Dear Friends,
I’m sharing the reviews of the week. As usual, there’s one fiction and one non-fiction work (in this case, there’s a fairly mean-spirited review of Jason Mott’s Hell of a Book and then a discussion of Peter Brooks’ very dense but very rewarding Seduced by Story). The idea, as always, is to dispense with plot summary and to try to engage with the deeper truth and aesthetic implications of the work.
Best wishes,
Sam
JASON MOTT’s Hell of a Book (2021)
Not bad as an encapsulation of where ‘literature’ is at the present moment - like if we had to amberize one book to showcase our misguided era to the future, then Hell of a Book would be a reasonable candidate. Everything is there - the combination of woke earnestness and woke solipsism, the comic book style, the hyper-self-awareness, the transparent bid for awards season.
As material for a pitch-treatment, Hell of a Book is can’t miss. It’s a brilliant pairing for a surreal buddy-com - the kid who makes himself invisible to hide from the sufferings of the world; partnered with the jaded writer who sees things that aren’t there. Plus there’s a satire of the publishing industry embedded in it - and everybody knows that people in publishing love to read about themselves. Plus there’s a whiz-bang opening section, featuring a man running naked down a hotel corridor - which is funny and well-written and leads, really, nowhere at all.
After the terrific surrealish setup and the crackling opening, and before the tearjerkeriness of the novel’s finish, there’s the long, long middle, which is mostly, to be honest, about what a great writer the narrator is and how fun it is to be on book tour until, oh no, he starts drinking a bit too much and tires of all the easy ass he’s getting and is exposed to some tough-talk from his agent - and then, next thing he knows, is on track to a nervous breakdown (or at least the love of a good woman and a break from alcohol). So, albeit with police brutality and questions of identity prominently in the background, the main plotline of Hell of a Book is, I’m sorry to say, the story of the author being persecuted by his own book tour. “I don’t understand why I have to keep telling this story again and again. The interviews, the hotels, the readings. Why can’t I just write and go away? That’s all I want to do,” the protagonist blurts out in one of the least sympathetic speeches I’ve ever read - which is also, unfortunately, the novel’s climax.
I can’t quite figure out how self-aware Mott is about the solipsism of the book he’s written. The idea, of course, is that the narrator is avoidant - a greedy man-child in need of some life lessons and of some really good pep talks, as delivered by agent, mortician girlfriend, and trusty limo driver - but there is no good narrative reason for the narrator to be as avoidant, or as silly as he is, and his solipsism is so over-the-top that it’s completely unclear why anybody would even bother try to fix it. A typical section might open, “Picture me at age nine” - and the reaction of anybody given an order like that would of course be to get as far away from the narcissist as possible. But, cartoonish as he is, the narrator is meant - I think - to be sympathetic. Not-real-and-easily-fixable problems like the narrator’s speaking constantly as if he were a Raymond Chandler character (calling his girlfriends ‘dollface’ or ‘toots’) are treated as if they were actual maladies requiring concerted reform from the assembled secondary characters who, for very unclear reasons, genuinely care about the narrator.
Is this all just satire on celebrities-who-can-get-away-with-anything-but-are-lost-to-themselves? I guess. The point is that the narrator - even as a gifted storyteller - has wandered so far from his authentic self that he has forgotten the color of his own skin. “I look down at my arm and sure enough it turns out that Renny is right. I’m black! A startling discovery to make this far along!” he thinks to himself at one point. But satire, to work, needs to have bite in it. The satire of the publishing industry and of the sort of consultant the industry might hire from time to time to re-motivate a flailing writer (“even though we’re in midtown Manhattan Jack smells of the ocean”) seems calculated almost entirely to bring a smile to the lips of Mott’s agent and publicist. And if the narrator is meant to be skewered as a stand-in for the celebrity-schmaltz complex, that satire never cuts very deep - his whole purpose, clearly, is to be redeemed; and he is so daffy (the puking out car windows, the inability to stop speaking like Sam Spade) that it’s hard to ever view him as being symptomatic of any larger problem.
