Denis Johnson: second worst writer of his generation?

I felt this way about Colm Toibin's The Master, but no one seemed to agree with me:

When a novel’s first words are "Last night at 3:00 a.m. President Kennedy had been killed," and the rest of it evinces no more feel for the English language and often a good deal less, and America’s most revered living writer touts "prose of amazing power and stylishness" on the back cover, and reviewers agree that whatever may be wrong with the book, there’s no faulting its finely crafted sentences—when I see all this, I begin to smell a rat. Nothing sinister, mind you. It’s just that once we Americans have ushered a writer into the contemporary pantheon, we will lie to ourselves to keep him there.

Having read nothing by Denis Johnson except Tree of Smoke, his latest novel, I see no reason to consider him a great or even a good writer, but he is apparently very well thought of by everyone else. According to The New York Times, which in 2006 sent a questionnaire to writers, editors, and critics, a collection of Johnson’s short stories titled Jesus’ Son is regarded by some as the best American book of the past 25 years. He is often called "a writer’s writer," with the customary implication that this is far better than being a reader’s writer. Denis Johnson is, in short, the sort of novelist whose work one expects to be reviewed on the cover of every prominent newspaper’s book section, as Tree of Smoke was in September. Equally predictable was the reviewers’ implicit injunction that we should ask not what the book can do for us, but what it can do for Johnson’s place in American letters. This much is standard Important Writer treatment, and for all I know, Michiko Kakutani (The New York Times), Jim Lewis (The New York Times Book Review), and other reviewers consider Johnson worthy of it no matter what he puts out. What I find difficult to believe is that they admire Tree of Smoke. For one thing, their own prose is better than anything in it.

The novel is attacked on both stylistic and mimetic grounds. Read on, if you dare. But be warned: "It would be a rare novel that did not yield some infelicities, but I defy anyone to argue that those quoted here are not representative of every page of Tree of Smoke. I might also point out that no book review can convey the tedium of reading bad prose in such unrelieved bulk."

50 book challenge: #50.

#50: Lytton Strachey: Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History. The funny thing about reading Eminent Victorians is that today it can be hard to understand intuitively why it was so innovative. E&E has a different quality, though - today, people still don't write history like this. Maybe it's viewed as too speculative, presumptuous (in speculating about motives or feelings), or just plain pretentious. For me, though, even if a historical narrative/argument is tendentious, I like it if it at least gives me a definite view - something to push back against. That kind of quality can be a good aide de memoire, if nothing else. Anyway, that's one of the reasons why this is such a fine work. I don't know anything about current opinion of the work's merits. I have a multivolume Strachey biography sitting on my shelves that I hope to get around to, someday.

Recursion.

The best of the "best of" lists of 2007.

There is no cabal.

This is obviously the first (or last?) step in a Masonic conspiracy:

Four members of an underground "cultural guerrilla" movement known as the Untergunther, whose purpose is to restore France's cultural heritage, were cleared on Friday of breaking into the 18th-century monument in a plot worthy of Dan Brown or Umberto Eco.

For a year from September 2005, under the nose of the Panthéon's unsuspecting security officials, a group of intrepid "illegal restorers" set up a secret workshop and lounge in a cavity under the building's famous dome. Under the supervision of group member Jean-Baptiste Viot, a professional clockmaker, they pieced apart and repaired the antique clock that had been left to rust in the building since the 1960s. Only when their clandestine revamp of the elaborate timepiece had been completed did they reveal themselves.

Hey, people! They were not there to fix a clock! You can see the hideout here.

50 book challenge: #49.

#49: Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union. The novel's originality of concept is praiseworthy, but the execution was quietly annoying, and a little half-baked. The plot moved slowly, too slowly if the idea was to mimic a Chandler novel. And there seemed to be too much overwritten description: all very artfully done, but seeming like the product of a writing workshop exercise ("O.K., now your main character, this Landsman fellow, meets a scrappy Alaskan bush pilot. Bring the bush pilot to life in 150 words.") In other words, every character introduction was accompanied by a very inventive description of clothing, quirks, facial features, etc., but how is that enhancing my enjoyment of the story, or necessary to it? Maybe my expectations were too high.

Now that's a mishpacha.

The gang.






Cara entertains the troops.












Papa shows Benji how it's done.

























Dovid embraces Elisha. Or tries to steal his ball. You decide.

