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.

Further Updates + Elsewheres

by Weston Cutter

Just for the record: CBooks has (geographically) moved this past year, in fact just this past month, hence the paucity and quiet. Things’ll be coming back sortly, be appraised. Of course, the speed with which this place gets back to more regular posting depends a bit on where else time’s being drawn with other work, of which there’s been a bit lately. Meaning:

Still going strong at the Kenyon Review, with posts here and here (both basically reviews, with digressions).

I reviewed Paul Maliszewski’s fantastic Prayer and Parable for the Mpls Star Trubine; I’ve been waiting for this book since 2003, and was thrilled to finally get the whole thing, and the review for the Strib’s short because they’ve got word-counts to consider and everything, but, really, you should be reading this book pronto.

(Maliszewski’s one of those ‘experimental’ writers whose work’s fundamentally driven by non-character engines—the scenario, the world of the story, dictates the eventual shape of the story as much as anything else. In this he’s lots like Helen DeWitt, whose Lightning Rods is coming this October and is fantastic. I’d be curious who else writes like this, this almost Borgesian way, in which schema/systems are as critical for book movement and heft as anything else [Barthelme, obviously, too][Danielewski's great in HoL, and, sure, his other stuff's systems-based, but don't pretend it's good writing—he's gone so far that the system/rules now dictate everything; reading him feels like listening to someone sing individual notes with perfect clarity for exactly 1 minute at a time and expecting thunderous applause for technical mastery].)

For what it’s worth: Blake Butler’s done some amazing stuff recently at HTMLGiant, not least putting up his submission list from 2006-2008. I’m personally interested in such a thing because 1) I like Blake and his work and 2) it was through a submission that I met the man. I have nothing exciting or sexy to say about what he posted, but when it went up I felt like it was just so fucking yes I didn’t know where to begin. Maybe this: Blake’s one of the younger writers it seems like lots of folks talk about, at least right at present this year, and I happen to mostly loathe some of the other younger writers getting press lately, and Blake’s response to people giving him attention seems one of the most generous and good things he could possibly do: he showed the work involved, what things too, the costs. Way too many younger writers are convinced that there’s some magic involved in securing an agent and a pub deal and etc., and I’m sure there are folks who’ve had different experiences, but shit is it a good public service of Blake to put up exactly how many submissions it took him—in just a two year period—to get to where he’s now got. If more writers owned up to this I think we could demystify the shit out of the whole snarky business (and I’ll note that this post is ironic in the extreme given Blake’s earlier piece: one’d think that writers should be those least inclined to flex any jealousy muscles, given that we all know the fucking insane amounts of work that go into getting things out and published. I’ll also submit that the line “Poets are the most jealous type of artist” might be the single fucking stupidest sentence I’ve read in a year, if not more).

Put Everything Else Down, Read This First

by Weston Cutter

            I didn’t read Patrick Somerville’s The Cradle in one sitting, but I maybe should have, since what happened instead was that I read the first 80 pages of it and then spent a day and a half pretending to be paying full attention to friends or the beer in front of me, but what I was really thinking about was Matt, the novel’s protagonist, and his quest for his wife’s old cradle.

            John Edgar Wideman said “you need just enough plot to hang a story on,” and the best proof of that’s in this book. The plot is as simple as it could be: on, literally, the second page, the plot is established when Marissa, a young and pregnant-for-the-first-time wife, asks Matt, her incredibly good and dedicated husband, to find and retrieve the cradle she’d been rocked in as a baby. The story is that the cradle’s a civil war relic, though Matt’s got his doubts.

            It’s as inauspicious as a start can get, yet that tiny nudge—wife telling husband to find something for her—sets up an entire 200 page novel so exquisitely it’s almost breathtaking. Somerville’s a master of letting a story unfold, and so, though the reader knows the cradle’s with Marissa’s mother as of page 2, we don’t see the full picture of Marissa’s mom’s absence for awhile, and we don’t get the full story of her departure from Marissa’s (and her father Glen) life for a bit.

