What Contemporary Literature Can Learn from 98 Years and 980 Bestsellers

Or…

Why Jonathan Franzen, Ben Marcus, and Michael Chabon Should Stop Arguing About “Contemporary, Quotidian, Plotless, Moment-of-Truth Revelatory” Fiction And Encourage Great Writing in All Genres

Every weekend, I glance at The New York Times Best Seller List to see what America is buying and to find out what appeals, at this cultural moment, to the mass-market reader. I do this not for items to add to my personal reading list – those titles typically derive from suggestions by friends and teachers – but to be aware of authors who will undoubtedly come up conversations with my parents’ friends, taxi drivers, or with people I meet at the beach, whenever I tell them I’m trying to be a writer.

Let me be clear, right off – I have nothing against best-selling novels, and I have been known to be perfectly happy curling indulgently around one now and again. I would also, I’m not ashamed to admit, be thrilled to find one of my novels on the bestseller list some day, if it meant that I could then settle down into a happy groove of producing fiction for the rest of my days.

But I don’t think I would get too much argument from anyone by suggesting that the bestseller list today doesn’t represent the most worthwhile literature being produced right now. However, when I tell people, for example, that I haven’t read The DaVinci Code or some other familiar title of the moment, the reaction can be anything from surprise to perplexity. “But aren’t you a big reader?” And when I proceed to defend myself by mentioning authors I am reading – Aimee Bender, Haruki Murakami, Joseph Roth, Peter Ho Davies, Raymond Chandler – I often get blank stares.

I suppose this is why I find it interesting and just a little bit quaint that two of the great literary minds of our generation, Jonathan Franzen and Ben Marcus, are engaged in a public debate, mostly conducted through Harper’s magazine, about the value of realistic fiction versus experimental fiction, as if the either-or equation presented by these two stylistic forms could actually solve the question of why people aren’t reading more – and if they are reading, why are they picking up such trash?

Franzen, for his part, worries in a Harper’s piece that was once titled, “Perchance to Dream,” and then reissued in his book, How to Be Alone, as “Why Bother,” that the social novel no longer has a place in literary culture because it can’t possibly expect to deliver to readers what other forms culture — from television news to the Internet or even extreme sports – already provide to mass audiences. Ben Marcus, in a piece in last month’s Harper’s magazine, “Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It,” argues that Franzen shouldn’t do so much hand-wringing over the question of literature’s popularity, or the fame of great contemporary authors as compared to that of movie stars or sports heroes. He, instead, writes that because literature is an art form, it is, like all other art forms, dependent upon experimentation and innovation for its very survival.

There is another group of writers and literary critics (not mentioned by either Franzen or Marcus), who create what you might call third camp. This group presses for neither realistic nor experimental fiction, but what, for lack of a better word, we might refer to as “the well-told tale.” If this camp had a manifesto, it might be Michael Chabon’s “Editor’s Notebook” preface to McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales. Chabon’s argument goes something like this: since 1950, American literary culture has labored under the burden of a kind of literary snobbery that excludes all but one form of literature. The term fiction, he argues, has in fact been only one mode of fiction, “the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story.”

Chabon and his supporters, who include a range of authors from Sherman Alexie to Stephen King, argue for a revival of all the lost genres of short fiction, ghost stories and westerns, detective stories and horror stories – in short, stories that are both fun and entertaining and serious, but that don’t require a level of readerly seriousness that feels like swallowing a brick.

All three groups, I should point out, cast themselves as marginal figures, defending a lost art against all who would encroach on their literary ideals. But none of them have a right to claim this status. Not a single one – Franzen, Marcus or Chabon — would be denied a spot at Yaddo or MacDowell. None of them need worry that their books will be published, that their articles will appear in print, or that they will ever be barred from writing for The New York Times Book Review. So, why are they so worried that their type of fiction is so embattled?

I thought I might find the answer to this question by doing a little cultural analysis of my own. It seemed to me that each group had two things in common. First, they were arguing that their form of literature was under-appreciated by the masses of readers. Second, they were arguing that their type of writing had a place in the cultural canon – that is, that ultimately they would hope that future generations would validate the form of writing they’re arguing for, by awarding it with praise, and by studying it in academic circles.

I decided to retrieve a list of bestselling novels in the United States for the last century to determine whether there has ever been a correlation between what we consider great works of literature and what is considered popular fiction. I also wanted to find out whether something has changed in the way we view literature – and whether people are really fighting for spots on the cultural charts, or whether they’re actually just seeking esteem from their literary peers.

I used the Lists of Bestselling Novels in the United States, available HERE, based on Publisher’s Weekly’s lists of bestsellers (not the NYT’s list). It includes ten titles for each year from 1900 to 1998, for a total of 980 titles. I then compared this list with a list of Pulitzer Prize winning novels I found on the Pulitzer web site to find out how many novels from the bestseller lists ever won literature’s top honor.

My first job was to scan the ninety-eight years searching for works that we might today deem “great literature” of the sort that, for instance, the English Department of a major American university would approve for an undergraduate’s general education (such as the General Education in Literature course I teach at Iowa). (I do not pretend to have read even a fraction of the books on the bestseller lists since 1900, so my judgments are made primarily based on my literary education and the biases handed down to me by professors and literary criticism I have read.)

Out of the 980 bestsellers dating back to the beginning of the century, I found fifteen that I’d expect to be slam-dunks – i.e. I wouldn’t have to spend a lot of time explaining to the English Department why they were worthy of serious consideration. They were:

1905: The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (#8, also 1906, #9)
1906: The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (#6)
1921: The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (#4) (Pulitzer)
1922: Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (#10, also 1923, #4))
1931: The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck (#1, also 1931, #1) (Pulitzer)
1937: Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck (#8)
1939: The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (#1; also #8, 1940) (Pulitzer)
1940: For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway (#4, also #5, 1941)
1943: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith (#4)
1952: The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (#7) (Pulitzer)
1958: Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (#3, also #8, 1959)
1961: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (#3) (Pulitzer)
Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger (#5, also #2, 1962)
1963: Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters by J.D. Salinger (#3)
1969: Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth (#1)

After compiling that list, I followed up by making another list of titles that might not be approved for a “greatest-hits-of-literature” class, but that I felt I could convince the English Department would be worthy of academic study. They were:

