Dave Eggers, as you may have heard, was tapped to write a new introduction to the 10th anniversary edition of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. The piece glows with praise for the gigantic novel, as one might expect (since such intros are, in many cases, packaging to sell the novel.) However, as The Rake has discovered, this isn’t the only time that Eggers has written about Infinite Jest. He was, in a 1996 review, very disparaging of the book. Perhaps Eggers has changed his mind about Infinite Jest, or perhaps the offer to write the intro was simply too tempting to turn down. As ever, I’m willing to give people the benefit of the doubt, but this smacks of opportunism.
Dave Eggers Waffles
The Millions Poetry Corner
Over the last year it seems that Spencer Reece has become the poet laureate of The Millions, mostly because his poem in last summer’s new fiction issue of the New Yorker was so amazing. Now, finally, his first collection of poetry, named after that poem I loved, The Clerk’s Tale, has been released. I’ve got my copy on order and I can’t wait to get it. While I’m waiting, I’ve been reading this interview with Reece.A NoteFrom the book I’m reading right now: “For it is certainly true that negligence in ladies destroys shame in their maids.”
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What people are reading: The Harry Potter edition
I only took the train one way today – Mrs. Millions was kind enough to pick me up this afternoon – but I still spotted at least three people reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in various stages of completion while riding the El this morning including one young man who was vigorously finishing the final pages. I wasn’t surprised to see Harry Potter on the train this morning, nor will I be surprised to see it a lot in the coming weeks considering the astonishing sales numbers the book generated this weekend. According to Scholastic Books, Potter sold 6.9 million copies over the weekend – that’s 250,000 copies an hour, more copies than 99.9% of books will sell in a lifetime. Barnes and Noble reported selling about 105 copies a second. You can get all the numbers here. Here’s my favorite stat, though. From the Guardian: “Retailers said that Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince had sold more copies in a day than The Da Vinci Code sold in one year.”All of this reminded me of my days selling Harry Potter books when I worked at a bookstore. As I recall, the day Part 5 came out, we sold more copies of that book than all the other books we sold that day combined, and this was at an independent bookstore on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, not exactly the kind of place that caters to kids. People can banter back and forth about whether or not Harry Potter books are any good – or whether or not adults should read them – but I know that they were good for our bookstore. For an independent, a big seller like Harry Potter can subsidize that less profitable business of trying to supply good literature to a dwindling group of interested readers.
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Appearing Elsewhere
Millions contributor Emily’s award-winning review of The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective by Kate Summerscale has been posted by VQR. Check it out.
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Iowa Dispatches, Part 1
The search for the person who will fill what is perhaps academia’s most prestigious creative writing job, director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is in its final stages. Four finalists have been announced, Richard Bausch, Lan Samantha Chang, Ben Marcus and Jim Shepard. Each will have an audition of sorts, which includes a reading, a mock workshop, and a talk on craft. Some friends in Iowa have been filling me in on this last part of the selection process, which got underway with Bausch’s visit to campus on February 10.I’m told that the process, itself, is somewhat odd, since it’s more of a performance than a way to discern teaching ability. During the mock-workshop, Bausch zipped through three stories in and hour and a half, faster than the typical workshop pace, and he digressed from the stories at hand to tell some stories of his own. He quoted some of his favorite works and seemed genuinely passionate about books and the writing life. He said he teaches patience, not writing, and said there are two rules to fiction: you have to use words and you have to be interesting. Though his commentary was somewhat liberal, Bausch’s critiques of the stories at hand were traditional, with specific recommendations about tone and pacing. For the public reading later in the evening, Bausch read a recently completed, as yet unpublished story, and during his “talk about craft,” he talked about memory and dispensed his 10 Commandments of writing, which included – to paraphrase – doing the work is the only thing that matters. Not if it’s good or bad, but that it gets done, everyday.Stay tuned for the next dispatch in a couple of weeks.
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Puppies Sell
Nolo Press, which puts out “trustworthy and approachable legal guides,” spent “two years and ‘hundreds of thousands'” coming up with a redesign for its book covers, according to Publishers Weekly. What did Nolo come up with? Dogs. Chip Kidd, book designer extraordinaire, happened to be guest blogging at Powell’s this week and registered his horror. (Thanks Laurie)
On the other hand…
There is no doubt some opportunism in an author taking advantage of an opportunity to look wise in hindsight, but Eggers also has a record of publishing Wallace stories–most notably the EXTREMELY recondite "Mr. Squishy," printed 5 years ago, pseudonymously, when there was no suggestion that any back-scratching would take place in return.
More generally, I think that Eggers' mediocre 1996 review is exactly what happens to great books in our hyperspeed culture. It is nearly impossible for a reviewer to tell how something is going to look in six months…not with respect to its strengths and weaknesses, but with respect to its staying power. I think I wrote a fairly glowing review of The Known World when it came out and I didn't know anything about EPJ, but I had little inkling that, in retrospect, it would appear monumental. Conversely, I really liked Aleksandar Hemon's "Nowhere Man" when I read it, but I don't think I'll be telling my grandkids about it.
This point is particularly relevant because certain blowhards who have had about three weeks to read the new Pynchon in advance readers' copies are now spouting off about it, both positively and negatively. How can one seriously evaluate something so big so quickly?
Though people do want to know about a book immediately, in order to decide whether to read it, it seems to me that the seriousness with which we take the insta-poll reactions to contemporary fiction should be in inverse proportion to the ambition of the work, or at least the page count.
What kind of opportunism would this be? Eggers is certainly the bigger name.
Good points here guys. People should have a right to change their minds, and an introduction to the book probably isn't the right place for Eggers to explain that initially he didn't like the book, but now he does (although it would be interesting to see him write about this somewhere.) For the record, I termed this as "opportunistic" because having his name attached to DFW in such a high profile way helps further burnish Eggers' cred in the world of contemporary fiction… But it's true, piling on Eggers here is probably unfair and just a little too easy… For more on why this isn't a big deal, check out Matthew Tiffany's thoughts on the subject.