by Lauren Leto
“The future belongs to crowds” (from Mao II): A speaker at your college graduation actually invoked this line in an inspired attempt to rouse the graduating class to set out into the world and promulgate the positive beliefs of the university, with the help of the alumni association. The speaker obviously had no idea what he was referencing, as DeLillo’s theme revolves around the idea that the collective identity diminishes the power of the individual. The only thing keeping you in your seat that day was the knowledge that your grandma had flown in to be there.
It is said that DeLillo used to keep two files on his writing table, labeled “Art” and “Terror.” In a self-deprecating way say that your two files would be “Art” and “Tweets.”
Mention how much you loved the McSweeney’s essay about DeLillo as a stadium vendor. Mimic the cry of a peanut thrower while you say, “Hot dogs cloaked in foil wrappers!” Then mention how great McSweeney’s is and how brilliant Eggers is for starting it—too bad his novels aren’t any good.
Describe a site you once stumbled on that combined randomly generated fragments of White Noise into one coherent string. Express surprise at how lucid these outputs were and mention it’s because of DeLillo’s consistent voice that his works can be chopped up and rearranged and still make sense.
In 1998, DeLillo shilled for Oldsmobile. He was the face on their print ad in the New York Times. Other authors on the ad wagon: Hemingway posed for Ringling Bros. and Ballantine Ale beer ads, airlines, and a pen company; John Steinbeck also lent his visage to Ballantine Ale.
How to Fake Like You’ve Read Jonathan Franzen
BASICS
Jonathan Franzen’s legacy is not his influence on but rather his intimidation of the average writer. His lengthy tomes with social bents gleefully and mercilessly knock the shit out of any short story collection.
ESSENTIALOGRAPHY
The Corrections
A mom’s quest to have her unhappy and disillusioned family home for the holidays.
Five words: Detailed Americana incarnate (fuck Oprah).
How to Be Alone
Franzen’s collection of essays, the most famous of which decries the death of the social novel.
Five words: Fuck the contemporaries; “Why Bother?”
Freedom
A loveless and broken family deals with middle-class problems.
Five words: Forget fucking Oprah, publicity whore.
DETAILS
The oft-mentioned and unavoidable Franzen anecdote is his public dissing of Oprah. In an interview shortly after being selected for Oprah’s Book Club, he expressed concern that the “Oprah’s Book Club” sticker on the cover of his books would repel male readers. Oprah responded by pulling the already-produced interview she had done with him.
Franzen releasing a book is the equivalent of one hundred thousand simultaneous media journalist and blogger orgasms. If you are not a fan of Franzen, your best bet is to stay off the Internet entirely for the month before and after the release of his work, in order to be spared everything from over-the-top Franzen praise to admonishments from female authors. Most famously, popular chick lit authors Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult chastised the media for writing off their novels as fluff and exalting Franzen as a god among men (the New York Times reviewed Freedom twice in one week).
Make a remark about how closely your family drama mirrors Jonathan Franzen’s: sometimes painfully dull, sometimes flashing with drama. Franzen’s real gift is creating characters who are relatable to all. It doesn’t matter what your family is actually like; it mirrors Franzen’s families.
Franzen was so serious about avoiding distraction while typing up The Corrections that he blindfolded himself, put in earplugs, and donned earmuffs in his soundproof writing studio.
As newlyweds, Franzen and his now ex-wife, writer Valerie Cornell, used to write for eight hours a day and after dinner read for five more. Their wedding anniversary was the only day they’d go out to eat.
Franzen refuses to explain the meaning behind the title of Freedom. The Corrections was so named because originally it dealt with prison programs.
How to Fake Like You’ve Read Ian McEwan
BASICS
This English novelist has been quoted as saying his goal in writing is to “incite a naked hunger in readers,” but mainly his writing makes me frightened to get naked. Sadomasochistic themes abound in his writing and keep the reader adequately piqued.
