On The Pleasures and Solitudes of Quiet Books

Essays Lists
August 27, 2013 | 8 books mentioned 25 5 min read

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1.
Some years ago, before my first novel found its eventual home, several editors in a row said the book was “too quiet.” I was told at the time that this was just a euphemism for “no obvious marketing angle,” but I found it interesting to consider the idea that some novels are quiet, whereas others are loud.

2.
coverIn her exquisite memoir, The Faraway Nearby, Rebecca Solnit writes movingly of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. Shelley gave birth to four children, but only the fourth survived. “In the years she gave birth to all those too-mortal children,” Solnit writes:

…she also created a work of art that yet lives, a monster of sorts in its depth of horror, and a beauty in the strength of its vision and its acuity in describing the modern world that in 1816 was just emerging. This is the strange life of books that you enter alone as a writer, mapping an unknown territory that arises as you travel. If you succeed in the voyage, others enter after, one at a time, also alone, but in communion with your imagination, traversing your route. Books are solitudes in which we meet.

But before the meeting comes the solitude, the book as a private space that a reader steps into, and nowhere is this clearer to me than on the subway. On any given morning, a majority of my fellow passengers are reading. It’s a way to pass the time, of course, but it seems to me that escaping into a book in these moments is also a bid for some measure of seclusion.

In the places where everyone drives, the roads fill with single-occupancy vehicles in the mornings and the late afternoons, thousands or millions of drivers in their solitudes. On a subway commute, packed in with strangers in an underground train, solitude is more elusive. We resort to small tricks to find some space for ourselves: the noise-blocking headphones, the iPad, the book. I wear earbuds on my commute, but unless I’m too tired to read or the person next to me is loud, the iPod in my pocket is dark. I just want things to be a little quieter, so that I can disappear into my book more fully. In those moments I just want to be a little more alone.

coverIt probably goes without saying that you’ll crave different solitudes at different moments in your life, both in books and in physical places. I have an immense love for loud books. Novels like, say, Nick Harkaway’s, about which I’ve rhapsodized at length, books that come galloping into your life with their doomsday machines and schoolgirl spies and ninjas and leave you daydreaming for days afterward about clouds of mechanized bees. But on the other end of the spectrum, there’s the immense pleasure of novels like Teju Cole’s Open City, which I finally got around to reading a few weeks back. Very little happens in Open City, plotwise. It’s a very intelligent meditation on memory, dislocation, family, music, national identity, and other interesting topics, but the action is mostly a man wandering the streets of New York. I found it mesmerizing.

Lately, possibly because it’s been a long summer of continuous hard work on a new novel and I don’t want to think about plot just now, or perhaps because my annual allotment of vacation days at my day job resets every September 1st, I’ve been out of vacation time since February, and reading quiet books is the closest I can get to a vacation at the moment, I’ve discovered a new appreciation for books that fall on the quieter end of the spectrum.

3.
Any definition of what constitutes a quiet book will naturally be subjective, but I think the important point here is that quiet isn’t the same thing as inert. I’m not talking about the tediously self-conscious novels written by authors who use “literary fiction” as a sort of alibi, as in “my book doesn’t have a plot, because it’s literary fiction.” I rarely get more than fifty pages into these books before they join the books-that-need-to-get-out-of-my-apartment-immediately pile by the front door. Nor is quiet necessarily the same thing as minimalist. Raymond Chandler’s prose is minimalistic, but his stories aren’t quiet.

The books I think of as being quiet, the ones I’ve been enjoying lately, have a distilled quality about them, an unshowy thoughtfulness and a sense of grace, of having been boiled down to the bare essentials. If the solitude you crave at the moment is a quiet one, here’s a short reading list of quiet books that I’ve recently read and admired:

cover1. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
The book takes the form of a letter written by an aging Congregationalist minister, John Ames, to his young son. I found the language extraordinary.

2. Open City by Teju Cole
A young psychiatrist, Nigerian-born, walks the streets of New York City. The walks open the city to him and serve as a respite from the stress of his working life.

3. Snow Hunters by Paul Yoon
A North Korean man defects and immigrates to a coastal town in Brazil following the Korean War, where he becomes a tailor’s apprentice. An elegant account of a quiet and solitary life.

4. The Number of Missing by Adam Berlin
A deeply moving chronicle of drinking, friendship, and grief. Paul was among the scores of Cantor Fitzgerald employees who died in the World Trade Center. In the months following the 9/11 attacks, his best friend, David, moves like a ghost between the bars of Manhattan, sometimes with and sometimes without Paul’s widow, Mel. Both are falling, but David is waiting for Mel to fall first, so that he can catch her.

cover5. The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
Sophia, age six, and her grandmother, who’s nearing the end of her life, while away the days of a summer on a remote island in the Bay of Finland. Jansson’s depiction of both characters and of their relationship is delightful.

6. The Harp in the South by Ruth Park
A classic in Australia. A couple raise their children in the slums of 1940s Sydney, “in an unlucky house which the landlord had renumbered from Thirteen to Twelve-and-a-Half.”

Image via Michael Veltman/Flickr

is a staff writer for The Millions. Her most recent novel, Station Eleven, was a 2014 National Book Awards finalist. She is married and lives in Brooklyn. www.emilymandel.com.

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Essays

Are You, Or Have You Ever Been, a Jewish Writer?