1919: The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad (#2)
1921: Main Street by Sinclair Lewis (#1)
1924: So Big by Edna Ferber (#1) (Pulitzer)
1925: Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis (#7) (Pulitzer)
1927: Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis (#1)
1928: The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder (#1) (Pulitzer)
1929: Scarlet Sister Mary by Julia Peterkin (#9) (Pulitzer)
1930: Cimarron by Edna Ferber (#1)
The Woman of Andros by Thorton Wilder (#3)
1931: Years of Grace by Margaret Ayer Barnes (#5) (Pulitzer)
1934: Lamb in His Bosom by Caroline Miller (Pulitzer)
` 1935: Lost Horizon by James Hilton (#8)
1936: Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (#1) (Pulitzer)
It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis (#5)
Eyeless in Gaza Aldous Huxley (#10)
1937: The Years by Virginia Woolf (#6)
1938: The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (#1) (Pulitzer)
The Citadel by A. J. Cronin (#2)
1943: The Human Comedy by William Saroyan (#5)
1944: A Bell for Adano by John Hersey (#9) (Pulitzer)
1948: The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer (#2)
1950: East of Eden by John Steinbeck (#3)
Across the River and Into the Trees by Ernest Hemingway (#3)
1952: The Cain Mutiny by Herman Wouk (#2) (Pulitzer)
1953: From Here to Eternity by James Jones (#5)
1956: Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor (#6) (Pulitzer)
The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir (#9)
1957: Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (#10)
1958: Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (#1, also #2, 1959)
1959: Lady Chatterly’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence (#5)
The Ugly American by Eugene L. Burdick (#6)
1960: Advise and Consent by Allen Drury (#1) (Pulitzer)
1961: The Agony and the Ecstasy (#1)
The Winter of Our Discontent (#10)
1964: The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John Le Carre (#1)
Herzog by Saul Bellow (#3)
1966: The Fixer by Bernard Malamud (#6) (Pulitzer)
1967: The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron (#2) (Pulitzer)
The Chosen by Chaim Potok (#3)
1970: Islands in the Stream by Ernest Hemingway (#3)
Travels with My Aunt by Graham Greene (#9)
1973: Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut (#3)
1976: Humbolt’s Gift by Saul Bellow (#10) (Pulitzer)
1977: Delta of Venus by Anais Nin (#9)
1979: Sophie’s Choice by William Styron (#2)
Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut (#5)
1981: The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving (#2)
1983: The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (#7)
1989: The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie (#6)
1998: A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe (#4)

I hope it goes without saying that my choices are, by necessity, subjective, and that these lists could be reorganized in infinite permutations based on a reader’s, or teacher’s, own prejudices and personal tastes. Herzog may belong on the top list, for example, as could Virginia Woolf, The Years, and one might easily make a case that A Tree Grows in Brooklyn belongs on the secondary list and not the first.
I have also tried to be conservative in my list-making. There may be other works on the bestseller lists that deserve a critical re-examination. Someone could certainly argue that I might’ve added more works by John Le Carre or Sinclair Lewis. The Pit by Frank Norris (1903) could be a contender for the second list, and Sir Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes mystery, The Hound of the Baskervilles, might fit into a course on historic mystery novels. One could make a case to also add Giant, by Edna Ferber, who won the Pulitzer in 1925 and was a charter member of the Algonquin Round Table.

We could also elevate a few more titles to higher stature, for example, by teaching them in a course the explored the socio-political impact of novels made into films. Our syllabus would include such works as Grand Hotel, by Vicki Baum (#4, 1931) or Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin (#7, 1967). Great books? Maybe not. But who can deny the impact they’ve had on our culture?

In total, I came up with 20 bestsellers that were also Pulitzer Prize winners; so in just under 20 percent of the years from 1900 to 1998, a critically acclaimed novel was also popular. And I came up with at least 65 titles – and maybe 70 at best — that would be worthy of teaching to future generations of young people. That’s about a 6.5 to 7 percent success rate, if we are to measure success based on literary value and longevity.

I had a mixture of emotional and intellectual responses after reviewing these lists and attempting to categorize the titles. I have to admit I was surprised. I had always assumed – as most people do these days – that the term “bestseller” was essentially synonymous with “trash.” But many of the great books we recognize today as literary masterpieces were, in their time, popular novels.

I was also struck by how difficult it was to find recognizable titles in both the first two decades and the final two decades of the century. It’s possible that I simply don’t know enough about the great works of American literature from 1900 to 1920, and there might be titles that I overlooked. But since I was born in 1969, and because I’ve been reading the Book Review for about 15 years, I found it a little surprising then to note that during my adult reading years there have been very few serious novels that achieved mass popularity. The only ones I found in the last two decades of the 20th Century were The Name of the Rose, The Satanic Verses, and A Man in Full.

The period we might call the “Golden Age” of bestseller fiction came in mid-century. As I got into the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, I was surprised to find myself highlighting not one or two recognizable titles every couple of years, but three or four sometimes in a single year. In 1961, for example, Americans were reading, or at least buying, The Agony and the Ecstacy (#1), Franny and Zooey (#2), To Kill A Mockingbird (#3), Tropic of Cancer (#6) and Steinbeck’s The Winter of Our Discontent (#10). That’s a pretty high-brow reading list compared to 1994, when three of the top ten bestsellers (#4, #7, and #8) were by Danielle Steele, and others were John Grisham (#1), Tom Clancy (#2), James Redfield (#3), Stephen King (#5) and Michael Crichton (#10).

What also struck me was that the names that hit the charts in 1994 are the same ones whose names appear on just about every list from 1980 to 1998, along with other repeat performers such as James Patterson, Patricia Cornwell, Scott Turow, Robert Ludlam and Mary Higgins Clark. If we were to judge literary value by the most books most Americans were buying, Danielle Steel would be our greatest American author, since her name appears on bestseller lists 29 times from 1983 to 1998, holding 24 percent of slots from 1990 to 1998 alone. She appears on the list three times each year in 1994, 1997, and 1998 and twice per year in 1985, 1987, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1995 and 1996.

Is Danielle Steel a great writer? I have not read any of her books so I am in no position to judge. But I very much doubt that anyone who considers themselves a serious reader of fiction would argue that she is the finest practitioner of the craft. But I do have to disagree with Anthony Lane, who, in a 1994 essay in the New Yorker concluded that the bestseller lists is no trashier now than it ever has been. Looking at my list, it’s clear the bestsellers have gotten far trashier.

The bestseller in fiction took a precipitous turn in the 1980s towards what might be termed the “throwaway read,” a novel with a shelf life of yogurt. Interestingly, that doesn’t seem to be quite as true with nonfiction bestsellers. America’s nonfiction bestseller lists still have some pretty hefty titles. This week, for example, the nonfiction bestseller list included Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, both complicated and voluminous works.

And nonfiction readers seem to be much more consistent in their reading tastes. Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, “exploring the importance of hunch and instinct to the workings of the mind” has been on the bestseller charts for 42 weeks this week, as Friedman’s book has stayed aloft 30 weeks. Steven D. Leavitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s book Freakonomics continues to be purchased after 29 weeks, and David McCullough’s 1776 keeps ticking at 23 weeks. Meantime, no fiction title on this week’s bestseller list has enjoyed that status for more than five weeks in a row.

What explains the runaway marketplace success of authors like Steel, who has produced more than fifty books with the speed of a Thai Nike sneaker factory, or Patterson, who advertises on television and who claims as a literary innovation his tendency to write very short chapters, so his works “feel addictive?”
Corporate consolidation of the publishing industry and the rise of the mega-chain bookstore are part of the answer, because the combination of the two forces has led to the decline of the number of titles published and a shift towards promotion of nonfiction, celebrity-driven titles, and mass-market fiction. The result is that “good fiction, investigative reporting and other quality books are simply being squeezed out of the market,” as a 1999 Multinational Monitor report asserts. Put another way, the books this industry prefers to produce are pre-packaged products, infinitely reproducible, and as easy digested as McDonald’s Big Macs.

