How Literature Saved My Life

6. ALL GREAT BOOKS WIND UP WITH THE WRITER GETTING HIS TEETH BASHED IN The only books I care about strip the writer naked and, in that way, have at least the chance of conveying some real knowledge of our shared predicament.

Sometimes the place I go to be alone to think turns out in the end to be the most dangerous place I can be

YEATS SAID that we can’t articulate the truth, but we can embody it. I think that’s wrong or at least beside the point. What’s of interest to me is precisely how we try to articulate the truth, and what that says about us, and about “truth.”

What separates us is not what happens to us. Pretty much the same things happen to most of us: birth, love, bad driver’s license photos, death. What separates us is how each of us thinks about what happens to us. That’s what I want to hear.

Texting: proof that we’re solitary animals who like being left alone as we go through life, commenting on it. We’re aliens.

Updike: “I loathe being interviewed; it’s a half-form, like maggots.” Gertrude Stein: “Remarks are not literature.” Um is not a word, but I like how people use it now to ironize/mock/deflate/put scare quotes around what comes next. The moment I try not to stutter, I stutter. I never stutter when singing to myself in the shower.

The perceiver, by his very presence, alters what’s perceived: Plato, Dialogues of Socrates. Eckermann, Conversations of Goethe. Boswell, Life of Johnson. Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer. Schopenhauer: “The world is my idea.” We don’t see the world. We make it up.

Ancient Sanskrit texts emphasize the ephemeral nature of truth. Sanskrit writers use fiction, nonfiction, stories within stories, stories about stories, reiteration, oral history, exegesis, remembered account, rules, history, mythological tales, aphorisms to try to get to the “truth,” often dressing it up in narrative as a way to make it appear comprehensible, palatable. Sanskrit works revolve around the question “Who is the narrator?” Subjectivity is always present in the recitation: the nature of reality is ever elusive. We spend our lives chasing it.

When playing an electric guitar, instead of plugging the cord straight into an amplifier, you first plug it into a little electronic stomp box called a pedal. A second cord takes the altered sound from the pedal to the amplifier. The sound coming from the guitar to the pedal is “clean”—as true to life as a given electric guitar can be (which is a whole other debate). There are hundreds of different guitar pedals you can buy, each one altering the “true” sound of the instrument. One “clean” note from your Telecaster can become a crescendo of sound (if sent through the right effects pedal).

In Amadeus, Salieri says re Mozart’s score, “I am staring through the cage of his meticulous ink strokes at an absolute beauty.”

In Ron Fein’s Drumming the Moon, the flute assumes a pitch and sound somewhere between the tonality of human expression and wolf howl, never quite sure of its place in the world, negotiating its own survival.

I recently reread Renata Adler’s novel Pitch Dark and felt like I finally got it. The three sections are thematic sculptures. The first section is about how love is a mystery, a sadness, an absence, a darkness. The second section takes place in Ireland, where the Adler figure gets in a car accident: the misunderstandings between her and everyone she meets are represented as utter epistemological darkness. And the third section is this darkness writ large, into society and civilization as a whole—every human interaction is conducted in pitch dark.

Walking on Forty-fifth Street, Laurie and I witnessed a car accident. Ten seconds later, we had and held diametrically opposed views of what we’d just seen. (She was wrong.)

I find that no matter what I write, Laurie doesn’t respond to my work in the way I want her to, or more accurately, she resents that she’s an arrow in my quiver. I wouldn’t want to be an arrow in her quiver, either (though in a sense aren’t we all, etc.). I loved it when she asked, the day before my profile of Delilah was published in the Times Magazine, “Are we in it?”—i.e., do she and Natalie make cameos? When I said no, she said, “What, we’re not good enough?” I took this in the way in which I hope it was meant: as a brilliant gloss on Damned If You Do/Damned If You Don’t. Might as well go for broke.

