The passing of Julien Gracq

With the death of Julien Gracq last week in France at 97, all of "the old ones" are now dead.

That refers to the writers who shadowed our recent years and wrote long before the beginning of World War II: Ernst Junger, Julian Green, Francis Stuart, Jorge Luis Borges, Nina Berberova, Nathalie Sarraute, E.M. Cioran, Edward Dalhberg. These were writers who one knew, who one read and who one learned from. They were writers not shaped by the world they found themselves in but by the genuine ancient classical sources they touched to create works of literary art that sustain us still.

Gracq lived a life of utter discretion, not subject to gossip, not participating in the world of publicity, known only for his written work and as a refuser of any sort of public recognition--prizes, grants--for his work.

Four of his novels--"The Castle of Argol," "The Opposing Shore," "Balcony in the Forest" and "The Dark Stranger"--have been translated and are available in various second-hand editions. They are singular achievements: disturbing, delicate and written in a classical style that is endlessly sensuous and inviting. For those so inclined, Andre Breton hailed "The Castle of Argol" as the only surrealist novel ever written.

Thanks to Turtle Point Press, four other books--each distinct in form and content--are in print: "The Narrow Waters," a meditation on memory and travel; "King Cophetu," a brief fiction of loss during World War I; and my two particular favorites, "The Shape of a City" and "Reading Writing."

"The Shape of a City" is a model for how to write about one’s home place which, for Gracq, was the provincial city of Nantes, where he was raised and went to school. It should be required reading for anyone setting out to describe their home place. "Reading Writing" is probably the best book about these twin activities which all too often are stupidly separated. Consider the following quotes from "Reading Writing":
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"At ninety, no writer, if he is still writing, can hope to maintain all the quality of his production. But in painting, Titian and Picasso--others, too, no doubt--manage perfectly well. No writer is brilliant until full adolescence at least. But, in music, Mozart--others, too, no doubt--was. Which tends to corroborate physiologically the hierarchy of the arts as promulgated by Hegel (which is fine by me).

"Historical counterproof would provide the same result: of all of the arts, literature was the last to appear. And one day, no doubt, it will be the first to be eclipsed."
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"The creative artist who steps back and tries to understand what he is doing stands before his canvas as before a green and intact prairie: for the writer, the literary material he would like to recapture in its freshness is already similar to what passes from the second to the third stomach of a ruminant."
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"The bad novelist--by which I mean the skilled and indifferent novelist--is the one who tries to bring to life, to animate from the outside and on the whole faithfully, the local color that strikes him as specific to a subject he has judged ingenious or picturesque--the true novelist is the one who cheats, who asks the subject, above all, through oblique and unexpected paths, to give him access once again to his personal palette, knowing full well that, in terms of local color, the only kind that can make an impression is his own."
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These quotes not only give you some indication of the incisiveness of Gracq’s intellect: Perhaps they also suggest why he will be missed.

Thomas McGonigle

Thomas McGonigle is the author of "Going to Patchogue" and "The Corpse Dream of N. Petkov."

They want to make a killing

"Murder by the Book" on CourtTV is an intriguing feature that taps one of the sturdiest, most dependable genres in publishing: the murder mystery. In lean bookbuying times, consumers are still interested in reading a good mystery. On this program, the authors discuss real crimes that horrified them and that may have inspired their literary careers. So far, viewers have heard from the likes of Sandra Browne, David Baldacci, Lisa Scottoline and many others.

"You can’t make this stuff up," Browne tells viewers, "and I’ve tried."

Upcoming episodes include Elizabeth George (Jan. 7) describing a double homicide in which no physical evidence can be found. (To track suspects, investigators must practice "victimology," in which they delve deep into the victims’ lives for possible answers.) Jonathan Kellerman (Jan. 21) discusses the murder of a college graduate lured from his Santa Barbara apartment by a thank-you card and a plant left at his door. Kathy Reichs (Jan. 14), Lee Child (Jan. 26) and Nick Santora (Feb. 4) are also upcoming featured authors.

