The Olive Reader

Although it technically kicked-off on Tuesday, today is the day that the PEN World Voices Festival gets going in earnest. There are a lot of amazing authors in town, and there are quite a few who you may not have the opportunity to catch again, so rare are their stateside appearances. Don’t let yourself down, go to an event or two this weekend.

Book parties aren’t what they used to be.

Speaking of tough times for novelists, it seems that Kaavya Viswanathan’s explanation of, and apology for, plagiarism accusations don’t wash with the publisher doing the accusing.

Stay tuned, but it does seem like the charges can’t be shrugged off as easily as the young author would like.

Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan and Philip Roth’s Everyman, two new novels of note, have received some rave reviews, with more sure to follow. Enter Michiko Kakutani, stage right. The Times’ sharpshooter sprays a lot of ammo at both books, here and here.

She seems to have similar problems with Gary and Phil:

On Absurdistan: “Absurdistan tackles…issues like globalization, democracy building and foreign civil wars, and it frequently feels synthetic and contrived.” On Everyman: “The allusions to King Lear…feel labored and contrived.”

On Absurdistan: “Perhaps because Misha feels like such a patchwork doll of a character, he never engages the reader’s interest…” On Everyman: “The problem is, this nameless fellow turns out to be generic, rather than universal: a faceless cutout of a figure who feels like a composite assembled from bits and pieces of earlier Roth characters.”

Consecutive days, consecutive takedowns. It’s hard out here for a novelist.

Junot Diaz’ Drown is one of my favorite short story collections, but it’s been 10 years since it was published. Where’s the new work? Diaz tries to explain in this interview with the San Francisco Chronicle.

(Via Maud Newton)

From the Wall Street Journal Q&A with Joyce Carol Oates:

WSJ.com: What are you working on?
Ms. Oates: I’m working on a Mark Twain story. I’m on page three. It takes an awful long time. I have notes on my desk, all sorts of mess, confusion. I’ve worked two solid days on two pages. If I went any slower I’d go backwards.

(Shameless plug: JCO’s brilliant collection of short stories High Lonesome is available at bookstores everywhere!)

From the Rolling Stone interview with Nick Lachey:

Q. “How do you know when your marriage is over?”
A. “I’ll tell you how I knew my marriage was over,” he continues flatly, tugging at his black T-shirt. “I was told.”

Come on. Sure, I work in publishing. But it’s really hard to look away.

Daniel Handler is someone we really like, and he has an exclusive essay up on Powells.com right now. Check it out.

The Lit Blog Co-Op made their latest selection today, Ticknor by Sheila Heti.

Like anyone else, I enjoy being right.

So after predicting that Sam Lipsyte’s Home Land was going to win the Tournament of Books when the brackets were initially announced over at The Morning News, I watched with increasing glee as the book vanquished foe after foe. Then, to my dismay, it was defeated in the finals by a close vote of 9-7 from a super-panel of literary judges. Ali Smith’s The Accidental took home the top prize, a live rooster. (Or, in this case, a donation to a favorite charity, since roosters can’t be legally shipped to the UK, where Smith lives.)

I don’t want to argue too hard against the results, because I haven’t read Smith’s book, and might well love it. But I did read Lipsyte’s book, did love it, and it disturbs me that the judges who voted for him showed, on average, more enthusiasm than those who voted for Smith.

Let’s just take a sampling of the opinions:

Eleanor Bukowsky:
(Lewis) Miner (the protagonist of Home Land) has been called a modern-day Holden Caulfield, but that is a profound insult to Salinger, whose anthem of adolescent agony is far more poignant and universally meaningful than Lipsyte’s. Although Miner is ostensibly an adult, you would never know it from the way he behaves. This is man (sic) has no real profession, no serious relationships, except with his druggie friend, and no goals. Yet, he criticizes the shallowness, materialism, and arrogance of his former classmates whose lives have turned out very differently from his.

I’m stunned by that reading. If Lipsyte falls short of Salinger’s achievement, which I agree he does, he joins an illustrious club in doing so. I could go on at length, but I’ll spare you: I’ll just say that Miner’s own failings (some of them not just pathetic, but disgusting) are what create the humor (and dark poignancy) throughout much of the novel, and being bothered by his hypocrisy in criticizing his classmates is to truly miss the point entirely. (And it’s not a subtle point. It’s not supposed to be.) So this judgment seems to me not like missing a field goal wide right, but like having the snap go over the holder’s head and having an opponent pick it up and run it in for a touchdown.