            If that sounds simplistic or not too big a deal, I’d here like to posit that, actually, a novel lives or dies based on how it provides its info to the reader, and an author who can make withheld information not annoying or anything but powerful and hunger-inducing is an astoundingly good author, and I’ll here just go ahead and proclaim that Patrick Somerville is totally that good an author. Because you know what the story at the heart of The Cradle actually is? It actually ends up being about Marissa exactly as much as it is about Matt; it ends up being about gone/bad mothers just as much as it’s about gone/bad fathers (or father figures, anyway). The book, fundamentally, is about family, is about not just the blood and bio that create that institution, but the decisions and choices that attend as well.

            This’ll either sound silly or overhyped, but the story in The Cradle, while great, is actually not the thing that makes the book so gasp-inducing; rather, it’s Patrick Somerville’s astonishing sentences, his way of sort of scribbling at the edges. Let’s try to make that clearer: though the point of fiction is to get whatever story’s being told across, the filligrees and details and extraneous bits—the unnecessary stuff, basically—are what make the story so good (if this seems far-fetched, consider that beans and rice will keep you alive, but once you add salt and pepper and olive oil to them, they’re quite a bit more appealing). The writer I’ve seen encapsulate this best is actually Paul Maliszewski, who, in an interview on One Story, said (in response to ‘What’s the best bit of advice about writing you’ve ever gotten?’)

         ”My teacher Michael Martone says—and I will quote him—”You can never have too much peripheral detail or too little on the color of a character’s eyes.” Along similar lines, he once formulated the theory of neat stuff, which holds that not every single thing in a story has to contribute to some airtight and flawless scheme. Some things, Michael says, are just neat.”

Somerville does this page after page all the way through. Here, describing Walton, Minnesota, page 84: “You could see the whole thing from the right angle.” Here, page 94:

            “…and now the dog came up and sat beside him, its tail wagging across the dirty concrete floor. The pleasure. That was what the cost was. That was the definition of worth. Matter was somewhere in there, too. Worth and matter. Darren had meant something more cynical about the marketplace. What he didn’t understand was that five hundred dollars was nothing when it came to the invisible mass of life.”

            These moments dot the pages like glitter, and it’s hard not to want to stop as you’re reading, call a friend, read passages aloud: it’s that sort of book—it’s a wonder, a literal, oh-my-gosh wonder.

            There are dozens more amazing things about this book, and I haven’t even touched the plot because, honestly, it’s too good a surprise, it’s too clickingly well crafted to rob the joy it’ll give the coming-in-blind reader. Just pick The Cradle up and start reading, pick the thing up and be dazzled.

Fake Fake Fake Fake Fake

by Weston Cutter

I assume all us dorks who read lit. journals have writers they track and keep dear, writers whose books (especially their debuts) are great big Happenings and Events just because we’ve seen so much for so long in such small doses (most recent list of my writers like that: Blake Butler, Caren Beilin, Crystal Curry, Lauren Jensen). And so, toward the end of last year, it felt like this great and magical gift when I found out that two of my old, old favs—Paul Maliszewski and Wells Tower—would both have books coming out early in 2009: Paul Maliszewski’s Fakers, out 1/19 from The New Press, and Tower’s Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, from FSG in March.

            What’s funny (and maybe telling about the full extent of my dorkiness re: this stuff) is that Tower and Maliszewski both write fiction and nonfiction, and if I’m totally honest I have to just admit that I like Tower’s nonfiction more than his fiction, and Maliszewski’s fiction more than his nonfiction, and so it was an odd sort of…not disappointment, but letdown, when I got both books. Because, seriously, have you read Maliszewski’s fiction in old copies of Gettysburg Review? Or have you read those old nonfiction pieces Tower had in Harper’s (esp. this one, about working in Florida for Pres. GWBush leading up to the 2004 election)? All that writing’s freakishly good, yet it’s apparently gonna be longer till we get those pieces in hardcover. Which, really, is not some hugely hard-to-deal-with thing, but it’s worth at least noting.