It’s hard to write a book, it’s very hard to write a good book, and it’s impossible to write a good book if you’re concerned with how your intimates are going to judge it. I learned a long time ago that the people whom you most want to love your books… won’t (I’m nowhere near Laurie’s favorite writer; ceaseless is her apotheosis of fellow Illinoisan D. F. Wallace). The people who know you the best are always going to view your work through the screen of their own needs. They’re never going to read it on the terms in which you intend it. As do I, of course, whenever I see even the briefest or most oblique description of myself in someone else’s work.

Are we all just characters in one another’s novels? Is the drama of love indistinguishable from the engine of narrative? Is reading for the plot identical to desire? Are we all egoists, and is the best we can do to make sure that our own needs don’t get in the way of other people’s desires? We’re all sleepwalkers in the mind of, oh, I don’t know, Napoleon. The emperor’s body is a box within a box within a box, a prison within a prison within a prison.

My former student Rachel Jackson: “Sometimes the place I go to be alone to think turns out in the end to be the most dangerous place I can be.”

According to Frank Harris’s My Life and Loves, Victorian women liked to fuck, though apparently (whaddya know?) only Frank.

Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March forever altered my writing life. By being as self-reflexive as it is, a heat-seeking missile destroying whatever it touches, the film becomes a thoroughgoing exploration of the interconnections between desire, filmmaking, nuclear weaponry, and war, rather than being about only General Sherman.

I grew up in a house in which there was much talk about love, peace, justice, truth, community, but what I saw operating in my own family was a horrific regime. I often feel like an Eastern European who traveled west in the 1980s and had to hear about the glories of Communism. The Eastern European had lived his entire life under the oppressive umbrella of Mother Russia. He wouldn’t care to hear naïve paeans to the Marxist state. I realize this is trumping up badly my own experience growing up in a San Francisco suburb, but that’s how it feels to me. Don’t tell me how right-on activism is going to save the world. The split between idealistic rhetoric and ragged reality was so extreme that I’ve never quite recovered an ability to participate in the commonweal. Although I can hear how naysaying this may sound, I peeked behind the curtain and saw the Wizard of Oz making silly noises into a megaphone. I’m not going to now believe all that sound and fury is signifying something real.

I’m a product of post-hippie California of the ’70s: a culture of the unreal that had lost its optimism and found its only refuge in drugs. You had to dig around to find any sort of meaning…

The last line of Adler’s other novel, Speedboat, is “It could be that the sort of sentence one wants right here is the kind that runs, and laughs, and slides, and stops right on a dime.” (Cf. Isaac Babel: “No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.”) She’s fascinated by the arbitrariness of language, the enveloping embrace of culture. Try as she might to liberate herself from social convention, e.g., cliché, she can’t. She’s doing everything she can to make me hyper-aware of her thought processes, to develop intimacy between the speaker and listener—moments in which I feel the strange rub of language, the way it not only evokes life but creates it, prophesies it. The epigraph is from Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies: “ ‘What war?’ said the Prime Minister sharply. ‘No one has said anything to me about a war. I really think I should have been told.… ’ And presently, like a circling typhoon, the sounds of battle began to return.” Speedboat is an oblique bildungsroman, taking Adler’s alter ego, Jen Fein—whose name suggests that she’s not real, that she’s Renata Adler—from the privacy of her pastoral childhood into the irredeemably corrupt, war-torn (cliché!) world of public affairs. Adler frequently writes and then repeats an idiomatic expression—for instance, “And what’s more, and what’s more…” It’s a very strange gesture, this impulse to articulate and articulate again: highly oral, even oracular. What is the book, exactly—a novel? memoir? cultural criticism? philosophical investigation? journal? journalism? stand-up comedy? I love that feeling of being caught between floors of a difficult-to-define department store. The chapter titles don’t very accurately or fully describe their ostensible contents. The material can’t be held by its titular container. The book is constantly breaking its own bindings, as you’re going deeper into, you know, a single human consciousness. You keep turning pages and reading scenes until finally you understand what, for Adler, constitutes a scene: a toxic and intoxicating mix of velocity, violence, sex, money, power, travel, technology, miscommunication; when you get it, the book’s over.

