Category: Books

The Technician: A Profile of Rick Moody

by Craig Fehrman, posted in All History is Local History, Books, Features

[New Haven Advocate]

In this week’s New Haven Advocate, you’ll find my profile of Rick Moody and his new novel, The Four Fingers of Death. (Moody writes such disparate books that it’s tough to pick a best [or a worst], but I can say that The Four Fingers of Death is easily my favorite.) One thing Moody and I touched on—and one thing the blogosphere’s been bandying about—is the idea that regional lit has sort of disappeared. Moody grew up in and around New Canaan and made his name with The Ice Storm, which savaged the affluent suburb, so he brought an interesting perspective to this. Since we didn’t have room to include the material in print, I’ll post some of it here.

One of the funniest things about the film adaptation of The Ice Storm is that New Canaan’s officials didn’t read the book before agreeing to let Ang Lee shoot it in town. When they finally got around to reading Moody’s novel, the townsfolk were scandalized. The New York Times, as you might imagine, was all over this story, and Moody promised the paper that “although [The Ice Storm] was set in New Canaan, it could have been anywhere.” So I started this line of questioning by asking him if, in these calmer times, he still believed this was true. “There are plenty of suburbs in the Northeast that could have stood in,” Moody said. “The larger question is, could it be set in a different time. There were social conditions that made that story what it was, both in real life and in the time of its writing.”

Still, when Moody talked about his next move, he framed it in geographical terms.

After The Ice Storm, I had to work really hard and really fast to not be ghettoized as a surburban writer of the Northeast. In some ways, there were readers who wanted me to serve that function, a preservationist role as a fiction writer for these towns and those socioeconomic strata. But why would you want to do that as a writer? Why would you want to limit your imagination?

Moody used Updike as an example of someone who could capture a place (the Rabbit books) without allowing himself to be limited to or defined by it. Moody also suggested some economic reasons, in addition to any creative ones, for the decline of regional lit:

Nobody wants to be limited to that market. You don’t want to be the bard of Fairfield County, especially given the economic pressures of making a living and of trying to be published by a big publisher. The big publishers select certain kinds of material, and it’s really hard not to get drafted into their model of how to do this. They want the writing workshops to do what the writing workshops are doing. Especially now, the book publishers are risk averse—they want to be able to quantify what a novel’s going to do, and it’s easiest to do that if they can speak to have it having particular effects and doing particular things. That’s why genre fiction is important to them. They pay lip service to the emotional relationship that they have, as editors, to literary fiction. But it’s still easier for them if it all does a certain thing—which is affirmational, epiphanic, realistic.

I’ll admit that I don’t see a direct link between the first part of Moody’s argument and the second, though I do see some connections to his argument against “creative writing by committee.” (Note how much milder that was around the release of The Ice Storm.) Still, it’s interesting to see a case against writing regional lit come from a writer so closely associated with his home state. In fact, Moody wrote the Connecticut chapter in 2008’s State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America. It begins: “Connecticut is a state that’s hard to love, but which I love anyhow, as one often loves what wounds—if only for the familiarity.”

Review of Sam Munson’s The November Criminals

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Books, Politics

[Wall Street Journal]

In tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal—online tonight!—I’ve got a review of Sam Munson’s first novel, The November Criminals. About the only bad thing I can say is that its page numbers are basically unreadable. (See for yourself on Google Books.)

One point I try to raise in the review is how and why we might think of The November Criminals as a “conservative novel.” The best broad take on this topic remains Benjamin Nugent’s, which appeared a couple of years back in n+1. Munson fans might also listen to this interview with him on The Forward‘s website. He sounds like another Jewish stoner funny man, Seth Rogen, to an uncanny degree.

Review of Tom Bissell’s Extra Lives

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Books

[Christian Science Monitor]

In the Christian Science Monitor, I’ve got a review of Tom Bissell’s Extra Lives: Why Videogames Matter. This book has attracted a lot of reviews—most of them, like mine, very positive—but I haven’t seen anyone point out that, in the book itself, Bissell actually writes about “why video games matter—and why they don’t matter more.” That subtlety might not make for a marketing-friendly subtitle, but it does make for an intelligent analysis of videogames. If the subject interests you, I’d also recommend Jason Fagone’s Esquire profile of an indie gamer. It’s one of my favorite pieces of magazine writing.

Another thing most reviews have overlooked is Extra Lives‘ appendix, which includes a long aside on Metal Gear Solid 4 and a longer interview with Peter Molyneux. Bissell asks Molyneux, who’s something of an eminence grise in the game design world, if he agrees that videogames have gone from “petroglyphic rock art to the Sistine Chapel in twenty years.” Molyneux responds, beautifully and affirmatively:

Pretty much everything we’ve done, we’ve invented. There wasn’t this technology pool that we pulled it out of. Ten, fifteen years ago, you couldn’t walk into a bookshop and learn how to do it. There weren’t any books on this stuff. They did not exist. Painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? No. We had to invent architecture first. We had to quarry the stones. We had to invent the paint.

“Because there isn’t a woman in the country who isn’t perishing to know what it’s really like to be the wife of an American president today”

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Books, Dissertation ephemera

[New York Times]

In this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, I’ve got an essay on the history of the first lady memoir. (It’s already online.) Laura Bush’s Spoken from the Heart gives us 12 such books,[1] and a few are genuinely good. I single out Lady Bird Johnson’s White House Diary for praise, but even the more prosaic examples are worth our time. In 2003, a professor named Robert Watson compiled a list of first lady biographies. Watson’s top five are no surprise: Jacqueline Kennedy (who’s been the subject of 37 biographical books), Eleanor Roosevelt (35), Hillary Rodham Clinton (27), Mary Todd Lincoln (19), Dolley Madison (16), and Abigail Adams (13). But 17 first ladies had received zero or one biographies. And while that ratio is improving—see the recent biographies of Helen Taft and Louisa Adams, both mentioned in my essay—I find it brave, and even inspiring, that these women were writing their own stories when no one else would.