50 book challenge: #46, 47, #48.

#46: Selected Letters of Marcel Proust. This is the other "0.5." What a snob! No surprise he did nothing remarkable in his life, har har.

#47: Chekov, Complete Short Novels, Complete Stories, trans. Pevear & Volokhonsky. Of the short novels, I read The Steppe and The Duel, and a smattering of the stories. I would have gladly continued, but the silly library refused to let me renew more than I already had. Anyway, never having read any of this writer's stuff before, this was brilliant.

#48: George Saunders, In Persuasion Nation. Too often, these stories were "funny" but not all that funny. Also, the stories didn't really tell a story - and that wasn't their purpose, to be fair - as much as present variations on a theme, that theme being rampant consumerism is deadening our souls omigod amirite? And the thing is, sure, I agree, but I'm not ready to join the church. The Red Bow was good, with some subtle touches, and again, it was true - the madness that can follow in the collective response to a tragedy, sometimes well-intentioned but sometimes not - but its force was monotonic. Good long interview with Saunders here.

I haven't read this book yet.

From a TLS review of Pierre Bayard's Comment Parler des Livres Que L'on N'a Pas Lus (How to talk about books that you haven't read):

Bayard’s project is a serious one. He tells us, in his “Prologue”, that he was born into a family who read little, that he himself has almost no appetite for reading and that, anyway, he cannot find the time for it. As a (fifty-two-year-old) professor of French literature at the University of Paris VIII (and a practising psychoanalyst), he often finds himself obliged to comment on books he hasn’t looked at. And yet “non-reading” is a taboo subject in the circles in which he moves. He lists three constraints that we all feel as readers: “The first of these constraints could be called the obligation to read. We live in a society . . . in which reading still remains the object of a form of sacralization”, particularly where certain “canonical texts” are concerned: it is practically forbidden not to have read these. The second constraint “could be called the obligation to read a book in its entirety. If non-reading is frowned on, speed-reading and skimming are viewed in as poor a light”. For example, “it would be almost unthinkable for professors of literature to admit – what is after all true for most of them – that they have merely skimmed Proust’s work”. Can this really be the case? If so, it’s a dismaying thought – presumably Bayard has had some explaining to do to his colleagues since his book was published in France earlier this year. The third constraint, and the one which most of us would take as given, is the need to have read a book in order to be able to talk about it: according to Bayard, it is perfectly possible to have a fruitful discussion about a book one hasn’t read, even with someone who hasn’t read it either. These constraints lead to a lack of openness in our dealings with each other, Bayard claims, and generate unnecessary feelings of guilt.

He does not address the fact that most of us have our blind spots where particular authors are concerned, and that many of us do feel oppressed by the thought of the books we haven’t quite got round to reading, or wish that we had read years ago and know we now never will. Bayard is not interested in this; instead, he divides the works he mentions into four categories: “LI” indicates “livres inconnus” (books he is unfamiliar with); “LP” “livres parcourus” (books glanced at); “LE” “livres dont j’ai entendu parler” (books he has heard discussed) and “LO” “les livres que j’ai oubliés” (books he has read but forgotten). Ulysses, for example, falls into the category “LE”: he claims not to have read the novel, but he can place it within its literary context, knows that it is in a sense a reprise of the Odyssey, that it follows the ebb and flow of consciousness, and that it takes place in Dublin over the course of a single day. When teaching he makes frequent and unflinching references to Joyce.

And here from Jay McInerney in the N.Y. Times, on the English translation. (I really only skimmed this last review, I must confess.)

0.999999. . . = 1

It's true!

Richard Mellon Scaife, you dog.

Charter member of the vast right-wing conspiracy:

Unfathomable but true, when Scaife (rhymes with safe) married his second wife, Margaret "Ritchie" Scaife, in 1991, he neglected to wall off a fortune that Forbes recently valued at $1.3 billion. This, to understate matters, is likely going to cost him, big time. As part of a temporary settlement, 60-year-old Ritchie Scaife is currently cashing an alimony check that at first glance will look like a typo: $725,000 a month. Or about $24,000 a day, seven days a week. As Richard Scaife's exasperated lawyers put it in a filing, "The temporary order produces an amount so large that just the income from it, invested at 5 percent, is greater each year than the salary of the President of the United States."

The Post has the story.