Nick Owchar

Every cover tells a story

Lynn Andriani in Publishers Weekly looks back on the interesting effort to rate an oft-forgotten aspect of publishing--the art of book covers. Fwis, a design firm, developed "Jackets Required," a forum featured on PW since July where the firm weighed in--with comments from booksellers, readers and designers--on cover designs for new works of fiction and nonfiction.

How do you classify book jacket design? As art or advertising? The answer, it seems, is somewhere in between. Of course illustrators create arresting images to draw readers--"I think it works well from a distance, which is all book covers really need to do," one critic says--but they also want something that will endure and hopefully become forever connected with that book (think of the timeless red cover to J.D. Salinger’s "The Catcher in the Rye").

These judges are a pretty harsh bunch, coming down hard on Milton Glaser’s design for Philip Roth’s "Exit Ghost" ("Looks like it was done under the gun") and Susan Mitchell’s design for Denis Johnson’s Vietnam epic "Tree of Smoke" ("It’s like the Pantone Swatch Trend of 1975 vomited on a book jacket").

What did the folks at Fwis like? For one, Chip Kidd’s design for Orhan Pamuk’s book of essays "Other Colors" ("The jacket presents the classic brooding black-and-white photograph of Pamuk’s hometown"). None of the raves, however, comes without contentious remarks, but that’s a good thing. The result of edgy debate is excellent work, and it also makes for some entertaining reading.

Nick Owchar

All things must pass

2007 was a rough year for the American literary pantheon, with the deaths of Kurt Vonnegut, Grace Paley and Norman Mailer. The three writers died within 7 months of each other, all at the age of 84. That’s just one of the connections Morris Dickstein mines in an essay for this Sunday’s Book Review, in which he explores what made these three authors resonate. For Dickstein, what’s important are not the similarities between them, which he sees as largely non-existent, but the fact that each had his or her own individual style. All three writers were shaped by their experiences, by the political milieu of post-World War II America, but also by the critical conversation over the so-called death of the novel, which animated American literary culture in those years.

This, Dickstein suggests, "points to something these contemporaries ... had in common: a sense of the breakdown of the novel, blurring the lines between literary fiction and autobiography, but also poetry in Paley’s case, science fiction for Vonnegut, journalism and social criticism for Mailer."

David L. Ulin

The art of the disclaimer

Augusten Burroughs was in the literary headlines this summer when the author and his publisher, St. Martin’s, settled out of court with the foster family he wrote about in his bestselling memoir "Running with Scissors." One result was that changes were made to the Author’s Note and acknowledgements that are reminiscent of the debacle surrounding James Frey’s pseudomemoir "A Million Little Pieces" (a prescient title if there ever was one).

Now it seems that St. Martin’s has learned its lesson with the publication of Robert Leleux’s "The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy" (272 pp., $23.95). A note to readers is prominently displayed on the page preceding the table of contents. Here’s an excerpt:

"This is the story of my Texas life. And while (essentially) true to my experience, I must warn that it often reads better (as in funnier, or happier) than it was lived. This service I’ve performed not merely for the sake of your sensibilities, but also for my art. After all, how does the old song go? A hat’s not a hat till it’s tilted. Well, mea culpa, I have tilted hats throughout...."

Have you ever read a disclaimer that is chattier than this one? Leleux has taken the boilerplate language of a Legal Dept. and raised it to the level of prosy prologue. Who says legalese must be boring?

Nick Owchar

Lat’s rollicking Malaysian childhood

Malaysian cartoonist Lat made an international name for himself with the graphic novel "Kampung Boy," attracting honors and such admiring fans as Matt Groening.

"Town Boy" (First Second: 192 pp., $16.95), Lat’s new graphic novel (and sequel), is a sweet slice of gentle humor. The liquid joy of this ongoing bildungsroman is a lot like "Peanuts" cartoons, only without that Schulz touch of sadness.

Set in Lat’s real home town, Ipoh, the book is a gentle portrait of a small Malaysian town written by the school prankster. The author and his best friend, Frankie, rock around the clock, play air guitar above Frankie’s parents’ coffee shop and get up to whatever mischief is at hand.

