FYI or die

Meghan O’Rouke has written an amazing article for Slate on gender and reviewing. 

Tres depresso martini. 

I would love to read an Australian version… Kill Your Darlings? Overland? Anyone?

Tellingly, the ratio of men’s to women’s books being reviewed is often, if not always, wider than the ratio of male to female bylines. The New Republicreviewed 55 books by men and only nine by women. The New Yorker reviewed 33 books by men and nine by women. The New York Review of Books reviewed 306 books by men and 59 by women—a slightly better ratio than its overall bylines but hardly even.

Read it here.

So I’m currently pulling apart an old Franzen novel for a project I’m working on, and it’s kind of breathtaking how well it’s holding up to the most brutal of analysis.  Even when it’s beaten down to verbs, nouns and adjectives it reads like water out of a tap.  It is almost enough to make me want to never write again.

But then I read this article in the Paris Review about his life work.  And it turns out that it’s not easy trying to write like Jonathon Franzen, even if you are Jonathon Franzen.  I can’t decide whether this makes me feel better or worse.

Either way, it’s an amazing read.  Definitely worth the cover price.  I especially like his discussion about his relationships and how they affected his writing.

I started writing Pynchonian letters to my then-fiancee, and I think it’s significant that she hated those letters and made her hatred of them known, and that I steered away from that voice-because of our relationship, because of an intense relationship with a woman.  Which now seems to me emblematic: You could either play with the boys like that, and relegate women to minor and substantially objectified characters on the margin, or you could try and have a full-fledged relationship with a woman, in which case that kind of boy writing, however brilliant and masterful, was necessarily subordinate.  It’s worth noting that at this point in my life, I feel much more indebted to various female writers- Alice Munro, Christina Stead, Flannery O’Connor, Jane Smiley, Paula Fox, to name a few - than I do to Pynchon.

Soundtrack to my Sunday afternoon is my favourite bookish babes Lorelei, Estelle and Anna K. talking about F Scott Fitzgerald.

Perfect Sunday listening.

If someone calls James Frey “the bad boy of literature” one more time I’m going to vomit.  

Any by the way, isn’t that what we call Michel Houellebcq?  Does broadsheet newspaper literary criticism have space for two authors to hold this cliche title?  

(In other news, I just finished watching season 5 of Bad Girls Club: Miami.  And I can tell you, those bad girls would glass both Frey and Houllebcq in the eye before they even stepped foot into the bad girl house. Those girls are way bad.)

Anyway, the aforementioned bad boy Frey has caused more controversy due to his new venture to get teams of writers to write books for him.  Operating in the vein of Warhol’s factory and Kloon’s art production line, he is contracting young writers to do his scribbling.  But, unsurprisingly, it seems that these writers are getting the raw end of the deal.

The contentious elements include: an upfront payment of just $250 (£156) to the writer for an entire book, which is pitiful unless the book is sold, at which point they get 30%-40% of any royalties obtained; the fact that Frey retains all final creative control and the copyright of the work in his company, with total power to decide what happens to the book; and a system of fines if the writer breaks the terms of the contract. A publishing lawyer told New York magazine that he had never seen a contract like it in his 16 years of negotiations.

Read all about it here.

So is that why they call him a bad boy?  Maybe in the literary world being a bad boy is less about being a bad arse (ala bad girls club) and more about being an arsehole?

Writing in books was always a touchy subject growing up.   I once borrowed a book off my mum and wrote in the margins, nothing particularly scandalous but in ballpoint pen nonetheless.  Probably something like: nice, or maybe some ecstatic !!!! that I do when I like a turn of phrase or idea.  Alas, the outrage at my pen crime (no doubt, enough to revoke my pen license?) was substantial enough for me to NEVER EVER write in any book that is not my own again.  A basic but essential lesson for every child.

Read More

It looks like Christos Tsiolkas is making waves overseas with The Slap.  While I didn’t really like this book as much as some of his other books- Jesus Man changed my life! - it does make my heart well up to see an Australian writer get this sort of coverage.  And this.  And this.

It is impossible for me to read something about Jonathon Franzen without thinking about this article.  Written by his ex-girlfriend, writer Kathryn Chetkovich, Envy, is an uncomfortably honest account of how it feels to be a writer dating another writer who becomes exceedingly successful while you are still struggling to get short stories published in local journals (tip: not all that flash.)  Published in Meanjin, the full essay now remains under their oh-so-tight paid content section.  I will quote from their sparse but free blog commentary:

On reading early drafts of the novel she remembers feeling the proverbial ‘stabs of dread familiar to all writers’, because ‘here were sentences, paragraphs, whole pages I not only admired but wished I had written’. After publication, things only became worse: ‘When the man was merely gifted but not particularly rewarded, I was comfortable; we were in it together, comrades in a world that didn’t care what we had to tell it. But now, what did his success prove if not that when the gift is prodigious enough, the world does need us, it will pay?’

The essay is one of my favourite things ever written about creativity human nature.  It was republished in The Best American Essays of 2004 and even Franzen heaped praise on it. 

On that note, I really can’t wait for the new Franzen.  This book nerd anticipation reminds me of how I used to feel as a ten-year-old waiting for John Marsden to release the next installment of the “Tomorrow When the War Began” series in the summer.  Excitement abounds.