‘Unconventional visions,’ Part 2

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If there was a literary equivalent of the youth vote, it was on hand in the basement of the Fowler Auditorium on Sunday at the festival’s ‘Unconventional Voices’ panel.

Authors Lydia Millet, Ben Ehrenreich, Yannick Murphy and Keith Gessen joined Jacket Copy blogger Carolyn Kellogg for a discussion that involved various topics such as sex, violence and Googling oneself.

‘We all do it,’ confessed Lydia Millet, author of (most recently) ‘How the Dead Dream.’ ‘It’s like masturbation.’

Responding to a question from Kellogg, Ben Ehrenreich mentioned how he chose to play with words and language as a way of getting through the often tedious process of writing. Fittingly, his novel ‘The Suitors’ proves itself trippingly difficult to define; it mixes Homeric themes with modern warfare, and includes a cast of characters nearly equal to Donald Antrim’s ‘The Hundred Brothers.’

Although Murphy and Millet agreed that playfulness with language was necessary, Keith Gessen stressed that he didn’t play with his writing—that he was more concerned that ‘there’s so much to tell already about the world as it is.’ An editor of the New York City-based critical journal ‘n+1’ and a freelance book critic, Gessen leaned forward and continued, ‘It is my hope that what I write remains factual sociologically.’

‘What do you mean you ‘don’t play?’’ asked Millet.

Gessen evaded any personal answer to the question, offering instead examples from Millet’s novel that he’d found to be affecting.

‘I’m not sure what ‘the world as it is’ means,’ Ehrenreich responded, perhaps thinking out loud. ‘And I’m not sure what that has to do with writing fiction.’

Earlier, Gessen had read a passage from his first novel, ‘All the Sad Young Literary Men’ in which the bookish character of Mark spends days looking at amateur porn on the college library’s computers.

‘This passage isn’t going to be appropriate for children,’ Gessen warned before he began. There were no children in the audience.

-- George Ducker

(Illustration for Ben Ehrenreich’s ‘The Suitors’ by Beppe Giacobbe)