Maggie Nelson claims that it makes her feel less alone to compose almost everything she writes as a letter. She even goes so far as to say that she doesn’t know how to compose otherwise. When I’m having trouble writing something, I often close the document and compose the passage as email to, say, my friend Michael. I imagine I can feel the tug of the recipient at the other end of the wire, and this creates in me a needed urgency. The letter always arrives at its destination.

In London, I asked my voluble cabdriver if he could locate the origin of the tendency of every British conversation to rapidly devolve into a series of quibbles, quarrels, and contradictions. “The end of empire,” he said with certainty. “We’re not going to make that same mistake again.”

Irony is the song of a bird that has come to love its cage—people always quote this truism as if it were the clinching point of an argument about the limits of irony, but name me the bird among us that is not caged and isn’t at least half in love with its cage.

All great books wind up with the writer getting his teeth bashed in

FIFTY-FIVE WORKS I swear by:

Renata Adler, Speedboat. D. H. Lawrence: it’s better to know a dozen books extraordinarily well than innumerable books passably. In a documentary on Derrida, when he shows the filmmaker his enormous private library, she asks him if he’s read all the books. He says, “No, just a few—but very closely.” I’ve read Speedboat easily two dozen times. I can’t read it anymore. It’s one book I’ve read so many times that I feel, absurdly, as if I’ve written it; at the very least, I feel that I know a little bit what it must have felt like to write it. In any case, I learned how to write by reading that book until the spine broke. I typed the entire book twice.

James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. My writing life was changed forever by Agee’s willingness to use, and ability to incorporate into his book, his rant-replies to a Partisan Review questionnaire.

St. Augustine, Confessions. Autobiography: the testimony of a being in dialogue with itself.

Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot. Overlapping essays on the inexhaustible dialectic between life and art.

John Berryman, The Dream Songs. Tony Hoagland: “Virtuosity with language is not by itself enough for poetry. A poem has to sustain a strong connection to the suffered world, and any intelligence that dares call itself poetic needs to be penetrated and informed by the life of the emotions. The ego must be breached by the fire and flood damage of experience. At the same time, plaintive wailing will not suffice. Successful poems have grace and vivacity—sometimes even power—of language, mobility of mind, and not a straight-faced, deadpan earnestness, but a brave freedom of feeling.”

Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions. An investigation of otherness pretending to be mere miscellany.

Grégoire Bouillier, The Mystery Guest. A character in Stardust Memories says that all artists do is “document their private suffering and fob it off as art.” Said more positively: a writer finds a metaphor that ramifies and attempts to persuade the reader that the metaphor holds the world’s woe.

Joe Brainard, I Remember. Outwardly, a series of random memories; in fact, beautifully organized around themes of resistance and conformity.

Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America. Here, too, a book is thought to be a random gathering, but it has real power and momentum, derived from the pressure Brautigan puts on the relation between pleasure and commerce.

Anne Carson, “Just for the Thrill: An Essay on the Difference Between Women and Men.” Ranges everywhere from songs on the radio to ancient Chinese history in order to get very deeply at the war between men and women.

Terry Castle, “My Heroin Christmas.” Many, perhaps most, reviewers use criticism as a way to brandish what they pretend is their own more evolved morality, psyche, humanity, but this flies in the face of what is to me an essential assumption of the compact between writer and reader—namely, that we’re all bozos on this bus. No one here gets out alive. Let he who is without sin, etc. Castle conveys the mad genius of Art Pepper’s autobiography, but she doesn’t stand back from the book as if she, too, isn’t wildly confused. She implicates herself and her drives and passions. Love is good, but hate is good, too. What she hates is at least as telling as what she loves. She makes the arrow point in both directions: outward toward the work and inward toward herself. I learn at least as much about Terry Castle as I do about Art Pepper.

