A Literary Love Story: Jennifer Egan and Shakespeare and Company

While in Paris, I wanted to visit Shakespeare and Company, the second rendition of the famous bookstore run by Sylvia Beach and patronized by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Picasso and others.  I wanted to buy A Moveable Feast (which I did, a new “restored” edition).  But I was also hunting for Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Good Squad (the photo, taken by my son, is me about to find it).  I’d wanted to read it for a while.  Now, with time–traveling Europe with my son–I was able to dive into it.  And I have to say, I think I am in love.

I haven’t enjoyed a book on so many levels in so long as I am enjoying Goon Squad.  It’s funny, poignant, poetic, nostalgic, smart, experimental, and enthralling.  And I’m not even finished with it.

Some things I’ve noticed as I’ve read: All the characters are blighted with flaws: drug addicts, egomaniacs, kleptomaniacs, lovelorn fools, runaways, adulterers, guilt-ridden gold eaters.  Each chapter is from a new point of view–sometimes first person, sometimes third, sometimes second…and the central character of each chapter is loosely connected to characters from the other chapters.  Sometimes the connection is thirty years before; sometimes it’s during the same time period–and all time periods are between the present and the ’70s.  Each chapter is a short story filled with a handful of reversals.  Egan will throw rocks at her characters and then, in a revelatory moment, expose the most generous beauty about them, only to snatch it away with some new punishment.  Yet, inexplicably, each chapter ends with surprisingly satisfying closure.  You feel for these wounded misfits as though they’re your sibling–or, maybe, a second cousin.

And the story in Goon Squad revolves around the music business, so for someone like me–who loves rock-and-roll and the stories of musicians and those associated with them–the reading is a blast.  And in this setting Egan’s imagination is at full throttle: one minute we’re with a record producer witnessing the failure of a promising act he signed, the next minute its 30 years earlier and the producer’s mentor is on a photo safari in Africa, flash forward and we’re with the producer’s wife’s boss, a publicity agent for a dictator, and we’re being flown to some foreign, suppressed country under armed guard.  These are geographically interesting, but its the small moments that Egan makes us privy to that standout the most.

You see, on top of the fun story and the mini-plots within the chapters, Egan’s prose is drop-dead gorgeous.  She has a way of threading deep within a character, drawing her focus down from the surface, into the innermost regions, and then back up into the scene, and down again for something even more insightful.

For example, the opening chapter follows Sasha after she steals a woman’s wallet.  What happens after the theft is the ongoing scene that Egan takes us through, but even in the first paragraphs, Egan takes us below the surface:

It began the usual way, in the bathroom of the Lassimo Hotel. Sasha was adjusting her yellow eyes shadow in the mirror when she noticed a bag on the floor beside the sink that must have belonged to the woman whose peeing she could faintly hear through the vaultlike door of a toilet stall. Inside the rim of the bag, barely visible, was a wallet made of pale green leather. It was easy for Sasha to recognize, looking back, that the peeing woman’s blind trust had provoked her: We live in a city where people will steal the hair off your head if you give them half a chance, but you leave your stuff lying in plain sight and expect it to be waiting for you when you get back? It made her want to teach the woman a lesson. But this wish only camouflaged the deeper feeling Sasha always had: that fat, tender wallet, offering itself to her hand — it seemed so dull, so life-as-usual to just leave it there rather than seize the moment, accept the challenge, take the leap, fly the coop, throw caution to the wind, live dangerously (“I get it,” Coz, her therapist said) and take the fucking thing.

“You mean steal it.”

He was trying to get Sasha to use that word, which was harder to avoid in the case of a wallet than with a lot of the things she’d lifted over the past year, when her condition (as Coz referred to it) had begun to accelerate: five sets of keys, fourteen pairs of sunglasses, a child’s striped scarf, binoculars, a cheese grater, a pocketknife, twenty-eight bars of soap, and eighty-five pens, ranging from cheap ballpoints she’d used to sign debit-card slips to the aubergine Visconti that cost two hundred sixty dollars online, which she’d lifted from her former boss’s lawyer during a contracts meeting. Sasha no longer took anything from stores — their cold, inert goods didn’t tempt her. Only from people.

