A brief and partial defense of Lionel Shriver’s new book, “The New Republic.”
Claire Dederer, writing at Slate, hates this book. I have yet to read it, so I cannot address what should be the bulk of her critique–the actual book. But I can rebut Dederer’s unfair, childishly immature, and Gawkerish interpretation of Shriver’s author note.
Lionel Shriver explains that she completed the novel in 1998 but couldn’t find a publisher. She blames this failure on her “poisonous” sales record. “Perhaps more importantly,” she adds, “my American compatriots largely dismissed terrorism as Foreigners’ Boring Problem.” Over the next decade, her sales grew, and with 9/11 the profile of terrorism grew as well. Shriver goes on: “I was obliged to put the novel on ice, because a book that treated this issue with a light touch would have been perceived as in poor taste.”
There’s so much that’s wrong with this paragraph. First and foremost, there’s Shriver’s condescending tone about provincial Americans of 1998 and their supposedly dismissive attitude toward terrorism. (In 1998, al-Qaida bombed the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.) Shriver, American by birth, has lived for over 20 years in the United Kingdom, and there’s a whiff of snobbery in the implication that she used to be one of those people, but fortunately has moved on to the higher cultural elevations of Europe, leaving all us dumbasses behind.
So first the book went unpublished because terrorism was unimportant to Americans. Then it languished because terrorism was too important to Americans. There’s a trend emerging here, no? One that Shriver seems to refuse to see. Here, I’ll spell it out: Publishers did not want to publish the book. (This despite publishing 10 other Shriver novels, including the best-selling We Need to Talk About Kevin.)
Let me spell something out for Dederer, (who by the way, I have never met, and is probably a very nice person, and who likely only wrote such a contrary review because she is writing for Slate, but none of which is an excuse for being wrong) Americans did not care about terrorism before 9/11. Political cliche or not, there was a pre 9/11 America and a post 9/11 America. Guess which one politicians used to take away our civil liberties with our blessings? Why wasn’t the Patriot Act passed after Al-Qaida bombed our embassies in Tanzania and Kenya? We didn’t give a shit. Read more »
Hi, how are you? It’s been a little while, hasn’t it? Did you miss me? I’ve been away. But I’ve been sneaking peeks at you sometimes, when you weren’t looking: Don’t be creeped out.
I’d like to take this moment of my triumphant return to talk to you a little bit about zombies. Hopefully Tyler has got you all excited about zombies with his post about genre.
You know me. Or maybe you don’t. But if you know me, you know I maybe have a bit of a thing for my sci fi and fantasy. Maybe a bit of a thing for zombies. Maybe not as much of a thing for pure literature. So, way back in last year when Jason Sommer told me that Colson Whitehead was coming out with a zombie novel, my reaction, naturally, was, “Isn’t he that literary writer that you love?” And that was pretty much it for me. I didn’t really go out of my way to track it down. You know, there are a lot (a LOT) of zombie stories in the world. Read more »
I like to think if I met a celebrity, say Brad Pitt because everyone knows him, I wouldn’t turn into a “Fan”. I wouldn’t pass out, I wouldn’t cry or scream or anything resembling a pre-teen Bieber fan. But this is a lie. If Brad Pitt attempted to have a conversation with me, I would do one of two things 1) only respond with head nods or shakes or 2) keep saying obnoxious things like “OMG” “HOLD ON. LET ME CALL MY MOTHER” “CAN I TOUCH YOUR MOUTH!”
This is because Brad Pitt has reached a certain level of celebrity in my mind that is beyond comprehension. He may as well not be human and instead be an idea. You can’t meet an idea and walk away normal. This is not the kind of fame I would like to attain. On the other hand, as a writer, the worse outcome of my writing career would be if , say, five to ten years from now, no one in the writing community had ever heard of MPT. So what’s the fine balance? I think Jess Walter has it nailed. Read more »
My two contributor copies of Willow Springs 68 arrived a month or so ago, and even as I admired the cover design, and perused the table of contents, I knew the first place I’d head: A Conversation with Richard Russo.
Almost exactly a year and three months ago, my crack interview team: Laura Ender, Sam Edmonds, and I, sat down at the Davenport Hotel with Richard Russo, armed only with notepad full of questions, the product of several meetings in which we discussed our battle-plan, and maybe too-much knowledge of Russo’s work, a result of each of us reading just about everything he’d ever published. As a second-year-student at the time, Willow Springs had put me in charge of the interview, and even if Russo hadn’t been one of my literary heroes I would have been nervous as all hell.
