More Alive and Less Lonely

by Jonathan Lethem

  7. When I was twenty-seven, and living in Berkeley, California, and had only published a handful of short stories in obscure literary journals and science fiction magazines, and Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine had just made a tremendous impression on me and my friend Angus MacDonald, and I was hanging out with a lot of graduate students in UC Berkeley’s graduate program in rhetoric, a program which featured a number of “star” theorists, the most intimidating and mysterious of whom was a woman known as Avital Ronell, I sometimes used to visit a café called Roma, on College Avenue and Ashby. There, more than once, I found myself seated at a table within shouting distance, on one side, of Nicholson Baker and, on the other, Avital Ronell. Baker would be correcting page proofs from The New Yorker, and Ronell would be writing on a laptop.11 Berkeley’s not a small town, exactly, but it’s not the big city either, and I’d get a little jolt of celebrity electricity from sitting between them and thinking I’m the only person in this café—including them—who knows who they both are.12

  8. I’d also point readers to Gilbert Sorrentino’s superbly disorienting use of footnotes in Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things.13 An example: “This sentence is an example of automatic writing.” Another: “No attempt will be made to describe this famous bar, thank God.”

  9. In the mid-eighties, at the start of my years in Berkeley, before I’d read any Wallace or Baker or Sorrentino’s Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, I conceived of a short story that would take the form of a sequence of footnotes, one blooming from the next, so that the original text would be completely dwarfed and forgotten. In my conception this story would be very firmly in the manner of Jorge Luis Borges, who’s a touchstone for any writer incorporating scholarly apparatus into literary forms (I believe Wallace has written and spoken of his admiration for Borges; I have no idea whether Baker has expressed any; I’d expect Sorrentino to have been very familiar, at the least). I never worked out the technical necessities for such a story, nor landed on any subject matter that seemed to demand this treatment, so it went unwritten. J. G. Ballard, around that same time, wrote and published “Notes Towards A Mental Breakdown,” a short story consisting of a single sentence with each of its eighteen component words lengthily footnoted, but I was unaware of Ballard’s story until it was collected in War Fever in 1990.

  10. Even more simply, both writers seem to want to make time slow the fuck down.14

  11. Ronell’s signature work of that period, The Telephone Book, consists of a critical text disrupted and enhanced by a torrent of typographical and design elements, among them excessive footnotes.15

  12. Because life is infinitely strange, Nicholson Baker now lives in Maine, a few miles from my father, and he and my father sometimes attend the same Quaker Meeting.

  13. I once spoke with Gilbert Sorrentino on the telephone, but we never met. I’ve been friends since high school, however, with Gilbert’s son Christopher, himself a novelist of note. In high school I never knew that Chris’s dad was a writer, and when I first discovered Gilbert’s writing, I failed to put the two Sorrentinos together.16 I wouldn’t until I was almost thirty.

  14. Wallace also frequently employs the footnote as a pretense-puncturing device, one providing tonal admonition to the reader and himself not to take all his theoretical posturing too seriously—and, in this cause, typically resorts to sudden idiomatic speech, or profanity. This is usually good for a brief, sharp guffaw. I’m afraid it also becomes very rapidly formulaic, and is surely the most irritating tic common to writers taking Wallace’s example.