ESSENTIALOGRAPHY
Enduring Love
The haunting story of a man who begins to stalk a couple after their lives intersect in a fatal accident.
Five words: Think more frightening Fatal Attraction.
The Comfort of Strangers
A disturbing tale that will make you think twice about mingling with locals in foreign countries as the protagonist couple are swept into a horrible predicament by a seemingly endearing stranger they meet while touring Venice.
Five words: Sadomasochism, cameras, and drugged tea.
Atonement
A young woman falls in love with a man only to be thwarted by her confused sister’s claim that he is a rapist.
Five words: Postmodern twist ending explains title.
DETAILS
Jonathan Franzen and Ian McEwan had a years-long feud that appears in interviews to be more media hype than actual strife. Most point to McEwan’s comment after John Updike’s death that Philip Roth was the last great living American novelist. Franzen countered by including a bit in Freedom about a character’s not being able to get very interested in Atonement. However, in interviews after the release of Freedom Franzen spoke well of McEwan, noting that he sent him a galley of the book early on and that McEwan was a “really nice guy” about it.
His mother’s name was Rose Lilian Violet. First wife was named Penny, second wife was named Annalena. Most of his female characters also have excessively flowery names: Briony, Cecilia, Lola, Rosalind, Daisy.
A rumor circulated that he only wrote fifteen words a day, thanks to a journalist mistakenly transcribing “fifteen words” instead of McEwan’s correct answer: five hundred words per day.
Following a bitter divorce, a court granted McEwan full custody of his children. His ex-wife then kidnapped their thirteen-year-old son and took him to France. The child was returned within the day. In another bit of familial turbulence, McEwan found out as an adult that he had a brother: his parents had had an affair when his mother was still married to her first husband, and they gave the child up for adoption. When her husband died in World War II, McEwan’s mother was free to marry the man she’d had the child with, David McEwan.
How to Fake Like You’ve Read Norman Mailer
BASICS
My mother claims she saw Norman Mailer in person once when she was in the Atlanta airport with me and my siblings while trying to make a connecting flight to Texas. She said he was wearing a crumpled linen suit and carrying a beat-up briefcase. He was probably on his way back from a movie set or a stump speech or a book tour: Norman Mailer attempted to be everything from a mayoral candidate to a movie director, and failed at most.
ESSENTIALOGRAPHY
The Naked and the Dead
Mailer’s first novel deals with soldiers in the South Pacific during World War II. It famously substituted “fug” for “fuck” at the request of the publisher.
Five words: Fug clemency and fug compassion.
Ancient Evenings
Heavily panned by critics and the public, Mailer spent about a decade writing this mammoth, which manages to be more sex than plot or character development.
Five words: Foot fetishists will love it.
Harlot’s Ghost
A book with more words than David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, this novel about the life of a CIA agent mixes genres and aggrandizes characters in a transparent and futile attempt to create an epic novel.
Five words: “To be continued,” please don’t.
DETAILS
Want to see som
ething bone-chilling? Search online for the video of Rip Torn attacking Normal Mailer with a hammer on the set of the movie Maidstone. Around the same time, Mailer also stabbed his wife with a penknife after she called him “faggot” at a party. His other notable fisticuffs include punching Gore Vidal in the greenroom of The Dick Cavett Show. The legend goes that Vidal, still lying on the floor, said, “Words fail Norman Mailer yet again.” In another feud, Truman Capote called Mailer talentless. In response, Mailer sat on him.
At his death, the New York Times ran an obituary titled “Norman Mailer, Towering Writer with Matching Ego, Dies at 84.” The obituary makes mention of his several overheated attempts to create the “Great American Novel,” which would likely be the most embarrassing attribute for any author to have committed to posterity after death. Still, Mailer’s ego could probably take such a blow, as the obituary reveals the source of his confidence: when he was a child, his mother used to repeatedly, obsessively tell him he was “perfect.”
Mailer was a cofounder of the Village Voice but didn’t make much of an impact at the paper. Reports say his articles were often turned in late and in need of intense editing.