“Okay,” she said. “Steal it.”

I could spend all day heaping praise on this novel.  For me, it exemplifies what fiction should be.  It’s truly art.  For insights into how Egan came up with some of her ideas (like the one above), checkout her website by clicking here.

The Animate Detail

Anton Chekhov

“She knows that what gives fiction its vitality is not the accurate detail but the animate one, and that novelists are creators, not coroners, of the human case.”  This is James Wood, from the May 7th New Yorker.  He’s talking about the writing of novelist Hilary Mantel.  He’s also echoing Chekhov’s advice.  Here’s Chekhov’s advice on writing:

I think descriptions of nature should be very short and always be à propos. Commonplaces like “The setting sun, sinking into the waves of the darkening sea, cast its purple gold rays, etc,” “Swallows, flitting over the surface of the water, twittered gaily” — eliminate such commonplaces. You have to choose small details in describing nature, grouping them in such a way that if you close your eyes after reading it you can picture the whole thing. For example, you’ll get a picture of a moonlit night if you write that on the dam of the mill a piece of broken bottle flashed like a bright star and the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled by like a ball, etc. …

Wood gives example of this active detailing from Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies, where Thomas Cromwell reflects on his son:

Gregory is a fine archer, a fine horseman, a shinning star in the tilt yard, and his manners cannot be faulted.  He speaks reverently to his superiors, not scuffling his feet or standing on one leg, and he is mild and polite with those below him.  He knows how to bow to foreign diplomats in the manner of their own countries, sits at table without fidgeting or feeding spaniels, can neatly carve and joint any fowl if requested to serve elders.  He doesn’t slouch around with his jacket off one shoulder, or look in windows to admire himself, or stare around in church, or interrupt old men, or finish their stories for them.  If anyone sneezes, he says, “Christ help you!”

The Gotham Writer’s Workshop

“In 1998,” writer Jacob Appel writes in his article “Tips for Placing a Short Story,” “I won the Boston Review’s annual short fiction contest for my story, “Shell Game with Organs”—a breakthrough event in my career that led me to obtain my first agent.  At the public reading sponsored by the Review, I informed the audience that more than seventy-five other journals, both large and small, had previously rejected the piece.”

I found this article at the Gotham Writer’s Workshop website.  Gotham is a private writing school in New York City, staffed by a variety of writers worth listening to.  From poetry to fiction and all points in between, the website offers expert articles on a variety of subjects.  See the archives page for the selection.

Harper Lee: Hey Boo…..a Documentary on the Writing of To Kill a Mockingbird

I never really read as a kid, but I did watch movies, and one movie that impressed me was To Kill a Mockingbird.  Harper Lee  was from Alabama.  My parents were from Alabama.  Harper’s first name is Nell (my mother’s first name).  My parents lived in the racially divided south at the same time as Harper, and when I was a kid, that prejudiced world swirled through my  Jacksonville, Florida, childhood.  So the story world in the movie was something I could identify with.  Years later, when I started reading, I came to Harper Lee’s book, and when I read the chapter where Scout first meets Boo, I actually teared up.  It connected in such a strong way to my childhood, to my parents and Alabama, and to the scene in the movie (the pale Robert Duval as Boo) that something deep down was tugging at me.

As I grew as a reader and then a writer, I read Mockingbird repeatedly and tried to learn from it.  I know it has its critics (Francine Prose wrote an essay about how how it simplified the world to cleanly for her tastes).  Maybe it’s not high art (or is it?), but it does so much.  Thankfully, PBS has produced an American Masters special on Harper Lee called Harper Lee: Hey, Boo. The documentary has interviews with Lee, friends, editors, and a who’s who of writers. The full documentary is playing on PBS stations now, and online.  Click the picture of Harper Lee to watch.

Harry Crews: “How do you like your blue-eyed boy, Mr. Death?”

