In Hiding for All to See

In an essay for The Millions, Mark O’Connell looks at Martin Amis’s out-of-print Invasion of the Space Invaders and claims the novelist tried to distance himself from the 1982 book about video games. He says Amis “has been avoiding talking about ever since” it appeared. O’Connell quotes another journalist’s assertion, from a review of an Amis biography that never mentions Invasion, that “anything a writer disowns is of interest, particularly if it’s a frivolous thing and particularly if, like Amis, you take seriousness seriously.”

Several other websites took notice of O’Connell’s piece, and either echoed the idea that Amis would like to excise from his resume the guide to Pac Man and other arcade fixtures or expressed surprise that he ever wrote such thing at all. Beneath a headline declaring it not to be an item from The Onion, a post at Jacket Copy reports: “Martin Amis, the brilliant British novelist, winner of the Somerset Maugham Award for best first novel and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography, who has been longlisted and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, long ago wrote a how-to video game handbook.… With an introduction by Steven Speilberg [sic] – that Steven Spielberg. For reals.” The New Yorker’s Book Bench is similarly shocked by Spielberg’s contribution, and call’s the book an Amis “secret,” while Slate implies “the masterful English prose stylist” should be embarrassed by such a “gem.” An earlier Slate article calls it a “marvelous oddity in the Amis oeuvre.”

Yet if Amis wants no one to know about the book, he uses a strange tactic to conceal its existence. Anyone bothering to look at the lists of his works in the front of his books would see Invasion of the Space Invaders there alongside Money, The War against Cliché, London Fields, The Information and the rest.

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The Pallid King

Even before I’d read the book, I anticipated critical praise for David Foster Wallace’s posthumously published fragmentary novel The Pale King. His previous books won him ardent admirers, and rumors about The Pale King suggested it would be exactly the kind of thing that would please his fans. I was not wrong in anticipating excitement over Wallace doing again what he’d done before.

Some reviewers did find much to like in the book and its accountant characters and invoke its unfinished status to explain away any weaknesses. Here’s how Richard Rayner concludes his review for The Los Angeles Times: “Much of the The Pale King is … hard work, but it’s welcome rather than the reverse, a shadow of the now lost ‘something long’ that Wallace might or might not have completed but still brilliant, a Spruce Goose of a book that barely achieves takeoff but glimmers and sparkles with sufficient suggestions of the grandeur that might have been.”

The job of a reviewer is to assess actually existing books, not books that might have been. (My review for The Oregonian appears in section O, p. 10, of the April 17, print edition.) If Wallace had lived to finish The Pale King, then it might have been very different. Perhaps it would have been better. Perhaps it would have been worse. I can’t say. Nor can anyone else. If, years in the future, an alternate version appears, with chapters rearranged and additional material added, I would not be surprised. However, as of April 2011, what there is to evaluate is what editor Michael Pietsch assembled.

And that book, in my opinion, is aggravating and tiresome. In a prefatory note, Pietsch recalls thinking that if anyone could make the IRS interesting, Wallace could. But I don’t think Wallace actually tried to be interesting in The Pale King, and, in any case, his isn’t. He repeatedly draws attention to the boringness of the text, as if doing that were clever. Some readers apparently think it is. Judith Shulevitz, for instance, insists that it’s “almost never boring” in an overwhelmingly effusive Slate review. If you’re the kind of person who enjoys listening to people go on and on and on about their drug use in college, then you might dig The Pale King. (Rayner at least notices that there’s plenty of “dead ink” in addition to what he considers “great writing.”)

I suspect Wallace enthusiasts congratulate themselves on their own perceived cleverness for “getting” what he’s up to in his highly self-conscious, digressive, long-winded, inconclusive, footnote-laden fiction. (Unlike Emily Cooke, of The Millions, I never grew to “love” Wallace’s footnotes.) In The Pale King characters praise the fortitude necessary to endure boredom, and a certain brand of reader inevitably stepped forward to announce his heroism for braving Wallace’s wearisome book.

The Pale King has no clothes. Reading it made me remember the anecdote about Kingsley Amis throwing Martin Amis’s Money across the room when he saw that his son put a character named Martin Amis in the novel. Wallace having a David Wallace character alone doesn’t bother me. (And I actually like Money.) But The Pale King reads like an elaborate but painfully unfunny joke. Deliberately tangled prose about boring subjects doesn’t stop being boring because of self-referential commentary about boringness. I imagine the author of Lucky Jim would be annoyed, as I was.