John Cheever, Journals. An actor read a Cheever story—never quite caught the title—on NPR’s Selected Shorts: a writer husband, estranged from his wife and living in Turin, writes a fantasy of how they’ll reconnect. Driving home, I found it so beautiful to listen to that when I arrived, I ran to the radio to hear the end of the story. It is as nothing, though, compared to the luminous precision of the journals, which he kept from 1940 until his death in 1982. The journals are very consciously and scrupulously sculpted: they’re clearly written to be read and published, and they supersede his fiction. It’s unfair, of course, to compare a fifteen-page story to a four-hundred-page book, but I couldn’t help feeling that in the story, Cheever lets himself get away with everything, and in the journals, nothing—he is relentless. In the story, he is grandiose and unfurls the logic of Christian forgiveness. Even as I was charmed by hearing the story aloud, I was constantly thinking, You lying sack of shit. I’ve read the journals. I know what it’s like at ground level for you, Buster. Don’t give me these happy coincidences and sweet endings.

E. M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay. Cioran: “Whatever his merits, a man in good health is always disappointing. Impossible to grant any credence to what he says, to regard his phrases as anything but excuses, acrobatics. The experience of the terrible—which alone confers a certain destiny upon our words—is what he lacks, as he lacks, too, the imagination of disaster, without which no one can communicate with those separate beings, the sick. Having nothing to transmit, neutral to the point of abdication, he collapses into well-being, an insignificant state of perfection, an impermeability to death as well as of inattention to oneself and to the world. As long as he remains there, he is like the objects around him; once torn from it, he opens himself to everything, knows everything: the omniscience of terror.” When Richard Stern and his wife, the poet Alane Rollings, were walking home from dinner one night in Paris with Cioran, Rollings had a painful blister on her foot. She was bleeding badly. Cioran refused to slow down for her or even acknowledge her discomfort. Maybe he thought she was learning something.

Bernard Cooper, Maps to Anywhere. The first part of Maps to Anywhere was selected by Annie Dillard as one of the best essays of 1988, but the book as a whole won the PEN/Hemingway Award for the best first novel of 1990, while in the foreword to the book Richard Howard calls the chapters “neither fictions nor essays, neither autobiographical illuminations nor cultural inventions.” The narrator—Howard calls him “the Bernard-figure (like the Marcel-figure, neither character nor symbol)”—is simultaneously “the author” and a fictional creation. From minisection to minisection and chapter to chapter, Bernard’s self-conscious and seriocomic attempts to evoke and discuss his own homosexuality, his brother’s death, his father’s failing health, his parents’ divorce, and southern California kitsch are delicately woven together to form an extremely powerful meditation on the relationship between grief and imagination. When a self can (through language, memory, research, and invention) project itself everywhere, and can empathize with anyone or anything, what exactly is a self? The book’s final sentence is an articulation of the melancholy that the narrator has, to a degree, deflected until then: “And I walked and walked to hush the world, leaving silence like spoor.”

Alphonse Daudet, In the Land of Pain. A contemplation of dying, rendered in dozens of preobituaries for himself.

Larry David, Curb Your Enthusiasm. “Deep inside, you know you’re him.”

Annie Dillard, For the Time Being. Literary mosaic is an alluring and difficult form: you gather a bowl full of jagged fragments, and you want each one to take you somewhere slightly new or hurt in a slightly different way.

Marguerite Duras, The Lover. When someone is searching, being cautious, solving a problem, the brain releases dopamine—the neurotransmitter that controls reward and pleasure. As soon as she finds what she’s looking for, the release of dopamine shuts off.

Frederick Exley, A Fan’s Notes. Trying to create in others an image of himself in which he can believe, Exley imagines various versions of potential success, none of which he respects and all of which he tries to court.

Brian Fawcett, Cambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow. On the bottom of each page, Fawcett runs a book-length footnote about the Cambodian war. The effect of the bifurcated page is to confront the reader with Fawcett’s central motif: wall-to-wall media represent as thorough a raid on individual memory as the Khmer Rouge. By far the most popular novels of our era are interactive, plot-driven video games: 11 million people subscribe to World of Warcraft alone, and there are dozens of other massively multiplayer games that are nearly as popular. All the people who play a particular game are in the same virtual space and interact with one another; it’s not exactly fiction or fantasy, and it’s not exactly reality, either. It’s a middle ground—quasireality, fictional nonfiction. When I’m standing poolside in my flip-flops, I’m comfortable, and when I’m swimming in the pool, I’m relatively comfortable. When I’m transitioning into the pool, I’m uncomfortable, but I definitely know I’m alive.