Literacy rates also contribute. Last year, the National Endowment for the Arts issued a report, “Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America,” which found that there had been an overall decline of 10 percentage points in literary readers from 1982 to 2002, representing a loss of 20 million potential readers.

Shortened attention spans may also be to blame. According to Publisher’s Weekly, an average person in 2004 spent a total of 86 hours a year reading, down from 101 hours a year in 1995. It’s possible more people are picking up throwaway novels because they simply want to spend less time reading.

But I fear that after all this analysis I’ve only ended up where Franzen began in 1997. Franzen blames the consumer economy and digital culture competing for peoples’ attention and making formerly serious readers less serious about books. He asserts that new media deluges us with so much information and entertainment that most people don’t feel as if they need to turn to books. “As… the novel’s audience peels away, what’s left is mainly the hard core of resistant readers, who read because they must. That core is a very small prize to be divided among a very large number of working novelists.”

But then I hesitate – aren’t some of the people who read trashy fiction people who also read “because they must?” What about the 11.23 million readers who bought John Grisham’s The Pelican Brief, despite the ever-present lure of the Internet, paint ball and extreme sports to distract them? Irving Bacheller, one of the most popular authors of the first decade of the same century, who made three appearances on the bestseller lists of 1900 and 1901, only sold a million copies of his most famous novel, Eben Holden: A Tale of the North Country (1900), at a time when there was no Internet, no video games, no television and not even a decent pin-ball game to distract them.

If Crichton’s readers don’t care about books, why read at all? Do we forget about these folks because, as Franzen says, because they treat books as “a portable substitute for TV?” Do we focus only on those people who felt culturally required to read good fiction at some point in the past? Franzen writes in “Why Bother?” that he was dismayed to find, after publishing his second book that, “All of a sudden it seemed as if friends of mine who used to read no longer even apologized for having stopped.” Did they stop because there weren’t good books out there for them to read, or because the cultural requirement seems to have been lifted? If the latter is the answer, then were they serious readers in the first place?

There is a very real crisis of American letters that began in the 1980s and seems to have only gotten worse in the last 25 years – and that is, the books that most Americans are buying and reading correspond very little to what we hope we’ll hand down to future generations as works of great literary merit. But instead of addressing the readers who are out there, a handful of literary critics are arguing with each other over what should attract members of this “hard core of resistant readers.” They’re fighting over what gets produced in literary journals and published in the ever-dwindling space offered for fiction in general-interest publications – realistic or experimental fiction.

Leaving behind the question of why people might prefer throwaway books to “serious literature,” let’s explore what we, as people who care about the future of great literature, can do about it.

Do we continue to allow this gulf between the readers of throwaway fiction and readers of “serious literary stuff” to widen? Do we, the “insiders” of the literary profession, turn our backs on those readers and continue to debate each other over which camp deserves the most critical acclaim and academic canonization? Do we demonize one group of writers in order to uplift our own segment of the literary elite? Or do we try and find a way, as authors, as people who believe in the value of “serious books,” to get good reading materials into the hands of the readers who already are reading?

Without, I hope, oversimplifying Franzen’s argument, it seems unfair to target masters of the craft such as William Gaddis, who is the subject of his 2002 New Yorker essay, “Mr. Difficult,” by saying that his work is too hard to read and not entertaining enough. He adds to his list of “difficult reading” authors such as Pynchon, DeLillo, Coover, Barth and Barthelme. Following this thread, I suppose Franzen would basically argue for tossing out most “post-modernist” books in favor of books with naturalistic logic and easy readability such as, say, Age of Innocence, which once attracted a popular readership.

I tend to agree with Marcus when he argues that there’s nothing wrong with a tough read – and in fact, sometimes it can be very enjoyable. And I agree that asking authors to always reproduce formerly-successful modes encourages writers to “behave like cover bands, embellishing the oldies, maybe, while ensuring that buried in the song is an old familiar melody to make us smile with recognition, so that we might read more from memory than by active attention.” Realism is already the reigning paradigm in literature today, or as Marcus puts it, the “incumbent mode.” And it’s still not popular enough for Franzen.

Franzen makes a good argument when he suggests that authors strive to have a “contract” with our readers – that when they take the time away from paint ball to read our serious novels we should provide them with something “fun and entertaining” that they can sink their teeth into. But “fun” and “entertaining” are pretty subjective terms, and I suspect that what’s fun for Franzen might not be fun to me – since he’s a big fan of bird-watching – and what’s entertaining to the guy I meet on the beach who’s happily reading Blink may not be entertaining to me.

I agree with Marcus that it’s unfair to categorize everything that doesn’t have a straightforward naturalistic plot as “experimental,” because that is far too reductive. The experimental label probably turns a lot of people away from great books that are not only worthy of reading but that are also “fun and entertaining.” But I disagree with Marcus when he argues that we basically forget about the reader who picks up throwaway novels because the pursuit of great art shouldn’t be dragged down by the lowest-common denominator.

But there is another way. Literature doesn’t have to be either “difficult and experimental” or “friendly and realistic.” This dichotomy is artificial, anyway. Chabon makes the case that it’s time we throw open the doors of the literary castle to a greater variety of literature, including genre fiction and other “low” forms that critics have deemed, in the past, unworthy of serious literary consideration. People like murder mysteries and horror stories and ghost stories and romances – that’s why they’re taking the time away from paint ball to read Stephen King, Danielle Steel, Patricia Cornwall, etc. Why do we feel required to dismiss this entire body of readers? Is it because we assume they are afraid of material that gives them, as Franzen puts it in his essay, “a sense of having company in this great human enterprise?” I’d wager that even most literary writers have at one time been obsessed with some genre, whether it’s science fiction or self-help or romance, or detective stories – though most likely they’ve kept these feelings closeted. They probably even secretly want to write these types of books.

Chabon argues for more reader-friendly tales, and even those that come from genres that have been long been discredited by the academy. He wants those modes – and new storytelling modes, too – to be practiced by writers who know a thing or two about the craft, so that the works can be character-driven, syntactically complex, ideologically complex, as well as “thrilling.” This is where his argument essentially intersects with both the points made by Franzen and Marcus. Franzen wants literature to be popular. Marcus wants new modalities. Is it so impossible to imagine that popular forms could be harnessed by writers who actually have something to say about the “great human enterprise?” Shouldn’t the best practitioners of our craft be encouraged to write the kinds of stories that people will enjoy, and to do so with all the intelligence, wit, attention to detail, understanding of voice, tone, energy and skill that is now devoted primarily to the realistic, naturalistic, mode?

I would argue that realistic fiction – as defined by Chabon as the “the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story” – is in fact just another genre. Anyone who has been reading literature since the 1960s is familiar with the formula, the style, the arc, and the anticipated weightiness and lyricism of the prose. We know at the end of a realist story that someone will have an epiphanic moment, just as we know that at the end of a detective novel the mystery will be solved in some way we didn’t expect. We can almost set our clocks by the point, about three-quarters through a New Yorker story, when we are supposed to be moved to tears or to have a sudden awakening. If these expectations from realistic fiction prevail, why should we be surprised that readers are bored with “serious literary fiction?”

