1.
I was reading a novel by David Lodge when my eye, perhaps due to the libidinous influence of his leading man, began to wander. I took up with some provocative new reading and found myself in the awkward position of juggling two books at the same time. However, as is sometimes the case, my two-timing gave me access to unexpected dovetails and useful, if confusing, lines of inquiry. Upon completing A Man of Parts and Girl Land, the new offering from Caitlin Flanagan, I know that our young girls are in extreme peril: if they are not succored by their families, they will wind up in nude animal ecstasy with H.G. Wells.

I suspect I am not alone in having a love-hate relationship with Caitlin Flanagan that verges on the indecent. Her writing is alluring and memorable. Despite her interest in the traditionally female preoccupations of hearth and home (so much Dior bedding!), she writes with a self-assurance that feels, if we give reign to our troubling gendered taxonomies of thought, masculine. Flanagan does not equivocate, and her style gives her an aesthetic leg up on some of her more mealy-penned critics. I admire her chops, even when she uses them to sound like an unusually well-spoken Rotarian. Caitlin Flanagan is role model of sorts: I sort of think she sucks, but I sort of want to be her.

H.G. Wells, like Flanagan, opined on social matters not as a result of any special training or specific professional insight, but through the confidence that an educated, intelligent, and up-to-date person with access to the press is qualified to weigh in on the questions of the day. The two of them could have had a rousing exchange in the public arena, with Wells combating priggishness and Flanagan pointing out, not inaccurately, that Wells was a pig who elevated his habit of impregnating young virgins by advocating free love. They both take rather a dim view of the most militant women’s libbers, Wells because they are sexless vegetarians; Flanagan because they represent to her a self-destructive moral relativism. Indeed there is no love lost between these two and the traditional Left of their respective days: Wells was too libertine, Flanagan too reactionary.

In Lodge’s well-researched and fantastically engaging novel, Wells, like Flanagan, shows a tendency to put forth his particular preoccupations through literary punditry. Among other things, his writing tried to open the way for his own extremely unorthodox domestic arrangements, which he conducted with difficulty imposed by the prudery of the day. Flanagan’s Girl Land, on the other hand, is a prescriptive meditation on the dangers and mysteries of teen girlhood; it is a strange, sometimes silly document that suggests a working-out of Flanagan’s thoughts about her own adolescence.

2.
Half of Girl Land is a mildly interesting, discursive, and occasionally compelling account of the evolution of the American teenage girl. This evolution is charted by changes in the approach to dating, periods, diaries, sex, and proms in the course of the 20th century. As a quick and dirty social history, Girl Land contains items of interest, even if they are not news. (And sometimes, they might not be history: proms, she says, did not draw inspiration from “the formal dances held at the country’s elite private schools, which were not called proms, and which had little in common with this new kind of event,” an assertion which anyone who has read F. Scott Fitzgerald on the attractions of the Yale Prom knows immediately to be false.)

Using an adult novel by Betty Smith and how-to guides for new brides, Flanagan documents the trauma of marriage for young women with no information about sex and no societal permission to want it. Wells himself encountered trouble in this area, describing his first wife Isabel’s views on sex in his autobiography as “nothing more than an outrage inflicted upon reluctant womankind.” Wells took a somewhat enlightened view about Isabel’s frigidity and, in Lodge’s novelization, when he met her again after marrying a second woman who happened to be uninterested in sex, he asked for another shot: “It was all my fault. I was a clumsy, impatient lover then. It would be different now. I could make up to you for those unhappy nights.” Likewise Flanagan takes aim at the claim that women don’t reach the height of their sexual awakening until their forties: “That a woman’s sexual response has to be ‘learned’ is ridiculous. What has to be ‘learned’ is a male’s sexual technique…The notion of women entering a three-decades-long sexual utopia beginning at the exact year with estrogen begins its steep, irreversible plummet is loony.”

Flanagan sensibly tells us that young women want to have sex, that they feel desire in their teenage years, and that this was in years past made manifest through early, often unhappy marriage. The randiness of women is again borne out by the experience of Wells, who seems to have been surrounded by very young women who went through great lengths and committed all manner of subterfuge to divest themselves of their virtue in his crowded bed. Among these, the affair of Amber Reeves was a scandal which almost had him (and her) hounded out of society. She became pregnant, and he couldn’t marry her on account of being already married to the Christ-like Jane, who spent her time raising her and Wells’ sons and writing kind notes to his young paramours during their confinements. Wells solved the problem by essentially trading the pregnant Amber to a young man who was willing to marry her in spite of her condition. The literary fruit of this union was Ann Veronica, a novel describing a young woman who kicks free of the traces of society and her father by having hot sex with a married man on an Alp.