  15. Avital Ronell and I were later on the faculty at NYU at the same time, but we never met.

  16. When I say that I “discovered” Gilbert Sorrentino’s writing, what I actually mean is that I found a copy of Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things at a used bookstore in Vermont, while I was briefly enrolled at a college there, and purchased it, and kept it on my shelf unread for, literally, decades. I have the copy in front of me here as I write, and I can completely recall how and why I fell in love with the book’s distinctive design: it is a hardcover tricked up to look like a publisher’s rough galley, with the words “Jacket front panel” typed in twelve-point courier font on the front jacket, and below it, named in equally modest font, all the various specifications that a designer would be expected to add to the jacket: author’s name, copy, publisher’s imprint, etc. It is like a book titled “book,” or, more exactly, a book design consisting of the words “book design.”17 On the first flyleaf18 my name is written—“J. Lethem”—in a block handwriting distinctive to that time in my life (and, indeed, the practice of writing my name on the flyleaf of books was limited to my two-odd years in Vermont, though that was hardly the only period in my life when I was certain my shelves were subject to the predation of book-thief acquaintances). Tucked inside the same flyleaf, much more recently, is Gilbert Sorrentino’s Los Angeles Times obituary, painstakingly clipped from the newspaper. (The New York Times did him barely any justice at all.)

  17. The band XTC’s second album, called Go 2, has a jacket design employing a very similar trick. I like it, too.

  18. The building housing the English department at Pomona College includes an office containing a scattering of half-filled bookshelves, into which has been thrown a measure of cursory organization—a few categories clumped together, and a central run of literature which has been alphabetized. The office belongs to no member of the permanent faculty, but is sporadically put in use by visiting professors. Salvador Plascencia occupied it one semester, and Maggie Nelson all last year. Some portion of these books are, unmistakably, the ass-end leavings of David Foster Wallace’s office library, the better portion of which were surely collected by his family or shipped to the Harry Ransom Center in Austin Texas, which holds Wallace’s papers. Certainly, any books featuring Wallace’s marginal annotations, which have become justly famous for their eccentricity and wit,19 have been shipped off to the Ransom Center. The books left behind, unremarkable titles in themselves, featuring nothing personal to Wallace, could therefore be considered a footnote to the Ransom Center’s important collection of his books. The first time I browsed through those shelves, however, I found that a number of novels—titles by Ann Beattie, John Updike, Dostoevsky, and others—featured lively marginal remarks on many of their pages. The handwriting even looked to me like Wallace’s, at least at first. What a discovery! That the books had been left behind seemed a terrible oversight, until I further discovered that the witty, eccentric remarks scattered through their pages weren’t Wallace’s, but rather those of some other person, who’d helpfully written his name on the flyleaf of every book belonging to him, if only I’d looked: J. W. Heist. At first, in the heat of my selfish wish to be the rescuer of unique Wallace annotations,20 the name seemed obviously fictitious—“J.W. Heist indeed!”—yet I was finally forced to acknowledge that the handwriting wasn’t really the same as Wallace’s, nor were some of the annotations characteristic, exactly, of his. There were anachronisms, too, in the cultural references within the remarks. Though no amount of asking around the English Department or googling J.W. Heist’s name seemed to produce any confirmation of his existence, I did eventually find tucked into one of these books a deeply-yellowed Chicago newspaper clipping that included Heist’s name among the listed winners of a college literary scholarship award.21 The spare office’s bookshelves conflated a bunch of different items—some mostly unimpressive Wallace books, many more Heist books, a few other things as well—which some anonymous volunteer had later organized.

  19. Unique marginal annotations, especially those by a person of distinction (as opposed to the majority of hand-written markings in books, which are only distracting or annoying, and spoil the reading) could be seen as “artisanal footnotes.”

  20. Speaking of selfish, in my investigations in that office I did put claim on one volume, which now lives in my office: a first edition of John Berryman’s Recovery. Recovery is an unfinished novel, on the subject of alcohol
ism and treatment, published posthumously after the great poet’s suicide in 1972. There are no markings to prove it was Wallace’s (nor any that prove it was Heist’s); if it was Wallace’s, there’s no way to prove he read it. But I believe it was, and that he did. If the Ransom Center comes calling now, I suppose I might surrender it. But I might not.

