Archive by Author

Contemporary American Fiction

24 Aug

I’ve been thinking a lot about Contemporary American Fiction (CAF, if you will) this week. We’ve had these circular discussions going at the bookstore about, you know, overrated writers and underrated writers (ahem); everybody’s been making their own lists so that everyone else can refute them flatly, and loudly. And there’s of course talk about Jonathan Franzen and the Great American Novel/Novelist question, and what exactly Lev Grossman might be angling for with this article, (not to mention his Time list from the end of last year of the Top Ten Books of the Decade). Frankly, it’s all getting to be a bit much. The books we’re arguing over—even the supposedly overrated ones, or the ones dubbed critical successes—are not the books people are buying in droves. I’m droning on about how unsettling it is to CAF that Mr. Franzen was named the Great, they’re arguing about Junot Diaz, and meanwhile ten copies of The Help or The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo or Twilight walk out the door. Something seems amiss in the realm of literary fiction, and the problem isn’t emanating from comments pages.

So I’ve been relaxing far from the Internet scuffles and the literary publishing blogosphere, away from our daily rants and arguments[1], enjoying the new issue of ASF (plus Colum McCann’s This Side of Brightness and Daniil Kharms’s Today I Wrote Nothing) when all of the sudden, Sunday morning I open my email to find an installment of “Work in Progress,” FSG’s new newsletter. It contains none other than a video of (guess who?) Jonathan Franzen talking about (guess what?) the state of CAF and the contemporary novel. Oy. There’s no escaping it.

I was dismayed by the video[2] not for what he said, exactly, but for how simply, patly he summed things up, like his characters, his novel, the purpose of reading and the novel (and he didn’t stick to lit in his generalizations, either). See for yourself. And so I went seeking some good old-fashioned, wordy, convoluted perspective in an interview with David Foster Wallace, the first one to pop up on YouTube, which just so happened to cover—oh hey—CAF, its readers, and the novel. Whaddayaknow.

In the interview[3], he aligns CAF and its readership (albeit 10+ years ago) with contemporary classical music and its following.  Actually, he spends a while just trying to put a number on people who care about CAF, or more specifically so-called serious books.  He throws out half a million, then settles on probably a million people in America who care about this stuff.  That’s perspective for you.  That’s humbling.  Especially, in my case, for a bookseller.

This minority aside, I think people should keep talking about the divide between popular literature and serious works—and especially the way the two are lately striving to imitate each other to stay afloat in the struggling publishing economy. I’m thinking of popular books that take themselves seriously, for example, or serious, difficult works that seem totally apathetic. You can see it in cover design, blurbs, press from the publisher, book trailers. Serious, gut-wrenching works have covers and trailers that say, “This book’s a joke!” (Gary Shteyngart, anyone?) while trite romantic comedies that actually read themselves to you are hailed as provocative pieces. Don’t believe me? Remember when Nicholas Sparks compared himself to Hemingway? We still joke about sneakily shelving his books in the Classics section. Right by Muriel Spark.

For whatever reason, books that bridge the seriousness divide from either side, no matter how superficially, seem to sell the absolute best. I can’t tell whether this dual trend’s effect is homogenizing for CAF or ever more polarizing. Suffice to say I’ll be on the lookout. One thing I can tell you, though. Whatever it is they pick up, people are still reading.  Maybe that’s where the conversation should start.

[1] By the way, these tend to take place between booksellers stationed across the floor, which means we’re often shouting directly through unassuming customers, which may be sort of significant.

[2] Of course I watched it; I want to like him so badly!  Instead it affirmed my long-held belief that writers are better off not talking.

[3] Which I’ve decided not to link to.  Franzen and Wallace both bring up the necessity of finding quiet and stillness in order to read, and watching an author interview on YouTube seems like the antithesis of that.

Book Remedies

3 Aug

I’m away from the bookstore this week.  I was so looking forward to a real break from eight hours on my feet dealing with people, but can I tell you a secret?  Boy, do I miss it.

That’s right.  I’m spending this relaxing Chicago vacation pining for my retail job.

It shouldn’t be a job that follows me home.  But I find it increasingly hard not to make book suggestions in everyday conversation.  Is this odd?   Someone tells me they’re feeling restless, they don’t like their job, or any other complaint and I’m already making a list of titles.

Recommending books is a diagnostic and, ultimately, prescriptive process a lot of the time.  You’re looking for something to read?  Tell me, what was the last book you read?  Ah.  And you found yourself bored by ho-hum Victorian historical fiction?  A hundred pages in and feeling lethargic?  Let me offer you something a little more epic.  Take David Mitchell’s new one with a side of Hilary Mantel and call me in the morning.  (Can I just say I love when people do that?  Follow-ups are the best.)