The detective novel – now a well-worn form that seems to have been born with prehistoric man, was actually only invented 150 years ago by Edgar Allan Poe. The form has hundreds of terrible practitioners, perhaps thousands. But it also gave us some works of art, such as The Maltese Falcon by Dashielle Hammett. Great works can often come out of what we consider to be low-art. Huckleberry Finn is an adventure novel; Gone with the Wind is a romance novel; The Old Man and the Sea was a seafaring tale.

We don’t think of them that way today, because they’ve withstood the test of time. The reason is that they were written well and overcame their genre categorization. My suspicion is that in the future we’ll be less concerned about what mode of writing an author chose and more concerned with whether they approached the subject of truth with some honesty, humanity, and insight. When new and old genres accomplish this, we can throw away the useless labels “genre” and “experimental.”

-This piece was never published but was Nina Siegal’s MFA Thesis paper at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, May 2006

George Saunders Interview with Nina Siegal

March 2006

Q: I sense in your work a willingness to critique American culture both
subtly and overtly. How do you feel about being called a “political” writer? And
if you are political, how so?

A: Well, I’m a little leery of that term, only because it often means
“someone who is advocating, through fiction, a particular political
view.” This is death, for storytelling, because it implies a kind of
incuriosity. Fiction should always be saying “on the other hand;”
complicating our habitual view of things. Also, fiction doesn’t
advocate very effectively, simply because the deck is stacked: You’re
creating a world, and the rules by which that world works, so it’s easy
to make things come out your way. (Look! All the redheads ARE evil,
just like I said!) And readers feel this, I think, and pull away. As
they should.

But having said that, I’ll also say I believe the primary work that
stories do is ethical. That is, you take a character and put him in a
shitstorm, and see how (and what) he does. If you design the shitstorm
right, this becomes a meditation on our plight here on earth. Which is
by its nature ‘political,’ ie, about the search for The Decent, an
examination of the question: What is it that disturbs our grace and
makes us behave badly? And in our time - with our big media and all
pervasive government - the answer to this question often feels
political.

I think the main thing fiction does is rev up the quality of our
awareness, make us more involved in the world, more enamored of it.
And this feels political maybe, especially in a culture like ours,
where so much of what we do is infused with dullness and materialist
sloth. Fiction is a way to rouse the private voice inside ourselves,
which is a radical thing to do when so much depends on muffling that
voice and forcing it into acquiescence.

As far as critiquing American culture, you bet. Although I hope
there’s also a note of praise in there as well, of celebration. I am
befuddled and charmed by America, in addition to being irritated by,
and impatient with, it.

Q: Next, maybe you can you talk a little bit about your fascination
with theme parks. Do your futuristic or absurdist visions of them
express some vision of America’s dystopian evolution? Or how would you
describe what they represent?

A: Honestly, I just started writing them because I had so much fun
doing it. The conceit of setting a story in a theme park. I don’t know.
It made me write in a more compressed, edgy way, helped me break free
of certain realist tics I’d acquired. It was an accident. And then the
political overtones were there, but at first I kind of didn’t realize
it. I mean, now I can see all the ways that a “theme park” is
“metaphorical” and all of that - but first it has to be a real theme
park, with real people in it (”real” in the sense of: a viable, albeit
distorted, scale model of an actual theme park and actual people).

(A little PS to the above):
In terms of this new book - I think it is political, in the sense that
it is kind of a poem to America - this new weird America we’ve made,
drifting toward lying and manipulation and corporate sub-nations and
consumerism in ways both beautiful and sinister. And I confess: Ever
since I was a kid I’ve been obsessed and in love with the idea of
America. I used to sit around drawing flags, etc. Used to (and still
do) sit around wondering “What is America really all about” and “Is
America ultimately a good thing or a bad thing?” and “What’s good about
us?” and “What’s bad?” And lately I think we don’t really know what we
stand for anymore. After 9/11 we were: the scared country that wasn’t
going to get burned again. Then we became: Those guys who believe in
Freedom above all else, but won’t be bothered to define the term. So
what I think we’re in need of is a vision or a goal that is in scale
with our capabilities; in the absence of that, we’re going to have
issues, in the same way that a very powerful person with nothing to do
that might lift himself out of himself, is going to have issues.

Q: Gosh, it’s really wonderful to get a chance to correspond with you
like this…

A: Likewise! And feel free to tell me if I’m being too long-winded.
You’re asking really interesting questions.

Q: In any case, picking up where we left off, in terms of the new book,
how do you see it as a continuation or evolution from where you’ve been
before? Are you going deeper into similar territory, or are you feeling
somehow freer to explore things that you only sort of touched on
before? Or are you trying things you somehow feared trying in the past?

A: One thing I like about writing story collections is that they are
almost impossible to plan. Because they’re made up of X number of
small projects, most of your energy is spent on trying to make those
small projects work. And then you look up and those X number of
stories are saying something when taken as a group, something you
didn’t plan on saying, something you didn’t know you knew, and
(hopefully) something that is more complicated and nuanced than any
pithy reduction of it you can come up with. So I guess I’d say I
hope the answer to each of your questions above is yes.

The one thing I am proud of about this book is that I wrote many of the
stories out of a kind of ragged anger/sadness about what was going on
in our country. And I wasn’t sure that was allowed.my artistic
instincts told me it maybe wasn’t (this may reference your question
above about fiction writers being wary of being accused of being
political). But finally I opted to believe that if I was feeling it,
there must be a way for it to be used in stories. So whatever virtues
or defects the collection has come out of this experiment.

Q: Also, you seem to be particularly comfortable in the novella form, a
fiction category that I’ve heard lots of people call unsaleable. What’s
your attraction to the novella? And who are some of the novella writers
you’ve considered your big influences (if there are any).

A: I’ve never really studied novellas especially. I like some of
Tolstoy’s longer stories, which border on novellas (Master and Man, The
Kreutzer Sonata). I love “The Overcoat,” which is pretty long. My
guess is that this issue of being comfortable in a form is parallel to
the fast-twitch/slow-twitch thing in sports..a person has a kind of
natural frequency in which they write, that in turn suggests a
form/length.

Q: I’ve seen you compared to Orwell in several places, particularly
Animal Farm. What do you make of that? And how do you feel about the
comparison?

A: Well, I’m always happy to be compared to Orwell, even though it
will always involve, once the comparison is made, him standing
victoriously with his foot on my chest, twitching that little mustache
of his. The last book (”The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil”) got
lumped in with Animal Farm, mainly because it was on the book jacket,
but I’m not able to write the kind of linear satire that he does so
brilliantly in that book. What I do, I think, is exaggerate certain
human tendencies and make a kind of distorted image of the “real” world
- but the image is inconsistently distorted, more fun-house mirror than
shrinking ray..like a scale-model, but melted. Orwell is a good
example of someone for whom the political and the personal are one and
the same thing, and I love him for that - for his integrity and his
high expectations of the world, and his honesty about it when the world
is disappointing.