  21. I’m not making any of this fucking shit up.

  —from The Thing The Book: A Monument to the Book as Object, 2014

  III

  Objects in Furious Motion

  Fierce Attachments

  Preparing to introduce a book you’ve loved for years, you might find yourself leafing through the previous edition, turning it in your hands as well as plunging in to reencounter certain sentences to marvel again at their slant and freshness, their capacity for permanent surprise. You might also flip to the beginning, hoping to discover that your introduction’s already there, already written—which is the feeling that this artifact has given you time and time again: that it knows your thoughts. The book is an object in furious motion, humming with its own energy, and all you might wish to do is touch it, alter its trajectory barely, so as to nudge it into universal view.

  Couldn’t I just say that you must read Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments? That I am here to insist this book become a banner in the wide world, as it is a banner already in my mind, one I march behind? And yet, cradling this earlier edition, I notice eight endorsements, all quite eloquent, all by women; could it somehow be that I am the first man to testify for this book? (I check an earlier edition, also on my shelf, and of course this isn’t actually the case.) Vivian’s Gornick’s memoir has that mad, brilliant, absolute quality that tends to loft a book out of context, then to be admired, rightly, as “timeless” and “classic.” Yet it is a memoir centered, at least apparently, on the intricacies of a mother-daughter relationship, a memoir written in the eighties (before the boom) by a writer associated, proudly if unsimply, with the Feminist movement. Is it mine to love, then, let alone to brandish as a piece of my own heart? Yes. The reader’s path into the entrancement of Fierce Attachments is neither by way of gawking curiosity about the specifics of Gornick’s or her mother’s life, nor by the easy identification that depends on resemblance—on overlapping circumstances—not even the resemblance of femaleness.

  Identification, in Fierce Attachments, works another way. Immersing ourselves in the book’s searing yet seemingly offhand honesty, we find that we simply become Vivian Gornick (or the speaker bearing her name), just as we become her mother, and then Nettie Levine, the passionate and nihilistic young neighbor who emerges as the book’s third major character, forming with mother and daughter what Richard Howard has called “that affective, erotic plot by which, just so, we triangulate our lives.” Yet our sense of transubstantiation isn’t limited to these three. Gornick draws us into brief, scalding alliances with three men, lovers and husbands along the path of her self-uncovering: Stefan, Davey, and Joe. And too, passingly, with a half-dozen other neighbors in the Bronx, and a psychiatrist, and of course the elusive father. By giving every actor in turn eyes with which to see the narrator who has seen them, and voices to rival the narrator’s in acuity, however briefly, Gornick has burned these figures onto the page. Not only does no one escape her gaze, but she escapes no one else’s. I’m not speaking of fairness, an overrated virtue in literature, and perhaps in life as well. Gornick might be said to demolish her cast of players, but by that standard she also demolishes herself. I prefer to say that like a magician pulling the tablecloth from under a table full of settings, she miraculously leaves herself and her cast intact, and shining with what I suppose can only be described as love. Tough love; that’s what they call it.

  This would probably be a fine place to quit, only I’m driven to give just a bit more of a writerly tribute, and a personal one, to the memoirist and essayist who along with Phillip Lopate and Geoff Dyer taught me whatever I know about flaying the bullshit from sentences about myself. I hate to saddle her with the epithet “writer’s writer,” but Fierce Attachments demands honor as the work of a breathtaking technician, one whose control of a distilled form of scene and dialogue, of withheld punch lines, and of the use of the white spaces on the page, makes me still wonder why she has never tackled fiction, the love of which she so eloquently professes in her critical essays. Like much of the writing I love most, Fierce Attachments draws strength from the method of paradox. These pages contain my favorite description of a would-be writer’s realization that she simply is a writer, for better or worse and no matter how unclear the path before her:

  In the second year of my marriage the rectangular space made its first appearance inside me. I was writing an essay, a piece of graduate-student criticism that had flowered without warning into thought, radiant shapely thought. The sentences began pushing up in me, struggling to get out, each one moving swiftly to add itself to the one that preceded it. I realized suddenly that an image had taken control of me: I saw its shape and its outline clearly. The sentences were trying to fill in the shape. The image was the wholeness of my thought. In that instant I felt myself open wide. My insides cleared out into a rectangle, all clean air and uncluttered space, that began in my forehead and ended in my groin. In the middle of the rectangle only my image, waiting patiently to clarify itself. I experienced a joy then I knew nothing else would ever equal.

