News

A father and son walk along a road in a post-apocalyptic future. Around them, everything is dead or dying. Between sunup and sundown, the sky’s color changes by only a few shades of gray. It’s numbingly cold, and ash falls from the sky nearly all the time. The reader is never told what could have caused the world to turn out like this, but it’s not hard to imagine that it could be a nuclear explosion. In the end, it doesn’t much matter what caused it all, because there is life to attend to. The little boy needs to be fed and protected, and the father devotes himself to that. There are other survivors, but it’s hard to tell who “the good guys” are, those “who carry the fire.” McCarthy ventures into the deepest, darkest recesses of the human heart, and chronicles what he sees in vivid, yet restrained prose. Some survivors engage in cannibalism; others have organized in armies, red scarves at their necks, killing and stealing and rampaging; slavery reappears; and through all this madness the father must find food and protect his little boy. I had to put this book down a couple of times because I was not sure I could finish it. But I cared about the characters far too much to stay away, and so I picked it up again and finished it in one sitting. What Cormac McCarthy has done in his new novel is difficult, brave, and incredibly well-executed. A masterpiece.

I’ve had a copy of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking for a long, long while, and I finally got to read it last week, on the plane to New York. It’s her memoir of the year following the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, of a massive heart attack while their only daughter, Quintana, was in the hospital, receiving treatment for septic shock. (After the book was completed, but before its publication, Quintana passed away, in an almost unbearable post scriptum.) Didion chronicles the process of grief and mourning with stunning clarity, and many times I was moved to tears and had to put the book down. But there were also moments when I was frustrated by the sheer amount of control in the prose, as if the words could somehow serve as refuge from things Didion might not want the reader to know.

My apologies for the lack of posts these past few days. I’ve been busy with travel, and I’ve also been devoting whatever time I have to my novel. Posting should resume shortly.

The inimitable Tod Goldberg offers a write-up of the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which took place last weekend. Here’s a snippet:

A popular misconception about Los Angeles is that it’s a town full of illiterate, fame-obsessed aspiring screenwriters whose most intense relationship with literature is Starbucks’ employee relations manual. Well, perhaps that’s not the most popular misconception — there’s the one about how pictures of your shaved genitalia appearing in US Magazine is actually a wise career move — but time and again Southern California is noted for being the Capitol of Vapid; a place where Norbit’s opening weekend is considered the high watermark of cultural talk. And while this may be true for the ten percenters who clog Wilshire Blvd. and the mail room denizens who spend their off hours speaking in Variety‘s Esperanto while in line at Baja Fresh, the hidden truth is that Los Angeles is a book town.

The empirical evidence is provided every April when the Los Angeles Times hosts their annual Festival of Books and Book Prizes ceremonies, a three-day celebration of the written word on the campus of UCLA. An average year features 150,000 readers, 500 authors, a hundred moderated panels, countless book signings, those weird people who believe Ayn Rand is a religious icon, those weird people who believe Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’ caterwauling alien/human hybrid child is the messiah, my gut filled with churros and at least three of the following spectacles..

You’ll have to go over to Jewcy to read the rest. And check out the posts over at Pinky’s Paperhaus and Galleycat.

My trip to New York was great. My first event was the History and the Truth of Fiction panel, which was held at NYU. We had a great turn out, and it was particularly nice to see a few familiar faces in the crowd. Colum McCann, our moderator, was fantastic; he knew how to ask questions that would involve all of us and get us to discuss with one another. Several wraps up have popped up online (see, for instance, this, this, or this) and some photos as well.

One of the highlights of the PEN festival for me was getting to meet Abdulrazak Gurnah, whose latest novel, Desertion, was one of my favorites of last year. We were on one panel together, Where on Earth: The Refugee Emergency, which was about different experiences of exile, whether old or new, forced or desired, brutal or peaceful. (We also shared a memorable cab ride, during which the driver, a fellow Moroccan, treated us to his life story, including an anecdote about how he worked as a bartender for ten years while being an observant Muslim.)

My final event was a gathering of storytellers, with Jonathan Ames, Pico Iyer, Edgar Oliver, and Neil Gaiman. Ordinarily, Alex loves to talk to writers, but he was so intimidated that he fell completely silent in Neil Gaiman’s presence–which was quite amusing considering that Gaiman is so nice, and so down to earth. I was fortunate enough to spend some time with Pico Iyer at the rehearsal, and heard so many wonderful stories of his travels, including the one he told at The Moth, about a trip to Aden to do research on a fourteenth-century Chinese Muslim eunuch admiral. (Yes, you read that last part right. More on Zheng He here.)

I didn’t get a chance to go to many other panels, but I loved the Town Hall Readings, and the panel on Gritty Realism, with Daniel Alarcon, Guillermo Arriaga, Jorge Franco, and Patricia Melo, moderated by the amazing Francisco Goldman. You can read various reports about the panels and readings at the World Voices blogs, and at TEV.