Maybe the previous post is being too reductive. Probably is. But what spurred me to post, in addition to the correspondence I mentioned there, was a second correspondence I was having with another friend, on a different subject entirely. We were talking books and I mentioned my current obsession with Graham Greene. I mean it: I am obsessed with the guy. After reading two books in the last six months I’ve become addicted to his books like they’re Girl Scout cookies. A couple chapters into re-reading The Power and the Glory, I put it down and decided to do this obsession right. I’m starting from the beginning and reading through his entire oeuvre. I may even read his three-volume biography concurrently. What I mean is, I’m obsessed.
The last time I was this obsessed with an author, I was in college and the author was Donald Barthelme. To this day it’s difficult for guests to be in my living room and not comment on the number of Barthelme books around. But how did I get from Barthelme, where concept, language, and a collagist approach to prose squash such traditional notions as plot and character, to Greene—who is known for nothing if not taut plots and the inner turmoil of his characters? I read The Power and the Glory as a freshman in college and enjoyed it, but at the time it struck me as solid but nothing special. “Special” was something like the chronologically fluid Catch-22 or Barthelme’s absurd and abstract treatment of Snow White.
There’s a parallel there with my taste in music then and now. While I was so in love with Can or even Low—groups that in their own way were deconstructing the song to reveal certain elements buried under the more obvious, more tangible ones—I was also reveling in Barthelme, the Fiction Collective, Pynchon, Sorrentino. The mechanics of writing were the thing—the means, not the ends. Ronald Sukenick’s Long Talking Bad Condition Blues had not a single dot of punctuation; Mark Amerika’s Kafka Chronicles was a stream-of-consciousness hail of noise. Now, whenever I pick up a novel that seems more pleased with its structure than with its story, I toss it aside. Mark Danielewski is the heir to the tradition right now. Some are touting him as a genius but I just want to throw his books across the room. It’s too labored. At least Mark Amerika realized (rightly) that his vision belonged on the web. It’s beyond print; why try to constrain your vision, so driven by typographic dances and a hyper-Choose-Your-Own-Adventure structure, to a book format?
Yes, it makes me cranky. The same way Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s new record made me cranky for its faux-experimentation. But like I said yesterday, that’s not to say I can’t appreciate it when it’s done right. Look at an author like David Mitchell. Cloud Atlas is a technically exhilarating novel, but all the bravura Mitchell displays in the actual writing is in support of a plot, of characters, of a larger theme—in other words, of telling an absorbing story. Musically you need look no further than Bjork to see someone go about as far out there as you can get yet still retain emotion, never mind a melody.
A far less extreme but much more unlikely example is the newest hot shit, Peter Bjorn & John. Who would think that a band responsible for the earworm of the year, “Young Folks,” would effortlessly drop in more cerebral tracks like “Poor Cow,” “Start to Melt,” or the album highlight “Roll the Credits” ? These guys ably demonstrate that it’s easy to have a handle on your mechanics without sacrificing heart. They’re not reinventing the wheel, but that’s the point: you don’t have to try so hard!
Which brings me back to Graham Greene. If ever there was an author who had such complete control over his mechanics, put to perfect use in support of the story he wants to tell, it’s Greene. No element overpowers the other. One of the books I read last year that has spurred me on this kick, The End of the Affair, is the perfect example. After setting up all three sides of a triangle, giving us tantalizing scenes and memorable supporting characters, Greene flips it two-thirds in and gives us a brand-new narrator. In lesser hands it would feel forced, artificial. Take for instance Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude, a perfectly excellent novel that nearly derails at the two-thirds mark when it shifts from third to first person. But Greene pulls it off, leading to great emotional payoff. Thus far the books I’ve read by Greene don’t feel Big and Important—there’s no aspiration to Nobel here—but when I’m finished with the book all I want to do is go back to page one and start over. What more should a book, or a record, wish to accomplish?
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