Essays
March 3, 2011 | 8 books mentioned 16 8 min read
In the fall of 2005, when my first novel came out, I was invited to speak to the Jewish Book Council, a group of representatives of Jewish community centers and synagogues from across the country.  I was one of about 25 writers who were to stand before them that afternoon, in the first of two or three sessions they’d hold. We were all sorts of Jewish writers, corralled into a giant hall—a handwriting analyst who had written about the signatures of celebrity Jews, a young woman who had gone to China to teach English but had ended up starring in a soap opera there, and Ira Katznelson, the great Columbia University historian, who that year had written a book about racial inequality in 20th Century America. We were called up, one after another, and allotted two minutes each.  They sat in front of us, mostly late-middle aged, mostly female, presumably Jewish, all of them with reading glasses and notebooks—the scariest possible bar mitzvah crowd, deciding whom to invite to speak to their particular audiences, in San Diego or Palm Springs or Shaker Heights.  I was given an orange tag, not a red one, which meant I had to leave before hors d’oeuvres got served, and since my last name begins with B, I went early in the program. Usually I do pretty well in front of audience, but this time I blew it.  Did I mention, when I got to the podium, that I had published a previous book of stories, or that the stories had won some big awards?  Did I say that one of the awards I’d won had been Jewish?  No.  I told them I lived in Brooklyn, and I mumbled something about how my novel had been a labor of love, and how I hoped they would love it too, if they read it.  Then I wandered past my seat (the only writer not to return to his seat), and went to the back where the wine glasses were (nobody else had touched a wine glass), and in full view of the ladies, downed a plastic glass of cheap Chablis. Still, I got a couple of gigs. Even now, a good half of the paid readings I get invited to are sponsored by Jewish organizations. In fact, Jewish readers took interest in me even before they had read me.  When my first story was published in Zoetrope, there was an item about it in the Jewish Daily Forward, in their Walter Winchel-esque “Knickerbocker” gossip column, “Gabriel Brownstein has published a story.” —the assumption being (I guess) that their readers were rooting for a guy with my name.  Even non-Jews take interest in me as a Jew.  About 90% of the time I get book reviews assigned, the authors of the books are Jewish.  I’m not complaining—those books have been good—but had my father dropped the second syllable of his last name, no way would you see my by-line on an article about Singer or Roth. “Are you a Jewish writer?” That’s the big question—the question every Jewish writer gets asked when he stands before a Jewish crowd.   It’s a question about allegiance, I guess, about identity—and because the answer is so obvious  (my last name is Brownstein, I’m sitting in a synagogue basement, hawking a book) it feels a little bit needling, posed with a raised eyebrow, and the eyebrow I imagine is my late Great Aunt Henya’s, drawn in an orange pencil to match her permanent’s rinse. I’ve worked out different replies.  The rim shot: “No, I’m a Korean gynocologist.”  Or “Yeh, yeh,” with the flap of the hand (Yiddish being the only language where a double positive is a negative).  But the fact is inescapable: Were I to convert to Catholicism and to renounce the pen for dentistry, that would only make me a more interesting Jewish writer. As a kid, I’ll admit it, I thought of them like an all-star team, The American Jews—Saul “The Sultan of Swat” Bellow roaming right, Bern “the Iron Horse” Malamud at first, Grace “Pee-Wee” Paley, the slick-fielding shortstop, and in center my hero, Phil “The Jersey Clipper” Roth.  All I wanted, maybe starting at about fifteen, was to be a utility infielder on that squad, maybe a pinch runner, but certainly to wear the uniform.  And that uniform was never the long black coat and yarmulke.  Alexander Portnoy wanted to be “just a center fielder,” not a Jewish center fielder.  None of my heroes took the field with a big YIDDLE on their chest, or played for the home team. And that’s what drew me to them—their ambiguity, their irony, the same things, it turns out, Cleanth Brooks liked about literature. My team by now has won so many championships that their influence is pervasive.  Everyone wants to wear the cap.  It’s not just Updike with his Beck books.  Barack Obama, on the campaign trail, acknowledged his debt to Bellow and Roth.  Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom is over-populated with brilliant, superreal Jewish caricatures—the assimilated Larchmont housewife, the downtown hippy, the neo-con sage—Franzen (not a Jew) even has a Jewish identity rediscovery subplot.  Some of my favorite recent Jewish short stories have been by non-Jews, like Nam Le’s “Meeting Elise,“ about a New York painter’s colonoscopy, or Anthony Doerr’s beautiful requiem for a dying Holocaust survivor, “Afterworld.” Not long ago, William Deresiewicz wrote an interesting article in the Nation about the state of contemporary Jewish letters.  He noted that the Jewish subcultures that spawned the great Jewish-American writers of the midcentury are all gone, and that it’s no longer possible to be a Jewish-American writer as Bellow and Roth and Malamud and Paley were, moving from the margin toward the center while embracing both.  The Jewish writers of my generation whose subject is most overtly Jewish—Dara Horn, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Nathan Englander—tend to write historical fiction, and they seem not to be following the madcap assimilationist comedy of Portnoy’s Complaint but more the elegiac lyricism of Cynthia Ozick, as in The Shawl—a search for something lost, a search for authenticity.  