One of the strange, heady powers that the writing of fiction awards is the arrival of multiple mouths. You’ve got one brain, but get a story going and all of a sudden you’re compelled to speak in several voices. Here’s the temptation: since you’ve got to put words in all those mouths, why not channel an opinion or two? Heck, your friends thought you were witty/interesting/insightful the other day, when you held forth on claret/basset hounds/[insert topic here]. Seems like a win-win to incorporate that into dialogue. Your brilliance gets immortalized, and your characters get to have something to say.

Whoa there.

Let me put it this way: lectures in literature are not only a misuse of intimacy, they’re a misuse that can destroy that intimacy. And when you think about it, intimacy is the engine of fiction. The empathic leap that lets us believe, for hours at a time, that we’re not physically in a chair, turning pages–that’s an act of intimacy. Which is why we often feel a personal connection with authors whose work we admire; heck, we’ve been inside their heads. read more »

01.11.10 § 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