One way to measure the impact of Lady Bird’s Diary—and I wasn’t able to get into this in the essay—is to look at when the first lady memoir became a distinct genre with its own history. Publishers loved to market early first lady memoirs as disposable women’s lit. (While doing the research, I posted an example of this; this post’s title, taken from a White House Diary ad, is another.) Journalists and reviewers didn’t help things. The NYTBR review of Edith Wilson’s memoir that I quote in the essay erroneously called it the first first lady memoir. At least a reader wrote in with a stern correction.

The craziest example of this came in the coverage of Lady Bird’s Diary, which kept describing it as the first such book “since the memoirs of Abigail Adams.” I’m not sure what’s worse: that this ignores several first lady books or that it invents a historical document. I emailed Edith Gelles, author of the excellent Abigail Adams: A Writing Life, and asked for her help: “Abigail’s only ‘journal,'” Gelles confirmed, “was a brief diary that she kept of her journey to England.” So what are “the memoirs of Abigail Adams”? The best theory I’ve got is that a frazzled journalist scanned the title (but not the contents) of the 1840 Letters of Mrs. Adams, The Wife of John Adams. With An Introductory Memoir By Her Grandson, Charles Francis Adams. The “memoir” is a biographical sketch written by Charles—similar in format to what he did for John Adams’s oeuvre a few years later. Nevertheless, someone said something about Abigail Adams and memoirs. A few repetitions and we ended up with Abigail Adams’s phantom autobiography.

Contrast this with today: as First Lady, Laura Bush could quote from Lady Bird’s Diary; now, as a first lady memoirist, she can explain how she “wanted to give people a sense of what life is like in the White House, even in mundane ways. . . . [That wasn’t] really a part of the other First Ladies’ memoirs that I read. ” (Of course, this comes from her cover story in the latest Ladies’ Home Journal; some things never change.) You won’t find anything like Laura’s awareness of writing in a tradition until after Lady Bird. Even though Eleanor Roosevelt wrote more than 20 books, for example, the coverage of A White House Diary never mentioned her as an antecedent.

That’s one reason I describe Eleanor as an “outlier” in my essay. But Eleanor was also an outlier in her grasp of the first lady tradition. In her syndicated newspaper column for Januray 25, 1939, she writes:

I went to bed fairly early last night and read the last installment of Mrs. Woodrow Wilson’s memoirs. I find the editor’s notes, which skip over what you feel must be interesting reading, a little disconcerting. I suppose this is done to keep more of the interest for the book, which will appear later.

————–

[1] Books aren’t the only form for memoir, of course, and several first ladies wrote autobiographical essays. I’ll mention Grace Coolidge’s example—to avoid confusion as much as anything else since, in 1993, her series of essays for American Magazine (along with some unpublished material) was issued as Grace Coolidge: An Autobiography.

Details’ 1996 Profile of David Foster Wallace

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Books

I bought David Lipsky’s Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace the day it came out—bought it at 9:02 a.m., in fact. Like a lot of readers, I found there to be too much Lipsky, but at least it didn’t come at the expense of Wallace. Their transcript includes lots of great stuff; one thing that struck me was the references to a contemporaneous profile of Wallace by Details writer David Streitfeld. Here’s Wallace:

  • “Like Streitfeld thought I would never be his friend after the thing came out in Details” (18)
  • “They’ll take seventy pictures, and a Details shot’ll come out” (19)
  • “I’m more or less a regular person. And this was Streitfeld’s whole thing: ‘Are you normal, are you normal, are you normal?'” (42)

In the online expanse of Wallace fans, I couldn’t find even a citation—much less a copy—of this profile. So, with the help of Yale’s ILL division, I tracked it down. The above picture is, in fact, the “Details shot.” (Since I was working from a .pdf of a scan, this is the best I could do. Still, it’s easy to understand Wallace’s trepidation toward future photo shoots.)

Streitfeld’s profile is short—around 1,500 words—and a little predictable. That said, it’s miles better than the smug (and now oft-cited) New York Times Magazine profile by Frank Bruni. (Bruni breaks the story of Wallace’s “special tooth polish to combat the effects of the tobacco he chews,” and I couldn’t help but think of his recent profile of Scott Brown, where, again, Bruni finds a “plastic container used to hold a teeth-whitening mold.” One more instance of Bruni uncovering a clandestine dental product and I’m calling bullshit.) Streitfeld also adds a few details and intonations to the standard picture of Wallace: his Illinois home’s proximity to a slaughterhouse; the pizza coupons on his fridge; and, most interesting of all, I think, some closing insights into his religion. (Who knew Wallace twice failed the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults?)

The other important thing about Streitfeld’s profile, of course, is that it’s now a primary source in the history of Wallace’s literary reception. If you look at the timeline of Infinite Jest’s publicity (and factor in magazine lead times), it seems Streitfeld was the reporter who got there first; their interview took place around December of 1995, as Streitfeld cajoled Wallace into buying some Christmas lights. But Streitfeld never put the profile on his website. Even more improbably, Details never put it on theirs—not even during the rush of obits and tributes that followed Wallace’s suicide.

So I’m going to pull a Gawker and just post the full text after the jump; if anyone wants me to take it down, they can contact me here. But I hope they don’t. Streitfeld’s profile makes a nice counterpoint (or chaser) to Lipsky’s book.

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