But that search for authenticity is not what I love. It’s not that I’m ambivalent about being a Jewish writer, but that the kind of Jewish writer I am is ambivalent. I’m more attuned to the dissonant chord than to mournful harmonies, and reading Ozick—ah, she’s so brilliant, nobody’s smarter—I can get uneasy.  In the Puttermesser Papers, for instance, a character begins riffing on Yiddish, with its only one word for knife: “By us, we got only messer, you follow?  By them they got sword, they got lance, they got halberd . . ..  Look it up in the book, you’ll see halberd, you’ll see cutlass, pike, rapier, foil, ten dozen more.  By us, pike is a fish.”  And it’s feels like a sermon not a story, as if the character is mouthing the author’s beliefs, by us we’re gentle, by them they’re mean, and this for me shades quickly toward Ozick’s politics, the kind of Zionism that brooks no irony or ambiguity, or much sympathy at all for the other guy’s sufferings or cries for justice. What happens when Jewish fiction becomes identity fiction?  Here we come to the difficult thing at the heart of this essay and the heart of contemporary Jewish-themed fiction, i.e., fiction about the Holocaust.  Here, irony and ambiguity seem out of place:  I may find my ethnicity comic, but Nazis most certainly won’t.  Ozick’s "The Shawl" is not the first piece of fiction by an American-born Jew to re-imagine the horrors of the camps, but it is one of the most influential.   And “The Shawl” is beautifully written, six-pages long and composed as if in a trance.  A mother watches as her child is thrown against the electrified fence of a concentration camp:  “And all at once Magda was swimming through the air.  The whole of Magda traveled through loftiness.  She looked like a butterfly touching a silver vine. And the moment Magda’s feathered round head and her pencil legs and her balloonish belly and zigzag arms splashed against the fence, the voices went mad in their growling.”  In direct contradiction of Theodore Adorno’s dictum that “there can be no poetry after Auschwitz,” Ozick turns Auschwitz into poetry. Her writing, in some ways, is the antithesis of the flat-eyed, clear-eyed prose of Primo Levi, whose Survival in Auschwitz chronicles the awful banality of the place, and examines the daily bleakness of mass slaughter with his clinical chemist’s eye. As a writer you can’t help but be struck by Ozick’s audacity, but now, thirty years after “The Shawl,” it’s become habitual. Everybody turns Auschwitz into poetry—serious writers like Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, and Englander, and less serious writers and film-makers and TV-show producers, all the way down to Holocaust kitsch like The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. A world-wrenching mind-boggling horror—a set of horrors that no one can wrap their mind around—has become a genre, holocaust fiction.  And like the Jewish comedy that I so love, the field’s open to everybody.  I can hardly go two semesters of creative writing classes (at a Catholic school, natch) without getting a concentration camp story.  And yet when I taught Survival in Auschwitz recently in a graduate literature course, my students didn’t much like the book.  So dry, they said.  So bleak.  It was missing something.  In most Holocaust stories, they said, you got that little ray of sunshine, of redemption—the triumph of the human spirit. Bellow, of course, didn’t much like being categorized as a Jewish writer.  He was uncomfortable with Isaac Beshevis Singer (“too Jewy”) and joked that he, Malamud, and Roth were the Hart, Schaffner and Marx of American letters.  The great Jewish writers of the 50s saw identity and history as unsteady things.  Malamud’s “The Magic Barrel” ends with its hero running from rabbinical studies toward love, and the old matchmaker, Salzman, muttering prayers for the dead.  The viewpoint in Roth’s late great Israel novels—The Counterlife and Operation Shylock—is doubled, two Roths, split identities, the whole concept of authenticity set ablaze. Perhaps in the work of contemporary historical Jewish novelists we’re seeing a counter-reaction, an attempt to put that fire out and reclaim all that was lost.  Maybe people are done reading about ambivalent Jews.  After all, you can be a Jewish writer these days, a Jonathan Lethem or a Joan Silber, and not really write that much as a Jew at all.  Meanwhile, the very best of the current Jewish writers who write on Jewish themes, Michael Chabon and Allegra Goodman, have managed to leap the dichotomy between the old ironists and the new earnestness largely through the sheer force of human comedy.  American-Jewish fiction remains rich in potentialities—infinite numbers of stories to be written about family, history, assimilation, Zionism, philo-Semitism, anti-Semitism, ideology, and power—no wonder people are still interested. I went to a conference not too long ago on Asian American writers, and “Are you an Asian American writer?”  the writers were asked.  For me, it was a little trip through the looking glass, and I wondered:  Is this how it goes all over the country?  You invite a panel of writers, troop them up under the fluorescents, and then ask, “For us or against us?” David Henry Hwang, the playwright, had a good answer.  He said that for years he had resented the categorization, but in time he had come to terms with it.  You have to get categorized, he said, one way or another—Jewish writer, gay writer, women’s writer, sex writer, what have you.  He talked of friends, fine playwrights with unspectacular careers, who had never been categorized, and said, look, that’s why they never took off.  You need to get categorized in order to succeed. Truth is, these days, any writer who gets any attention should count himself lucky.  A reader, somewhere, from some reason, is thinking of you—that alone should be cause for a happy dance.  So, yes, ladies and gentlemen, I am a Jewish writer.  Invite me to your community center, please! (Image: Seychelles Island-1, from zeevveez's photostream)
Essays
| 8 books mentioned 16 8 min read
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25 comments:

  2. “Both are falling, but David is waiting for Mel to fall first, so that he can catch her.” Possibly the best line I’ve read all week.

    I’ve always loved quiet books (Marilynne Robinson is a special favorite), so thank you so much for this short list. I would also add Stoner, previously covered by The Millions, except that I haven’t finished it yet so no guarantees.

  3. I read the title of this essay and immediately thought of The Summer Book, which I found by chance in a used bookstore. I had no idea what it was about or who the author was, but it seemed like exactly the type of book I needed at the moment. It was peaceful and gentle and nostalgic.

  4. Thanks for this essay. I’ll be searching out the Yoon and Berlin books, especially. I’m in the middle of The Summer Book (which I’d saved for summer reading, of course!) and am enjoying its distinctive pace. I can recommend Jansson’s The Winter Book, too, but perhaps you might save this until winter arrives?

    As for Cole’s Open City, I found his novel is be an increasingly disquieting quiet read, to the moment when I realized that all his walking is an attempt to put emotional distance on a disturbing event in his past. Then his quiet novel, at least for me, became very loud indeed. I found this book to be even more rewarding when reread . . .

  5. A great list! I can’t wait to look into some of these novels. “Open City” and “Gilead” are beautiful. Might I recommend that “Tinkers” or (if Paul Harding’s first is any indication) “Enon” be added to your list?

  6. This essay was a graceful, quiet read itself, and the list of recommended books is fantastic. Thank you!

  9. I get the occasional need to seek books which provide comforts from the difficulties of everyday life, but the idea that a novel should adhere to some “loud” vs. “quiet” spectrum me is a largely useless dichotomy, if not a timid prescription that would be thrown out of any English class. Fiction should be flexible enough to inhabit ALL emotions: to make the reader laugh and cry, to give the reader noise and quiet (and if you’re seriously viewing OPEN CITY as a “quiet” novel, you’re clearly ignoring, if not misreading, the very loud pain that is buried within Julius and that is just as clamorous as any Harkaway vision).

