An Interview with Paul Maliszewski

by Weston Cutter

It’s been awhile since we’ve had the chance to run an interview this fun and in-depth in awhile, which makes this all the more satisfying: a long, interesting-as-hell interview with Paul Maliszewski, he of Prayer and Parable and Fakers, both of which I thought were excellent (reviews here and here). I’m not sure there’s all that much critical info one needs to get into this, aside from this: this could’ve been much, much longer. Maybe this’ll be some on-going thing, a Checking In With Paul feature on Corduroy. Regardless: enjoy the interview, but, obviously, more critically: go purchase the man’s books and read them and pass them along. A formatting note: no, I don’t know why the footnotes don’t automatically jump you to the page’s bottom, nor how to make them do so. 

Do you feel like there’s anyone writing at present who’s writing with any sort of similar aesthetic goals as you?

You’re supposing I can know other people’s aesthetic goals, when I can’t reliably explain my own. But let me say this: two recent books that gave me strong feelings of recognition were Adam Gilders’s Another Ventriloquist, a collection of stories, and Deb Unferth’s novel Vacation. Our sentences aren’t outwardly similar. Unferth’s are more arresting, the syntax torqued, where mine are plainer on the surface, to the point of seeming flat. This business of recognition is tricky, though. It’s a little like hearing a song on the radio and thinking, That sounds so much like my life! She must be singing for/about/to me! There’s guesswork involved, and one finally has to make a great interpretive leap. Both Gilders and Unferth pay particular attention to the thoughts of their characters, and they do so in not-typical ways, i.e. not just saying, so-and-so thought, quote-unquote, I’m not happy at my job. I appreciate when characters are allowed to think, and at some length. I like when they’re given access to sophisticated language, too, even literary language. I’m not a fan of the terse, uncommunicative school of character, where the author gets to be occasionally lyrical and the characters are all like, Hey, what’s up? Not much. You? There’s also some attempt in these books to capture the grammar of consciousness. This is not to say Unferth and Gilders are writing stream of consciousness. It’s more an interest in people’s logic, how people try to explain who they are and what they’re about, and how they deceive themselves with their accounts, which can seem carefully constructed but are rarely complete.

Harbach’s Masterful Fielding

by Weston Cutter

            Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding has as of today been released for just shy of two weeks but this book’s been a large spot on the radar for awhile, as anyone who tried to finagle an ARC after the initial fifteen hundred ARCs were distributed. One’s got to assume few debuts get an initial ARC run in four digits. Plus of course there was the news of the book’s sale itself, the high six figures Little, Brown shelled out (all of this stuff is well covered in Keith Gessen’s article in the latest Vanity Fair, which to this reader seems like the absolute easiest article to ever have been written in the history of ever: I like Gessen quite a bit, and I’m as into VF as the next guy, but seriously? You write a huge article [which'll be turned into an e-book for $1.99] on your friend, the co-editor of the magazine you work? For what it’s worth: it’s moves like those that get folks up in arms about MFAs and networking vs. artistic merit—I’m glad Gessen wrote the article, and I’m happy Harbach’s getting the attention, but it’s just…the whole thing’s about as nepotistic as it comes). anyway: all the background info you need about Harbach’s book’s out there: The Art of Fielding has been the publishing of the story of the year so far.

Regardless of whether the story of the book’s birth and existence Matter or Last in any significant way is up to others to debate. What’s for sure is that The Art of Fielding is one of the most satisfying, fantastic long novels to have been released in a long, long while. Harbach’s clearly trying to take his place at the table alongside Franzen and the rest (worth asking: who exactly is the rest? I can’t think of any who are working that Dickensian seam quite like Franzen: Eugenides, maybe, and Powers to a degree, but Wallace isn’t quite part of that group, I’d argue, and ditto some of the other guys that used to be clumped in there [Moody, Antrim]). If you’re looking for a book that will suck a solid weekend of yr life and offer all the essential and mesmerizing joys of fiction, this is your book.