            None of the above is to in any way say that Maliszewski’s Fakers (and Tower’s Everything Ravaged, but that’s a review for later) is not hugely entertaining and fun and funny and almost sneakily deep and thought-provoking: it’s all those things. The book starts with what’s got to be Maliszewski’s most famous (idle Q: how would one measure?) piece, the one from The Baffler called “I, Faker,” about Maliszewski’s time at an upstate NY business newspaper, a time during which he wrote and sent letters, signed by fake individuals, to his own newspaper, which newspaper, of course, ran the letters, and so the falseness had to enlarge, and eventually Maliszewski even had to make a real website for his fake business…all of which is worth just going ahead and reading about (I’m sure the essay’s in one of the two Baffler anthologies, too, which you should have, obv).

            But what’s most interesting, as Maliszewskis sort of digs into stories of overt fakery (see: JT Leroy, a writer let me here say I never even liked and whose graceless fall gave me a bigger surge of schadenfreude than I’m comfortable admitting) and more borderline stuff (Sandow Birk’s paintings of the Great Wars of the Californias, which war was fake, but which paintings mimic/mock/push-at ideas of ‘historical’ paintings, how the narrative of history is made, etc.), is how dicey the whole concept of fakery even is. Obviously, the bulk of getting duped is about having trust destroyed: a prank may piss someone off, but the angered person wouldn’t likely say s/he’d had her trust betrayed by the prank, meaning the victim can sort of get at the impulse or intent of the act. Yet, for instance, people got pissed, deep-down, I-want-my-money-back pissed, about J. Frey and M.L.Pieces. Could he have just gone on Oprah and said his book was a prank, was a thing designed just to reflect something satirical back onto the culture that’d spawned it? That his book was, in fact, a high-minded critique of exactly the sort of ravenous vampiricism that drives most contemporary non-fiction? Would that’ve pissed anyone off less? More?

            The thing is, fakery’s a subject that’s maybe more important now than it’s ever been, because now that the whole idea of ‘authenticity’ is so slippery, the notion of ‘fake’ will, likewise, get messed with (though, in fairness, Maliszewski doesn’t really go into that brave-new-digital-world aspect, though with long-ish pieces on Jayson Blair [NYTimes] and S. Glass [New Republic], he’s certainly working toward that terrain [since the web's officially passed printed newspapers are the place most folks get their news]). And, of course, Maliszewski can’t, any better than anyone, find the Magic Secret that’ll allow us to all see through deceptions with ease, that’ll stop even the most cold-eyed cynics among us from (stupidly) opening that junk e-mail message that looks suspiciously possible, the one about the money… (though Maliszewski does tell the story of the Drake fortune, and the schemers who worked the midwest, netting millions for duping people the same way e-mail scammers are now duping people).

            Which is maybe the craziest part of Maliszewski’s Fakers: how uncomfortably close it has to come to basically pointing a finger at us, at the gullible, the duped, the folks taken by these deceptions. We’re not to blame, and it’s not an issue of fault, but Maliszewski does a really cool and interesting job of showing how deceptions works and hurts in the ways it does because of how closely deceptions hew to what we deep down want—want to own, or believe, or hear, or see, or whatever. Some fundamental aspect of getting duped involves not just a participant, but a willing participant: we must be drawn in, somehow. And that juncture—the moment when a story hinges, where the about-to-be-duped is ready to consider the whole thing true—is one of the most interesting things I can think of, and Maliszewski’s just written the best book that’s been written about that small, loaded, strange place.

 

            (The last chapter’s about Chabon, and I wanted to write about it here, but the chapter really, really threw me for a loop. If you’re going to get this book just to be able to impress friends at the bar or whatever, read the last chapter first. I still haven’t made my mind up about the chapter, which means that, in just that chapter, Maliszewski’s done one of the greatest magic tricks there is: he’s made something that might appear simple infinitely, infinitely complex).