any­one to actu­ally like, much less want to publish.