Author Archives: Alec

Jonathan Franzen, whose new novel Freedom I have devoured rapaciously and loved, gave a great interview to NPR. Among the treasures:

Only if you have some regular connection with some kind of darkness or difficulty or conflict does serious fiction begin to matter. And so it’s simply realistic to let people, as the stories of their lives build toward dramatic peaks, to enter these dark woods from time to time. And it’s really as simple as that. And then because I think it tends to be funny up to a point, up to the point where you need to be hospitalized.

&:

If I’m just writing about something moderately interesting in using interesting well-turned sentences, it just has no life. It’s got to come out of something that’s – some issue that’s still hot in me, something that is distressing me and there are plenty of things to be distressed about. And for a long time I was able to get a lot of energy onto the page from certain kinds of political distress, environmentalist distress, even aesthetic distress, sort of a war on certain strains in literary fiction that I was opposed to, and that kind of anger has become less interesting to me because it seems like a younger man’s game a little bit.

And also, the writer is still too well defended. You are armored in your anger. And particularly, in the new book, I tried to let go of that or I found myself letting go of it and went to the deeper, more upsetting things, which were much harder to get onto the page, but whose presence I could feel. I could feel like some, you know, pool of magma beneath the crust, that there is heat down there. If I can only find a way to tap into it, it will make the pages hot in the way they have to be.

&:

The great thing about novels and the reason we still need them, I think will always need them, is you’re converting unsayable things into narratives that have their own dreamlike reality. And instead of having factual statements about what is – here’s the factual statement I will never make about myself, I can’t make about myself, I’m too ashamed or afraid to make about myself. If that can be translated into characters who feel like they have some independent life, and if they’re embodying through their story that informational material about myself, then I feel as if it’s been not quite said but it’s been enacted.

Do you like Gary Shteyngart? Who doesn’t? He’s hilarious. Devastatingly handsome. Almost always impeccably dressed. And he’s BFFs with James Franco.

OK, sure, he’s also a pessimist, but a lovable one, as you’ll find out if you read the interview I did with him for The Rumpus:

This generation is fucked. We can’t keep up with the technology we’ve created, and it’s like we were invaded by a barbarian horde and we don’t know what to do. Sometimes I think that the iPhone and everything else that is now a major part of my life is a punishment that I’ve inflicted on myself for sins that I can’t quantify. This is maybe—I don’t know—going back to Hebrew school, but since the iPhone came out, my life has gotten progressively worse. I land on a plane and I get nervous if my iPhone—my äppärät—can’t connect. It’s like I’m running a Fortune 500 company. I’m supposed to be a fucking writer, working in solitude, right?

PS. Hey, even “George Clooney” likes it.

Listen to Faulkner lecture on writing, & read from “The Town.”

I interviewed Jennifer Egan for the great literary online magazine The Rumpus. You can read it in full here, but here’s a teaser:

Look at a book like Tristram Shandy, which is so crazily experimental in a way we still have yet to match. There’s such a desire not to just say:  this happened and then this happened and then this happened. The tension is between the incremental and inexorable passage of time and the leaping, stuttering quality of consciousness. The two do not match up. One result of that is that time is passing gradually, but we experience its effect as very sudden. Our perception of time is full of all these gaps. That really interests me, and I think it informed the fragmented structure of the book. I wanted to capture as many shocking discoveries of time having passed as possible, which is difficult to do if you’re just moving forward in time.

• Njabulo Ndebele.
• J. M. Coetzee
• Zoe Wicomb
• Ceridwen Dovey
• Niq Mhlongo
• Nadine Gordimer
• Lisa Fugard
• K. Sello Duiker
• Deon Meyer
• Zakes Mda
• Phaswane Mpe
• Rozena Maart

One of my earliest sports-related memories, apart from being forcibly drowned by the summer camp bus driver/swim coach, was going to a Blackhawks game at the old Chicago Stadium, pre-MJ. I was maybe six, too lanky to play, didn’t know how to skate anyway. Plus I was already permanently embarrassed due to a bad stutter, which nearly kept me bedroom-bound. The first game Dad took me to, during Denis Savard‘s first stint with the Hawks, was an eye-opening experience: I was doused with my first Budweiser, ate my first Vienna Beef Chicago-style hot dog (Mom’s dogs were slathered in nothing more than ketchup), and I almost caught my first puck. Or Dad did. He’s pretty adamant he was the one responsible for reaching up and knocking it down before it peeled off into a deeper row, and now that I think about it he’s probably right. But, in my youthful nimbleness, I was the one who darted between foreign legs and picked the puck up. We still have it, all these years later.

