Front-table brethren

Levi on Jonathan Coe's The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim:

[...]Coe unexpectedly transforms The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim from a good, diverting book, into a an amazing one, making a decision so daring, yet so effective, that I still can't quite believe it....Coe's ability to use complicated structure and narrative game-playing not to show off but to flesh out his thematic concerns is one of his his greatest gifts (see The Winshaw Legacy)--but it is also his riskiest habit as an author....In this new novel, the risk Coe takes is even more striking, and, while I expect there will be a lot of disagreement about this, I think it works, brilliantly.

If you've not tried Coe...start with The Rotters Club. But do eventually find your way to Maxwell Sim, if for no other reason than that it's daring, and wholly distinct from its front-table brethren--and surely daring and distinction should be rewarded?

Eat the Document

Sam Frank's great "The Document"—in the current issue of Triple Canopy*—is a must-read for any fan of David Markson, Thomas Bernhard, Saul Bellow, Anthony Powell, Dawn Powell...not to mention

Walter Abish, Kathy Acker, Max Apple, Paul Auster, John Barth, Frederick Barthelme, Ann Beattie, Raymond Carver, Michael Chabon, Andrei Codrescu, Laurie Colwin, Evan Connell, Robert Coover, Coleman Dowell, Deborah Eisenberg, Stanley Elkin, Bret Easton Ellis, Mary Gaitskill, Kenneth Gangemi, William Gass, Donald Goines, Barry Hannah, Jim Harrison, Janet Hobhouse, William Kotzwinkle, Cormac McCarthy, Joseph McElroy, Jay McInerney, Leonard Michaels, Steven Millhauser, Kem Nunn, Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley, Walker Percy, Richard Price, James Purdy, Ishmael Reed, Philip Roth, Gilbert Sorrentino, Richard Stern, James Wilcox, Joy Williams, Tobias Wolff, and Al Young...Waugh, Compton-Burnett, De Vries, Henry Green, Spackman, Colwin, Elkin, Colin MacInnes, Gaddis, Sorrentino... Hobhouse...Paley, Eric Kraft, Beckett...Donald Antrim, Mark Costello, Susan Daitch, Jeffrey Eugenides, A. M. Homes, Jonathan Lethem, Richard Powers, David Foster Wallace, Colson Whitehead...Lorrie Moore...

An incredible piece of writing—it is its own thing. And Triple Canopy's presentation is amazing; I haven't found another site that presents articles in such a readable way for the screen. (Make sure you click on the footnote—two videos.) Shouldn't e-tablet companies be hiring 3C as consultants? Or I don't know, maybe they already are...

(March! This month I've already been blown away by Rebecca Taylor's "Virginia Mountain Scream Queen," in the new Believer—now this!)

(It's also a must for Richard Stern–o-philes—basically me and Jason McBride. "Dick" Stern has a nice cameo.)

(I had a few more reflective paragraphs here but I will stop now. Please read Sam's piece. It is one of the best things you'll read this year...and it also seems to me to be the Writing of the Future.)

_____

*and published in the new, "Failure" issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction, guest-edited by Joshua Cohen...whom I mentioned in my recent Jonathan Coe piece for Bookforum:

After several days of enforced and enjoyable reacquaintance with the Coe canon, I went to a party, where I tried to find someone with whom I could rave about Coevian greatness. One writer I met said, "I think I've heard of him . . . Palladio?" Ten minutes later, another narrowed his eyes as he searched for some connection, coming up with the hopeful "He wrote . . . Witz, right?"

Here's an exclusive bonus for readers of this lonely old blog (who BLOGS anymore??): About five minutes after the above episode, who should walk in but...Joshua Cohen himself! Who then regaled me and Alan Gilbert (not the NY Phil. maestro but the critic-poet whose first book of poems, Late in the Antenna Fields, is now out) with an account of distant relatives of his who were also writers.

Bonus #2: The party was for what turned out to be the final issue of Open City, as immortalized here and here.

Bonus #3: As I was about to leave the party, who should stumble in but...Sam Frank!

Aren't you glad you still read The Dizzies (er, Disambiguation)??