(I’ve combined the two questions)…

Q: Jonathan Franzen and Ben Marcus and others in the literary world
have recently had some back and forth (mostly in Harper’s) about the
current state of literary fiction in America. For his part, Franzen
has expressed concern over the death of the “social novel,” which we
might think of as the kind of book that might spark a national debate
over some topical question like the state of, I don’t know, the
American family. Let’s start with Franzen’s argument. Do you agree that
the social novel is defunct, or that somehow publishing forces (mass
market booksellers, consolidation) have somehow made it harder for
fiction writers to publish and get read in a socially resonant way?
(Feel free to disagree with my characterization of Franzen’s argument)

From Marcus’ perspective, it’s experimental fiction that’s out-of-vogue
or under attack in literary circles. I suppose your work can be
characterized as experimental, although it’s also highly narrative and
accessible (although one doesn’t necessarily rule out the other). Where
would you place yourself on this continuum? And does this debate
energize you in any way? Are you on one side or the other?

A: I have a feeling that to some extent this old experimental vs not
thing (which goes back at least as far as Gardner vs Gass and I expect
even back to Pushkin vs Gogol and beyond) is a version of that old SNL
sketch, where this TV announcer says to two fighting people: “Hold it,
hold it, you two! You’re both right! It’s a dessert topping AND a
floor wax!” By which I mean, I think that both Franzen and Marcus are
on to something. Literary fiction does seem somehow not as widely read
as it should be (not as influential) AND work that is edgy or difficult
does seem marginalized. (I find Franzen very experimental and find
Marcus’s work to be emotionally moving/satisfying).

What I’d say is that personally I’ve been frustrated to some extent by
my inability to draw a bigger audience and I’ve been doing a lot of
soul-searching about why this is. Is it because I’m so smart? That
would be nice. But somehow I doubt it. Then I wonder is it because I
am doing fancy-pants Elitist art moves, too insecure to be a real
populist? Am I being punished for being a product and landlord of the
MFA Ghetto? Possibly. Or is because the Masses are drones? Well, I
think of Dickens: he did okay. But then I think of “Swapping
Proctologists” and think, well, hmm, maybe they are Drones. My secret
fear is that I am somehow writing in a way that both 1) pre-guarantees
a small audience and 2) stems from some flaw in my personality, ie, I
am not big-hearted enough to write something that ‘most’ (more?) people
could read and enjoy and be moved by.

My resolution is to try and make my writing as big as I can while, at
the same time, recognizing that many of the best effects available in
fiction are highwire effects that the majority of readers might not be
ready for. Also trying to remember that the way fiction might
influence a culture is complicated. How so? Well, unlike, say a
movie or a television show, a book is being read by a self-selected
group of people, who are highly trained in processing that particular
medium. And I would say, from what I’ve seen at readings etc, that
this group is also disproportionately influential - more energetic,
kind, motivated, wealthier, etc. So, if one of them reads a book,
that book gets internalized and goes forth in this highly concentrated
form, so to speak. I find that encouraging.

Also I remind myself that the art that is read or watched by gazillions
often is shilling for the status quo - in tone, in content, in its de
facto assumptions.

And finally - I once heard Tobias Wolff say that ALL good writing is
experimental. Nobody sets out to write something that’s been done
before. So maybe the trick lies in recognizing that some supposedly
experimental writing is deeply conservative and some ostensibly realist
work is actually radical. And trying our best not to subscribe to this
paradigm too rigidly, since, in that case, the best we could do is
Completely Be One or the Other. And who wants to do that?

PS Post the interview anywhere you want, even a phone pole or two.
Maybe that will get me the big audience I crave (see above).

Q: It seems to me that your work is very accessible, in that it is
written in a vernacular that’s easy to understand — no Latin phrases,
for example, or references to obscure philosophical movements or Ezra
Pound — in fact, much of your voicing is intensely contemporary, with
colloquialisms, corporate-speak and some fun managerial gobbledygook.
Also your situations would be pretty identifiable and resonant (though
I’m going to test out this theory later in the semester by having some
of my Midwestern students read your work). And I dare to say that your
work is also big-hearted, in the sense that it’s funny and engaging and
loving towards its down-trodden protagonists.

I don’t posit all this simply as flattery, but because I hope we could
maybe delve deeper into this question. If I’m right, and that it’s not
some flaw in your approach, is there any way we see the lack of mass
popularity of your work as a symptom of something societal? Is “serious
fiction” for lack of a better term, somehow antithetical to the
American way of media consumption… even of books? Does it lack easy
answers or sensationalist or sentimental plot lines? Are mass-market
readers conditioned somehow to want material that doesn’t make them
question their world all that much? Gosh, this is a long question….

Okay, here’s a simpler way to ask: What WOULD it mean to be “a real
populist?” Would you have to be Stephen King or James Frey? (or: Is
there an equivalent of Steinbeck and Arthur Miller writing today? Could
there be?)

A: Well, I agonized over this one awhile and then it occurred to me
that one obvious answer is: I’m writing short stories. This is a
difficult medium, for readers and writers, kind of an acquired taste.
The pleasures have more to do with a knowledge of the form and then a
satisfaction at how the limits of the form are being transcended.

Aside from that, I have the feeling that there’s something about the
darkness in my writing that puts some people off. To me, it’s not
really all that dark - but there is a turn in my stories toward, let’s
say, the “there but for the grace of God I” moment that I think makes
some readers uncomfortable - they find me negative, or mopy, or too
inclined to dig through the pile of gold to find the little pile of
crap, say. Why is he so worried? Why not concentrate on some happy
things? And I sometimes find myself agreeing with them. I aspire to
be able to look at any moment and write about it. But fiction skews
toward the catastrophic and, as somebody once said, “Happiness writes
white.” Nobody cares about the day Little Red Riding Hood stayed on
the path and got back home safely. So what I content myself with doing
is try to induce glee within this ‘dark’ context, showing that yes,
misery, cruelty, hatred are real, but that there are counterweights -
humor, artistry, etc - that compensate these things. Something like
that.

But you know, it is a really interesting question: Is it true that
something has happened in American culture that precludes a Steinbeck
1) existing and 2) being read? I really don’t know about that. I
think for now I’m just going to contemplate that one a little bit. It
seems to me that “The Corrections” did what a Steinbeck book used to be
able to do: garner much-deserved critical praise AND a mass audience.
In film it doesn’t seem like as much of a problem - I think of, say,
Wes Anderson. But part of me thinks there’s been a kind of upward
ghettoification of artistic culture which has somehow made it more
snide and more content to preach to the converted, while at the same
time there’s been a kind of dumbing-down in American culture in
general.a kind of reactionary swerve away from anything perceived to be
“critical” or “negative” or “super-serious.” So that means a big gap
between writers and mainstream readers. I don’t know. Were Americans
reading Steinbeck before Oprah suggested it? Are they reading Chehkov
or Dickens? I really don’t know. When I generalize I start sounding
like USA Today (”We’re Generally Eating Slightly Larger Fish, While
Listening to Statistically More Violin-Engorged Songs! And Loving It!”)

