Ignorance + Curiosity

Having finished Anna Karenina recently, I’m vaccinated against throwing around hyperbole about books. So anything I write about Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked is going to be muted.

Maybe you should judge the novel by my actions. There are the actions you can see here on this blog: I’ve interrupted my life twice — today and Tuesday — to post quotes from the novel. There are other actions you can’t see without me telling you about them: I’ve listened to the audiobook of Juliet, Naked while jogging; I’ve listened while lying down, eyes shut, easing into sleep; I’ve listened while switching clothes from the washer to the dryer; I listened to the end of the story just now while picking up more books and audiobooks from the library.

The novel is engrossing, basically. Not at first. I got hooked — and stayed hooked — when Hornby put readers inside the head of a character named Tucker Crowe.

I seem to be solidly in the Hornby demographic, whatever that is. Hornby sees people — or, at least, certain types of men — for what they are. He’s honest. I’m even tempted to say brutally honest, except that there’s nothing brutal about it. Hornby’s honesty makes the world more hospitable. He depicts idiosyncrasies — even idiotic idiosyncrasies — without dismissing their owners as irredeemable idiots.

Juliet, Naked is not Anna Karenina. Hornby is not Tolstoy. Hornby’s writing in the novel is, in fact, so unassuming that I’m tempted to say that it’s not even good writing. But that’s nonsense. A book is just words. The words are written. If what is written manages to engross, to ring true, to coax laughter, to provoke introspection, to yield blog posts from a guy who loves Anna Karenina, then the writer might be doing something — perhaps even many things — very well.

(Side note: Hornby blogs; Tolstoy doesn’t.)

For a good stretch, I listened to almost nothing but podcasts. No audiobooks. Hardly any music, even. I’m not clear on why I stopped. But because I stopped, iTunes stopped downloading new podcasts. So last night, when I inexplicably went hunting for a podcast to listen to, I found that my most recent episode of “The Sound of Young America” was from 11/10/09. It turned out to be an interview with Nick Hornby, who still is probably most famous for having written High Fidelity.

The interview is everything that is right about the podcast and its creator. Jesse Thorn is sincere. He’s curious. He’s interested. He can also walk right into awkward conversational moments. These might well derail his interviews. Instead, they seem to help make the interviews more real, more illuminating. Take this exchange with Hornby, who deserves credit for either not taking umbrage or for getting over his umbrage:

Thorn: My wife and I watched “An Education” earlier today and she read the book as well and she said to me, “Well, you could tell Nick Hornby was involved.” And I was like, “Why is that?” And she said, “Oh, you know, like, some people are in it and they’re sort of dissatisfied with what’s going on, and they go through a big long thing, and …” She did not mean any of this pejoratively and I want to make that clear.

Hornby: That’s fine.

Thorn: “They go through a big, long thing, have a lot of adventures, and the biggest thing that they learn is how to be confortable with what they were, rather than how to be a new thing.”

Hornby (laughing): Yes, um, well I would say that’s kind of my subject, and it’s quite a good subject, I think, because it seems to me there’s too much in the culture that teaches us how to be a new thing. And that’s what most books are about. And they have messages. And the message is that you can be a whole, brand-new you. And I think that’s probably particularly true of America. And I don’t really believe that. And I think that the best we can do is make peace with ourselves and who we are and what we’ve got.

Thorn: Was that ever hard for you to do?

Hornby: To make peace with myself and what I was? It’s difficult to answer because I wouldn’t have been able to make peace with myself if I hadn’t been able to write or I hadn’t been able to make a living as a writer. I think I would have been pretty dissatisfied. So once I got published, it was pretty easy to make peace with myself because that was really the ambition, I think, was to be able to support myself through writing.

Thorn: Sometimes I have nightmares about the protagonist of High Fidelity, who’s struggling with this conflict within himself which is essentially is he going to be a guy who makes things or a guy who listens to things that other people made and categorizes them.

OK. You get the idea. I’m not going to transcribe the whole thing. It takes more time than I have, and I’ll probably run afoul of copyright law if I transcribe much more. If you want more, here’s a link to the interview just in case I don’t manage to embed the full audio of the interview right below this paragraph.

The Sound of Young America

Once you’ve read the first paragraph of a story called “The Sock,” you will have read as much Lydia Davis as I have. Here. It’s just 107 words. Go ahead and read it:

My husband is married to a different woman now, shorter than I am, about five feet tall, solidly built, and of course he looks taller than he used to and narrower, and his head looks smaller. Next to her I feel bony and awkward and she is too short for me to look her in the eye, though I try to stand or sit at the right angle to do that. I once had a clear idea of the sort of woman he should marry when he married again, but none of his girlfriends was quite what I had in mind and this one least of all.

That’s on page 129 of The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis. It’s not my habit to start on page 129. The book just sort of fell open to page 129 when I got it home from the library today. I’d been waiting for it since December. According to the Seattle Public Library’s web site, 54 people are waiting for me to finish the book and bring it back.