    This gormless and egregious essay is little more than a retread of the dreaded and utterly useless “unlikable” characters debate. It is designed to encourage a type of pusillanimous and passive-aggressive reader, one who imposes her own dull and blinkered and eggshell-walking view of humanity onto Goodreads and Amazon, who diminishes the full range of literature and discourages authors from taking chances. That this nonsense would be published on a website ostensibly devoted to serious literary discussion is a mark that nobody here is especially interested in minding the store and stirring up real debate and answering to the more serious challenge of how to stay subtle and rational-minded in literature when the world is a mess that no amount of hiding will declutter.

  10. The last few lines are exactly what I envision when I think of a “quiet” novel. Perhaps “quiet,” then, is a misnomer.

  11. Pingback: Ether: Is Social Reading the End of an Intimacy? | Porter Anderson

  12. Re: Edward Champion comments, above

    I’m a big fan of Emily St. John Mandel and someone who has no concern about “likability” in either my characters or my own interactions. I like my fiction quiet. I like my fiction rough. Don’t care, so long as it’s good. Ms. Mandel’s essay displays the same lovely writing style and quietly but sharply perceptive sensibility that marks her fiction. She is a young writer I value and I look forward to following her career.

    As for Champion’s hatchet job, what nonsense. Nothing she is writing about has anything to do with the “unlikable” characters debate. You, sir, have totally missed the point. A “gormless and egregious essay?” “Designed to encourage a type of pusillanimous and passive-aggressive reader…” “Dull and blinkered and eggshell-walking view of humanity.” Balderdash!

    As for your galumphing and harrumphing umbrage that “this nonsense would be published on a website ostensibly devoted to serious literary discussion….” All I have to say to that is… Get thee back to your murky lair under the bridge, Troll!

    Sincerely

    Moe Murph (Definitely not the quiet type)
    Washington, DC

  13. I endorse Maureen’s defence of this essay; it seems churlish to attack it so venomously. The tone was surely intended to be slightly humorous and conversational, to stimulate the kind of friendly, literary discussion one would prefer to see in these comments – not an unwarranted, egregiously misguided attack! Let’s have a bit of quiet, calm comment, please.

  14. Gilead is a marvel. So free of irony and guile and tortured self-consciousness.
    I think Evan Connell’s pair of novels, Mr Bridge, and Mrs Bridge, can be tagged Quiet. So uneventful you can’t put them down. You cant wait to see what doesn’t happen next. Another way of saying that every sober paragraph, every mundane moment, feels (quietly) momentous.

  15. Maureen: How have I missed the point? Would you care to actually offer a defense/? Do you actually have an argument? No, you don’t. And I do. And I will happily debate you at length (or, for that matter, the pusillanimous Emily St. John Mandel, who remains “quiet” and reveals her limitations as a thinker with her silence) using specific examples and taut arguments. But, of course, you have nothing more in your cheap rhetorical reticule other than asserting that the proposition is wrong. Is that too “loud” for you? Have I upset your fragile minds by calling you out on your indolent thinking? Oh dear.

    Simon Lavery also belongs in the dunk tank for failing to argue. Neither of you can offer a bona-fide position. You only wish to declare my viewpoint wrong. That doesn’t fly in any real debate. Are either of you familiar with a constructive argument?

    You people are what’s wrong with America. Learn how to think or you’ll end up dead and useless.

  16. Re: Edward Champion

    My above short comment was in reply to you, I just forgot to name you as the intended recipient, the point being that “quiet” simply refers to a style of writing and not the entirety of the literature put in such a category. Every dichotomy can be deconstructed, but that doesn’t change the self-evident difference in writing style between Marilynne Robinson and, say, David Foster Wallace. And, yes, there are differences in writing style between the authors listed in the article above, but I’m sure you can wrap your “rational” mind around the axis of difference we’re adopting here that shows a greater difference between “quiet” and “loud” styles of literature than between works of “quiet” literature. Again, this isn’t a rigid axis, and the standard is subjective, but, of course, you already knew that, given that literary tastes are always subjective—-as are the taste (or lack thereof) in “rational” comments.

    (Why do I feel like I’ve just been trolled?)

  17. Emily wrote, “some novels are quiet, whereas others are loud,” which is a pretty clear-cut rigid dichotomy that is even more problematic than the speculative riffing Zadie Smith was doing in her essay, “Two Paths for the Novel.” The fact that you, CJ (or should I just call you Lee Siegel?), and Emily would rather ascribe a taxonomic element to writers as deeply complicated and as variegated and as rich as Marilynne Robinson and DFW reveals that you are not especially interested in unpacking the literary ideal I described above: once again, that fiction should encompass ALL human qualities so that one does not approach the act of reading literature in the same crass manner as one orders from a Taco Bell drive-thru.

  18. Re: My dear friend Ed,

    This will be my last post on this thread, and I want to apologize on behalf of both of us for making a bloody mess of the bottom half of this page when such a beautiful article starts it off. Ed, if you still want to continue, you’re on your own.

    Despite the fact that you obviously aren’t looking for an open-minded discussion rather than looking for a mole to whack with your hammer of a brain, I still find just enough logic in your post to warrant a response. Since you’re going so analytical on me, you should also know, of course, that the “some . . . , others . . . ” construction is not delimiting, as opposed to “some . . . , the others . . . .” The sentence you cited could easily have continued, “and others have pink covers, and others still are written in Greek.”

