One Hit Wonders
My girlfriend and I, both under weather in different ways, wanted to divert ourselves from our aches and pains the other night by watching a movie. She suggested Stone Reader, since it looked nicely soporific. But only 15 minutes in we both had a violent reaction to it and decided to go with a random Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode instead.
The premise of the movie looked promising. A guy who makes video for political campaigns had found a book, The Summer of Stone, on the basis of an effusive review, when he was a kid. Though he didn't read it at the time he bought it, he later came back to it and found it worthy of the extravagant praise of the review (I dimly recall the phrase "a novel of the century".)
Yet he could find no other records of it besides the one review, nor any information about the author. This is the dream of every English major and perhaps every reader: to find a book, usually a novel, that no one but yourself has read, and yet which will shake up the world when you show it to them.
A promising if sentimental set-up. And yet the follow-through (just 15 minutes, mind you) made it clear that was being explored was hero-worship at best, and religion at worst. The straw that broke the camel's back was an interview with Leslie Fiedler (I think), who intoned hierophantically about American writers who have written only one book. However much he intoned, this matter it seemed was too deep for mere scholarly analysis, despite his other assertion about this being intrinsically "American." This is where I started to tear my hair out, not solely because he failed to mention the greatest one book wonder of our time, Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird.
It was clear that analysis of any kind would have killed the almost mystical reverence that Fiedler has for one-book wonders. In other words, his interest isn't scholarly or even about learning, but something closer to worship. It's precisely this attitude that both stymies equal, wide surveys of contemporary literature, but also is deadly for new authors. His talk of course ended with the example of J.D. Salinger, who actually wrote five published books, is symptomatic, because the hermitic J.D. has made cult of his absence. Reputedly, he is still working away on the adventures of the Glass family, even though their published stories had started devolving into preciousness and religious bromides. Don Delillo and Thomas Pynchon, on the other hand, are nearly as private people as Salinger, and yet their privacy barely informs the reading of their work. Moreover, they are not one-book wonders, but writers who have struck out in various paths and occasionally shown up with pretty marginal work. In other words, they have Careers.
Yet common readers and it seems professors enjoy the story of tragic youth, and thereby cultivate (i.e. make a cult) of these writers, to the detriment of actual practicing writers. You only have to think about the "careers" of Sylvia Plath and John Kennedy O'Toole, two young writers who wrote extraordinary first novels only to commit to suicide, to realize how sick this attitude is. Like Diane Wakoski, I believe that we should praise the living and the survivors. Yet our celebrity oriented novel reading culture prefers to kills it young and enjoy their torment.
By the way, I have never read a book that had no other readers. There are books that are more secret than others, but no book that is truly a Book is known by nobody but you. And that, my Best Beloved, is what is lovely about a real Book.
My girlfriend and I, both under weather in different ways, wanted to divert ourselves from our aches and pains the other night by watching a movie. She suggested Stone Reader, since it looked nicely soporific. But only 15 minutes in we both had a violent reaction to it and decided to go with a random Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode instead.
The premise of the movie looked promising. A guy who makes video for political campaigns had found a book, The Summer of Stone, on the basis of an effusive review, when he was a kid. Though he didn't read it at the time he bought it, he later came back to it and found it worthy of the extravagant praise of the review (I dimly recall the phrase "a novel of the century".)
Yet he could find no other records of it besides the one review, nor any information about the author. This is the dream of every English major and perhaps every reader: to find a book, usually a novel, that no one but yourself has read, and yet which will shake up the world when you show it to them.
A promising if sentimental set-up. And yet the follow-through (just 15 minutes, mind you) made it clear that was being explored was hero-worship at best, and religion at worst. The straw that broke the camel's back was an interview with Leslie Fiedler (I think), who intoned hierophantically about American writers who have written only one book. However much he intoned, this matter it seemed was too deep for mere scholarly analysis, despite his other assertion about this being intrinsically "American." This is where I started to tear my hair out, not solely because he failed to mention the greatest one book wonder of our time, Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird.
It was clear that analysis of any kind would have killed the almost mystical reverence that Fiedler has for one-book wonders. In other words, his interest isn't scholarly or even about learning, but something closer to worship. It's precisely this attitude that both stymies equal, wide surveys of contemporary literature, but also is deadly for new authors. His talk of course ended with the example of J.D. Salinger, who actually wrote five published books, is symptomatic, because the hermitic J.D. has made cult of his absence. Reputedly, he is still working away on the adventures of the Glass family, even though their published stories had started devolving into preciousness and religious bromides. Don Delillo and Thomas Pynchon, on the other hand, are nearly as private people as Salinger, and yet their privacy barely informs the reading of their work. Moreover, they are not one-book wonders, but writers who have struck out in various paths and occasionally shown up with pretty marginal work. In other words, they have Careers.
Yet common readers and it seems professors enjoy the story of tragic youth, and thereby cultivate (i.e. make a cult) of these writers, to the detriment of actual practicing writers. You only have to think about the "careers" of Sylvia Plath and John Kennedy O'Toole, two young writers who wrote extraordinary first novels only to commit to suicide, to realize how sick this attitude is. Like Diane Wakoski, I believe that we should praise the living and the survivors. Yet our celebrity oriented novel reading culture prefers to kills it young and enjoy their torment.
By the way, I have never read a book that had no other readers. There are books that are more secret than others, but no book that is truly a Book is known by nobody but you. And that, my Best Beloved, is what is lovely about a real Book.
posted by RobCrowe at 2:59 PM
1 Comments:
Pretty woke comment, Rob.
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