A: MAYBE.

Prominent cheekbones?

My Bookforum piece on Jonathan Coe and his latest novel is now online. Here's the beginning:

Painting a word-picture of a woman at a restaurant, the titular narrator of British author Jonathan Coe's new novel, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim, writes, "She had long black hair, slightly wild and unkempt. A thin face, with prominent cheekbones." Prominent cheekbones? Just as the cliché meter is warming up, Max adds a parenthetical: "(Sorry, I am just not very good at describing people.)" This self-deprecation is enough to win us over, and it lets Max off the hook to unleash a few more lines of workmanlike, tentative details . . . prompting another aside: "(I am not very good at describing clothes either—are you looking forward to the next three hundred pages?)"

Sim city

The new Bookforum is partially online. My review of The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim is only in the paper issue as of now. I like the coverline: "Why Jonathan Coe Deserves an American Audience."

(I've read most of/finished some good pieces already—Ruth Franklin on Joyce Carol Oates, Erik Davis on Robert Duncan's The H.D. Book, Rivka Galchen on Lydia Davis/Madame Bovary...there's something by Paul La Farge...)













*

Coe notes:



Thank you to Gautam, who sent me a copy of The Rain Before It Falls several years ago—I talk about it a bit in the piece.






*

My essay in the Times about the longest sentence was the original impetus behind rereading Coe's The Rotters' Club. What a book!

*

I reviewed Coe's biography of B.S. Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant, when it came out in 2005, but did not dwell much on the ending. I do so in this Bookforum piece, as it is clearly a source for a chunk of the new novel.

Being boring

With The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim, Coe has undertaken to write the life of a bore from the bore’s point of view (at one point, in the book’s best passage, the hero appears to bore someone literally to death) as his life unravels and he sets off on a journey of uncomfortable discovery. This is not unprecedented, but it is a stark choice. The most famous recent bores have appeared not in novels but on television, in the characters of Alan Partridge (Steve Coogan) and David Brent (Ricky Gervais). In drama the actor is able to operate in the gap between the character’s idea of himself and the world’s, and a screenwriter can create all kinds of grotesquerie in a realist context. It is harder to generate this friction in a novel.—Sean O'Brien, TLS

Parkiana for October 2009

I. My J.G. Ballard appreciation, in the form of an abecedary, is in this weekend's Los Angeles Times. Alas, we couldn't fit the entries for letters F, M, S, and W, so I include them here—that's right, this is a DISAMBIGUATION EXCLUSIVE™! (This whole setup reminds me of the end of Mark Leyner's Et Tu, Babe, where the abecedary is revealed to be incomplete because "On September 24, 1994, federal operatives, acting under the authority of the Punitive Confiscation Act, sized Chapter Five manuscript entries for the letters B, E, H, J, K, L, N, O, P, Q, R, U, and X.") Many thanks to my editors for letting me write the piece in this form in the first place!

Flight
Flight enabled and denied haunts these pages. In “The Air Disaster,” the “world’s largest airliner,” holding a thousand passengers, crashes near Acapulco, and though people think it landed in the sea, one intrepid journalist, acting on a hunch, heads to a remote mountain village instead. But his hunger for a scoop colors his judgment, and he finds himself in a hell of grotesque misunderstanding.

Man
Some story titles: “The Overloaded Man” (1961), “The Subliminal Man” (1963), “The Illuminated Man” (1964), “The Impossible Man” (1966).

Science fiction
Places where most of these stories appeared: Science Fantasy, New Worlds, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, Fantastic Stories, Worlds of If, Argosy, Anticipations, Dangerous Visions.

Wave IX
Poetry journal edited by Paul Ransom, narrator of “Studio 5, The Stars,” featuring products of the VT. (See Vermilion Sands.)