Yes, to get the obvious and perhaps necessary stuff out of the way: Harbach’s an n+1 guy, which, if you’re into inside baseball, puts him in the post-Eggers, more serious milleu (someone should make flow-charts of how Wallace led to Eggers/McSwys let to n+1). Harbach’s also the guy who wrote the awesome old article about how Franzen’s The Corrections was the follow-up to Infinite Jest, an article which is necessary reading according to this reviewier. Also, through homage or whatever, Harbach’s made a cast of characters which shares similarities with lots of Wallace—anyone who comes to Fielding with Jest in mind will notice all sorts of overlap (big and little things: chewing tobacco, surnames built around variations of the word light in various languages, a parallel between lead characters [Hal in Jest, Henry in Fielding]). Anyway, enough of the other shit: that’s what a keen, score-keeping reader may wish to have acknowledged before entering the book.

But oh lord, what a book. Seriously, just such a book. I unfortunately recently read the latest Eugenides (who has his own Wallace-based issues), which I was expecting to be a big, satisfying novel with an immersive narrative world and etc (how could I not expect that, given Eugenides’s past works?). I was massively let down by Eugenides, as I imagine most people will be, but I left the book just bereft, hurt that the book absolutely did not deliver on that rarest magic, the believable and sustained fictional world (there’s really just a ton wrong with the new Eugenides).

So it was with that hellhound of disappointment on my ass that I dug into Harbach’s door-stop last Friday, and I spent the day gladly on my back, getting up at 7pm feeling that wonderful, strange way one does on finishing a great book: thrilled that I’d been in the world, disappointed that I was now finished with the world. The story centers around Henry Skrimshander, a college short stop playing for Westish College, a fictional school on the coasts of Lake Michigan. Henry’s an almost magically gifted short stop, a mistake-less monster on defense, and, at the book’s start, we trace him moving quickly from high school through the first two years of college as he plays and works out, bulking up and becoming a hitter as well and, of course, playing the whole time without committing an error.

Henry’s Fielding‘s bright sun, and it’s strange: the characters which orbit him are, arguably, more fascinating and riveting than he is. There’s Guert Affenlight (see what I mean about surnames and light?), Westish’s president, a Melville scholar who gave up a faculty position at Harvard to return to Westish; there’s Pella, Guert’s drop-out, young-married daughter, who arrives at Westish and tries to start a new life (or pick up where her old one went off the rails); there’s Schwartzy—Mike Schwartz—who is absolutely the heart and soul of this book, a year Henry’s senior, the team catcher, habitual tobacco chewer…Schwartz is the reason, I’m guessing, most folks’ll love this book; there is, finally, Owen Dunne, Henry’s roommate, and Owen happens to be gay and who becomes involved in the relationship for which most readers’ll feel most powerfully. There are other love relationships, one of which is fantastic, one of which will give you a stomach ache. There is, of course, Henry’s fall from perfection: 164 pages into a 517 page book, Henry’s errorless streak ends.

Henry’s streak ending actually provides perfect insight into how badass Harbach is, for two reasons. First, Harbach lets the story just go: real early on in the book two full years of college pass in a matter of pages. This was, to this reader, jarring on coming upon them: it’s too early in the book to fully understand the author’s sense of pacing, sure, but two years in a matter of pages seems much. Turns out, however, that Harbach’s doing exactly the right thing. Here’s a sideways route to Harbach’s badassery: the latest Colson Whitehead and Jeffrey Eugenides both move like stuck muck, so slow you’ll find yrself flipping pages just because otherwise you’ll pass the F out, and both make for terrible reading because of such speed—whole pages devoted to microdetails one finishes reading about only to be pissed, borderline hurt that one’s been made to focus on something that feels trivial. Harbach’s speed through such moments builds massive trust rapidly: not once, after that first two-years-in-a-blink blip, did I question his moves.

The second big reason to love Harbach and Fielding: the plot’s just a fantastic zigging thing. You already know the big plot pivot point—that Henry eventually earns an error, and that that imperfection dogs him. But, again: that happens 164 pages in. You’ll spend the rest of the book—350+ massively satisfying pages—wondering how things’ll shake out, only very occasionally being able to see clearly the upcoming moves (and those moves you can see coming are fairly well telegraphed, meaning you’ll actually get satisfaction from being able to see it coming and then seeing it actually transpire as imagined).

There’s plenty else to love about this book—the writing’s clean and open, feels in the best ways like the midwestern school and people the book’s set in and with and around: the writing feels true, mostly without guile, mostly attempting to do both good and well. I can’t think of a book that’s gonna come close to this in terms of satisfaction, story, character, plot…it’s gonna be awhile. You’ll see.