There are obviously all sorts of problems with Hell of a Book (starting from the title) - and I’m appalled, actually, that it won the awards that it did, National Book Award included - but that’s not to say that it’s completely without merit. I liked the Soot sections. I felt that Mott is perfectly capable of writing very well. There’s real wisdom in a line like “I try to explain to him that adulthood just isn’t built for believing in the existence of other people” or, more Sam Spadeishly, in “The Fear’s the oldest state of being in the human hustle.” The (inevitable) redemptive moment for the narrator is actually much more powerful than I would have expected it to be - the narrator, daffy, alcoholic, broken, begging off the responsibility for writing about black kids killed by police, and being told “You’re the voice. This time.” - and then having the same injunction laid on him by Soot - “I just want you to see it the way it really is. See me.” - to which the narrator responds bravely, simply, “‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Okay.’”
In a sense, then Hell of a Book turns out to be like a referendum on ‘the comic book style’ in American literature. Everything, as per the received literary wisdom of the last decade or so, is in cartoons, typology, everything is always pushed to the point of extremity and absurdity - the narrator is a wildly successful author which means also that he’s completely alcoholic and completely feckless; Soot has ‘the darkest skin anybody had ever seen,’ which means that he must be at the very bottom of the social system (“If there’s one thing I know about being Black it’s that dark skin is a sin. Hell of an affliction. The last thing you want. Just ask anyone,” Mott writes.). And that cartoonistic overdetermination - usually played for laughs - is meant, also, to be deployable as pathos. The ludicrous narrator, given his talking-to by the grieving mother and by the ghost of Soot, can snap to - become ‘the voice’ for the moment very much as Mott, nominating himself, is presumably the voice for the moment. The wicked racist cop, after having revealed himself to be a family man and not entirely without human feeling and to himself be a figure worthy of pathos, is duly exposed to a very Field of Dreams sort of atonement. “The Shape that was once a man continues onward, footfall by footfall, into the cornfield and the figures that stand waiting for him. It is as though they have been waiting for him, patient as a river.”
It’s possible, I suppose, to be an intelligent reader and to be moved by this - to be impressed with Mott’s ability to zag between gags and pathos, and with the way in which emotion is summoned up at the drop of a dime. I’m a bit more hard-hearted than that, though. My feeling is that a facile cartoonish style applied to weighty topics doesn’t make the book unexpectedly poignant; it makes the weighty topics seem facile and cartoonish. To each their own, I guess, but, for my taste, that combination of cartoonishness, solipsism, melodrama stands for everything that’s wrong with literature at the moment - writing that’s mercenary and manipulative but knows exactly what boxes to check.
PETER BROOKS’ Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative (2022)
Brooks was a professor of mine in college. He was a formidable, remote presence, famous for having written a tour de force work called Reading for the Plot which seemed to distill about a half-century of literary theory (particularly that clustered around Roman Jakobson and Jacques Lacan) into a concise, persuasive text. There was the sense, in the way he carried himself, that almost nothing more needed to be said - he had developed a brutally effective method of reading fiction; and he had distilled virtually the entirety of modern literature down to a handful of authors, particularly Rousseau, Proust, and Freud (whom another student referred to as ‘the Brooks canon’), and who between them had teased out and codified the modern uses of narrative.
So it was a bit of a surprise to come across a text by Brooks called Seduced by Story, which wondered if the emphasis on plot had it all wrong and had in fact wrecked the culture. Brooks has noticed the obvious - that everywhere he looks, the world is saturated in ‘story.’ Every political campaign is guided by its ‘narrative’; every product has its ‘story.’ And, like Victor Frankenstein racing across the Arctic in pursuit of his wayward monster, Brooks is frenetically claiming that this wasn’t what he meant at all - and that “the mindless valorization of story” has gotten completely out of hand.
To try to thread the needle between ‘reading for the plot’ and ‘seduced by story,’ Brooks has to make some very tricky distinctions. He is appalled that the ad campaigns of Tom’s of Maine, Proctor & Gamble, and J. Crew all feature ‘our story’ - and seem to be somewhat sincere about it, just as he is incredulous that an apparently serious article on economics in The New York Times suggests that we need a “better story about the drivers of economic growth.” On the other hand, he stops short of the extreme dissent of Jean-Paul Sartre, who rejected the novel, or of the philosopher Galen Strawson, who claims that there is no coherent self that can be constituted by narrative. The - very reasonable - middle way proposed by Brooks is to contend that storytelling provides a vital space for play and personal development (it is really, following D.W. Winnicott, how we assimilate to the world) without, however, believing that a coherent, comforting narrative can displace the harsh and often incoherent facts of the world-as-it-is. Brooks is a bit haunted by the idea that he himself, or at least the academic discipline he is part of, may ultimately bear some of the responsibility for the Tom’s of Maine ad campaign - “could it be that the current hyperinflation of story is linked, however distantly, to the new critical attention to narrative and its analysis that began in the 1960s?” he writes - and he believes with some degree of literalness that the way out of the ‘pervasive narratism dominant in the culture’ is, likewise, literary criticism. “What we need may be an analytic unpacking of the claims for narrative, a clearer understanding of what it can and can’t accomplish,” he writes. “Story is powerful, and for that reason it demands a powerful critical response. We need to dismantle and contest its claims to total explanatory force.”