II. I wrote a brief appreciation of Renata Adler's Speedboat for a cool little book called City Secrets Books: The Essential Insider's Guide (Fang Duff Kahn), a gathering of similar appreciations of interesting (and mostly obscure) titles. How obscure? Thornton Wilder's...The Cabala. Patricia Highsmith's...Edith's Diary. Jonathan Franzen's..."Erika's Imports." E.B. White's...The Fox of Peapack and Other Poems. Plus stuff I have somewhere but have never read (Elizabeth Smart's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept...no, not that Elizabeth Smart), stuff by writers whose other stuff I like (Robert Kelly's The Flowers of Unceasing Coincidence—"The shape of the whole thing...is that of a rhizome, i.e. a non-hierarchical space, a burrow where you, the can go to earth for as long as little as you like"), stuff that I've mentioned on this blog within the past couple of weeks (Chuck Wachtel's Joe the Engineer), stuff I truly have never heard of, authorwise and titlewise (Otto Lilienthal's 1889 book Birdflight as the Basis of Aviation, anyone? Giovanni Paolo Marana's 1683 Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy?), and enough of my all-time favorites (William Boyd's Any Human Heart, Powell's Dance of course, Todd McEwen's Who Sleeps With Katz [!!?!?!], Jonathan Coe's The Winshaw Legacy, Rachel Ingalls's Mrs. Caliban, Nigel Dennis's Cards of Identity) to make me believe that this gathering has some basis in reality. And where else can you read writers like John Crowley on Paul Park (no relation!), Carole Maso on The Pillow Book, Gary Shetyngart on Mordecai Richler? Wait...Buck Henry on Stanislaw Lem's The Futurological Congress?? Is this book for real?

Weekend screening: "Fat Man on a Beach"

(Via Me and My Big Mouth, which has a report on a recent screening of novelist B.S. Johnson's film and TV work, hosted by Jonathan Coe.)

(For more on BSJ, here's my review of Coe's biography.)

Dizzies Newsfeeds™ for Tuesday, August 21

1. "It’s not too much of a stretch to say that I live in Portland because Powell’s Books is here." (James Tata at Maud Newton)

2. Libraries at the beach. (Via Dizzyhead Thomas)

3. Meaty profile on Jonathan Coe, who has a new novel coming out: In terms of wider literary inspirations...The Rain Before It Falls owes a considerable amount to two rather surprising writers. One is BS Johnson, a modernist novelist of the 1960s and 1970s, who was the subject of Coe’s biography Like a Fiery Elephant, and whose tortured credo that “telling stories is telling lies” haunted Coe during the writing of the new book (he admits, in fact, that his novels have been getting darker ever since the Johnson biography). The other, happier influence is Rosamond Lehmann, whom Coe first read in his mid-twenties, and whom he considers one of the 20th century’s key writers. —Times Online
(Via Dizzyhead Gautam)

4. Jenny D on writing:

I draft the whole thing (we’re talking about novels here) from start to finish, writing in longhand in little notebooks. Then I type up the draft, including a first edit. Then I edit the hard copy, type in revisions, repeat ad nauseam. This latest novel probably underwent at least 10 revision cycles, each one of which potentially involved two or three or four close copy-edits. At some point (usually more than once), I read the whole thing out loud to myself, to make sure the sentences sound right and that I can stand by them.

Dizzies Newsfeeds™ for Monday

Jonathan Coe's new novel will focus on mothers and daughters....The parts of Adolfo Bioy Casares's diaries focusing on his friend Borges have been published, and the TLS has an in-depth look (with several significant reservations)....(I like that the TLS will review things that aren't even in English)....We agree with Nick Owchar at Jacket Copy re the final chapter of the Potteriad: "It is exciting that a book can still stir the kind of frantic energy typical in Dumas’ day"....Over at Slate, Dizzyhead Hua on the rap "beef" in the YouTube era....Not sure we agree with this take on The Sopranos vs. The Novel....The Sopranos is surely not as good as Lost???....What say you, Dizzyheads?....Devin has a new "Pop" post up—including this controversial gem:

Fab Revelation #537
That virtually the whole of Oasis's worthy career sprang from a single tight and polished tap of pop musicality: "And Your Bird Can Sing." And that as well as Oasis have done what they've done over their 15-year career, the Beatles not only did it better but did it in two minutes.

And via Pinky's Paperhaus, this photo of Faulkner's legendary wall outline for A Fable: