Sam Lipsyte, _The Fun Parts_

OUR CUP RUNNETH over--new story collections by George Saunders and by Sam Lipsyte, separated by mere weeks.

Saunders, as noted in LLL a little while back, seems somewhat mellowed to me, but Lipsyte's characters remain the underachieving, unassimilable, unprepossessing, still-sort-of-young-but-old-enough-to-know-better men that populate HomeLand and The Ask. They are also still hilarious, still compellingly articulate, still occasionally capable of candid self-assessement between bouts of delusion. Four of these stories--the New Yorker ones--I had read before, but they were all just as good, maybe better, the second time around.

Lipsyte's collection of not-quite-together males who are nonetheless capable of fascinating us with their rhetorical performance set me to wondering where they would fall on the Roiphe Index.

At least some of you, I imagine, recall Katie Roiphe's NYTBR essay of I think four years ago, praising the oft-condemned male characters of Roth, Updike, Bellow, and Mailer for their no-apologies sexual swagger:

There is in these scenes rage, revenge and some garden-variety sexism, but they are — in their force, in their gale winds, in their intelligence — charismatic, a celebration of the virility of their bookish, yet oddly irresistible, protagonists. As the best scenes spool forward, they are maddening, beautiful, eloquent and repugnant all at once.

By contrast, in Roiphe's eyes, the male characters of the current hegemonic American male novelists--Eggers, Franzen, Wallace, Chabon--seemed a bit over-polite, unassertive...wimpy, in effect.

So, what of Lipsyte's characters, brazen in their Guyishness? Would Lipsyte's male characters, in their sneaking off to get stoned, their addiction to games, their bluffing, their readiness to lie and their reliance on bullshit when trouble looms, count as "maddening, beautiful, eloquent, and repugnant all at once"? 

I'm guessing Roiphe's answer would be "no." Or even "NO!"  But why not? I, for one, would much rather hang out with one of Lipsyte's narrators than with, say, Rabbit Angstrom. They seem a lot more fun, and they are undeniably more verbally ingenious.

Re-reading _The Apes of God_

THE APES OF GOD was the second or third Lewis novel I read; I know I read Tarr first, but I no longer recall whether I read The Revenge for Love or Apes second. This was a good long while ago, I should mention, back when I was in graduate school. I'd rather not say exactly how many years--let's just say it was during the Reagan administration, and the Black Sparrow edition by Paul Edwards had just appeared. I remember, too, that I was curious about it partly because it had been cited in Fran Leibowitz's essay "Notes on 'Trick'."  That's how long ago it was.

I would say that out of every, say, thirty people to whom I mention that I'm deeply interested in Lewis, perhaps one asks for a book recommendation. I usually say Tarr, or The Revenge for Love, or Self-Condemned; at least a few times, I've suggested Snooty Baronet. To one particular, very unusual young man, I recommended The Childermass. I would never, ever recommend The Apes of God--too long, too strange, too plotless, too devoid of the usual kind of pleasures novels provide. Nonetheless, The Apes of God is what hooked me. After reading it, I had to find more Lewis, and figure out what was going on.

I've meant to reread it for years--well, now's the time. At the moment, I'm about 300 pages in.

The premise on which the satire rests in The Apes of God--that the wealthy and powerful have forsaken the role of being the patrons of art for the more stimulating and glorious role of being artists themselves--can be partly elucidated by Jacques Rancière's conception of the "aesthetic" regime in the history of art, which emerges about the era of the French Revolution and English Romanticism.  In Rancière's aesthetic regime, artists break with what had been prevailing notions of what art ought to represent (and what it ought never to represent)  and how it ought to represent it, even break with the prevailing notions of what counted as art, what registered as art, what could even be seen as art. Fragments, ruins, the drawings of children or the insane, folk ballads--efforts that might have registered earlier as incomplete, primitive, unfinished, defaced--began to seem to have an authenticity and immediacy that made them more completely "art" than conventional art could be.

If important art was that which departed from what art had long been supposed to be, the artist was almost necessarily in opposition--to society, to patrons, to his or her audience. So the 19th century becomes the century of the artist whose biography is a record of struggles against incomprehension and rigid expectations: Beethoven, Wagner, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Manet, Cezanne, Dickinson, Whitman. 

Under earlier "regimes" (early modernity, basically--say, 16th to 18th centuries) an individual (or institution) made visible his or her (its) power, wealth, influence, intelligence, and taste by commissioning the most skilled available craftsman to paint, carve, design, or compose something that could body forth his/her/its vision of what mattered. In the 19th century, though, the power, influence, intelligence, and vision being made visible were increasingly those of the no-longer-so-humble craftsman--that is, the artist. The patron was, almost be definition, someone who did not get it.  In these circumstances, why settle for being the patron?  Why not be the artist? Why not use one's wealth, if one had it, to support one's own art?

Lewis had so firm an idea of the seriousness and importance of art and so strong a conviction that only a few individuals in any generation were truly artists that the proliferation of wealthy amateur artists in 1920s London struck him not as merely ridiculous, but as an outrage. Since to be an artist was to create, a divine prerogative, those who were only pretending to be artists were aping God.

All right.  But can this idea support a novel that runs 650 pages? An essay, certainly--the Lewisian "encyclical" that in the novel is given by Horace Zagreus to Dan Boleyn. A novella, certainly.  But is it too much a phenomenon of London High Bohemia, circa 1925, to sustain so long a fiction?

The answer seems, obviously, "yes," so I was amazed to come across this passage in the last n + 1, in an essay (another one) on the dismal prospects these days for artists and intellectuals:

One possibility, and the worst, would be to see the next decades exacerbate the class character of culture.  In this scenario, since very few people not already wealthy would risk careers as writers or artists, certain vital strains of culture would become, more exclusively than today, the expression of an upper-class stratum. A basic relegation of literature, art, and philosophy to pastimes of the idly rich (as, say in prerevolutionary France) doesn't seem impossible. (page 14)

Prerevolutionary France and 1920s London, my young friend, although I don't suppose the lit classes at your university included The Apes of God.

Lewis! Thou shouldst be living at this hour!  Your audience has at last arrived.

Carmelo Cunchillos Jaime, ed., _Wyndham Lewis the Radical: Essays on Literature and Modernity_

ANOTHER COLLECTION OF essays on Lewis, this one from six years ago. The editor and five of the contributors are (or were) associated with the University of La Riocha in Spain, which must be the nerve center of Lewis scholarship in Spain--although, to be honest, some of these contributors seem to be using the occasion of writing on Lewis to write about something they apparently care about rather more: aesthetics of short fiction, Evelyn Waugh, Jeanette Winterson.

The Winterson piece addresses the question of why Winterson often mentions canonical modernists Eliot, Joyce, and Woolf, but never Lewis.  You were wondering about this yourself, no?  Don't deny it. I expect the author's answer to this question will prove definitive.

Prof. Cunchillos has lined up not only a good number of his colleagues, however, but also some of the heavy hitters of Lewis scholarship--Edwards, Munton, Caracciola--who, once again, deliver the goods. To cavil, I was hoping that Edwards's chapter on Lewis and Augustan satire would note the irony that two of Alexander Pope's greatest advocates in the 1920s, Edith Sitwell and Lytton Strachey, happened to be Lewis's particular bêtes noires, and also hoping that Munton would not feel the need to take a few more swipes at Fredric Jameson's book...but nonetheless, as usual, you can't get through a page of their contributions without learning something new about Lewis.

Were a prize for the volume mine to give, though, I would probably give it to Stan Smith--not a frequent caller in Lewis precincts, but his chapter on Lewis, Auden, and the Auden group shows extraordinary command of the relevant Lewis material as well as the superbly nuanced understanding of the period context one would expect from this particular scholar.

Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King_

I WAS AMONG the multitude who fell like a brick for A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.  Here was a young writer who had read David Foster Wallace and gotten it. Eggers was no mere imitator--sweeter, more carbonated--but like Wallace was willing to go to gloriously baroque excess with the American vernacular and was brave enough to declare, like the usher at the end of Delmore Schwartz's "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities," that what one does matters.

The next book, a novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity, featured two young men trying to give away a windfall of money to which they did not feel morally entitled.  Oof. I finished it, but just barely. Perhaps Eggers felt guilty, I surmised, about becoming famous and prosperous with a book about his family's pain, and this book purged that guilt...all might yet be well.

But the next one--What Is the What--I couldn't finish. Undaunted, or not yet sufficiently daunted, I picked up the non-fiction Zeitoun when it came out, hit this on p. 61--"Kathy shuddered at the thought"--and stopped. Shuddered at the thought? The subject matter of Zeitoun seemed worthy and earnest, but life is too short to read books in which people shudder at thoughts.

I was about to write off Eggers.  Then, from a few yards away, I saw a book in my local Barnes & Noble that appeared to be bound in tree bark.  What the hell is that? Well, it was A Hologram for the King, of course.  Say what you will, the guy knows how to pick a cover. Twenty-five dollars later, I was about to give Eggers another chance.

And you know what?  It's good. Good enough to take a chance on the next one, at least. The language seems awake again: "The glass container that held them all fell down through the atrium to the lobby, silent as snow, and the doors opened to a wall of fake rock.  The smell of chlorine." The main character, Alan Clay, is in an interesting pickle: a former executive whose company ran aground, now a "consultant" with a diminishing list of clients, at fifty-four too old a dog to learn many new tricks, facing a pile of debts and his likely inability to pay for his daughter's next semester at a prestigious college, he has a chance to solve all his problems if he can just make one big sale to a Saudi monarch.

A Hologram for the King has lots of great nubbly historically- and culturally-specific detail (the creation of King Abdullah Economic City, the decline and fall of the Schwinn bicycle company), but at bottom we have (I am not the first to notice) a reworking of Kafka's The Castle.

Like the land-surveyor K., Alan is summoned to undertake a mission in an unfamiliar place, yet when he arrives, no one seems ready for him, he can't get the information he needs to complete his mission, and the people he most needs to talk to are invariably unavailable--except when, by the wildest chance, he bumps into them, but these lucky encounters somehow fail to result in progress.  He meets people, befriends some, some merely attach themselves to him, and he is gradually enmeshed in the life of the place without being truly a part of it.

At the end, we don't really know whether Alan has gotten somewhere or not, but the ending feels oddly, eccentrically upbeat. I can't for the life of me say why--nothing seems to be going Alan's way, really. He is still in a terrible spot. But he has met a wonderful woman (and had an episode of impotence--but surely one can get Viagra in Saudi Arabia) and seems to think he may still be able to make things work out.

One can't really be Kafkaesque (a word I should have known I would be unable to avoid, despite my best intentions) and vaguely upbeat, I suppose, but somehow the ending seems well-judged. A Hologram for the King does not dislodge Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled from the top of my Contemporary Kafkaesque list, but it's a secure # 2.

Wyndham Lewis, _The Demon of Progress in the Arts_

LEWIS'S FIRST NON-FICTION book, The Caliph's Design (1919) was about art, as was this, his last (1955), but none of the many in-between--he did, however, write a good many essays about art in general and painting in particular from the 1920s through the late 1940s, and served a distinguished stint as art reviewer for the Listener until blindness forced him to resign.

Lewis always writes about painting as a practicing painter himself (here, as a formerly practicing painter), as an insider--important to remember, since he often sounds cantankerous about innovation and experiment in the arts, as this book's title suggests. But Lewis himself was a powerful innovator as a painter in the earlier part of his career, and he saw what made Picasso the greatest painter of his generation; it's not as though he was clamoring for the return of Constable and Gainsborough. He could, though, be as curmudgeonly as any New Criterion-type, or as Tom Wolfe in The Painted Word, when he thought lofty talk of innovation and experiment was serving as a smokescreen for charlatanry or thinness of talent.

Had he lived another ten years, what would he have made of Warhol? Or, much later, Damien Hirst? Hard to guess--all we know is that his take would have been dauntingly original, whatever it was.

Herein lies the Lewis Conundrum, also exemplified by his long essay "The Diabolical Principle," his no-holds-barred assault on various self-appointed avant-gardistes of the late 1920s. He sounds like a conservative when he's attacking artistic innovation and experiment--but he was as open-minded as anyone about genuine innovation and experiment, right up to the end (he admired Francis Bacon, for instance).  When he thought the innovators were merely posing, though, or finding a way to disguise the weakness of their technique, or essentially marketing themselves...then his wrath knew no bounds.

Chris Cleave, _Little Bee_

OUR BOOK CLUB selection for April. I don't know whether book clubs are as popular in Britain as they are here, but this novel could almost have been designed as a book club selection: narrated in two quite distinct women's voices, with a significant and painful politico-moral issue as its background, quite a bit of humor but also one scene of horrifying action, a redemption-through-self-sacrifice theme in its conclusion.  An enjoyable read and discuss-able, a book that book-club members would be highly likely to recommend to friends in other book clubs who are looking for suggestions.

Did I myself enjoy the book? Sometimes.

Every other chapter in the novel is narrated by Little Bee, a teenaged Nigerian refugee who makes her way to England to elude some oil company thugs who have massacred her village and want to leave no witnesses. Why England?  Because of a horrible encounter on a beach involving herself, her sister, the thugs, and a vacationing English couple--the details of which Cleave withholds for about half the novel--she has the phone number of the husband in the couple. After two or three years in a detention center, she finds a way to get out and calls the man, announcing her imminent arrival on his doorstep. On getting this news, he hangs himself.

The alternating chapters are narrated by Sarah O'Rourke, lifestyle magazine editor, mother of a pre-schooler boy who is always in a Batman costume, and widow of the man who hung himself. Sarah was on the beach as well at the time of the horrifying encounter, and was not at all expecting to see Little Bee again. What to do with her?

Cleave shows ambition in choosing to write his novel in the voices of two women, and two such different women at that, one of whom with a cultural experience remote from his own. I thought he did well with this, though. Both Little Bee and Sarah are intelligent, observant, and aware, and Cleave's handling of their struggle to fashion a relationship out of the trauma of their first meeting is affecting.  This was the strength of the novel, I thought.

Less convincing are Cleave's contrivances to get Little Bee back to Nigeria (Sarah comes along, with her son) for yet another encounter with the same oil company thugs on, wouldn't you know it, the very same beach, with, yes indeed, another suddenly opened opportunity to sacrifice oneself for another, only this time....

In these last fifty pages, I wondered whether Cleave was thinking less of book clubs than of Hollywood. After working hard to keep things plausible--e.g., research into English detention centers for refugees, into Nigerian idioms--he makes a beeline for the heart of melodrama. Disappointing.  Well, we all have to make a living.

Wyndham Lewis, _The Writer and the Absolute_

CONTINUING MY TRAWL (after The Red Priest) of the Lewis books from the 1950s I had not previously gotten around to, I picked up this.

1914-30 seems to be the period of choice for people who decide to investigate Lewis, and for good enough reasons, but his books from the fifties deserve to be better known. Self-Condemned ought to make any list of the five best British novels of the 1950s, I think; Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta are at least as compelling as the comparable theologically-inflected fantasy novels of Charles Williams and C. S. Lewis; Rotting Hill is a convincing portrait of post-war austerity England. So, what about the critical prose of his last decade?

The Writer and the Absolute (1952) carries on the critique of his literary contemporaries Lewis had begun in the 1920s and 1930s with Time and Western Man, Paleface, and Men Without Art. The prose and the analysis are less energetic here than in those books, but by the same token less vituperative, and on the whole just as worthwhile; Lewis shows the same acuity in picking his subjects (targets?) for the period 1946-50 (Camus, Sartre, Orwell) that he did for the period 1925-30 (Joyce, Pound, Woolf, Eliot, Hemingway, Lawrence).

The Writer and the Absolute is ostensibly a defense of the principle that writers should free themselves from the demands of party or ideology. The arguments are much along the lines of those in Julien Benda's Belphégor and La Trahison des Clercs, books that strongly impressed Lewis (and Eliot, among others) in the 1920s.

The reader soon gathers that, for Lewis, the party writers need most urgently to distance themselves from is the Communist one, and that the complementary ideology-to-avoid is Marxism. Well, no surprise. Lewis had found himself marginalized on several fronts thanks to the fashionable leftism of the 1930s, and at several spots alludes to his having been frozen out (almost literally--he moved to Canada) from the London literary scene during the Auden-worshipping/Spanish Civil War/Popular Front era.

Accordingly, what interests him the most about Sartre is his vexed relationship to the Communist Party, and what interests him the most about Orwell is Homage to Catalonia, Animal Farm, and 1984. By the standards of 1952, though, Lewis treats writers who made left-wing commitments in the 1930s with moderation--his American publisher at the time was Regnery, whose list also included William F. Buckley, Brent Bozell, Whittaker Chambers, James J. Kilpatrick, Albert Nock... compared to the foamings of that crew, Lewis's recognition that Sartre and Malraux are important and valuable writers seems extraordinarily fair-minded.

Lewis always gravitated towards intelligence--ungenerous, unfair, even vicious he could certainly be towards the works of his most gifted contemporaries, but he he always had an infallible nose for which books were the real thing.