When word came that John Updike had passed away, I asked my friends over at The Rumpus if they were planning any sort of tribute to him. Their immediate response: What a great idea. Could you put it together? 
Um, okay. Why not? I dispatched the following email to some of the novelists I knew: read more »
02.22.09 § 0
(The text of my remarks on David Foster Wallace, delivered January 31 at the Koret Auditorium. This was part of the San Francisco Public Library’s Writers Remembered, an annual tribute to writers who passed away in the previous year.)
David Foster Wallace didn’t just bring his own style, he brought his own relationship to words. He didn’t arrange them, like pretty things, on the page. He was not a tour guide, ushering us through neatly trimmed, topiary wordscapes. Asking us to admire them from the path.
A David Foster Wallace wordscape is a sort of wilderness, through which you can find yourself staggering, careening, losing the line of horizon. But rather than feel abandoned by a careless author, full of himself and overwriting, you get the sense that the Wallace himself is undergoing a process of discovery, of chance orientation and disorientation, very similar to yours. The territory bears his name, but it is mapless. There is creation, but there are no pretenses of control. read more »
02.18.09 § 0
Cynthia Ozick calls Alice Munro “our Chekhov”, and I couldn’t agree more. Not only am I amazed that she hasn’t won the Nobel Prize yet, I’m amazed that hordes of dazzled, appreciative readers haven’t gathered in the Ontario countryside, woven their own Nobel Prize out of roots and branches, and presented it to her door. It’s a deep pleasure to come across a collection of Munro stories that you haven’t read yet, as I did last week with The Progress of Love, first published in 1986.
There’s one fascinating element I find myself noticing in these stories—and now that I look, in other Munro stories as well. It’s just one facet of her talent (and I’m sure there are PhD theses on it) but worth noting nonetheless. read more »
02.16.09 § 0
A few months ago I was contacted by Mike May, who happens to be the subject of the Robert Kurzon’s recent book Crashing Through: A True Story of Risk, Adventure and the Man who Dared to See. If you’re familiar with the book, you know that Mike was blinded at the age of three, but that didn’t stop him from being a daunting overachiever. CIA employee, world record-setting skier, businessman, inventor–like I say, daunting. It was gratifying to learn that he’s a fan of A Sense of the World, and that he rightly views James Holman as a kindred spirit. Unlike Holman however, his story has a fascinating, modern twist. Thanks to innovations in stem cell research, he was able to undergo an operation that actually restored a measure of sight–a surprisingly mixed blessing, considering how well-adapted he had been to the non-visual world.
Mike is also CEO of Sendero Group, the company that pioneered “talking map” software for the GPS. That innovation that has greatly increased the independence of many modern-day blind travelers, and in the spirit of both Crashing Through and A Sense of the World, Sendero is sponsoring an annual scholarship award “for the most impressive travel adventure for the year” by a non-visual traveler. read more »
02.13.09 § 0
“The fire spoke, chattering like a madman, and then quieted again in a helix of sparks. My friend, so still and copper-outlined in the dark, said something so softly that I cannot, even more than thirty years later, hear what it was.”
This is a passage that displays at least three facets of Andy’s world-class chops–probably more, but here’s what struck me about it upon a recent reading: read more »
02.13.09 § 0
I’m trying out a new category of occasional postings. Like most writers, I can’t help but deconstruct other writers’ work on the fly. When I’m reading a book, often I’m struck by a particular passage–how it rings true (or false), and achieves (or fails to achieve) a particular effect.
So I’m going to start sharing those paragraphs, and my reactions to them, right here.
These aren’t meant to be construed as book reviews. The engagement is on the language level, and not necessary reflective of any overall opinion of the book itself. Ultimately, I’m not talking about the book, but rather about the carpentry of writing, as glimpsed within a particular set of pages.
Okay? Bear with me. My first entries will be on Andrew Sean Greer’s The Confessions of Maxi Tivoli, which I’m re-reading for an upcoming article of mine.
02.01.09 § 0