Lat, who adopted that pen name while cartooning for the New Straits Times (Mohammad Nor Khalid was too long for the panels), is Muslim. As he and Frankie discover their world, the boys compare religions, which for them mostly means food prohibitions. They bicycle around town and pull stunts. When they sneak into an arcade to watch a mechanical peep show, an angry adult hauls them out by their shirt collars. During a school race, they cheat and take a shortcut. And they long for Normah, "the hottest girl in Ipoh." There are dances, art classes (all the boys draw pinup stars) and band performances. Without noticing it, Lat and Frankie grow up.

What lingers is how honest and sweet the book is. Each person is doing or thinking something, and their interactions give a sense of family and community.

Charles M. Schulz’s wife, Jeannie, once told me that when Schulz liked a drawing, he said it had a "rollicking" line. Lat draws a rollicking world.

Laurel Maury

Laurel Maury, who reviews for The Times, is a critic based in New York City.

A clever literary auction

If you’re a fan of writer Peter Matthiessen and you have at least $16,000 to spare, you might have a shot at accompanying Matthiessen on a trip to Belize for wildlife- and bird-watching (the package allows you to have six people in your party). Think it’s worth it?It’s certainly worth it to The Paris Review, which is asking readers to help support the magazine with a unique auction.

The other item now on the block is a day on the set of the film "Blink," starring Leonardo DiCaprio, with screenwriter and director Stephen Gaghan. So far, the going bid is $4,750. And for the Matthiessen trip? Nothing yet. Zilch! Hanging out with Leo might appeal to some, but how can this compare with an opportunity to observe spider monkeys, ocelots, explore barrier reefs and jungles with one of the world’s preeminent writers? Oh c’mon thou readers with deep pockets! What are you waiting for?

Nick Owchar

Remembering Diane Middlebrook

"Call Diane" unexpectedly flashed in my mind last week. Though I knew Diane Middlebrook, one of the finest literary critics around, had been battling cancer for several years, I didn’t take this message as an ominous sign. At year’s end, it’s natural to think of those people you’re long overdue to contact. Then I received the news that she had died last Saturday. There are many fine obituaries online that pay tribute to her singular abilities as a critic, as the provocative biographer of poet Anne Sexton and jazz musician Billy Tipton. I can add very little, except that I will miss her.

We had never met, but we shared lengthy phone conversations and email correspondence in recent years, ever since I was dazzled by her study of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, "Her Husband." In that book, she reread both poets’ works in light of their relationship, and her explorations especially of Hughes’ visceral imagery were luminous and sharp. I asked her if she would have time to share her particular brand of stardust with our readers, and she warmly responded. She graced our section with reviews possessing an intimacy and lightness that any writer knows only come after a lot of hard work. Of a book of John Ashbery’s selected prose, for instance, she began:

"Nobody but a reviewer will be likely to read John Ashbery’s captivating book of bite-size essays on poetry and painting straight through from beginning to end. Some pieces look tastier than others right away.... But don’t take the bait. Arranged as they are by date of publication, the essays produce, in time-lapse glimpses, the equivalent of a memoir of how Ashbery turned himself into Ashbery."

We had things in common--a love of Roman poetry (her final project is a biography of Ovid to be published in 2009) and personal experience with cancer. We talked about clinical trials; she wrote from Europe when she went there for treatments; she talked about the cellular behavior of cancer so vividly that I felt sorry for her oncologist. The same formidable curiousity that informs her literary work was so powerfully abundant in the way she thought about her illness.

My final thought, though, is less about Diane than about myself. I wish I had heard that interior voice months ago and given her a call. I won’t be able to open her books again without regret--but when I do, at least I'll hear her voice.

Nick Owchar

Power of the press ...

I've spent the last few days reading Walter Lippmann's "Liberty and the News" (Princeton University Press: 92 pp., $16.95), a small book of essays originally published in 1920 that is startling in its prescience — or maybe it's just that nothing ever really changes in the end.