Amy Fusselman, The Pharmacist’s Mate. The book fluctuates wildly and unpredictably from Fusselman’s attempt to get pregnant through artificial means, her conversations with her dying father, and his WWII diary entries. I don’t know what the next paragraph will be, where Fusselman is going, until—in the final few paragraphs—she lands on the gossamer-thin difference between life and death, which is where she’s been focused all along, if I could only have seen it.

Mary Gaitskill’s essay “Lost Cat.” Far and away the best thing she’s written, asking as it does in its every sentence, “Is love real?”

Eduardo Galeano, The Book of Embraces. Galeano marries himself to the larger warp and woof by allowing different voices and different degrees of magnitude of information to play against one another. A mix of memoir, anecdote, polemic, parable, fantasy, and Galeano’s surreal drawings, the book might at first glance be dismissed as mere miscellany, but upon more careful inspection, it reveals itself to be virtually a geometric proof on the themes of love, terror, and imagination, perhaps best exemplified by this minichapter: “Tracey Hill was a child in a Connecticut town who amused herself as befitted a child of her age, like any other tender little angel of God in the state of Connecticut or anywhere else on this planet. One day, together with her little school companions, Tracey started throwing lighted matches into an anthill. They all enjoyed this healthy childish diversion. Tracey, however, saw something which the others didn’t see or pretended not to, but which paralyzed her and remained forever engraved in her memory: faced with the dangerous fire, the ants split up into pairs and two by two, side by side, pressed close together, they waited for death.”

Vivian Gornick, The End of the Novel of Love. The very embodiment of the critical intelligence in the imaginative position: literary analysis as farewell to feeling.

Simon Gray, The Smoking Diaries. A man, whose friends are dying and who by the final book of the tetralogy is dying himself, stands before us utterly naked and takes account: Rembrandt’s late self-portraits, in prose. The gravitation is very extreme to always make himself look bad, and in so doing, of course, he renders himself lovable. Each minisection of Gray’s four-volume work is typically only a few pages long, the subsections connect in beautifully oblique ways, and each book is held together by an understated but brilliantly deployed metaphor. An entire life, an entire way of thinking, comes into being. Having read the diaries, I feel less lonely.

Barry Hannah, Boomerang. The stakes, shifting from “character” to “author,” get raised. Hannah exposes his own flaws, extends them, and frames them as tragedy.

Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights. Modularity mirroring and measuring sleeplessness.

Amy Hempel, “In the Animal Shelter.” Beautiful women, abandoned by men who don’t want to get married and have children, go to an animal shelter to cuddle with “one-eyed cats,” to imagine mothering these homeless pets—to reverse the rejection they experienced by the men—but also to reexperience that rejection. “Is mama’s baby lonesome?” the women ask the abandoned animals.

Robin Hemley, “Riding the Whip.” An autobiographical story in which a boy’s older sister commits suicide. Attending a fair with a girl on whom he has a crush, he pretends not to care about his sister. He comes to feel, viscerally, his guilt, his close identification with her, and their shared masochism.

Wayne Koestenbaum, Humiliation. Humiliation runs like a rash over the body of Koestenbaum’s work. Here he confronts the feeling directly, and the result is an unusually discomfiting meditation on—I don’t know how else to say it—the human condition.

Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia. The freest form: the essay.

Philip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings. Both poetry and the essay come from the same impulse—to think about something and at the same time see it closely and carefully and enact it. An odd feature of poetry is that it’s all “true”: there’s no nonfiction poetry and fiction poetry. Whether it’s Larkin or Neruda, it all goes into the poetry section of the bookstore.