It isn’t always so simple to find a remedy, and the goal, obviously, is that the customer walks away with books.  This can go one of three ways:

1. They crave something brutally specific—“Hi, I need a cookbook to balance my dog’s Yin deficiency through diet”—to use a true-life example.  So I’ll pick a section (Pets?  Alternative Healing?  East/West Studies?) or track down an expert (Katie).  Bookstores are crawling with people who know everything about the things you’ve never heard of.

2. They want something broad, vague, generic—“I just want a page turner!”  “Give me a beach read!”  People really say these things!  Then it’s the ethically awkward let-me-steer-you-to-this-book-I-haven’t-read-but-that-everyone-so-highly-and-unanimously-adores game.   It’s a mainstream, cross-genre scavenger hunt (which quickly descends into who can read the back of the book faster), or it’s a handy go-to.  In 2010, that means hello, Stieg Larsson!

3. And then, of course, there is the rare and magical match.  They tell me they love what I love, read what I read, where to next?  It’s practically cinematic. These are the most fun—I feel like the Biblioracle over at The Morning News—but they’re the hardest for me as a bookseller.  Cause see, someone tells me they love experimental fiction, they wish Borges had written a novel, and what I want to do is lend them my copy of Cortázar’s Hopscotch. I have actually done this.  Insisted, “No, don’t buy it.  Just come in tomorrow and you can borrow mine.”  Or we don’t have, say, the particular Dostoevsky translation I’m telling you to buy, but I have it at home.  It’s a little underlined but come on, you can ignore that.  Ordering it would take a week!  This is much much more dire.

It’s a hard job to be away from.  So I quieted my nerves with a little pilgrimage to one of my all-time favorite places, Bookman’s Alley in Evanston.  Said hello to Roger Carlson and the freaky (read: real) stuffed wildcat head in Sports, ate a few gumdrops, swayed to what I’m convinced is an actual phonograph hidden somewhere in the stacks, and tried to decide if that snappy inscription in Graham Greene’s The Living Room was really written and signed by Anaïs Nin and therefore worth the $65 price tag.  Too risky, in the end.

Notes from the Bookstore

13 Jul

Hello. I write you from a big little bookstore in Austin, named after some folks in a Ray Bradbury novel. The idea is to give you a glimpse of life from inside the realm of independent book-slinging. I thought I’d start this column with the most recent milestone in my retail life: inventory.

Sunday night, I was told to show up for work at 6 p.m. Little to no detail followed. Not sure what to expect, I had been told that you either a) go in ready for the most miserable night of the year, or, b) make the best of watching other people crack under the late-night pressure. I chose option b, mostly just curious about the process and what an all-nighter does to book people.

I was given a Home Depot apron, a glorified remote-control called ScanPal II, and a section. Shakespeare through Poetry. What followed is difficult to account for or explain clearly. I heard the mechanized beep of the ScanPal registering each book I scanned, and was aware, obliquely, of many other people and beeping machines moving at my periphery. I remember a vague, irritated feeling at the flimsiness of the poetry volumes. They can’t stand up on their own, which might be significant in nonphysical ways.

More than the details of the task, the other sections I scanned, the announced breaks every so often, what was striking about inventory night was its soothing mindlessness. Time—lots of time—passed without my actually realizing it at all. I was overcome by a sort of dazed feeling; the books in my hands were no longer books, my hands no longer hands. I had been warned not to scan sections of books I care about because of what it means to have them turn into mere consumer products. But none of that even mattered. I kind of forgot where I was. Who I was.

Some part of my brain—the mechanized part, maybe, the part I don’t use enough—must have been working overtime, because I came home in the middle of the night and could not sleep at all. The dazed feeling lasted. I thought about the discrepancy team who were called out of their beds at 2 a.m. to come in after me and figure out what books were missing, and I secretly wished I was one of them. But I had to be back in the store at 10 a.m.

When I came in, all the shelves were tagged with yellow strips that meant they’d been counted. I can’t even describe the feeling of order, satisfaction, clarity in the morning. A profound peacefulness had settled over my usually messy, haphazard workplace. The yellow tags signify someone’s been there, in each corner and forgotten section. Every book—even the flimsy, self-published poetry—had been touched and noted.

I started wondering, in my bleary, sleepless state, what if we inventoried other things? Our homes? Do people do this? Count every last thing, list them out, mark their places. Or our lives, every person we know or care about. Maybe that’s what family reunions are really for. Or the Census, I guess. I have to imagine if we took some sort of private stock like this, just once a year, the lucidity would be immense.

It’s been raining here in Austin, a strange relief from the Texas summer heat—and ideal bookshop weather, obviously. My store has become a halfway house for crickets. They freaked me out for a while, with their twitchy, brown enormity, but lately I’ve found them good company. It’s reassuring, sort of, the way they chirp from all the corners.