By the way, thanks for all the nice things you said above. I
appreciate it.

Q: Hey, sure. I do hate asking these over-generalized questions that are utterly
impossible to answer (if Dostoyevsky were American and living in Tampa,
what would he be writing about?) Anyway, I appreciate your approach to
the question and I like tossing it around.

You mentioned this sense that your writing takes something lightly
comic and then flips it so that it’s dark. This reminds me of Lenny
Bruce jokes or maybe that moment when Buster Keaton is sinking in his
wooden dinghy and it’s funny and it’s funny until you realize he really
is sinking and then it’s all pathos. I think I heard an NPR reporter
asking you about this quality of your work. I’m curious, where do you
think this approach came from? Is it just a way you’re naturally
inclined to understand the world?

I think, yes, it’s my natural inclination for sure. Mamet talks about
how fictional imagination is related to daydreaming. I think what he
means is that the spontaneous, unforced quality of daydreaming is what
we’re shooting for when writing. He uses the example, if I’m
remembering correctly, of that moment when we imagine making our
deathbed speech, or getting a chance to talk with an old lover and
explain ourselves. The pathos in my writing feels like this - hardwired
in somehow. My ‘progress’ as a writer, such as it was, had to do with
letting this out naturally. If I try to imagine someone being heroic,
it feels… difficult. But to imagine someone being humiliated and
struggling against that, then getting insulted, then falling into a
hole… and loving him while this is happening, but still making it
happen… yes, that I can do. Why? God only knows. Probably it’s deep
and sick.

Q: On another idea: I heard you talking to the same NPR interviewer
about your style or diction, and how you realized at some point along
the line that you weren’t going to be writing Faulkner-style prose and
that you had to write in a voice that felt more comfortable to your
middle-class upbringing (it’s quite possible I’m remembering this
incorrectly). Can you talk a little about whether you think there’s a
kind of class element to prose style?

A: I don’t know if it’s class as much as accessing certain inner
voices coming to realize that any voice you can “do” is a valid one.
Or maybe that there are certain voices that we have easy access to, and
so our form of being articulate must have something to do with using
those. I suspect that the Faulkneresque tone came pretty naturally to
him, and when he finally started writing that way it felt like coming
home. In my case, the voice was simpler and more vernacular than what
I, at that time, considered ‘literary.’ It was also often flat-out
inarticulate. And I thought: Well, sure, I know a lot of people, in my
corporate life, or back at the slaughterhouse, who were inarticulate
but 1) passionate and 2) were inarticulate in ways the were not
meaningless (that is, the pattern of their inarticulateness came out of
a psychological/cultural place that was interesting and important).
But the bottom line for me was the realization when I hit 30 or so,
that books had a lot of sentences in them, and so it might be best to
write in a style that came naturally, because I didn’t like the idea of
faking it for so many sentences.

By the way, if Doestoyevsky was an American living in Tampa, he’d be
writing about Tolstoy, who would be an Armenian in Bayonne, New Jersey.
Trust me, I really know my Russian lit.

Q: I noticed earlier that I didn’t quite pick up on a very interesting
point you made about how you pick up and process what’s happening with
America, and how we respond to it. It seems like with 9/11, in
particular, there was some kind of sense that we had to have a
respectful distance — or at least some “processing time” — before we
can respond as creative people to what’s going on in our world. In a
sense, you’re saying that your book is a fairly immediate response to a
certain feeling of instability or frustration with American
culture/politics but that it somehow was able to come out during your
experience of going through it. I like that. I can think of some other
writers who tend to respond in an almost topical way — maybe Tony
Kushner or Grace Paley at one time. Can literary writing “take the
temperature” of the cultural or political climate in a country at a
particular time? Or do we need to sort of wait, and understand our
socio-political culture only in retrospect?

A: I think it can respond pretty quickly. But ‘quickly’ defined
pretty broadly. I guess my feeling is, when something like 9/11
happens, it really just triggers or exaggerates existing American
trends and defects. So a writer would want to write something that
would both outlast the current political moment and harken back from
it, to other American (or just human) crises. So in some ways “The
Lottery” is a pretty good post-9/11 story. And I hope that some of the
stories in this new book will still have currency in 50 yrs, which I
think they will if people in power are still lying in slick ways to
those of us who aren’t.

When we responded to 9/11 by getting ultra-patriotic and insisting we
had “to do something,” that was nothing new with us. That was one very
pronounced vision of America, one you can see, for example, in the
lynch mob scene in Huck Finn. The tragic thing was that, in doing so,
we rejected another tradition of ours, that of waiting until the last
possible minute to get into wars, or maybe of being properly mindful of
the complexity of the world (which is also in that lynch mob scene, in
the guy who gets the mob to back down.) We made a choice of two
American paradigms and personally I think it was the wrong one.

But I think an artist can kind of be like a canary in the coal mine,
sensing something that isn’t fully developed or articulable (if that’s
a word) yet. And then the reader responds to this in the same kind if
intuitive way: something feels familiar and in an odd way
consoling…there’s something good and empowering about seeing ones’
own doubts and fears and queasinesses appear on the page. And though
it’s not reducible, the experience is still heartening, I think.

Also — way earlier you asked about my politics. I am pretty far left
but trying to cultivate a healthy disgust for hypocrites and liars of
both political stripes. I think our country is better than our
government would make people believe. I think the role of art is to
continually complicate our views and move them along the continuum from
conceptual knowledge toward specificity. Our current problems, seem to
me, have all to do with people in power who believe in their own ideas
too much, ideas that were too much formed in the lab and not enough on
the street. So we took those naive, bookish, messianic ideas and
mistook them for truth, and now are reaping the harvest. I don’t like
the demonizing of Bush et al — it’s too easy and won’t help us not
repeat all of this. The only thing that will help is going deep (in
kindness and true curiosity) and trying to really understand how the
world looks to them — people like Rumsfeld etc wake up in the morning
feeling very energized at the good they’re going to do during the day.
So this is where art comes in: It’s the one way we can become Other
long enough to understand that Other doesn’t really exist — we have it
all inside us, and can therefore understand, and can therefore
transform.

Whew! It must be late and I must be tired.

Q: Wow… well, I must say, this is spectacular.  Oh, and if you could send me a brief list of bio info, that would make it all very straight-forward for those who don’t know your history before you were a fiction writer.
I can’t tell you what an honor and a privilege it has been to be able to
have this discussion with you via email.
Thanks again, truly, for a wonderful correspondence.
all best,
Nina

A: Sure:
BIO INFO:
It went like this, more or less:
Graduated from Mines
Worked in Sumatra
Came home sick
Lived in Amarillo TX, LA, and Chicago, while working a bunch of
different jobs - slaughterhouse first, then doorman, then roofer.
Got into Syracuse MA program, studied with Toby Wolff. (this is like
1986-1987)
While in program, got married.
Had our first daughter in 1987, moved to Albany, worked as tech writer
for pharmaceutical company.
Moved to Rochester in about 1989, worked from then until 1996 as tech
writer/engineer for environmental company. Wrote CivilWarLand during
that period, it came out in 1996.
Started as a temporary hire at Syracuse in 1997, hired the following
year, been here since. I’m officially as Associate Professor in the
English Department, and I teach in the Creative Writing Program.

—————————–
George Saunders Profile
by Nina Siegal

American fiction has become a largely apolitical affair in recent
years, with even the savviest social novelists, such as Jonathan
Franzen, shrinking from sweeping cultural critiques. A notable
exception is George Saunders, the contemporary master of the darkly
comic short story, and the closest thing our literary moment has to
Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut.

He’s one of the only effective social satirists writing fiction
today,” says Deborah Treisman, fiction editor of The New Yorker
magazine, which has published at least one or two Saunders stories a
year since the mid-1990s.

The author of two acclaimed short story collections, Pastoralia and
Civilwarland in Bad Decline, Saunders has also written a novella, The
Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, and a children’s book, The Very
Persistent Grappers of Frip. In June, Riverhead will release his third
collection of short stories, In Persuasion Nation, which Publisher’s
Weekly calls “his best work yet.”

A Saunders story typically operates by some gross exaggeration of
contemporary life, set in a not-too-distant future where things have
gone irrevocably haywire. His admixture of comedy and pathos, absurdity
and realism, and his playful touch make it so you barely feel the
political sting. But it’s there.

Saunders doesn’t love the term “political” to describe his work. Any
attempt to advocate a particular political stance would be “death for
storytelling, because it implies a kind of incuriosity” he tells me,
and because “fiction should always be . . . complicating our habitual
view of things.”

By the same token, he believes in “ethical” fiction. “The main thing
that fiction does is rev up the quality of our awareness, make us more
involved in the world, more enamored of it,” he says. “And this feels
political, maybe, especially in a culture like ours, where so much of
what we do is infused with dullness and materialist sloth. Fiction is a
way to rouse the private voice inside ourselves, which is a very
radical thing to do when so much depends on muffling that voice and
forcing it into acquiescence.”

As far as his own politics, Saunders says, “I’m pretty far left but
trying to cultivate a healthy disgust for hypocrites and liars of both
political stripes.”

Born in 1958 and raised on the South Side of Chicago, Saunders says he
was inspired to write by reading Hemingway — and by a high school
teacher he had a crush on. But he didn’t take the usual route. In 1981,
he received a B.S. in Geophysical Engineering from the Colorado School
of Mines and went to work on an oil exploration crew in Sumatra.

“Somehow it never occurred to me to study English,” he says. “I was
very much under the sway of Ayn Rand at the time and didn’t want to be
a sniveling Thinker, but an exotically named Doer of Great Deeds. Like
a pirate or, in my case, an engineer.”

For a while after graduation, he had a series of odd jobs, working as a
knuckle-puller in a slaughterhouse in Texas, a doorman in Beverly
Hills, and then a roofer in Chicago. In the mid-1980s he decided to go
back to school, this time to study writing at Syracuse University in
upstate New York, where he worked with Tobias Wolff and Douglas Unger.

He got married during the program and had his first daughter in 1987.
After receiving his MFA, he moved to Albany to work as a technical
writer for a pharmaceutical company. From 1989 to 1996, he was in
Rochester, New York, working as a technical writer and environmental
engineer, while completing his first book, Civilwarland, by sneaking it
in at work, he says.

During this time, he submitted several short stories to The New
Yorker, and David McCormick, the then-assistant fiction editor,
responded with a positive letter to one of them, “Downtrodden Mary’s
Failed Campaign of Terror.” McCormick and the then-senior fiction
editor, Dan Menaker, asked him to send more work, and Saunders
submitted a couple more stories that were also rejected. When Tina
Brown took over the magazine, he tried again, submitting “Offloading
Mrs. Schwartz,” a story from the Civilwarland collection. That was the
winner.

“I waited for about a month, I guess,” he says. “Then I was out
working at Fort Drum in Watertown, doing a groundwater investigation
for the Corps of Engineers with another guy from our company, and got a
message at, of all places, the MicroTel, saying they’d accepted the
piece. Needless to say, a big night ensued.”

Civilwarland was published in 1996,  the same year Syracuse University hired him as a temporary creative writing teacher. He’s been there ever since, and is
now an associate professor in the English Department, teaching in the
Creative Writing Program.

Given the current trend in contemporary American literature toward
naturalism, it’s a wonderful surprise to come across a prominent
fiction writer who is willing to toy with reality and who is unafraid
to take on such taboo subjects as American consumerism, corporate
greed, and abuses of power.

“We’re in a political situation that’s just overflowing with ripeness
for satire, but satire is just not coming out in fiction as much,” says
Treisman, who is also Saunders’s editor at The New Yorker. “You see it
in a lot of political cartoons, short films, graphic novels, but it’s
hard to make it meaningful and appealing to readers in fiction, without
having them feel that they’re having their heads beaten on with a
hammer. That’s George’s gift. I never feel as if I’m being beaten over
the head.”

The same is not true for Saunders’s characters. They are often being
beaten over the head, berated into submission, absurdly dehumanized by
senseless and mean corporate-style overlords, most of them barely
literate.

Take, for example, the main character of “Pastoralia,” perhaps
Saunders’s most famous story, from the 2001 book of the same name, in
which the narrator and a woman named Janet perform the roles of
prehistoric man and mate in a financially failing Human History theme
park. They are required to fax their bosses Daily Partner Performance
Evaluations, and then live together in harmony. The faceless owners of
the theme park send the performers notes — and less and less goat to
eat every day. Meanwhile, Janet’s real family is falling apart, largely
due to the fact that she can’t sustain her son on her paltry salary.

In his novella, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, Saunders
takes us to Inner Horner, a country so small that only one person can
fit inside at a time, and the six other countrymen must wait their turn
in a “Short Term Residency Zone.” When the country suddenly shrinks and
can only accommodate three-quarters of a person, the Inner Hornerites
become refugees to Outer Horner, a much larger country, which is now
under the thrall of a new despot named Phil.

A “slightly bitter nobody,” until his brain slips out of his head,
Phil makes a rousing speech to his countrymen, saying that the Inner
Hornerites are weaklings and parasites. He instructs his fellow Outer
Hornerites to tax their neighbors for overstepping their bounds.

“Tax time, slackers,” said Phil. “Stop that stupid stretching and
listen up. You’re late with your dang taxes.”
“But we don’t have any money,” said Elmer. “You know we don’t. You
took it all yesterday.”
‘Oh, you people,” said Phil. “What did you have in mind? Living in our
beloved country for free forever? Do you know what we do? In our
country? We work. We believe that time is money. Therefore, as time
passes, in our land, we diligently work, which produces, guess what?
Wealth. Money.”

In an essay Saunders wrote to accompany the novella, he explained, “I
had in mind, at various times, Rwanda, Bosnia, the Holocaust . . .
Islamic fundamentalism, the war on terror, the invasion of Iraq, red
states vs. blue states, Abu Ghraib, Shia vs. Sunni,” he explained, “as
well as smaller, more localized examples of Us vs. Them.”