Jonathan Lethem, The Disappointment Artist. The disappointment artist and I solidified our friendship when he told me he was a Mets fan. As my college writing teacher, the novelist John Hawkes, liked to say, “There’s only one subject: failure.” I remember his saying that a story I’d written was “about love without communication and in the context of violence.” I remember thinking, Really? I thought it was just about taking a hike with my dad. Hawkes’s saying that made me a certain kind of writer, because his abstraction interested me immeasurably more than the details of my story.

Ross McElwee, Bright Leaves. Antonya Nelson says that the best fiction “gets lucky.” Similarly, I’d say that the best nonfiction jumps the tracks, using its “subject” as a Trojan horse to get at richer material than the writer originally intended. McElwee’s film Bright Leaves pretends to be about his conflicted relation to his family’s tobacco farm, whereas it’s really about the way in which we all will do anything—make a movie, smoke cigarettes, collect film stills, build a birdhouse, hold a lifelong torch for someone, find religion—to try to get beyond ourselves.

David Markson, Vanishing Point. The best book I know about 9/11, because it’s barely about it: other calamities have befallen other peoples in other times.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick. Melville said to Hawthorne, “I’ve written a wicked book and feel as spotless as the lamb.” His wickedness: in the middle of the nineteenth century, contemplating a godless universe.

Leonard Michaels, Shuffle. Several years ago, when Michaels died, the encomia focused entirely on his stories, but for me his “legacy” rests, or should rest, on his essays and journals, especially Shuffle, in particular the long middle section, “Journal,” which per its title presents itself as mere notes whereas in fact it is a beautifully patterned and organized investigation into sexual desire, anger, despair.

Michel de Montaigne, Essays. The essayist is not interested in himself per se but in himself as symbolic persona, theme carrier, host for general human tendencies.

Vladimir Nabokov, Gogol. Nabokov says somewhere that the essence of comedy—perhaps of all art—is that it makes large things seem small, and it makes small things seem large. My favorite book of Nabokov’s, because for once you can feel how lost he is.

V. S. Naipaul, A Way in the World. Seemingly separate blinds—long essays about seemingly disparate subjects—form a single curtain: how to resist colonialism without being defeated by your own resistance.

Maggie Nelson, Bluets. A brief meditation on the color blue, a cri de coeur about Nelson’s inability to get over the end of a love affair, and a grievous contemplation of a close friend’s paralysis. The book keeps getting larger and larger until it winds up being about nothing less than the melancholy of the human animal. Why are we so sad? How do we deal with loss? How do we deal with the ultimate loss? It’s impressively adult—wrestling with existence at the most fundamental level—in a way that I find very few novels are. One Hundred Years of Solitude, say: halfway into that book, I realized I wasn’t learning anything new page by page, so I stopped reading. I want the writer to be trying hard to figure something out; García Márquez, you could argue, is doing this by implication, but to me he’s not.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo. Adorno: “A successful work is not one that resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one that expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.”

George Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant.” In three thousand words, Orwell tells me more about the sources, psychology, and consequences of racism and empire than entire shelves of political science. All of the power of this deservedly canonical essay arises from his willingness to locate an astonishing mix of rage and guilt within himself. I don’t judge him. I am him.

Blaise Pascal, Pensées. Aphorisms.

Don Paterson, Best Thought, Worst Thought. Aphorisms sent through radiation.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet. Aphorisms attached to a suicide pact.

Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past. The book that I think of as mattering the most to me ever, but I read it more than thirty years ago and I find that I have trouble rereading it now. Seems sad—do I still love it, did I ever love it? I know I did. Has my aesthetic changed that much? If so, why? Does one resist that alteration? I think not. The book still completely changed me, still defines me in some strange way. Proust for me is the C. K. Scott Moncrieff translation in paperback, all the covers stained with suntan oil, since I read all seven volumes in a single summer, supposedly traveling around the south of France but really pretty much just reading Proust. I came to realize that he will do anything, go anywhere to extend his research, to elaborate his argument about art and life. His commitment is never to the narrative; it’s to the narrative as such as a vector on the grid of his argument. That thrilled me and continues to thrill me—his understanding of his book as a series of interlaced architectural/thematic spaces.

