Category: literary life

Luc Sante reviews Russell Banks’s new novel, The Reserve, for the NYT Book Review, and he doesn’t seem to like it very much:

It is 1936, and we are in the Adirondacks, at a party at a luxurious camp on a vast private reserve. (“Camp” is a local upper-caste understatement, comparable to the use of “cottage” in Newport, R.I.) As the sun begins to dip behind the mountain range that dominates the horizon, a beautiful young woman detaches herself from her elders and walks barefoot to the shore of the lake. Suddenly a seaplane appears in the air and all look on, stunned, as it lands on the surface of the water. Such a thing has never before occurred, and furthermore is taboo under the largely unspoken laws of the reserve. A dashing aviator — we will discover that he is a famous artist, a radical, a free spirit — steps out of the plane and locks eyes with the glamorous yet troubled young woman.

You can picture this on the movie screen, can’t you: all golden light and exquisite set design and dazzling wardrobe and starring, perhaps, Keira Knightley. Russell Banks’s new novel begins this way, and the scene exemplifies both its strengths and its weaknesses — it is not necessarily evident which is which.

I’m a bit disappointed, because Banks’s Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter are among my favorite novels, and I always hope to find the magic again.

There’s a great profile of Francisco Goldman in last weekend’s Guardian Review. His latest book, The Art of Political Murder, is just now coming out in the U.K.

When I was a young, nerdy teenager, I never missed Bernard Pivot‘s Apostrophes, the famed French chat show about literature. It was informed but not stuffy, and Pivot really did read the 3 or 4 books that were discussed each fortnight (imagine that!). I never understood why there wasn’t something similar in the States. I like Charlie Rose, but his PBS show is usually a one-on-one interview with no opportunity for discussion among different writers of the same genre. But now comes word that Daniel Menaker, former editor at the New Yorker and at Random House, is going to start an online TV show called Titlepage.

“Titlepage” will combine elements of “Apostrophes,” a popular French literary program; “The Charlie Rose Show” on public television; and “Dinner for Five,” in which a group of actors discussed their craft, on the Independent Film Channel.

I am so excited about this. I hope the show is good.

A few weeks ago, in my Beginning Fiction class, we read John Cheever’s short story “The Enormous Radio,” which was published in the New Yorker in 1947. I’ve always liked that story, and it still seems relevant today, what with MySpace and YouTube. Now I just came across this 1956 radio adaptation from CBS Radio Workshop. It’s interesting to see what choices were made in the course of turning the story into a radio play; for instance, Cheever barely paid any attention to the maid in the story (the reader doesn’t find out her name is Emma until the very end), and certainly he doesn’t give any idea about her race, but in the radio adaptation she is played by someone who is clearly going for a black character. Both the avoidance of race in the story (no one’s is mentioned) and the recourse to stereotypes in the adaptation seem to me to be reflections of the times, and I wonder what people will say in fifty years about today’s stories, and about our blind spots.

The picture above is of my own, enormous radio: An old Philco we picked up at an antiques store in Portland a few years ago.

Vladimir Nabokov’s last manuscript, The Original of Laura, is apparently in a vault in Switzerland. Nabokov wanted it destroyed, but his son Dmitri (now 73) is undecided about the directive, according to Slate‘s Ron Rosenbaum.

Dmitri’s predicament goes beyond Laura. It’s one that raises the difficult issue of who “owns” a work of art, particularly an unfinished work of art by a dead author who did not want anything but his finished work to become public. Who controls its fate? The dead hand from the grave? Or the eager, perhaps overeager, readers, scholars, and biographers who want to get their hands on it no matter what state it’s in?

To me, an unpublished manuscript belongs to the author only; if Nabokov wanted it destroyed, then it should be.

I have two new posts up at Words Without Borders, one in which I discuss some of the literary influences at play in Camara Laye’s The Radiance of the King, and a second one about Toni Morrison’s introduction to the novel. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this novel as much as I did.