Jennifer Egan = Perfect Fiction

by Weston Cutter

I have nothing and no one but myself to blame for being late to the Jennifer Egan party. I was working bookstores when her first book came out, and I remember seeing it, picking it casually up a couple times, but never allowing myself to buy it, for reasons I can’t possible recall. I’ve read her, just like everybody, during the last ten years as she’s published great pieces in the New York Times Magazine and elsewhere, and I’ve passed battered paperbacks of her Look At Me over and over at used book shops, thinking should I?, wondering when I’d get to her stuff, and then some other book would present itself and another year passed without my having read Egan.

I can remember distinctly the last time I was late to the party about a certain writer–it was Richard Powers, and in some year-end interview somewhere, Christopher Hitchens mentioned that he’d just read Powers that year (this was like 2001) and had been blown away and would soon be reading everything Powers’d ever written. I took Hitchens’s words to heart, dove into Powers, and was equally thrilled.

And I’m glad to here report that I’ll soon be doing the exact same thing with Egan’s body of work. Lost in the swirl of chatter about Franzen’s Freedom is that his book, while magnificent, is actually only among the best books of the year, and that, also among the best books of the year, is Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad. Please note that from here until the end of the review, I’ll be doing everything I can to keep my raptorousness in check, but this book all but shoves the reader right over the biggest cliffs of joy: the book was, until Freedom, head-and-shoulders above every other book I read this year.

(And this book came out awhile ago, for the record: should be plenty easy to find in stores.)

One of the fun-ish things earlier in the summer was reading reviews of this book and finding reviewers uncomfortably contortioning themselves in hopes of grasping whether the book’s a novel of a series of connected stories. Here’s true: doesn’t matter. A Visit From the Goon Squad is a container for multiple narratives, each of which features a character we’ve either already met or whose existence fits neatly into the larger whole. I will say that the book pushes gently, encouragingly at new-ish (which is saying a lot) notions of what fiction can be and do: there’s a PowerPoint chapter within this book, and it’s one of the most breath-catchingly beautiful things I’ve seen in a book in a long, long time. That section alone’s worth the book’s price.

But so what’s the book actually about? I’ll leave the pleasure of discovering the title, but it’s at least safe to point out that, no, there’s no overt/named goon squad. The easiest answer to what’s the book about is: music. The book’s one of those rare, celebratory, intellectually-satisfying books about the pleasure of music. That sounds a bit bats to stake a claim to—the book’s as much about regular old relationships and time passing as any other great book—but it’s true, the book’s fundamentally structured around music. Central characters are music producers, are musicians, are die-hard fans of music whose life has been massively shaped by an ability to receive pleasure from it.

Pause and just consider that. If you’ve read your share, you know that writing about music is rarely much fun to read. Not fair, start again: writing about music in which the pleasure of music is centrally vital, that’s hard. Music writing can be great—that long article about “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” from a decade back, for instance, or anything Alex Ross writes—but writing makes the enjoyment and necessity of music a central point? Rare. James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” is about the top, in terms of genius, and everything else pegs lower.

So: music, that’s what the book’s fundamentally (to me) about—liking music, playing music, producing it. What’s awesome about music is that one couldn’t find a much dirtier industry for such a pure thing (regardless of what rock-god dreams folks have, when they sit down to play something, if they’re folks who actually give a damn about music and expression, are likely thinking about that stuff). Meaning: the way music is made/disseminated automatically involves dirt and purity crashing together, neither wearing seatbelts. So the book ends up being about that, more than anything else—the dicey, impossible-to-navigate line marked intent, the line that separates folks who do something simply for the love and blood of it versus those with more avaristic agendas. Also: about how intent can be resuscitated, purified, shaped back into what it once was after a period of toxicity.

There’s more. This review doesn’t do justice to what Egan’s done (and, for all I know, what she always does). I got this book in maybe June, and let it sit on a shelf for a month because I’m an idiot, and the minute I began it, I couldn’t stop. I read it in a day. Like the best books, I finished it feeling very much like I do around my closest friends, the people I enjoy most: I felt loved and in love. This book will make you a bigger, better person. Make your autumn count.