In 1986, when I found out I was going to Florida, I started reading Harry Crews.  I knew of his world through my parents: poverty, dirt farming, alcoholism, the South.  He even had a character with my mother’s maiden name, Nell Head.  His books were funny and violent and peopled by outcasts, some deformed, some evil, some just bat-shit crazy.  When I learned he’d had polio as a kid, I remember wondering if he was deformed in some way, on crutches with weak legs—this despite his jacket cover photo that threatened to kick anyone’s ass.

When I arrived at UF, I found him relatively whole.  He would run the graduate fiction writer’s workshop I was in.  The first night, someone mentioned the People magazine interview that had described how Harry, in a drunken stupor, urinated in the interviewer’s car.  Harry was embarrassed, but he handled the question fine.  For me, anyway, I was in awe—here was a real writer, respected, well published, a bit of a legend.  But Harry’s alcoholism would come more and more into the forefront of our class’ relationship with him, and ultimately to a sad night where I tried to sober him up.

I recall the first class we discussed student work.  Michael Cox turned in a story that broke from traditional narrative with flashbacks, ellipses, etc., and as the twelve or so of us waited for Harry to start the discussion, he looked around the table with the same mean-eyed squint his book covers portrayed.  We were all nervous, wondering what he was going to say, how this workshop would work, what attitude he would have.  Finally, Harry opened his mouth like he was ready to spit and said, “What the hell is this?  A goddamn dream?”  On the outside, we were all downcast eyes and sheepish grins, but on the inside, we were dying out laughing, save Michael, of course, our guinea pig.

What happened next was not so funny.  Harry had the habit of calling me “Coach.”  My guess is, he called everybody “Coach” if he couldn’t remember their names. That week I called him to discuss my first story.  About my writing he told me over the phone, “You got it, Coach.”  The IT, I suppose, was talent.  I was thrilled.  But when I went into the workshop that Monday night to have my story discussed, Harry wasn’t there.  He was home, drunk.  I remember somehow we got him on a payphone and I was talking to him and he said he needed help.  I had had my fair share of experience with drunks, so I ended up at his apartment to lend a hand.

Harry’s apartment complex seemed like something out of the fifties: cinder block, plain, a place I would never want to live.  Inside was clean.  The living room had no television.  On a desk beside a manual typewriter was a three-inch high, perfectly stacked pile of papers.  His manuscript for The Knockout Artist.  I don’t recall anything else about the main room that I’m sure connected with the kitchen.  Just the manuscript of the novel yet to be published.  And then there was Harry, in the bedroom, in a shadowy half-light.  He lay in the bed, beside him an empty pint of liquor.  He’d overdone it, he said.  Done it to himself again.  I got him a Coke from the fridge and told him to drink it.  He spoke about my story, and told me the first sentence wasn’t a sentence, but that the story was good, that I had “it,” the infamous IT.  He asked me to get his manuscript from the table and told me the page to read.  I read the portion where Eugene Gibbs, the failed boxer, intentionally knocks himself out with a blow to his chin.  The passage described why Eugene did it, why he punched himself (which was his act, how he made money), and Harry, in the darkness of his bedroom, said, “That’s me, Coach.”  The message was clear.  He self-sabotaged himself with booze.  I suppose we talked about it, why he did it, and somehow we got to the subject of his son, the one who’d drowned in a neighbor’s pool many, many years before.  Somewhere in that discussion Harry started making gasping noises, as though he were drowning, too.  I tried to calm him down.  I think I even yelled at him to cut it out.  He caught his breath.  I could only make out his profile as he lay on his back with his eyes closed.  Then he said, “Bloody me up, Coach.”  I didn’t understand, and he said it again.  “Bloody me up.”  This was guilt talking, 23-years of it.  Later, I was told he’d get into fights for the sole purpose of being beat up.  “Bloody me up,” he said again.  He wanted me to punch him.  To bloody his face.  I was repulsed and told him there was no way I was going to hit him.  Fortunately for me, he soon passed out.  When he did, I left as fast as I could.

Sober, Harry was kind and brilliant.  I remember him telling me about profanity in fiction.  He said when his brother read the word “shit” in one of his books, it was as if there was really a piece of shit on the page; it was that real to him.  He said of staying focused in a story, that you have to keep your eye on the story as if you were pushing a bean across the floor with your nose.  He said if you want to be a writer, you have to hold writing above everything and everyone, a rule I think he lived by.