The majority of Seduced by Story is a history of the novel and is often only tangentially related to the overriding point about the domination of narrative. The threads followed by Brooks are 1) an understanding, evident in the early history of the novel, that literary exchange is a fraught space, that the reader will always be curious about who the narrator is and how they know what they claim to know and that, even with the stabilization of the novel in the 19th century and the shift towards ‘omnipotent narration,’ the sense of instability remains inextricably wedded to the act of storytelling and ‘narrative bound up with questions of knowing’; 2) a discomfort by sophisticated practitioners of the novel e.g. Balzac, Charlotte Bronte, about the fact of literacy itself, a nostalgia for conditions of orality in which storytellers are aware of the presence of their listeners, are able to gauge the effect of the story and to adapt to the needs of their particular audience, and a very sophisticated move in which modern novelists recreate aspects of orality within literature, using the ‘authority of death’ as a narrative device unavailable to oral storytellers; 3) a move initiated by Romanticism and pursued by Modernism to ‘smudge the outlines’ of character, to treat a character more as ‘an optics’ perceiving the world in their own way than as a perceived object; 4) a theory of childhood development contending that “children don’t so much learn as budding scientists - practicing experiments to discover empirical truths - but rather learn through the exchange of stories true or untrue”; a view that assigns virtually boundless importance to the value of stories in shaping our developmental assimilation to reality and that offers a temptation to the psychologists, more than seized upon by Freud, to craft narratives “marked by persuasiveness rather than fidelity to truth” as a path to healing for adults; 5) some addenda-ish thoughts on the ubiquity of storytelling within the legal system, giving the lie to the legal system’s frequent insistence that it relies solely ‘on the facts.’
This is all dense, complicated material, tightly compressed, much of it brilliant, and each of these threads would lend itself to a much longer discussion. As for the somewhat bewildering discussion of orality and literacy (#2 in the summation above), that’s the most interesting point of all. Brooks is following Walter Benjamin, who claims that a story, in the old-fashioned storytelling sense, is fundamentally about “the moral of the story” while the novel is about “the meaning of life.” The difference is that the storyteller is embedded in the telling of the story, while the novel intrinsically positions itself after the death of the character; it is a digressive, ‘lawless’ form that follows the narrative-less contours of life-as-it-is-lived, while the fact and authority of death grant the narrative its particular shape. This intricate argument is the key, really, for Brooks to make the move away from ‘pervasive narratism.’ The storytelling that surrounds us is understood to be a somewhat primitive form - lining up a sequence of events and claiming that that sequence confers some sort of narrative authority. In fact, storytelling, as practiced at the apex of the novel, is a more sophisticated instrument; and here, like a three-card monte player able to shuffle his reliable cards in such a way that he can produce whatever outcome he wants, Brooks deploys the ‘Brooks canon’ to argue against plot. In this formulation, Rousseau takes the first step - he claims that the world is so hopelessly fallen that fictions are, sad to say, the only form that can speak to it (“novels are necessary for corrupt populations”). And Proust builds on that to develop his idea of ‘metempsychosis’ - in which the novel is not so much about identification with ‘fictional characters’ as it is a remarkably profound mirror image of oneself, the novel serving as a kind of “vast cemetery” in which the novelist inters in fictional form the soon-to-be-forgotten figures the characters were based on. Seen in this way, fiction becomes a fun-house mirror, a realm beyond death that allows for an eternal sense of play. And, from this sensibility, the narrative just-so-ness of the Tom’s of Maine or J. Crew ads loses its force - the ad copy isn’t exactly ‘a story’ in the way that Brooks means it; it’s a manipulative intrusion of the tools of narration into the real world.