Lodge, through painstaking use of original correspondence and a careful reading of the man’s innumerable publications, has done a huge service by resurrecting a writer who was also a doer, a social reformer with avenues to foreign and domestic policy at a time when a novelist’s opinion could matter in world affairs. Wells was a leonine figure in English letters, a “comet” now “passed out of sight.” For me he had only vague associations with time machines and a radio scare; shamefully, I’m always forgetting which one it was that was in Citizen Kane. Lodge strikes the perfect balance in his portrait: Wells, as befits a writer, seemed a touchy, insufferable, infuriating, philandering, selfish bastard. And, in spite of it all, a visionary and a regular old charmer.

3.
I was charmed by Lodge’s portrayal, so I read Ann Veronica, and was in turn charmed by its high-flown didacticism written in service of Wells’ libido, and its series of infinitely quotable quotes. Wells was what might crudely be called a poonhound, a characteristic that corresponded nicely with his ideals about free love and the sexual liberation of women. And even though he wrote Ann Veronica in order to justify the patently awful position in which he had placed a young woman of extremely bright prospects, it strikes many palpable hits against the Flanagans of his day (it also caused an uproar).

In common sense and the life of H.G. Wells, the wages of sin are pregnancy or disease, realities that Flanagan notes in her overview of teenage sexuality in previous decades. Bizarrely, when she arrives at the present-day state of affairs in Girl Land, the consequences of untrammeled teen sexuality are less clear. Pregnancy and disease do not enter the equation in Flanagan’s criticisms of our current sexually explicit culture; her one reference to Planned Parenthood, the traditional province of these problems, is a throw-away swipe at their website, upon which it is evidently possible to find information on the art of fellatio. (By the way, H.G. Wells might have learned this from the source — he had sex with Margaret Sanger too.)

Flanagan giggles at what she calls “Moral Panics,” the adult furor fueled by rumors of “rainbow parties,” wherein young girls are said to fellate willy-nilly, leaving unlikely rainbows of lipstick upon a squadron of teenage johnsons. Flanagan debunks the rainbow party, but assures us nonetheless that oral sex has left its previous province of the exotic (exotic, yet the novelist Violet Hunt is reported to have enthusiastically performed it upon H.G. Wells) and become totally commonplace for American teens. Still, it’s not so much of a problem for Flanagan, she writes, because she has sons, less likely to be “wounded, emotionally and spiritually, by early sexual experience, or by sexual experience entered into without romantic commitment, as are women and girls.”

More disturbing to Flanagan are rap and pornography, and their unspecified deleterious effects on the development of young women. One of her major canards is that the left, and feminists, are at great pains to valorize pornography, the same way, she tells us, they valorize “black urban America,” which is represented in Flanagan’s sketchy diorama of cultural decay by rap music. Flanagan is alone in an amoral hellscape:

I believe that we are raising children in a kind of postapocalyptic landscape in which no forces beyond individual households — individual mothers and fathers — are protecting children from pornography and violent entertainment. The ‘it takes a village’ philosophy is a joke, because the village is now so polluted and so desolate of commonly held, child-appropriate moral values that my job as a mother is not to rely on the village but to protect my children from it.

What this all means for children is unclear, because Flanagan does not tell us. She points out that women in pornography often come from abusive childhoods, and yet she does not suggest that all of the young blowjob queens, their spirits warped by songs “in which [they are] urged to suck dick and get fucked” will venture down this path. Likewise she mentions the problems of eating disorders and cutting, yet fails to properly correlate these with her concerns about the culture at large. Rather than provide real documentation of the consequences of lewd and sexist music, she reports on the Pimps and Hos prom after-party, on the well-bred Los Angeles girls who “jostle off the party buses and onto the sidewalk, where they are regarded with surprised delight by whatever men happen to be there — homeless guys, street thugs, the club’s bouncers, wanderers — and who had not expected to get an eyeful of very young, upper-middle-class girls dressed in panties and boots.” Here Flanagan forgets her earlier chapters, echoing the spirit if not the letter of racial panic she described in the 1960s, during which time it was feared that (white) runaways would be preyed upon by men “some black, some white.”