  Later in the book, Gornick seems to mourn the inability of this rectangle to thrive, expand, encompass more of her life. The paradox is double: by the evidence of the book in your hands, the very book that describes this resistance and frustration, Gornick’s rectangle has done precisely that, grown to encompass not only her life, but, for the duration of the book, her reader’s. And yet for all it encompasses, it remains exactly as intimate and local as her first description of its appearance: exactly the size of her body.

  —Introduction to Fierce Attachments, 1987

  Attention Drifting Beautifully

  (Donald Barthelme)

  Welcome to the wacky world of.

  Donald Barthelme is the consummate jester of the American short story, but to say that is perhaps to risk a slight. For it is Barthelme’s great achievement that during his heyday (and perhaps no American writer has ever had so hey a day as Barthelme, if you wish to go back and study the record of his prolificity and consistency in the decades of the 1960s and ’70s) his “jesting” made as essential a contribution to the literary life of his times as any story writer ever has—Hemingway, Beattie, Carver.

  The three stories here (“Robert Kennedy Saved From Drowning,” “A City Of Churches” and “The School”) show wonderful evidence of the things Barthelme did well—though it is odd to speak of “doing well” at things that, especially at the time they were done, nobody else had ever dreamed of or dared to do. Barthelme is a demon of compression, and surprise. He never bothers with dull transitions, rote explanations, or any kind of apology for what interests or amuses him. Instead, the man made an art of letting his writerly attention drift into silliness, gloom, parody, restlessness, and self-mocking, all within the space of stories that were each relentlessly well-conceived, each a kind of formal proposal for a new kind of story.

  Barthelme’s in love with voice, as any story writer ought to be, but the voices he loves are unexpected ones: the tedious complainer, the pompous aesthete or windy literary professor, the writers of bureaucratic press releases or technical manuals. He finds the hidden beauty and hilarity and sadness in the sound of the human voice pretending and failing to know what the hell it is talking about, or to admit what’s really on its mind. The result is that if the word postmodern didn’t need to exist before Barthelme, it sure did after—though by the time you’re done struggling over a definition for that problematic word you’ll wish you’d just pointed to Barthelme instead: he singlehandedly authenticates and exhausts “the postmodern short story”; he corners the market.

  “Robert Kennedy Saved From Drowning” (which, as it is
collected in Barthelme’s Sixty Stories, is touchingly dated “April 1968” so that the reader will understand that it anticipates Kennedy’s assassination rather than being a commentary after the fact) is the story among these three which most shows evidence of Barthelme’s “laboratory” techniques (the word is Barthelme’s—he spoke often in interviews of the laboratory of his fiction). The partitioned structure frees the ventriloquizing voice to wander in and out of the language of recounted dreams, of bureaucratic hagiography, and of corny anecdotes. Nevertheless, the story is unified by an underlying voice—would it be foolish to call it Barthelme’s?—which ultimately confesses a tender feeling, a perhaps grandiosely tender feeling, toward the depressive Kennedy.

  “A City Of Churches” and “The School” play more at the conventions of the traditional story. Still, the restless absurdities and ghoulish irreverence of “The School,” and the unembarrassed fascination with lists and the metafictional aside about a CBS news story with the title “A City of Churches” in “A City of Churches”—as well as the frank sexual fantasizing in both stories—all reveal Barthelme’s impatience with the consistency and earnestness of slice-of-life fiction, even when he briefly arouses more conventional expectations in the reader. Both stories read partly like fables, or allegories, except that they resist any easy diagrammatical interpretation. Barthelme loves to tease at moralizing, but his universe is often one of cheery horror.