Do unto others

This post is not really about our book tour, but if you ask other people to support your readings, then you should support the readings of other people, don't you think?

That is why, if you live in or near Chicago, I am encouraging you to go Myopic Books at 7:00 pm tomorrow night to hear Elizabeth Ellen and Geoffrey Forsyth read short short fiction from their respective collections A PECULIAR FEELING OF RESTLESSNESS and IN THE LAND OF THE FREE. Their reading is not part of a tour per se, but Elizabeth is coming all the way from Michigan, and Geoffrey is coming all the way from the suburbs.

Both of them are fantastic writers. Here are some sources other than me that say so:

"Elizabeth's work is intimate. She gets right in there and gives you what she's got." --Kelly Spitzer, Smokelong Quarterly

"Geoffrey Forsyth has a wonderful way of merging reality with the just slightly off kilter magical realism to create a world that we'd love to live in." --Dan Wickett, Emerging Writers Network

I will be there for sure, so if you are too, come say hi.

Jealousy and Indignation

There is no novelist I admire more than Philip Roth. His novel American Pastoral might be the best novel of the twentieth century, and there is great debate about whether it is even his best novel. When the New York Times polled contemporary novelists about which they believed was the best novel of the last 25 years, American Pastoral was one of the runners-up to Toni Morrison's Beloved. Roth's novels actually received more best novel votes than Morrison's, but the Roth vote was deeply divided among partisans of this Roth or that. Of twenty-one novels that received more than one "best" vote from the Times panelists, six were written by Roth.

Debates about which novel is better or best might miss the point -- we go to the novel because each one offers us a singular experience -- but there is no disputing that some writers do more with the form than others. In Roth's case, he has tried everything. Early in his career, he wrote a classic coming-of-age novella ("Goodbye, Columbus"), an uncharacteristically (for him) Jamesian bloat (Letting Go), several screwing-around comic novels (Our Gang, The Great American Novel, The Breast), and the twentieth century's definitive dramatic monologue (Portnoy's Complaint.) Portnoy alone, or even "Goodbye, Columbus," would be a career-defining accomplishment for almost any writer. But Roth didn't even begin to hit his stride until he wrote his first Nathan Zuckerman book, The Ghost Writer, the first of nine (to date) starring Roth's alter-ego, a novelist whose career we watch unfold alongside Roth's. The Zuckerman books themselves have great range, from the postmodern play with the Bernard Malamud and Anne Frank stories in The Ghost Writer to the Stephen Dixonesque alternative storylines of The Counterlife to the mature observer-narrator strategies of the American trilogy written in the 1990's-- American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain, which constitute Roth's best and most important work-- to the deep reckonings with mortality and the will to be vital in old age in the final Zuckerman book, Exit Ghost.

Note that we haven't yet even discussed vast and important swaths of Roth's body of work. I'd be remiss if I didn't at least mention the dark, frank sexual reckonings of the Kepesh books, or the timeless meditation on death in Everyman, or the play with biography and identity in the "Philip Roth" series, or the profane wisdom of the standalone Sabbath's Theater (my favorite, favorite Roth novel.)

So it is with high expectation that I went to the bookstore last week and bought the audiobook version of Roth's latest, Indignation. I bought the audiobook because the print version won't be available for a few weeks, and I couldn't wait any longer. I have now listened to it three times, twice straight-through, and I can tell you that although I thought it might be impossible for Roth to avoid repeating himself -- he's nearly thirty books into his career, he's in his late seventies, and he's exhausted nearly every narrative and structural strategy available to novelists of any generation and invented several new ones -- I was wrong. Indignation is something new altogether, a didactic anti-war tract masquerading as a ghost story masquerading as a bildungsroman. Boxes within boxes within boxes, yet the reader is never put-off or confused -- such is Roth's undersung craft of clarity. It is a feat he achieves by way of structure, mostly, and also by avoiding the temptation to overcook the language. Despite a profusion of omniscient novelistic conceits, the narrative throughout remains firmly grounded in psychological realism. Whenever we are with a character, we inhabit the character fully. We buy every word. Every moment is fully realized, is deeply believable, and ultimately contributes to the deep emotional payoff the novel's ending offers the reader.

I fear giving a proper review here, because this is one of those novels whose unfolding secrets open out not only onto pleasures, but also onto thematic discoveries, and I don't want to rob the reader of either. But I do want to say, for the reader wary of tricks, Indignation isn't a trickster novel. Indignation is a profoundly moral novel that takes narrative strategies often deployed toward base ends and transforms them into something artful, tragic, and deeply beautiful.

