Reality Hunger (61 page)

These “Let me tell you what your book is about” encomia are all notes I wrote to friends about their books. My impulse is always to push the book toward abstraction, toward sadness, toward darkness, toward doubleness, toward seventeen types of ambiguity. I always try to read form as content, style as meaning. The book is always, in some sense, stutteringly, about its own language. I’m always framing myself and the author as the lone founts of dark wisdom; I’m always the exponent of airy despair; I never touch ground.
Metaphysical
is big. In my formulation, the subject of the book is never what it appears to be. I frequently say that the book is seen to be about X when really it’s about Y. I always read the book as an allegory, as a disguised philosophical argument.
Existence
is frequently mentioned, as are
human, animal, sex, fuck
, and
violence
. I love the words
powerfully
and
enormously
and
relentlessly
and
bottomlessly
. I use
investigation
and
exploration
and
excavation
and
examination
and
rigorous
over and over. What would I do without
meditation?
There’s always an implied love story between me and the writer—me loving the book, loving the writer.
Candor
is key—being willing to say what no one else is willing to say. The act of writing is inevitably viewed as an act of courage (
brave
is all over the place). Life’s difficult, maybe even a drag; language is (slim) solace. No one
else gets what you’re doing; I alone get it. You and me, babe.
Intimacy. Urgency
. We alone get life. Let me explain your book—the
text
—to yourself. Let me tell you what your book is about. Life is shit. We are shit. This, alone, will save us—this communication.

manifesto

It’s a commonplace that every book needs to find its own form, but how many do?

If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms.

All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Nadja. Cane. Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me!
“The Moon in Its Flight.”
Wisconsin Death Trip. Letters to Wendy’s
.

We evaluate artists by how much they are able to rid themselves of convention.

Jazz as jazz—jazzy jazz—is pretty well finished. The interesting stuff is all happening on the fringes of the form where there are elements of jazz and elements of all sorts of other things as well. Jazz is a trace, but it’s not a defining trace. Something similar is happening in prose. Although great novels—novelly novels—are still being written, a lot of the most interesting things are happening on the fringes of several forms.

Still (very still), at the heart of “literary culture” is the big, blockbuster novel by middle-of-the-road writers, the run-of-the-mill four-hundred-page page-turner. Amazingly, people continue to want to read that.

The Corrections
, say: I couldn’t read that book if my life depended on it. It might be a “good” novel or it might be a “bad” novel, but something has happened to my imagination, which can no longer yield to the earnest embrace of novelistic form.

Is it possible that contemporary literary prizes are a bit like the federal bailout package, subsidizing work that is no longer remotely describing reality?