Jonathan Raban, For Love & Money. For twenty-plus years I’ve been showing drafts of my books to Jonathan, who within days of receiving the manuscript will call and not only insist that it can be so much better but show me how. For Love & Money, which he calls “only half a good book,” is a brutal, ruthless coming-of-age-of-the-author disguised as a miscellany of essays and reviews. Jonathan comes out of what is to me a distinctly British tradition of showing respect for the conversation by questioning your assertion rather than blandly agreeing with it. He’s exhaustive and disputatious, never settling for received wisdom or quasi-insight. More than anyone in my life, he encouraged me to think off-axis about “nonfiction.”

W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn. Wendy Lesser: “The crucial art of the essay lies in its perpetrator’s masterly control over his own self-exposure. We may at times be embarrassed by him, but we should never be embarrassed for him. He must be the ringmaster of his self-display. He may choose to bare more than he can bear (that is where the terror comes in), but he must do the choosing and we must feel he is doing it.”

Lauren Slater, “One Nation, Under the Weather.” Many writers pretend that they don’t read reviews of their books and that in particular life is too short to subject themselves to reading bad reviews. Kingsley Amis said that a bad review may spoil breakfast, but you shouldn’t allow it to spoil lunch. Jean Cocteau suggested, “Listen carefully to first criticisms of your work. Note carefully just what it is about your work that the critics don’t like, then cultivate it. That’s the part of your work that’s individual and worth keeping.” Sane advice; Slater doesn’t follow it. Receiving a bad review from Janet Maslin of her genre-troubling book Lying, Slater does that thing you’re not supposed to do: she dwells on it, in public. Accused of being narcissistic, exhibitionistic, self-absorbed, neurasthenic, whiny, derivative, she agrees, revels in her woundedness, and dares me to disagree with her, writing, “The fact is, or my fact is, disease is everywhere. How anyone could ever write about themselves or their fictional characters as not diseased is a bit beyond me. We live in a world and are creatures of a culture that is spinning out more and more medicines that correspond to more and more diseases at an alarming pace. Even beyond that, though, I believe we exist in our God-given natures as diseased beings. We do not fall into illness. We fall from illness into temporary states of health. We are briefly blessed, but always, always those small cells are dividing and will become cancer, if they haven’t already; our eyes are crossed, we cannot see. Nearsighted, far-sighted, noses spurting bright blood, brains awack with crazy dreams, lassitude, and little fears nibbling like mice at the fringes of our flesh, we are never well.”

Gilbert Sorrentino, “The Moon in Its Flight.” “Art cannot rescue anybody from anything.” It can’t? I thought art was the only twin life had.

Melanie Thernstrom, The Dead Girl. The title refers to Thernstrom’s best friend, Bibi Lee, who is murdered, and also to Thernstrom, who can’t seem to live.

Judith Thurman, Cleopatra’s Nose. In nearly every essay, Thurman appears to be looking out a window, but she’s not. She’s painting a self-portrait in a convex mirror. There’s always a moment when the pseudo-objective mask drops, yielding a quite startling self-revelation.

George W. S. Trow, Within the Context of No Context. An assemblage of disconnected paragraphs, narrated in a tone of fanatical archness, and perhaps best understood as what Trow calls “cultural autobiography.” In other words, its apparent accomplishment—a brilliantly original analysis of the underlying grammar of mass culture—is a way for Trow to get at what is in one sense his eventual subject: the difference between the world he inhabits (no context) and the world his father, a newspaperman, inhabited (context). In the book’s final paragraph, Trow writes about his father, “Certainly, he said, at the end of boyhood, when as a young man I would go on the New Haven railroad to New York City, it would be necessary for me to wear a fedora hat. I have, in fact, worn a fedora hat, but ironically. Irony has seeped into the felt of any fedora hat I have ever owned—not out of any wish of mine but out of necessity. A fedora hat worn by me without the necessary protective irony would eat through my head and kill me.”

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five. The expository first chapter, for all intents and purposes a prologue, renders moot the rest of the book and everything else he ever wrote. I live and die for the overt meditation.