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Best Books of 2010

In order to write about them for The Oregonian, The American Interest and other publications, I read a fair number of brand new books in 2010. Nevertheless, I can’t make an honest top-ten list. Here are six that truly stood as exceptional:

1. Martin Amis’s The Pregnant Widow (Alfred A. Knopf)
2. Kevin Canty’s Everything (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday)
3. Don DeLillo’s Point Omega (Scribner)
4. Charles Goodrich’s Going to Seed: Dispatches from the Garden (Silverfish Review Press)
5. Randy Robert’s Joe Louis: Hard Times Man (Yale University Press)
6. Richard Williams’s The Blue Moment: Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and the Remaking of Modern Music (W.W. Norton & Company)

The short list reflects my tendency to read roughly proportional amounts of fiction and nonfiction. I probably read more poetry in 2010 than in most years, and Goodrich’s small volume was my favorite of several contenders.

The year 2010 saw new books by authors I once thought of as reliably remarkable – Christopher Hitchens, Ian McEwan, Milan Kundera – that I found disappointingly inferior to their earlier efforts. I could name several very good but not quite excellent books. Here’s one: George Kimball and John Schulian assembled a fine collection of boxing-related poems in The Fighter Still Remains. A few years earlier, however, Robert Hedin and Michael Waters edited Perfect in Their Art, an anthology containing much of the same material – and a great deal more.

This leads to the Achilles heel of year-end lists: the absence of the great older stuff. While I read many books published during 2010, I also read many from other years, which are automatically disqualified from “best of” contention but deserve mention all the same. I reread some classics, like Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. (I also read several books about Mailer, but these weren’t so good.) I also finally got around to some wonderful books I should have read much sooner, such as Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. If I were to list the ten books I most enjoyed during 2010 regardless of publication date, the four named in this paragraph could be added to the six above.

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Frank Kermode’s Legacy

Does the death of literary critic and scholar Frank Kermode on August 17 signal the impending end of a cultural epoch?

Adam Kirsch, senior editor at the New Republic thinks so. Kermode “was one of the last exemplars of an ideal that dates back at least to Matthew Arnold: the ideal of the literary critic as the humanist par excellence,” Kirsch writes in Slate. “What gave the critic his special authority was the way that he thought and wrote at the intersection – of the classics and the contemporary world, of literature and society, of the academy and the common reader.” In addition to teaching at Cambridge and Columbia, Kermode authored or edited more than fifty books. He wrote regularly for publications such as the London Review of Books, which he helped initiate, and the New York Review of Books.

As it happens, one of the essays in Fighters & Writers germinated with an NYRB review Kermode wrote of a collection of nonfiction by George Orwell. A reference Kermode made to an accusation that could have radically altered Orwell’s reputation prompted me to investigate the charge, delve into books about Orwell, revisit his work and produce a personal essay about his lasting impact on me.

Fighters & Writers also includes a piece on Martin Amis, whose The War against Cliché Kermode discusses in a biting passage Kirsch quotes in his obituary. Kirsch wrote one of the more astute assessments of another Amis collection, The Second Plane, as I note in my essay about that book.

I’d like to think Kirsch is wrong about a literary era’s death coinciding with Kermode’s. I mention the connections with my work simply to illustrate that the intersection Kermode mapped still sees some traffic.

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Martin Amis & His Critics

There’s something special about Martin Amis. He provokes strong feelings. With The Pregnant Widow, he once again brought forth bucket loads of critical ink, which I sample over at Open Letters Monthly.

Of all the reviewers, Sam Anderson in New York magazine best summed up the novel when he said: “It’s like NC-17 P.G. Wodehouse.” That’s the line I’d put on the cover of the paperback.

Back in 2008, I surveyed the reviews of Amis’s The Second Plane.

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Books That Changed My World

The books writers name as all-time favorites reveals something about their interests, outlook, attitudes and perhaps even their values. Illustrating this very point, The New Yorker’s Book Bench blog posted Susan Orlean’s list of the books that changed her life. She cites works by Joan Didion, John Hersey and Tom Wolfe, and it’s not hard to see why the author of The Bullfighters Checks Her Makeup, The Orchid Thief and other works of nonfiction would regard them as influences. She also includes fiction that I would include on my list, such as James Joyce’s Ulysses (appropriate for a Bloomsday post), Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.

In the same spirit of giving some sense of what I’m about, here’s an incomplete first attempt at such a list of the books that made the most impact on me (in no particular order).

• George Orwell’s Ninety Eighty-Four, Animal Farm, Homage to Catalonia and his essays – just about all Orwell, actually.
•  Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man and The Piazza Tales as well as M-D.
•  A.J. Liebling’s The Sweet Science and A Neutral Corner (Liebling raised writing about boxing to an art, and Fighters & Writers certainly owes something to his example, if only in aspiration.)
•  Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love and Saturday
•  Albert Camus, The Plague and The Myth of Sisyphus, at least
•  Philip Larkin, Collected Poems
•  Salman Rushdie, Step across This Line
•  Philip Roth, The Counterlife, The Facts and The Human Stain
•  Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act
•  Martin Amis, The War against Cliché
•  Anne Fadiman, At Large and At Small
•  Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
•  Zadie Smith, On Beauty (which I liked better than the novel that inspired it)
•  Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness
•  Anne Hathaway, The Year of the Goat
•  The Life of P.T. Barnum, Written by Himself

This is by no means exhaustive…

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Norman Mailer and…Martin Amis?