Stop Whatever You’re Doing

by Weston Cutter

And read John Domini’s excellent “Against The Impossible.”

Seriously. Do it.

Clancy Martin

by Weston Cutter

            It’s been two years since McSweeney’s 23 came out—which I’d argue strongly is still their best recent quarterly (included: the ever-devastating C. Beilin, Wells Tower, a woman named April Wilder)—which means it’s been two years since I first read Clancy Martin and came unsnapped by his fiction. His story “How to Sell” was just freakishly good (and, again, among such freakishly good company that every story in that issue now strikes me as amazing—there’s simply a shared glow to them all), and not only were Martin’s sentences somehow both direct/compact and wild, but the story itself had this sort of seething confidence, a bluntness that established a coherent world (jewelry sales in TX) so quickly and thoroughly you never even cought that it was as if the world wasn’t created so much as called-up, beckoned.

            Anyway: the story was incredible, talk-about-for-months-afterward incredible. And then the next time I saw C. Martin’s name was in some NYTimes article about Lorin Stein in which mention was made of How to Sell, Martin’s debut novel (the guy’s a professor in Kansas who has also written this). And now, as of the 20th of May, his How to Sell has finally hit, and you’d be hard-pressed to line up better names to have on yr dust jacket: Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, Benjamin Kunkel, Sam Lipsyte.

            The brief bad news first: How to Sell is not “How to Sell.” The McSweeney’s story was a bowl-you-over tale of a pair of brothers who are on equal footing regarding how to sell jewelry, was/seemed a story about competition and the smeary inner/underworld of the jewelry business. The novel certainly has the latter in spades–there’s so much smeary underworld stuff it’s hard to keep track of things.  The biggest change, though (this could all be a gigantic misread, and Martin’s McSweeney’s story was simply an really tightly edited piece of the whole, though the giveaway on that one’s that the story was autobiographic [main character: Clancy Martin] and the novel may well be, but the character’s now named Bobby Clark), is that How to Sell is, despite the smarmy/smeary underworld details and the stunning pace and everything is, at its core, a coming-of-age story—movement toward redemption, young man given choices and being forced to make decisions of huge consequence, the who-am-I questions that haunt. And let’s just be totally clear: coming-of-age isn’t (at all) a bad thing, it’s just not what the story in McSweeney’s set this reader up for (and it’s shitty because the McSweeney’s excerpt set the book up to be something totally Other, something none of us had ever remotely seen before, and for that to be made into something that can be summarized/shrunken into a “coming of age story” is sort of sad, to me). [In fairness to Mr. Martin and the novel itself, it's probably a mean and dicey thing to compare the novel to the story, anyway (though I don't see how one could really help it)]

            Anyway, the novel: Bobby Clark, a young man from Alberta, drops out of high school and moves to Texas with his brother Jim, and on getting picked up from the airport, Bobby’s yanked hard into Jim’s world—doing coke in the limo on the way back to the jewelry store Jim’s just left to come get his brother (plus also in the car is Lisa, a woman intimately connected to both men, too), working quickly into sales at the jewelry store Jim’s employed at, getting involved in transactions (of emotion, of flesh, of jewelry) that are stomach-churning to read, in ways.

            Because How to Sell is being totally straight in its title and cover art: it’s about sale, about transaction, and that issue’s here tackled with a directness that will absolutely leave bootprints on whatever naivete or pollyana-ish optimism you may have. Which, again, isn’t at all a bad thing: the book to a large extent focuses on the creepy death that is life-lived-according-to-sales-and-transactions, on the sacrifice of human softness and fragility that goes hand-in-hand with an overwhelming urge toward avarice.

            So it’s an odd little book, overall: it’s a stunner, and there are sentences in here as plunky and whipped as any great fiction you’ll read in any good literary magazine (speaking of: has everyone seen NYTyrant? Good god, only a few issues in and those people are absolute giants and putting out the best magazine I know of), and it’s more than worth the $25 it’ll set you back. Here’s the real hope, at least from this reader: that, next time, Mr. Martin’ll give us more of what made the story such a zinger, that he’ll trust his work enough to not bother giving it coming-of-age scaffolding.

(for the record: here’s a real worthwhile review of How to Sell by T. McCarthy from the NYTimes from like two weeks back.)