    To return to the contention at hand, I’ve already mentioned that the axis chosen is arbitrary. That does not preclude other equally valid axes from being chosen, resulting in equally valid comparisons. A rationally minded person such as yourself should know very well that the first step to “unpacking” anything is to draw distinctions; otherwise everything is equally singular as everything else and no meaningful comprehension can be made whatsoever outside of, “Oh, that’s a work of fiction.” You obviously believe that more can be said, given the arbitrary standard that you put up: “fiction should encompass ALL human qualities.” Ergo, under this rubric, the closer a work of fiction is to this goal, the better it is. There is no universal truth that supports your axis as “better” or “worse” (or other such nonsense dichotomies) than any other; and I might mention the fact that democracy has no logical connection with truth.

    But that brings me to my third and last point: You’re begging the question. This article never said that “quiet” works are better than “loud” ones always and forevermore. Did your cherry-picking skip over how the author said “I have an immense love for loud books”? And the numbers on the list have no ordinal value attached to them at all, not even implied in the text. There is no evidence period that the author is promoting a “taxonomy” of literature; even if there were, you have provided no argumentation supporting the harm that such a taxonomy would cause to your “literary ideal,” which, again, is as arbitrary an axis as the one you so “rationally” seem worked up about.

    Even when I know I’m having my time wasted, I find this article too good to not defend. (And that, my dear Ed, is a subjective literary taste.)

  19. I am so grateful for this essay. Just gave me two more books to my “to read” list–The Summer Book, and The Harp in the South.

    I’d like to add three more books that I consider quiet books, very powerful, poignant, and unforgettable, and these are the trilogy by Kent Haruf–Plainsong, Eventide, and Benediction. About the lives of people in an imaginary town in Colorado, called Holt.

    I realize that I am slow to add my comments here, and so probably no one will even get to this little submission, but just in case one person reads my suggestion, and then gives these books some attention, I will be satisfied.

  21. Thank you so much for this article, Ms. Mandel. I’ve never conceptualized novels in this “loud” and “quiet” way, but it seems like a really useful way to think about books
    .
    It also helps me personally, as a reader, because lately I keep picking up “quiet” books that I’m sure I’ll like, reading for fifty pages, and then just forgetting to finish them! It’s baffled me, because I know intellectually that the book is good, but I can’t get into it. Whereas when I’ve picked up something like “John Dies at the End,” I can’t get enough of it. I think I set a record finishing that book!

  22. What a lovely essay. I have Gilead in my to-read pile and might just move it up now. I have not read the others on this list but they are now on my list too.

    I can’t recall if I’ve thought of books as quiet or loud but, yes, I get the meaning. And, as I think through my reading this year, I think The Book of Ebenezer Le Page would fall into the “quiet” category as described here – although it is a book that covers an entire man’s life over some 60+ years and filled with so many lovely characters. Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love, which I re-read this year, might fall into the “loud” category, even though I loved it even more this time around.

    Thank you for this lovely piece.

  24. Good article, I’ll have to check out some of these books.

    Ironically it ended up provoking the loudest noise I think I’ve ever seen on this webpage. For a second I thought I was on thermps or htmlwhatever with the kids.

  25. Love books like these; thank you to Emily for giving me more to read! Have always loved the quietness of So Long, See You Tomorrow by James Maxwell. Its refusal to draw attention to itself makes it all the more compelling.