Last night, after raucous all-night celebrations on the streets of Chicago, my brother got to touch the Stanley Cup. Which I think is illegal, or frowned upon.But that’s the way we do it in Chicago: there ain’t nothin’ on a pedestal, not even the stinkin’ Stanley Cup. As it well should be in what’s supposed to be this democracy of ours.

Once-waterboarded Christopher Hitchens writes in his memoir Hitch-22 of meeting Ian McEwan (through–who else?–Martin Amis). According to Hitch, McEwan “seemed at first to possess some of the same vaguely unsettling qualities as his tales. He never raised his voice, surveyed the world in a very level and almost affectless fashion through moon-shaped granny glasses [!!!], wore his hair in bangs, was rail-thin, showed an interest in what Martin used to call ‘hippie-ish’ pursuits, and when I met him was choosing to live on the fringes of the then weed-infested ‘frontline’ black ghetto in Brixton.”

Far be it from me to be an expert on “granny glasses,” but Hitch may have been onto something (see right, although personally I was hoping for a thicker rim).

Presently, as if in a certain McEwan novel about love and stalking, Hitch received a phone call from Thomas Pynchon. I don’t know about you, but I have long imagined this exact moment. I’m sitting in the basement rec room, a budding 17-year-old wannabe writer, reading Gravity’s Rainbow while my brothers play Nintendo in the next room. The phone rings. Mom calls down. “Who is it?” I yell up to her over the mechanical clatter of Super Mario Brothers. “Don’t know. Funny accent.” Mildly trepidatious it might be my soccer coach calling to say practice has been pushed up to 4 a.m. tomorrow, I pick up and am greeted by… Now, in my teenage fantasy, he says, “Hey, man, Tom here. You know, Tom Pynchon. What’s up, man?” Throw in a stutter for dramatic effect. Static on the line because he’s calling from an undisclosed location in Pennsyltucky (this was before Mason & Dixon, part of the research of which legendarily included the author walking the entire Mason-Dixon line). But never did I imagine he’d come right out and say, as Hitch recalls,

“This is Thomas Pynchon speaking.”

Because, um, Pynchon? Wouldn’t he be a bit more…hesitant? Guarded? Maybe mumble something along the lines of “Oh, hey, hi, um…” and not come right out and brashly declare “This is Thomas Pynchon speaking?” Although, with this knowledge, go back and listen to Pynchon’s actual voice (the two Simpsons appearances, here and here; the Inherent Vice book trailer), and yeah, OK, I can picture it. Especially with the mild Long Island accent.

The intrigue builds as Hitch writes on:

“I am glad that I did not say what I first thought of saying, because he was soon enough able to demonstrate that it was he, and that a mutual friend (make that a common friend) named Ian McEwan had suggested that he call. Larry Kramer’s ultra-homosexual effort Faggots had been seized by the British Customs and Excise, and all the impounded copies were in danger of being destroyed. Mr. Pynchon was somewhere in England and was mightily distressed by this. What could be done? Could I raise an outcry, as Pynchon had been assured by Ian I could? I told him that one could protest hoarsely and long but that Britain had no law protecting free speech or forbidding state censorship. We chatted a bit longer, I artlessly offered to call him back, and he laughingly declined this transparent try-on and faded back into the world where only McEwan could find him.”

I don’t know about you, but while I pine for the Pynchon biography, what is emerging, of late, is a literary love affair friendship between Pynchon and McEwan that rivals another famous allegedly homosexual literary coupling, between Melville and Hawthorne. The mind reels what revolutionary words are whispered late at night under the covers…