Even as she fails to quantify in a meaningful way the consequences of a culture harmful to young girls, Flanagan exercises the nuclear option of parental judgment, arguing that the wages of permissive parenting are no less than death. In Girl Land, she supplies the example of Melanie Bellah, a 1970s liberal mother who allowed her daughter the freedom to kill herself with drugs and sex. In a recent review cum retrospective of Joan Didion that is as compelling as it is cruel, Flanagan names that author an accomplice in the death of her child. These women presumably invited Flanagan’s judgment by putting the details of their lax parenting in writing, which Flanagan herself does not do. And as her children have the virtue of being alive, there is no obvious route via which the distant reader might criticize her parental choices. Her house is of the most opaque glass.

And yet, if we are to glean what we can from the details she includes in her book, we might see how Girl Land is a working-out of something deep and personal, offering parental guidance for the daughter she doesn’t have based on her own remembered girlhood. Her early experience with the dangers of dating occurred when she was “emotionally troubled” and her parents were away, “meeting with [her] father’s publisher in the city.” Later she tells us, “At the time of my adolescence my mother was too distracted to give me everything I needed to turn out well. But 20 percent of her attention was enough, because the whole culture was supporting her.” Her melancholy epilogue describes how she left home as a young woman: “convulsively and competely, with a kind of scorched-earth finality that was the product of the particular times we grew up in and of the intensity of the family drama we were desperate to escape.” It’s as if Flanagan examines her own teenage close calls in an age where the lewdest thing she could get her hands on was Judy Blume’s Forever, compares them to a Rihanna song, and concludes that the sky is falling. This would explain why she doesn’t explore the real and particular dangers of our current moment, or introduce us to any teenagers living in it. I think a memoir would have made better sense, and better reading.

4.
Flanagan, like any person ever to be alive, believes that she is living in unprecedented times: “…the culture, as always, presses forward, and the dream has become more fraught with ugliness and threat…” It’s true that you can say things now in music that are the absolute height of vulgarity (and violence). But I’m also struck by the parallels between her censure of our moment and that of Ann Veronica père, who receives his daughter’s request to go to a dance with her neighbors, the Widgetts, with unbridled horror.

She seemed to think he was merely the paymaster, handing over the means of her freedom. And now she insisted that she MUST leave the chastened security of the Tredgold Women’s College for Russell’s unbridled classes, and wanted to go to fancy dress dances in pirate costume and spend the residue of the night with Widgett’s ramshackle girls in some indescribable hotel in Soho!

The Lord alone knows what they might do in that indescribable hotel — it’s the prom after-party with a vengeance. When Ann Veronica rebels against her father and runs off to live alone in a furnished bedsit, he reflects, “A man’s children nowadays are not his own. That’s the fact of the matter. Their minds are turned against him … Rubbishy novels and pernicious rascals. We can’t even protect them from themselves.” In a conversation with an acquaintance, he talks of the corrupting influence of the culture at large: “There ought to be a Censorship of Books. We want it badly at the present time. Even WITH the Censorship of Plays there’s hardly a decent thing to which a man can take his wife and daughters, a creeping taint of suggestion everywhere. What would it be without that safeguard?”

Flanagan writes about playing Milton Bradley’s Mystery Date, how girls of her generation secretly hoped for the sexy “dud,” “a grease monkey with a five o’clock shadow dressed in a mechanic’s uniform.” A friend of Ann Veronica’s father opines “What a girl of sixteen cares for is hair and a high color and moonlight and a tenor voice. I suppose most of our daughters would marry organ-grinders if they had a chance — at that age,” and suggests, much like Flanagan, “I think we ought to teach them more or restrain them more. One or the other. They’re too free for their innocence or too innocent for their freedom.”

Like the adults who surround and censor Ann Veronica, Flanagan seems less concerned with all the fragile residents of Girl Land, than with the girls of a certain class and upbringing. Like Wells, Flanagan runs in rarified circles. The young women with whom Wells dallied were intelligent young women with parents of means, either in the form of social or real hard capital. Rebecca West, Amber Reeves, Rosamund Bland — these are young women for whom early sexual experience was less likely to lead to ruin. Flanagan’s examples of teen or tween excursions into promiscuity are in every instance from class backgrounds where young women have the greatest prospects, even the Canoga prom-goers of the “impressive but nonheady eighty thousand dollars a year family incomes.” Yes, there are the young women who were lost in the permissive 1970s, but they are presented as extreme cautionary tales precisely because their they were from wealthy and educated families. If it can happen here, and all that.