Of Brooks’ three musketeers, Freud is the one whom Brooks is closest to disowning. Freud, he claims, really was thinking as a scientist - “committed to getting the story right, to using construction only to fill in missing pieces of the ‘forgotten years’” - but his followers inevitably went further and determined that “the factuality of the story constructed between patient and analyst has no importance, that what matters is only the story itself, its capacity to create therapeutic conviction.” In a world saturated with Freudianism, that overreach of Freud’s insights may go a long way, Brooks contends, towards explaining story’s “promiscuous overuse in public life.”
And that overextension of Freud is really the terrain that Brooks is patrolling - attempting to shore up the porous frontier between fiction and myth. As he puts it, “If you start believing in [stories] literally, they case to be fictions and devolve into myth, which claims explanatory status and demands belief.” That fudging is nowhere more apparent than in the current devolution of our political process - with the political aphorism ‘campaign in poetry govern in prose’ standing in for a great deal of what has gone wrong. In terms of ‘poetry’ - i.e. the creation of myths, the mad generation of stories - Trump actually has been close to ‘a very stable genius,’ concocting a pair of easy-to-hook-onto narrative ideas, that the constellation of illegal immigrants and coastal elites are ruining the country, that it’s possible to return to a somewhat fuzzy yet inwardly strong distant past; and, needless to say, he’s been a catastrophe in governance. In terms of governance - of prose - Biden has been a pretty capable president, kept the wheels of government turning, effective supported Ukraine, etc - and, nevertheless, has managed to be a complete political inept, with no ‘myth,’ no narrative thread sustaining him.
It is not at all easy for Brooks to clamp back down on ‘story saturation.’ If democratic politics itself has more or less lost all contact with the actual reality of governance - if it’s possible, for instance, to govern well and still be a ‘failed president’ - then we have moved into a realm of myth and it takes a collective hard-headedness that we do not possess to effectively distinguish between fiction and reality. But, in his suggestive way, Brooks points in several different directions for how to restore stories to their proper role (and there is, within the thicket of ideas, the thrill of a very smart person getting ahold of a culture-shaping vision). There is the direction of better storytelling, which is on the novelistic front a reprise of modernism, an understanding alongside Proust’s metempsychosis and Woolf’s optics of the ‘stakes’ in storytelling - that every story is a kind of tragedy, an eradication of a flesh-and-blood person and a respectful establishment of their new existence on the plane of storytelling - and which, unexpectedly enough, has actually occurred with The Golden Age of Television, Hollywood’s mid-century ‘dream factory’ turning itself over, in dramas like The Wire, Mad Men, etc, to narratives that have real-world corollaries, that exist for some higher purpose than just to entrance or distract. There is the direction of better psychoanalysis - which is to say a more textured understanding of the ‘ground of reality’; Brooks, as far as I can tell, isn’t a very woo-woo sort of guy, but much of this is happening in the gradual shifting-over of the society from a Freudian to a Jungian understanding of the self (or to put this in a more tuneful sort of way, in ‘the dawning of the Age of Aquarius’). As meditators know, everything is phenomena, and much of the work of meditation is to dissociate from stories, from the sort of Freudian narrative constructs that predominated over a half-century or century of psychoanalysis, and then to open up to energy that’s a bit looser and more collective and, in a word, more Jungian. And then there is the direction of lyricism - as teased out by Roman Jakobson and elucidated by Brooks. Brooks cites Jakobson’s distinction between different types of disruption of the linguistic apparatus - the loss of the narrative function and the loss of the metaphoric function and suggests that neither is of more importance than the other. “The seeming obliteration in the public sphere of other forms of expression by narrative suggests that something in our culture has gone astray,” writes Brooks. I’ve noticed this in funerals or even just when listening to music - the way that a poem will suddenly surface as a eulogy and have an overpowering effect on a group of mourners who might collectively have gone months up to that point without thinking about poetry at all; or the way that a sort of inane song, with no comprehensible storyline, will somehow tap into a very deep, and neglected, emotional space. It’s not so much that there’s anything wrong with stories, as Strawson or some of the French extremists, like Sartre, would have it, as of a ‘skewing.’ There are other ways to express ourselves - more metaphoric, more lyrical, less of a linear narrative sequence. Forget that we have those resources and we distort ourselves.
What's wrong with the "patient as a river" line? It gives me chills just reading that in this excerpt.