What has all this to do with my book or our tour (the ostensible subject of this blog, yes?) The title of this post is "Jealousy and Indignation," and, frankly, I'm jealous jealous jealous of Roth's skill, his craft, his intelligence, his willingness to take big risks, and his ability late in life to turn nearly everything he writes into something of immediate and lasting importance. And I'm indignant at my own inability, at age 32, to be as good as he is, and at the whole of our literature, broad and deep as it can be, to not often fail the tests of seriousness, entertainment, and clarity that Roth passes with such fluency every twelve to eighteen months. (It took me four years to write my first modest book of stories!)

This morning I'm working again on what I hope will be the final revision of my first novel, a manuscript that owes much to what I have learned about novel-making and novel-structuring from Philip Roth. Once again, I aim for the standard of risk-taking, ambition, and excellence he continues to raise, and, knowing that I will fall short, hope that straining toward his height and reach will cause my inevitable failure to be a noble and worthy one, far better than any lesser success I could have achieved had I been chasing a lesser champion.

Of Titles and Covers

I was warned: In the Devil's Territory is a terrible title for your book. People will think you've written a potboiler, a supernatural thriller, the Exorcist exiled in hell. The designer will give you an M. Night Shyamalan book cover, or maybe one of those Otto Dix paintings like "Sailor and Girl," the one they chose for Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater, or "Stormtroops Advancing Under Gas," or "Triumph of Death" -- some post-World War I nightmare of crawling through wrecked houses, of Lustmord, of trenchfooted men crawling through fields tainted with mustard gas.

The people who told me these things told me these things because I asked, and I asked because I trusted their advice, their smarts, their instincts about books and book publishing. And certainly they were right in some ways. My book is full of horrors, but they aren't supernatural horrors. They are humanly scaled: the woman suffering from dementia who believes the man giving her a bath is the cousin she watched murder his brother in a Kentucky tobacco field when she was a child; the husband who believes his ill and pregnant wife will die before Christmas and take their unborn child with her; the Cold War hero who flees East Berlin, three times swimming back and forth across the Spree River with her elderly relatives on her back so she can make her way to West Palm Beach, Florida, and ruin the lives of fifth grade boys.

But I did like the edge of the title, the way that it juxtaposes the all-too-human choices the characters make against the possibility of evil. Many of the characters are from an enclave of evangelical Christians in West Palm Beach, Florida, and would be familiar with the New Testament story that served as the imaginative starting point for Nikos Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation of Christ, in which the devil tempts Christ by offering him dominion over the earth, the territory that was the devil's own.

I originally used the title for the book's concluding story, the one about the Cold War hero, the teacher, whose early act of goodness did not assure that the rest of her life would not be lived out in pettiness. That story spans five decades and two continents, and occupies at least three points of view, two of which are progressive as the characters age, and one of which is in first person and might well be the reconstructor of everyone else's. It is built more like a novel than a short story -- it has a complex structure, there are lots of characters, and the thematic concerns of the story lie largely in the spaces between the concurrent stories. It seemed right, then, to choose a title that spoke to the story's thematic concerns rather than a title lifted from a setting or a character or a bit of metaphorically resonant language from somewhere within the story.

I had been re-reading Flannery O'Connor's "Mystery and Manners," and although my work does not share her theological predispositions, I do admire the fierceness of her work, and the clear-eyed way she is willing to account for our darknesses, and, temperamentally, I felt one of the book's subheads, "In the Devil's Territory," accounted for an idea that formed a context for the characters in my book and their struggles. Mine were characters full with their own capacities for selfishness, and full of conflictedness about their own good-doings, and all of it as they trod the territory the devil had claimed as his own. And a second resonance: Each story turns upon one or more moral choices or upon a memory of a past failure of goodness, and despite the characters' occasional embrace of a tenuous redemption, they're all constantly reminded how, in the words of one character's father: "You're far from home now, buddy."

With all of this in mind, I kept my title, but with fear and trembling. Everything would be in the hands of the book designer now. And that's where I got hugely lucky. Dzanc's Steven Seighman came through with a series of designs I loved. He read every story, and decided that the image that best represented them was a door that led to a dark place, a symbol of the choices that confront each focal character in each of the stories. The design we settled upon took as its centerpiece a photograph of a front porch somewhere in Appalachia, a porch that looked pretty nearly like how I imagined the front of Franny's house in the story "A Day Meant to Do Less," and he finished it with a red font that tipped its hat to the luridity of the title without taking it too far over the top. I'm really happy with his work. I feel like it in many ways captures the tone of the book, and most of all, I'm grateful that he rescued the title I wanted so badly to keep.