Mailer believed in reincarnation. He wanted to come back as a black athlete but he said that with his luck, he’d return to earth as a cockroach. Keep that in mind next time you find one in your bathtub.
How to Fake Like You’ve Read Charles Bukowski
BASICS
It’s not often I can say plainly that a novelist and poet’s dominant themes are sex and booze and being dirty, but with Bukowski, that’s where it’s at. Typically read at a slightly later phase and age than J. D. Salinger. Whatever you do, don’t listen to anyone who connects Bukowski to the Beats. He despised them and rather was massively influenced by Italian-American Los Angeles–based author John Fante, whom he has cited as his “God.”
ESSENTIALOGRAPHY
Post Office
A friend offered Bukowski, who was employed at the time by the post office, $100 per month for life if he’d quit—he did and Post Office was written shortly after. Mostly about drinking, gambling, and lusting after women while working at lowly jobs.
Five words: Semiautobiographical dirtiness in jaded adulthood.
Notes of a Dirty Old Man
Bukowski’s articles detailing his semiautobiographical, alcohol-drenched adventures.
Five words: Drinking, sex, dirty apathetic fame.
Pulp
Dramedy or parody (depends on who you ask) of detective novels, as done by a grimy old man.
Five words: “Dedicated to bad writing”: accomplished.
DETAILS
“Don’t try,” a line from one of his poems, is written on his gravestone. Bukowski believed writing should come simply, from the gut.
Bukowski wrote the first poetry you could stomach. Forget T. S. Eliot; nothing piqued your tenth-grade sensibilities more than “Girl in a Miniskirt Reading the Bible Outside My Window” or “My First Affair with That Older Woman.”
Bukowski wrote what he knew. The cat in Ham and Rye is his cat. The main protagonist of several of his works, Henry Chinaski, is undoubtedly Bukowski himself. From their first names (Charles’s real first name is Henry) to their love of the racetrack, their job history, and their women, the only big difference between the two was Bukowski’s habit of moderating himself every once in a while, trying out celibacy for years, or cutting back on drinking periodically.
Main protagonist Chinaski can be compared to that one particularly dirty ex-boyfriend or roommate whom you took a chance on and let move in with you, thinking the arrangement wouldn’t be too bad. Waxing poetically about shit stains in his underwear, advising us that “sometimes you have to pee in the sink,” Bukowski made no excuses for Chinaski’s skid row lifestyle, which makes you love him more. An observation from Ham on Rye: “There was nothing really as glorious as a good beer shit—I mean after drinking twenty or twenty-five beers the night before. The odor of a beer shit like that spread all around and stayed for a good hour-and-a-half. It made you realize that you were really alive.” I leave you with that.
How to Fake Like You’ve Read Deborah Eisenberg
BASICS
This austere short-story writer (and onetime playwright) is a critics’ darling, though she is not as well-known as her contemporaries. We have big tobacco companies to thank for her entrance into literature; Eisenberg started writing as a way to divert her attention while she quit smoking. This is confusing to most of us because a cigarette is usually exactly what we need before we can set our fingers to keys.
ESSENTIALOGRAPHY
Transactions in a Foreign Currency
A short-story collection trailing young women through their dissatisfying relationships.
Five words: Reasons to avoid Canadian men.
Under the 82nd Airborne
A story collection expanding from settings in Central America to New York City with mostly female protagonists exploring harsh truths about their lives.
Five words: Forget narrative, focused on details.
Twilight of the Superheroes
Varied stories all rotating around the lives of young people in post-9/11 New York City.
Five words: Dispirited, nuanced insanity and introspection.
DETAILS
Eisenberg has been together with Wallace Shawn for over thirty years. Does that name ring a bell? He played Vizzini in The Princess Bride and Mr. Hall in Clueless. More substantially, he’s an author and playwright of very well-received works. He’s also the son of William Shawn, longtime and revered editor of The New Yorker, to whom J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey is dedicated.