He’s often been likened to George Orwell, a comparison he finds
embarrassing. He even conjures up an image of Orwell “standing
victoriously with his foot on my chest, twitching that little mustache
of his.”

Saunders says he draws a picture of the world that is “inconsistently
distorted, more fun-house mirror than shrinking ray . . . like a scale
model, but melted.”

So influential has he been on the current generation of writers that
Treisman says she receives at least a few fiction manuscripts each week
from Saunders imitators.

“Ultimately, George’s stories are 99.9 percent ridiculous and .1
percent heartbreaking, but that .1 percent is the most important part,
the crucial part, it’s that one fragment of reality breaking into without
which you’d otherwise you miss everything,” Treisman says. “It’s very hard to
do.”

His new book, In Persuasion Nation, explores familiar Saunders
territory, but it also has a touch of realism that seems almost, at
moments, terrifying. One story from the collection, “The Red Bow,”
about a town consumed by a pet-killing hysteria, won him the 2004
National Magazine Award for fiction, and “Bohemians,” about a young boy
trying to make sense of two Eastern European widows who lives on his
block, was included in The Best American Short Stories 2005.

He wrote many of the stories “out of a kind of ragged anger/sadness
about what’s going on in our country,” he says. “Lately, I think we
don’t really know what we stand for anymore. After 9/11 we were: the
scared country that wasn’t going to get burned again. Then we became:
Those guys who believe in Freedom above all else, but won’t be bothered
to define the term.”
But he doesn’t pin everything on Bush.

“I don’t like the demonizing of Bush, et al,” he says. “It’s too easy
and won’t help us not repeat all of this.”

Saunders says he’s curious about them, though. ”People like Rumsfeld,
etc., wake up in the morning feeling very energized at the good they’re
trying to do during the day,” he says. “This is where art comes in: trying to understand those you might initially ignore, or reduce, or despise.”

Exploring this paradox, he says, can be part of “a meditation on our
plight here on earth.’”

“Our current problems, seem to me, have all to do with people in power
who believe in their own ideas too much, ideas that were too much
formed in the lab and not enough on the street,” he says. “So we took
those naive, bookish, messianic ideas and mistook them for truth, and
now are reaping the harvest.”

Nina Siegal is a freelance journalist who has been contributing to The
Progressive since 1997. In May, she received her MFA in fiction from
the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in Iowa City, Iowa.

I’m very honored to announce that I’ve recently become the founding editor of Time Out Amsterdam, which launched on September 25. I had no time to write about it in my blog this summer because I got hired in July and had to put a team together and create the magazine in a matter of weeks. The first issue, featuring Amsterdam’s Local Heroes, is now available, and I’m very proud of it. Please find copies at the American Book Center in Amsterdam (on the Spui) and in AKOs all over the Netherlands.

We’ve been written up in September 27 edition of the NRC Next.

‘A Little Trouble with the Facts’ is now available in French. That’s: ‘Une petite entorse à la vérité.’ So much better than the Dutch title. And a nice cover, too. Check it out from Marabout. 

cheers,

Nina

The Dutch version of my novel, which strangely has an English title — but not my title — is about to be published in Holland. They’re calling it Up & Down, which makes no sense to me, and it’s being classified as “chick noir,” apparently a new genre of literary fiction. HarperCollins, my US publisher, has the foreign rights to the book and sold the Dutch rights without retaining any control over title (supposedly this is typical in the business) so my vigorous protests went unheeded.

In any case, the publishing house, Truth & Dare, has done great publicity for the book so far, and I think the chick noir thing is kind of fun, though I’d probably prefer something like “dame noir” or “broad noir,” since I’ve never thought calling women “chicks” was very flattering or progressive.

The daily Dutch newspaper, De Pers (The Press) ran an interview with me on Tuesday. The very friendly reporter did a nice job with the piece, though he called my book “chick lit” — the fault of the publicity materials, no doubt — and he also said my favorite teacher was John Irving, though John Irving was never my teacher. I did mention, however that Irving had come to give a special seminar and workshop at Iowa, which was very inspiring. To be fair, the reporter gave me a chance to fix the errors, but I wasn’t able to check the Dutch translation in time. The main gist of the story is that I like to get feedback from other writers while I’m working on a book, which was certainly true for my first novel. I haven’t shown my new book to too many people, but I am looking to organize a writing group in Amsterdam for the support and feedback. The headline for the piece, Ik Heb Enthousiaste Meeleezers, means essentially, “I need to have enthusiastic readers.”

Nanners and Noodles notes, “I may have stumbled upon a gem of a book with A Little Trouble With The Facts by Nina Siegal.” She goes on to quote from the Publishers’ Weekly review. When last we checked, she was 60 pages in and “loving every bit of it.”

Bohemian Flophouse says, “What’s best about Nina Siegal’s art world novel is the dialogue – modern Valerie Vane talks sharp and slick like women in classic noir mystery books – think Lauren Bacall in those Bogey films.” Bohemian Flophouse just doesn’t like the cover of the book.

Ms. Frizzle is “thinking of reading 5-6 books that sold well, are on the smarter end of the spectrum writing-wise, and that are set in different worlds (ie, I don’t want to read only about women who work in fashion),” so she’s reading A LITTLE TROUBLE and finds it “hilarious” so far. She’s looking for other titles, too.

FuseAction, who heard the reading at KGB in New York, says on his MySpace page, “Siegal has put her newspaper experience to good use in what sounds like a delightful romp of a murder mystery.”

Tulipgirl says she read LITTLE TROUBLE from cover to cover in a single day.

Amy Belk, my best buddy, had really sweet things to say about the experience of coming to Amsterdam for my book launch: “I recommend the experience of standing in line for the autograph of someone you know and love. I think maybe we should do that for each other more often. Blush a little, hold out your newly purchased copy: um, please make it out to your friend, your fan…” Amy’s got a gorgeous Flickr page. I dare anyone to look at it and not fall in love with Amy.

My friend Corbin Collins blogged the Amsterdam book launch event at the American Book Center. See his contribution on Earth Goat.

To inaugurate the year of book-related events, on April 23, authors will read all over the city of Amsterdam from 7.00 in the morning till 19.00 to celebrate World Book Day and the opening AWBC year. I’m going to be reading in the afternoon at 15.00, on the second floor of the American Book Center, and I’m going to be followed by the wonderful Julie Phillips, whose first book was the winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2007, and she will be followed by Pete Jordan, author of the funny memoir, Dishwasher, and a frequent guest on Late Night With David Letterman. So, come join us to celebrate the fact that we live in a literary city! Who-hoo! Hope to see you there.

To recap, here’s the schedule:

April 23, 2008

American Book Center, Amsterdam, right in the Spui
15-15.30 Nina Siegal
15.30-16 Julie Philips
16-16.30 Pete Jordan

My brother took this photo of the fiction section at Borders in New York. The two weeks of readings is up and I have to say I’m glad, at least I don’t have to overcome stage-fright on a daily basis for a while, which is nice. Back to my private scribblings. How can I thank everyone for coming out for the readings — especially all the wonderful old friends I haven’t seen in so long? All I can say is I’m amazingly grateful to feel lots of support and love.