Certain authors are so closely identified with boxing that it becomes difficult to write about them without mentioning the sport. Ernest Hemingway, for example, not only wrote about boxing; he fancied himself as something of a boxer too. Indeed, boxing factored hugely in how he thought of himself both as a man and as a writer. “My writing is nothing,” he ventured, “my boxing is everything.” Though “Hemingway couldn’t box worth his hat,” as critic Wilfrid Sheed says of the novelist’s ring prowess, that unacknowledged deficiency didn’t lessen his personal and artistic investment in the sport. 

Other writers aren’t generally associated with boxing but still end up writing about it when they consider literary fight aficionados. Martin Amis, for instance, has written numerous reviews of books by Norman Mailer, which means he at least briefly touches on boxing, a subject Mailer returned to frequently. In doing so, Amis reveals an uncharacteristic uncertainty. Or, to put it another way, he doesn’t know what he’s saying. “In 1975 he wrote The Fight, an extended waffle on the Ali-Frazier match,” Amis writes in a piece included in The Moronic Inferno (1986). As anyone familiar with boxing history knows, there was not just one Ali-Frazer fight, and as anyone who’s actually read The Fight knows, Mailer covered Muhammad Ali’s fight with George Foreman. (Arthur Ashe makes the same mistake in A Hard Road to Glory.)

Amis also looks over the ring ropes to assess Mailer’s boxer poses. In The War against Cliché (2001), he judges an often-reproduced image taken in a boxing gym to be “the second worst photograph of Mailer ever published.” He says the worst picture decorated the back of Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967), and it’s hard to disagree with him there.

Still, Amis’s superficial and sometimes inaccurate glances at boxing lore led me to conclude the he had “no special interest in clashes where the Queensbury Rules apply,” as I phrase it in Fighters & Writers (where I also invoke Ali in an essay on Amis). But then – apropos of my comments on unlooked-for references to boxing – I found this in The Pregnant Widow (2010): “male disaffection was mere male sullenness, with its Queensbury rules….” It’s not much, granted, this suggestion that men (unlike women) have clearly regimented rituals for resolving disputes, and that the regulated violence of boxing is one of them, but it suggests that Amis may have picked something up from Hemingway and Mailer, who also linked boxing and masculinity.

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Fighters & Writers is at the printer!

As I write this post, Fighters & Writers is at the printer. Here’s a bit of background on my forthcoming book.   

Fighters & Writers is neither a traditional sports book nor a conventional collection of literary essays. It blends literary criticism, journalism and memoir and considers both the lively body of literature directly related to boxing and the ways the sport relates to writers not usually identified with it.

Essays in Fighters & Writers discuss works about boxing by authors such as Albert Camus, W.C. Heinz, A.J. Liebling, Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, George Plimpton, Philip Roth, New Yorker editor David Remnick, Darin Strauss and José Torres – a boxing champion who became a writer – as well as the cultural impact made by boxers like Muhammad Ali, Max Baer, James Braddock, George Foreman, Joe Frazier, Larry Holmes, Joe Louis and Mike Tyson. Rodwan also considers the sport in connection with figures such as Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens, John McCain, Ian McEwan, George Orwell, Henry Rollins and Oscar Wilde.

The title essay surveys a selection of the mammoth body of literature involving boxing in addition to writing on closely related topics such as confidence games. “The Ali Act” considers writers’ undiminished interest in one extraordinary boxer. “The Fighting Life” looks at two prominent writers’ use of boxing in their fiction. “A First-Class Sport” assesses boxing’s frequently overlooked positive aspects by examining the memoirs and autobiographies of several boxing enthusiasts, including a former heavyweight champion, a well-known trainer and television analyst, and prominent public figures including a former president and a U.S. senator. Other pieces in the collection explore how boxing inserts itself in writers’ imaginations even when they write about other subjects. Essays on diverse topics such as book dedications, Orwell’s Spanish Civil War memories, digressions, tattoos and weight loss reveal the close, if not always recognized, connections between fighters and writers.

Carlo Rotella, author of Cut Time: An Education at the Fights, called Fighters & Writers “a spirited and far-ranging meditation on boxing that’s also a thoughtful inquiry into the relationship between the writer’s craft and the fighter’s.”

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