In interviews Eisenberg seems to present herself as a lazy genius, with a self-deprecating style that stresses her lack of ambition. You can say her interview style is purposefully off-putting and that you haven’t seen anyone try so hard to make it seem like they don’t care.
The first story in Twilight of the Superheroes almost too succinctly captures the relationship you had with your first set of friends postcollege.
How to Fake Like You’ve Read John Updike
BASICS
Hailing from a small town, this tall writer was the spitting image of his main protagonist, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. The prolific author of more than thirty works characterized his writing as giving “the mundane its beautiful due” and, you’ll agree, his writing is stunningly lyrical at moments when he’s describing scenes that the rest of us take for granted as part of everyday life. However, I don’t include his sex scenes in that assessment (more on that farther down).
ESSENTIALOGRAPHY
Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; and Rabbit at Rest (three out of seven in the Rabbit series)
The Rabbit series is the examination of a man named Rabbit Angstrom stuck in his way of life, the victim of social constraints and a small town that offers very little in the way of meaningful stimulation. Most interesting point in Rabbit, Run: Rabbit’s newborn daughter is accidentally drowned in the bathtub by his manic-depressive and often drunk wife. Most interesting point in Rabbit Redux: A teenage girl becomes his lover but eventually dies when Rabbit’s house burns down. Most interesting points in Rabbit at Rest: Rabbit has a one-night stand with his son’s wife; his longtime mistress dies; he dies.
Five words for Rabbit, Run: Rabbit as bored young father.
Five words for Rabbit Redux: Rabbit as a middle-aged man.
Five words for Rabbit at Rest: Rabbit as fat old man.
Couples
Adultery and deceit abound in the ordinary lives of people living in a quaint town during the 1960s.
Five words: To marry is to dissatisfy.
The Witches of Eastwick
A group of women take on magic after their marriages fail and are charmed by a dastardly gentleman.
Five words: Movie version gave me nightmares.
DETAILS
Updike’s examinations of small-town monotony are fairly tame until he gets to the sex sce
nes, which are awful. The Widows of Eastwick garnered him bad-sex-in-fiction prizes thanks to lines like “Her face gleamed with his jism in the spotty light of the motel room, there on the far end of East Beach, within sound of the sea.”
He was such a prolific writer because he swore by his routine of writing at least three pages every day. Bring that up any time an acquaintance bemoans how hard it’s been for them to finish their book on deadline.
Updike acknowledged Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero in the afterword to In the Beauty of the Lilies, then in subsequent interviews admitted Ellis’s novel wasn’t that great—its main message being simply “to get wasted and stay wasted”—but that it had helped him formulate his own writing on “the sort of burnt-out generation of Hollywood–Los Angeles kids.” You can cite this as one of the reasons Bret Easton Ellis has such a chip on his shoulder.
The Centaur, Updike’s second National Book Award–winning novel, isn’t as well-known as the Rabbit series but is a must-read among his die-hard devotees. If you want to offend a major fan, say, “Updike’s egregious use of metaphor masks his chronically underdeveloped plot.” If you want to impress them say, “Metaphors allowed him to dwell within the abstract beauty of everyday happenstance.” Same meanings, different connotations.
How to Fake Like You’ve Read Bret Easton Ellis
BASICS
Ellis’s writings define contemporary novels set in Los Angeles. No author can avoid the comparison if they choose Hollywood as their backdrop. His characters’ California-It-crowd eighties mind-set awoke millions of teenage yearnings for the West Coast, regardless of his characters’ frequently dismal fates.
Ellis was influenced by and influenced his Bennington College friends and fellow writers Jonathan Lethem, Jill Eisenstadt, and Donna Tartt. Much ink has been spilled debating Ellis’s possible allusions to his peers in The Rules of Attraction (his novel about a group of college friends). Critics in the 1980s also repeatedly lumped Ellis into literature’s version of the “Brat Pack,” which included Tama Janowitz and Jay McInerney.