Now, about that opening paragraph, those 107 words.

Play along for a minute. Pretend you’re a cop. Pretend you’re at a crime scene and you find nothing but a scrap of paper bearing those 107 words. Now, take a moment to realize all the facts those 107 words give you — the relationships, the histories. Go further, though. Beyond facts. Think of everything you can reasonably surmise about the character responsible for those words. It’s a lot. I’m getting that nice brain tingle that comes from encountering a writer who’s in charge.

Consider averting your glance. For reasons that are strictly legitimate, I’m about to quote a passage from a novel that includes blunt sexual terminology. There will be crass synonyms. A synonym, for example, for the body part that starts with a P and ends with an ENIS. So if you’d rather avoid that, please stop reading.

Meaghan O’Connell’s blogged denunciation of a piece in the New York Times Book Review prompted me to read the piece itself. It’s called “The Naked and the Conflicted.” Someone named Katie Roiphe wrote it. She teaches at NYU.

Roiphe lost me almost immediately, lost me in one of the more alienating ways that a writer can lose a reader: by invoking a “We” to which a decent percentage of readers will not belong. To quote from Roiphe’s second paragraph …

We have internalized the feminist critique pioneered by Kate Millett in “Sexual Politics” so completely that, as one of my students put it, “we can do the math ourselves.”

Huh?

No, I should write more than that. “Huh?” is dismissive. What’s more, “Huh?” could mean so many things. So let me specify. I was permitted to depart Berkeley with a B.A. without ever hearing the name Kate Millett. So I have not “internalized” Millett’s critique “so completely” that I can do the math myself. Perhaps this just makes me ignorant. If so, there are gracious ways to lift a reader out of ignorance. I wish Roiphe had lifted.

Despite my ignorance of Kate Millett, I managed to understand Roiphe’s essay. I think so, at least. The piece comes with a handy visual aid for the benefit of dullards. The chart contrasts the sex scenes of four old male writers (not all of whom are still alive) with four from the new generation of male writers (not all of whom are still alive). The old guys — Philip Roth, John Updike, Norman Mailer, and Saul Bellow — apparently gave us sex scenes that triggered the words “explicitly” and “titillation” and “satirical” and “guilt” and “fear” and “quasi religious” and “rage” and “disgusting” and “comedy” and “disappointment.” The new guys — Jonathan Franzen, Michael Chabon, David Foster Wallace, and Dave Eggers — apparently have given us sex scenes that trigger the words “cool” and “innocence” and “self-conscious” and “ambivalence” and “refusal” and “childlike” and “trepidation.”

Roiphe’s harvest from the new generation involves, among other things, quoting from Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh — a novel whose newness can best be assessed by noting that it was published in 1988. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is old enough to vote. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is old enough to buy liquor in all 50 states. So The Mysteries of Pittsburgh seems problematic as a specimen of the work of what Roiphe calls the “new batch of young or youngish male novelists.”

I won’t pursue this point further. It would be impolite to ask Michael Chabon his age. Same with Franzen and Eggers. And Wallace, well, yes, let’s get off this topic.

For me, the most natural questions provoked by Roiphe’s compare-and-contrast are: Might Roiphe have missed someone? Might there be “young or youngish male novelists” who are writing sex scenes that evoke the explicitness, titillation, guilt, comedy, and disappointment that supposedly is characteristic of the old guys? Might it be a silly proposition these days to write titillating sex scenes for the consumption of a readership that has 24/7 access to Internet porn?

It’s late at night and I’m not going to try to answer those questions. Let’s just pretend they’re all rhetorical and move on purposefully toward a quote. This is the quote I warned you about. It’s still not too late to look away. The quote is a passage from Netherland by Joseph O’Neill, and I’m quoting it because it hammered me when I first came across it — hammered me with its bluntness, with its simultaneous vulgarity and restraint, with the way it conveyed a sad, personal truth of life which is hard to talk about and too easy to fall into experiencing. Here’s what O’Neill wrote in his far-from-obscure 2008 novel:

Over the following weeks, our last as a family in New York, we had sex with a frequency that brought back our first year together, in London. This time round, however, we went about it with strangeness and no kissing, handling and licking and sucking and fucking with dispassion the series of cunts, dicks, assholes, and tits that assembled itself out of our successive yet miserably several encounters. Life itself had become disembodied. My family, the spine of my days, had crumbled. I was lost in invertebrate time.

Whatever those sentences amount to, whether or not they hit you or Katie Roiphe or Kate Millett with the same force that they hit me, I hope we can all agree that they have very little in common with a Dave Eggers sex sentence in which, as Roiphe complains, ”the hero leaves a disco with a woman and she undresses and climbs on top of him, and they just lie there.”

I feel as if Roiphe and the Times have wasted my time with “successive yet miserably several” ideas that, in the end, climb on top of me and just lie there.