Written in the wake of the Versailles peace conference, the pieces here argue not only for standards in reporting but also warn about the danger of news that comes with an agenda, especially when the public is at risk of being manipulated by information (and misinformation) coming from all sides.

Lippmann understood the significance of these issues; one of the founders of the New Republic, he was an advisor to President Woodrow Wilson and later editor of the New York World. Beginning in 1931, he spent 30 years writing a Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated column for the New York Herald-Tribune. 

In "Liberty and the News," he lays out, in the most direct terms, his case for how the press can undermine democracy when it does anything other than report, as clearly and directly as possible, information and ideas. In a mass culture, after all, public opinion is everything, which means that the media helps corrupt the entire process if it doesn't hold itself to higher ideals.

It's easy to dismiss such a belief as naive or sentimental, especially in these days of the 24-hour news cycle, of Fox News, Drudge and the Daily Kos. Yet Lippmann was a hard-boiled realist who knew the power of the press.

"If I lie in a lawsuit involving the fate of my neighbor's cow,” he writes in one of this little volume's most cogent passages, "I can go to jail. But if I lie to a million readers in a matter involving war and peace, I can lie my head off, and, if I choose the right series of lies, be entirely irresponsible. Nobody will punish me if I lie about Japan, for example. I can announce that every Japanese valet is a reservist, and every Japanese art store a mobilization center. And if there should be hostilities with Japan, the more I lied the more popular I should be."

David L. Ulin

Making the most of those opening lines

First impressions matter on first dates, and they do with book reviews too. For your consideration, here are some provocative first sentences, from clever to pithy and everywhere between, culled from recent reviews appearing in a variety of outlets:

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Alan Jacobs, on a collection of Kahlil Gibran’s collected works, writing for First Things in a cruel homage to Gibran's style:

"Expansive and yet vacuous is the prose of Kahlil Gibran,
And weary grows the mind doomed to read it.
The hours of my penance lengthen,
The penance established for me by the editor of this magazine,
And those hours may be numbered as the sands of the desert...."

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Benjamin Jacob Hollars, on Ryan Boudinot’s "The Littlest Hitler," for Bookslut:

"Reading Ryan Boudinot’s short story collection, ‘The Littlest Hitler,’ is a little like stuffing your mouth with Pop Rocks and waiting for the explosion. It’s a little like dismantling a bomb. It’s like inhabiting a world where your brain is in your foot, your heart in your elbow, and yet you remain confident that you are anatomically correct while the world around you is horribly deformed."

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Lewis Macadams, on the poets Philip Whalen and Joanne Kyger, appearing in this Sunday’s L.A. Times Book Review:

"Philip Whalen and Joanne Kyger are often viewed as ‘poets’ poets’--a kiss of death that generally implies their music is out of most people’s range. But really, what this means is they’re the types of poets to whom other poets turn for their perfect pitch, to proclaim who they are....Whalen and Kyger are essentially School of Backyard poets, who look out their kitchen windows and see the universe."

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Cristina Nehring, on the sad condition of the American essay, at Truthdig:

"The essay is in a bad way. It’s not because essayists have gotten stupider. It’s not because they’ve gotten sloppier. And it is certainly not because they’ve become less anthologized. More anthologies are published now than there have been in decades, indeed in centuries. ‘The Best American Essays’ series, which began in 1986, has reached 20 volumes. The problem is that these series rot in basements--when they make it as far as that. I’ve found the run of ‘American Essays’ in the basement of my local library, where they’ll sit--with zero date stamps--until released gratis one fine Sunday morning to a used bookstore that, in turn, will sell them for a buck to a college student who’ll place them next to his dorm bed and dump them in an end-of-semester clean-out. That is the fate of the essay today."

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All of these are entertaining, but what’s the best opening line? Perhaps the briefest of them all.

Here’s William Fitzgerald, on Mary Beard’s historical study "The Roman Triumph," in the Times Literary Supplement:

" ‘Triumph’ is a word with umph."

Nick Owchar