I discovered his books in high school, and devoured them greedily, wondering why all novels couldn’t be this insightful, funny, and easy to read. Realistically, I wanted to write books like his. Adorably naively, I wanted to marry one of his daughters, (who were about my age) despite being barely able to talk to girls, so I could see him every Christmas in Maine.
I’d been a member of the finely-tuned Jess Walter interview team earlier that year, so I had a sense of how these things worked. But Editor Sam Ligon led that interview, and he and Jess were good friends. And this moment, meeting and running an interview with Richard Russo, was the biggest, at least socially, of my budding literary career. I planning on staying cool, and praying the tape-recorder would keep working the entire time. Read more »
I was sitting on my friend’s back patio, holding her baby whom I’d just met. His arms stretched in opposite directions and his hands splayed in wild starry shapes. Paula and I were eating fruit tarts and catching up. It was the first time I’d seen her since her baby was born. It was summer.
“I just try to remember I do it because I like it, because it’s fun.” The fact that it took me a while to make sense of her words in relation to our topic shows my mental alienation at the time. Because, you probably guessed it, we were talking about writing.
Over the last six months I have rolled these words around from time to time, trying to figure out if I actually do enjoy writing fiction. I began doing it because I liked reading fiction and liked the characterizations achieved on certain television shows that bring me pure joy. But the act of writing fiction had seemed difficult and rife with potential mistakes—all of which I was making. These mistakes would then be gently pointed out to me in my writing classes or by my writing group and I would soldier on, trying to crack this mysterious coded set of rules. Read more »
I like this picture of Jess because he looks like my 1994 Israeli boyfriend
Jess Walter, author of The Financial Lives of the Poets, The Zero, which was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award, and Citizen Vince, which won the 2005 Edgar Allan Poe Award for best novel, came to town a few weeks ago and did some secret-telling. I think I’ll tell his secret here. It’s not like he whispered it to me. I think the other hundred or two people in the room heard it, too.
This is what he told me and the students at the University of Colorado, Denver: He gets up every day at 6:00 am and writes—before he does anything else—before he checks his email, or reads, or rereads reviews of his books, anything. Except for one thing and I think this is the secret part.
He eats a gigantic cookie every morning. He says he begins waking up around 5:00 or 5:30 thinking about the chocolate chips and perhaps the flax seed or oatmeal his honey might have snuck in there for his health. And then, when he can’t bear it anymore, he gets up, opens the freezer, and claims the morning’s treat. I think he might warm it up in the microwave.
This is how he claims to get himself motivated to write each morning. Read more »
I meant to write my first post a long time ago. A long, long time ago. Like the first week of July. But, there were so many reasons-slash-excuses not to. At first, I’d just finished my thesis, and I was tired. Both my weary brain and my laptop’s overworked cooling system needed to take it easy. Then I went on vacation, and when I got back, I was too busy catching up on work. Then I had some freelance assignments to finish. And so on for the next two months—procrastination at its finest.
Even now, after the things on my official to-do-first list have all been checked off, I am still only writing this post because I forced myself to.
I am not one of those writers who “has” to write. I write because I make myself. Sure, I love it, kinda: writing helps me understand myself and other people, it gives me a voice and an audience, it takes me into pockets of the world I would never have explored otherwise. It makes the gears in my head start turning.
It also sucks. We all know this. As Dorothy Parker said, “I hate writing; I love having written.”
turns out that one of the five key steps to inciting a revolution involves falling in love.
i ♥ penguin’s “great ideas” series, which includes george orwell’s why i write & william hazlitt’s on the pleasure of hating. on the occasion of the 100th (and final) volume, the guardian chats with the series editor about their beautiful covers and his ten faves.
review, author interview, & excerpt of gary shteyngart’s super sad true love story—which features this killer opening: “Dearest Diary, Today I’ve made a major decision: I am never going to die.”
i see you driving ’round town with the girl i love and i’m like, “fuck you!” (ooo, ooo, oooo!)
because i am a graduate student at the end of his quarter and thus, inextricably, his wits, this is gonna be simple. in the words of rob gordon: “i’m feeling kinda basic today. top five side ones, track ones…”
my hometown paper used to highlight favorite opening lines of literature in its sunday book section. my hometown paper also used to have a sunday book section. so for those of us not lucky enough to have a book section, i did find a lovely post with 30 great opening lines from literature, including a favorite of mine from then we came to the end by joshua ferris: Read more »
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