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Essays

Interactive Art: What Video Games Can Learn from Freud

Essays
January 6, 2011 | 8 books mentioned 9 8 min read
1. What if the best thing art has to offer is freedom from choice? There’s a reason it’s high praise, not criticism, to say that a film or a piece of music or a good novel “sweeps you along.” There’s a selflessness in it: not just the pleasure in pausing the parts of the brain that plan and calculate and select, but in the temporary surrender of investing in someone else’s choices. Good art can be where we go for humility: when we’re encouraged to treat each of our thoughts as worthy of being made public, it can be almost counter-cultural to admit, in the act of being swept along, that someone else is simply better at arranging the keys of a song or the twists of a book and making them look like fate. Freedom from choice is a seductive way of thinking about art—and it’s at the heart of the debate over the cultural value of video games. Video games, for their cultural boosters, promise an art based on choice: an interactive art, possibly the first ever. For their detractors, “interactive art” is a contradiction in terms. Critics can point to video games’ narrative clichés or sloppy dialogue or a faith in violence as the answer to everything; but at base, they seem to be bothered by the idea of an art form that can be “played.” Choice is their bright line. Last spring, Roger Ebert nominated himself to hold that bright line on his blog. And though the 4,799 comments (to date) on his original post weighed in overwhelmingly against his claim that “Video games can never be art,” and encouraged him to back off of that blanket assertion, he summed up as eloquently as anyone the danger posed to narrative by video games’ possibility of limitless choice: If you can go through “every emotional journey available,” doesn’t that devalue each and every one of them? Art seeks to lead you to an inevitable conclusion, not a smorgasbord of choices. If next time I have Romeo and Juliet go through the story naked and standing on their hands, would that be way cool, or what? It’s possible, as Owen Good did, to write off the whole argument as empty, just a chest-thumping proxy war between generations or subcultures: “Art is fundamentally built on the subjective: inspiration, interpretation and appraisal. To me that underlines the pointlessness of the current debate for or against video games as art….Is there some validation the games community seeks but isn’t getting right now?” But then, every argument about art is about validation, about the assignment of prestige—yet those arguments are still worth having, because they can also be about something else. The argument over video games is about finding a place for choice in art, about respectability, and about empathy. And the best way into that argument may come from considering another cultural practice’s struggle for respect in its early days. I think that there’s already been a powerful interactive art, one that has some lessons for video games: psychoanalysis. 2. Too Jewish, too sex-obsessed, too much a cult of personality centered on Freud: before it was a more-or-less respected science, psychoanalysis was widely thought to be all of those things. George Makari’s Revolution in Mind begins the history of the movement that gathered around Sigmund Freud with a clique small enough to fit into a Vienna living room. Freud dreamed of creating a new scientific discipline, one legitimized by university departments, teaching hospitals, international conferences, and state funding; but he couldn’t even secure agreement among the rival scientists, doctors, artists, writers, liberal activists, and sexual libertines all drawn, all for reasons of their own, to his ideas of the unconscious. What exactly was this movement? Was it a school of medicine, a philosophical circle, a budding political party? With its objects of study so hard to pin down objectively, it was hard to say with certainty. Maybe it was art. That, at times, was the opinion of James Strachey, one of the more important figures in legitimizing this strange discipline and winning it an international reputation. James was the brother of the Bloomsbury author Lytton Strachey and a scholar of Mozart, Haydn, and Wagner; he was also one of the first English-speaking psychoanalysts and Freud’s most important translator. It’s because of Strachey that we still use Latin terms like id, ego, and superego, rather than Freud’s more down-to-earth “the It,” “the I,” and “the Over-I” (as a literal translation of his German would have had it). As an aspiring “talk therapist” in 1920, Strachey came from London to Vienna to undergo an extensive training analysis with Freud. He wrote to Lytton that he divided his time equally between the doctor’s office and the opera house—and, intriguingly, he described his sessions as a brand-new kind of aesthetic experience, a kind of private opera in which the therapist was the director and he was the star. Here is what he wrote after 34 hours on the couch: [Freud] himself is most affable and as an artistic performer dazzling…Almost every hour is made into an organic aesthetic whole. Sometimes the dramatic effect is absolutely shattering. During the early part of the hour, all is vague—a dark hint here, a mystery there—; then it gradually seems to get thicker; you feel dreadful things going on inside you, and can’t make out what they could possibly be; then he begins to give you a slight lead; you suddenly get a clear glimpse of one thing; then you see another; at last a whole series of lights break in on you; he asks you one more question; you give a last reply—and as the whole truth dawns on you the Professor rises, crosses the room to the electric bell, and shows you out the door. Why was the experience so aesthetically powerful, so unlike anything Strachey had seen before? In large part, it seems, the difference was that he was a participant in the drama, not merely a spectator—or maybe a participant and a spectator at the same time. There was a story being played out in one-hour increments; but the story was his story. His choices—how to react to each question, what to reveal and what to conceal, how to make sense of and advance the unfolding “plot”—gave the story its shape. And the scene of the real action was internal: “dreadful things going on inside you.” At the same time, though, Strachey realized that this was not a simple exercise in introspection or an outpouring of emotions—it was a guided drama. Freud shaped it as much as his patient did, not by telling a story, but by skillfully arranging a limited number of choices, on the fly, that reliably delivered his patient to the sensation of dawning truth and artistic completion. What’s remarkable is that he did it with such consistency. Strachey wrote about a series of conversations, and yet they all seemed to shape themselves into a classical dramatic arc: premonitions, a mounting pursuit, a crashing climax, and a cliffhanger ending. It’s true that James Strachey, aesthete as he was, brought his own unique preconceptions to Freud’s couch. But it’s also true that the dynamic he identified—the tension between free response and prearranged structure in each session—would, according to Makari’s history, be the cause of some of the growing movement’s greatest schisms. For instance, Freud’s Hungarian disciple Sándor Ferenczi came to advocate “active therapy”: confronting patients directly, turning their answers back on them, setting deadlines for progress, enforcing sexual abstinence, and even, in one case, regulating the patient’s posture during sessions. On the other pole, the Frankfurt analyst Karl Landauer argued for a passive technique that teased out the patient’s resistances to treatment, insisting that the therapist must not “impose actively upon [the patient] one’s own wishes, one’s own associations, one’s own self.” Long after Freud’s movement had achieved the legitimacy he always sought, this tension between hands-on and hands-off treatment would end friendships, partnerships, and careers. 3. Of course, video games are not a kind of psychoanalysis, and psychoanalysis would not make much of a video game (“press ‘A’ to confess sexual feelings for Mother”). Nor has psychoanalysis shaken off its detractors, then or now, by painting itself as an art; as compelling as Strachey’s vision was, there was always more prestige in claiming the objectivity of science. Besides, if it was so pleasurable for Strachey to reflect on his treatment, how serious could his problems have been? Strachey may have idealized his treatment—but he also found the emotional potential in a practice that many of his contemporaries were writing off as a fad. And in doing so, he gave evocative evidence for the possibilities of interactive art. He also, unwittingly, described the reasons why video games seem so promising to so many. They can be an art that makes us both spectators and performers, one that can turn us from passive audience members to partners, flattening the relationship between artist and audience without erasing it altogether. In the private drama he co-created, Strachey was decidedly the junior partner; Freud was such an effective senior partner because he balanced choice with structure, keeping his patient personally invested even as the session stayed fastened to some important dramatic rules. Is it too far a stretch to see this as a type for the relationship between a skilled video game designer and a savvy player? In video games, our story can be anyone’s but our own. But their greatest promise, and greatest advantage over traditional art, is in their power to create empathy—to make someone else’s story feel like our own because we are temporarily living it. We’ve been able to lose ourselves in video game characters ever since the first player sent his Italian plumber off of a ledge and exclaimed “I died!”—not “Mario died!” Today, though, that power of empathy is being put to much more complex uses. In Slate’s annual Gaming Club discussion last month, Chris Suellentrop reflected on “the scene—it feels unfair to call it a level” in the game Heavy Rain that forced him to cut off his own character’s finger: “It felt agonizing, like I was cutting off my own finger. It was one of the most remarkable things I’ve ever experienced, in video games or any other medium.” Similarly, in Extra Lives—both a defense and a criticism of video games’ cultural potential—Tom Bissell spends pages meditating on a drive through the night city in Grand Theft Auto IV, with two bodies hidden in the trunk of his car. It was a dangerous risk undertaken to advance his character’s underworld career—and it was also an unsettling choice in which he felt criminally complicit. Interactivity, Bissell writes, “turns narrative into an active experience, which film is simply unable to do in the same way.” Film could not have left him with the same sense of guilt. It might be that empathetic power that ultimately brings the argument over video games’ cultural value to an end. Even in the midst of his criticism, Ebert concludes that the works of art that have moved him most deeply “had one thing in common: Through them I was able to learn more about the experiences, thoughts and feelings of other people. My empathy was engaged.” Perhaps there aren’t any games that engage his empathy, let alone engage it more powerfully than a film. Maybe there never will be: it’s telling that the moments identified by Bissell and Suellentrop as emblematic of video games’ potential tend to revolve around extreme violence. Even Bissell complains that game designers tend to give short shrift to narrative and characterization and line-by-line prose—and maybe we shouldn’t expect that to change. Given the amount of capital most sophisticated games demand—let alone the capital it would take to finance one complex enough to count as truly interactive—maybe we should expect them to settle permanently into the niche of the summer blockbuster. But even among the big-budget films, there are those that challenge us and move us. Video games, in principle, don’t have to be any different—and the potentially interactive art they hold out promises to move us with the intensity of Strachey’s light breaking in. When and if that happens, we shouldn’t expect art to be washed away in a flood of endless choices, with characters going through the story “naked and standing on their hands.” The most interesting argument won’t be about video games’ status as art, but about how to build an art that most effectively balances choice and structure, openness and narrative. Every increment toward freedom could mean deeper involvement and deeper empathy, at the cost of shapelessness; every increment toward structure could mean more captivating stories and characters—even as we find it harder to imagine ourselves into their shoes. The debate between the virtues of freedom and control, articulated almost a century ago by Freud’s disciples, will play out again, inconclusively, in a realm they could have barely imagined.
Essays
| 8 books mentioned 9 8 min read
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Essays