Rosecrans Baldwin:
I really enjoyed The Accidental, but I was ready to love Home Land — everyone told me how much it made them laugh. I didn’t laugh once and I feel like the Grinch for saying so.

Baldwin seems like a fine fellow, and is one of the head honchos at The Morning News, a high-quality site. But not laughing once while reading Home Land strikes me as impossible. I think a robot might laugh at least once. Even if you want to point out flaws, it’s an uproariously funny book. So this seems very odd.

And then there’s Nell James, who casts a tepid vote for Smith in so-clever-it’s-nauseating haiku form, ending with this:

Neither book’s my fav
Home Land was well written, no
Accounting for taste.

Better that, though, than Dale Peck’s tired act of withholding a decision because of the crippling ennui that comes over him whenever he, you know, reads — the same gambit he used to get attention when he judged an earlier round. Considering both contestants, he writes:

Fiction like this saps our strength with false catharses even as it encourages us to congratulate ourselves that we know—and care!—so very, very much about the doom with which novelists are fully, sanctimoniously complicit.

Ooooo-kay. I’ve enjoyed many of Peck’s “hatchet jobs” in the past, but how about offering a specific opinion about the books, rather than a fashionably obfuscating rant against our impending doom? Maybe next year.

In the meantime, congrats to Smith.

From Time Out New York, interview with Edmund White:

TONY: Have your sexual adventures ever interfered with your writing?

EW: Well, I’ve written 20 books. I think most writers are people with very strong appetites for food, booze, sex, pleasure and art. The French call people who don’t like those things small-natured — petite nature. I guess I aspire to be the opposite of that.

(shameless plug: My Lives is available at bookstores now!)

The excellently named The Written Nerd gives you an inside look at bookselling. Word is that she works at McNally Robinson.

Today, everyone should celebrate Beckett’s Centenary.

Here’s how:

1. Read the New York Times piece, which includes some wonderful back-story on Beckett’s publisher (and my idol) Barney Rosset.
2. Go to your favorite bookstore and buy Beckett. Grove’s stunning hardcover reissues are worth every penny.
3. And then go to a cafe. If you dont have a cafe near you, just pretend your local Starbucks is ‘unique’. Sip some espresso and ponder life. And think about who we are waiting for….

Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. … Yes, yes, it’s the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it’s always the same thing. Yes, it’s like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don’t laugh any more.

^{Also, check out this online exhibition of Beckett’s work from the University of Texas, Fathoms from Anywhere. (via) – EV}

If you haven’t had the chance, please do subscribe. Its not only a great way to spend your money, but its almost better than watching America’s Next Top Model reruns. Its only $40 bucks for 5 issues. Super deal.

Subscribe here.

WHOLPHIN ISSUE #2 ANNOUNCEMENT:
We are sorry that Wholphin #2 is not yet spinning in your DVD players, but we wish to share with you the very good reason for the delay.

When Steven Soderbergh emails you to say that he’s willing to take a day out of the hyperproductive tornado of his life to make a short cinematic homage to Godard’s Alphaville for your little upstart DVD magazine, you stop production and praise Ganesha for your unbelievable good fortune. Ganesha is the mischievous Hindu god whose head was cut off by his father Shiva, replaced with the head of an elephant, and now rides around on a mouse. So. OK.

In short, there will be a Soderbergh original on the next DVD (along with monkey-faced eels, melting heads, sour death balls and more), and it will arrive at your doorstep by mid-May.

Thank you for your patience.
-Wholphin

Due to technical difficulties in Blogville, this reminder is coming awfully late in the day, but it is National Drop Everything and Read Day (D.E.A.R.), and the Olive Reader encourages those of you with children to read to them. We also encourage those of you with significant others who aren’t too sharp to read to them, and those of you with neither children nor spouse nor alert domesticated pet to read to yourself, which is really the original and still-most-potent form of the activity.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, due to my usual forgetfulness I have to run and deal with the fact that, for me, today is D.E.A.R.F.Y.T. Day (Drop Everything and Remember to File Your Taxes).