Harry was brilliant.  Steel-trap brilliant.  Of course, he never remembered me coming by his apartment, and I knew not to mention it.  Rumor went around the department that he ended up in detox, and the next week, when the class met, William Logan taught it (and ripped my story to shreds…so much for the IT).  Harry never taught us again.  Instead, I’d see him in his office.  He would always talk to me, give me advice, tell me stories.  Later, at my request, he observed the creative writing class I taught and wrote me a recommendation letter.  Harry was damaged goods, but he was human and because of his humanity he was loved, especially by his students, many of us who are remembering him today.

Henri Cole and Hens

How do you dive deep when talking about chickens?  This is a particular genius Henri Cole has: brief brush strokes of common events laid side by side with the philosophical.  The poem describes, first person–just a guy relating an experience–him calling the chickens to eat, picking one up, and telling her, “Everything will be okay.”  Then three lines later Cole pulls out his laser and delivers a line worthy of poet and priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins: “God dooms the snake to taste nothing but the dust . . .”  It’s quite a feat, and in fourteen lines, too.  Here’s the poem, originally published in The Atlantic.  Below it, Henri Cole explains where it came from and reads it.

Hens

By Henri Cole

It’s good for the ego, when I call and they come
running, squawking and clucking, because it’s feedtime,
and once again I can’t resist picking up little Lazarus,
an orange-and-white pullet I adore. “Yes, yes, everything will be
okay,” I say to her glaring mongrel face. Come September,
she’ll begin to lay the blue-green eggs I love poached.
God dooms the snake to taste nothing but the dust
and the hen to 4,000 or so ovulations. Poor Lazarus—
last spring an intruder murdered her sisters and left her
garroted in the coop. There’s a way the wounded
light up a dark rectangular space. Suffering becomes
the universal theme. Too soft, and you’ll be squeezed;
too hard, and you’ll be broken. Even a hen knows this,
posing on a manure pile, her body a stab of gold.

Sound: Sylvia Plath Reads “Daddy”

I came across Sylvia_Plath reading “Daddy” and was impressed by the sound and rhythm, the repetitions, the reliance on the long vowel diphthong “oo,” the echoing transitions that slide words and ideas together.  If you’ve never heard her read it, it’s worth the listen.

Daddy
by Sylvia Plath
You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white, Barely daring to breathe or Achoo. Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time-- Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, Ghastly statue with one gray toe Big as a Frisco seal And a head in the freakish Atlantic Where it pours bean green over blue In the waters off beautiful Nauset. I used to pray to recover you. Ach, du. In the German tongue, in the Polish town Scraped flat by the roller Of wars, wars, wars. But the name of the town is common. My Polack friend Says there are a dozen or two. So I never could tell where you Put your foot, your root, I never could talk to you. The tongue stuck in my jaw. It stuck in a barb wire snare. Ich, ich, ich, ich, I could hardly speak. I thought every German was you. And the language obscene An engine, an engine Chuffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. I began to talk like a Jew. I think I may well be a Jew. The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna Are not very pure or true. With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack I may be a bit of a Jew. I have always been scared of you, With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. And your neat mustache And your Aryan eye, bright blue. Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You-- Not God but a swastika So black no sky could squeak through. Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you. You stand at the blackboard, daddy, In the picture I have of you, A cleft in your chin instead of your foot But no less a devil for that, no not Any less the black man who Bit my pretty red heart in two. I was ten when they buried you. At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do. But they pulled me out of the sack, And they stuck me together with glue. And then I knew what to do. I made a model of you, A man in black with a Meinkampf look And a love of the rack and the screw. And I said I do, I do. So daddy, I'm finally through. The black telephone's off at the root, The voices just can't worm through. If I've killed one man, I've killed two-- The vampire who said he was you And drank my blood for a year, Seven years, if you want to know. Daddy, you can lie back now. There's a stake in your fat black heart And the villagers never liked you. They are dancing and stamping on you. They always knew it was you. Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through. 12 October 1962