Free is a Complicated Word, or, The Idea Coincidence

Essays
July 22, 2009 | 8 books mentioned 2 7 min read
Sonya Chung's first novel, Long for This World, will be released by Scribner in March 2010. She is currently at work on a second novel, Sebastian & Frederick. You can learn more about Sonya and her work at www.sonyachung.com.Here's how it happens: an idea, or a question, or a theme begins to take shape in your mind. There is a tipping point, when it moves from background to foreground. Then: you see it everywhere. You are wearing Idea-X-colored glasses, everything speaks to this idea; it is a prism through which All Can Be Considered and Understood.Lydia Kiesling noted a related phenomenon in her essay here at The Millions, "The Reading Coincidence."Throughout my life as a reader I have noticed this thing happening over and over; a book I read after finishing a seemingly unrelated book turns out to be linked to the previous book in some way... Every book you read in a short period of time mentions one of the other books you just read, or a movie you saw last week, or even, like, a dream someone told you against your will? Doesn't it? And isn't it weird?... What is it called? Is there, perhaps, a pertinent volume of Remembrance of Things Past to which I should address myself?It is weird. And I don't know either to whom or what we should "address ourselves" in order to understand. But following is the anatomy of my Idea Coincidence around the notion of free:June 11 - My blog response to Dan Baum's twitter-essay about being fired from the New Yorker. I ponder the tensions between institutional sanction and intellectual-creative freedom.June 19 - A friend refers me to D.H. Lawrence's "The Spirit of Place" from his Studies in Classic American Literature. "Men are not free when they are doing just what they like. The moment you can do just what you like, there is nothing you care about doing." June 25-27 - I read Toni Morrison's A Mercy. Jacob, an Anglo-Dutch trader, inherits New England farm land in the early years of the American slave trade. He and his English wife Rebekka, are orphaned (literally and emotionally, respectively), free from family ties; and they reject church-community ties, forging instead a life of untethered self-determination. "They leaned on each other root and crown. Needing no one outside their sufficiency. Or so they believed... Those [church] women seemed flat to [Rebekka], convinced they were innocent and therefore free."Then, a week of being haunted by Rebekka's fate: Jacob dies of smallpox, she contracts the same; her isolation engulfs her (her children have also died). Their makeshift family - a Native American bondswoman, two cast-off slave girls, two indentured servants, and a blacksmith (a free black man) - begins to come apart:They once thought they were a kind of family because together they had carved companionship out of isolation. But the family they imagined they had become was false. Whatever each one loved, sought or escaped, their futures were separate and anyone's guessOn death's door, in feverish lucidity, Rebekka asks, "Were the Anabaptists right?... [Was] her stubborn self-sufficiency outright blasphemy?... She had only to stop thinking and believe." She recovers, then joins the church; her deal with God. The indentured servant Scully observes: "Mistress passed her days with the joy of a clock. She was a penitent, pure and simple. Which to him meant that underneath her piety was something cold if not cruel." Was Rebekka, the only technically free woman in the novel, ever truly free?July 2 - In an effort to shake off some of Morrison's (and Rebekka's) haunting presence, a light movie rental, Waitress, by Adrienne Shelley. Protagonist Jenna Hunterson, played by Keri Russell, wants to break free of her tyrannical, dim, pathologically love-hungry husband Earl, but finds herself unhappily pregnant with his baby. In the end, she finds her freedom in the mother-child bond.July 5 - I read Adam Zagajewski's heady essay, "Toil and Flame," on Polish painter Jozef Czapski. For Czapski, freedom was a way of seeing, an inner disposition. "Seeing must be governed by one principle alone, the principle of ‘inner freedom'" - which, according to Zagajewski, is rooted in Keats's negative capability, and a dynamic "not-knowing" that is essentially religious - "very strong faith and very strong doubt alongside a complete inability to stay fixed in one single, stable metaphysical conviction." July 9 - Publishers Weekly article on the hoopla around Chris Anderson's book Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Upon its release, angry readers accused Anderson of claiming that everything online should be free. Says Anderson: "... the book is not about how everything should be free, but about how the economics of free are developing in the increasingly digital world... I knew that the word ‘free' was a misunderstood, confusing word, and it has triggered fear and longing in equal amounts. I'm now dealing with the consequences of just how complicated the word is." July 14 - Bezalel Stern's guest post at The Millions on Richard Ford's Independence Day. Stern: "Real independence, Ford posits, is all about making connections. Independence is with people."What does it all mean? The fulcrum for me is Morrison's Rebekka. She is "free" - a white woman, living outside of religious institutionalism, unobligated to crown or lineage or patriarchy; free from the dictates of group or creed. Tied only to one person, one man, her kind (and equally untethered) husband Jacob. She has arrived at this station through a series of choices - in each case making a calculated determination to trade in the devil she knows for the devil she doesn't:"...her father got notice of a man looking for a strong wife rather than a dowry... her prospects were servant, prostitute, wife, and although horrible stories were told about each of those careers, the last one seemed safest... marriage to an unknown husband in a far-off land had distinct advantages... America. Whatever the danger, how could it possibly be worse?Religion, as Rebekka experienced it from her mother, was a flame fueled by a wondrous hatred. Her parents treated each other and their children with glazed indifference and saved their fire for religious matters... It was when [the Anabaptists] refused to baptize her first-born, her exquisite daughter, that Rebekka turned away. Weak as her faith was, there was no excuse for not protecting the soul of an infant from eternal perdition.But then here is Lawrence, cautioning against a dangerous kind of "masterless-ness," a specifically American version of freedom defined in negative terms, and by flight:Those Pilgrim Fathers and their successors never came here for freedom of worship. What did they set up when they got here? Freedom, would you call it?... They came largely to get away... That's why most people have come to America, and still do come. To get away from everything they are and have been... Which is all very well, but it isn't freedom. Rather the reverse. A hopeless sort of constraint. It is never freedom till you find something you really positively want to be...Zagajewski/Czapski bring Morrison and Lawrence together for me: Rebekka possessed some strain of Czapski's inner freedom, a dynamic not-knowing; her "weak faith" was her faith - faith and doubt together. Partnered to Jacob, she was able to sustain a living doubtful faith, her own version of what Lawrence terms a "deep, inward voice of religious belief" to which an individual must be "obedient" in order to be truly free. One of my favorite moments in the novel is this exchange between Rebekka and the Native American servant Lina, Rebekka's closest confidante:R: I don't think God knows who we are. I think he would like us, if He knew us, but I don't think he knows about us... He's doing something else in the world. We are not on His mind.L: What is He doing then, if not watching over us?R: Lord knows.The strength of Rebekka's doubt-faith only fails her after Jacob dies; her essential solitariness, and the demons of her cut-off past, are no longer counterbalanced by her flesh-and-blood life of goodness and freedom with the man on whom she bet everything. Morrison paints her as a tragic figure - strong enough for a free, uninstitutionalized life only as long as a man anchors her world; in his absence, the thin-threaded ties that have bound her to her motley household of strays fray and unravel abruptly.Morrison's socio-historical context is specific; but the implications may echo into the present universal. Where does our freedom, our "masterless-ness," leave us in the end? For modern, ambitious urban-dwellers, for instance, who've fled constraining or otherwise unfamilial families, the tenuousness of patchwork community and makeshift family simmers uneasily beneath busy lives of creativity and/or career. Will these new and sometimes unconventional threads hold? Perhaps independence is indeed about "making connections," as Ford's Frank Bascombe comes to realize (according to Bezalel Stern); but the nature and context of those connections matters. Not all of them will endure. And true freedom seems to be a condition that reaches for both depth and permanence.Is it the parent-child connection that is, in the end, The Profound and Enduring Bond which engenders a true inner freedom? Both Morrison and Adrienne Shelley posit motherhood as a miraculous road to freedom - as if childlessness is a woman's specific version of Lawrence's masterless-ness. The slave girl Sorrow in A Mercy gives birth to a child and then renames herself:She had looked into her daughter's eyes; saw in them the gray glisten of a winter sea while a ship sailed by-the-lee. "I am your mother," she said. "My name is Complete.Waitress's Jenna Hunterson also looks into her newborn daughter's eyes and is instantly endowed with clarity, courage, a moral center. No longer desperate to flee, she finds liberation right where she is, in the identity of mother. (Hmm... Maybe this is a "Mom Book" question.)"Free" is a complicated word indeed, Chris Anderson. And while at first the commercial use of the word may not seem relevant, it does raise relevant questions: free equals something for nothing, in the parlance of commerce. At no cost. But it seems clear that true freedom does indeed come at cost. The uproar over Anderson's book reveals a fear that the cost of "free" would be borne disproportionately by media organizations, artists, content providers. For Dan Baum, the cost of creative freedom was a burned (or at least singed) bridge with a powerful cultural-media institution, as well as the financial stability that I would guess "freed" him in many ways. Fellow freelancers out there may feel the cost of your freedom from institutional-employment daily: isolation, financial worry, wide swings in self-esteem (my attitude toward my freelancer's freedom has been known to shift by the hour, depending on what does or does not arrive in my email box).In the end, I address myself to you, thoughtful reader. "I would rather start a conversation about free, even in wildly misinformed, polarized, noisy ways, if it gets people thinking," Anderson said about his book.Perhaps to start we can embrace our dynamic not-knowing - all that we might be fleeing and whatever doubt-faith undergirds our present freedom. We can wonder if we are on God's mind, if self-sufficiency is really a virtue; if we should have children (or not) or live closer to (or further from) our biological families; if we should keep freelancing or take a real job; what free means and what it really costs. Suspended between drudgery and flame is what Jozef Czapski called his work, implying perhaps that only in the liminal state can we fully experience the process of freedom - living out choices and circumstances, forging and casting off various ties that bind - all of which ultimately teaches us what it means to be free.
Essays
| 8 books mentioned 2 7 min read
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