Misogyny still reigns, and obviously there are connections to be made between wounding sexual experiences, for girls of any class, and a variety of troubles. Flanagan does not make them. If we look again to the young women of Wells’ acquaintance, we concede that an affair with the premier man of letters of the day is not experientially equivalent to giving an unreciprocated blowjob to a be-khakied stranger at a Pimps and Hos party. Still, Wells presents us with some real consequences of naive young ladies’ liberation: they might be lent money under the pretense of friendship and lured into cabinets particuliers for an almost-rape. In real life, Wells’ youngest conquests ended up with babies (and, apparently, a surprising lack of resentment). For Flanagan, the act of listening to lewd music, being ogled by street toughs while wearing fancy dress, is as much as you need to know. Vulgarity is as appalling in its own right for her as it was for Ann Veronica’s father.

(A brief digression: My high school girlfriends and I knew every last word to the song “Put it in Your Mouth,” a song that makes me blush today, a song that would have sent our parents into conniptions. We sang it in our rooms with enormous gusto. That was more than 10 years ago, and today we all appear, on the surface at least, to have muddled through, to good schools and jobs and fulfilling relationships. This was a boarding school, a fortress of privilege, and this will always have more to do with outcomes than a song about blowjobs.)

5.
It seems like Flanagan has written two books — one book is a quiet look at her own young womanhood, set against a brief history of the rearing of young women. I found her sympathetic portrait of Patty Hearst moving, and I love that Flanagan, she of the Dior bedspreads, talks blood puddles and clots as she describes the carnage of menarche. But the second part of this book is polemical and inchoate. Flanagan is good at talking about the times, just not the times we’re in, and when she turns her eye on the current scene, such as it is, and particularly when she offers her prescriptions for preserving the emotional and physical health of young women, she sounds not only hopelessly out of touch, but lacking the critical faculties her readers know her to possess.

Her recommendations for reader-parents are “Take the fifteen-minute tour,” “Make her bedroom an Internet-free zone,” “Get her father involved in her dating life,” “Remember: giving a girl limits doesn’t limit the girl,” and she ends with the half-hopeful, half-sinister promise that “Girl Land ends.” In the first of these, she instructs parents to Google “porn” and see what happens, in a manner that suggests they won’t believe what they find. This is by far the dumbest moment in Girl Land, and the fact that it represents one of the biggest bees in Flanagan’s bonnet is not good news for the book. I know that the Internet is scary, and indeed the few quick keystrokes it takes to access hardcore pornograpy is a far cry from my own painstaking teen journeys through Clan of the Cave Bear to find the nasty parts. But you don’t have to be a porn apologist to know that if Flanagan thinks her adult readers, thousands of whom read her solely on the Internet, don’t know the kinds of things they can find in its darkest recesses, she has broken with reality. At the very least, someone likely to buy a book by Caitlin Flanagan is also likely to read a newspaper, from which they will hear such tidings as the Supreme Court’s ruling on “crush videos.”

The Internet is not an artifact that struck the earth out of a clear blue sky; it is an ever-enlarging cabinet of human curiosities — awful, trivial, delightful, aspirational — built over time by people who are mostly alive today. Flanagan’s 15-minute tour is so weirdly limited, imagining her readers as a cadre of people just like her, who’ve never poked around the Internet or indeed spent vast swathes of their daily life thereon. Most adults with an Internet connection have already taken the 15-minute tour, and then some — the same dad who is meant to involve himself in his daughter’s dating life probably doesn’t need to Google “porn” to know where to find it.

Speaking of dads, H.G. Wells knew all about them — to them he was a Svengali. Boundaries and glowering fathers with well-oiled shotguns are well and good, but teenagers live to defy them. And the more unreasonable the parental stricture seems, the more likely the teens, like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, will find a way. Ann Veronica’s father says to her:

What nonsense is this?…You have this home. You have friends, acquaintances, social standing, brothers and sisters, every advantage! Instead of which, you want to go to some mixed classes or other and cut up rabbits and dance about at nights in wild costumes with casual art student friends and God knows who. That — that isn’t living! You are beside yourself. You don’t know what you ask nor what you say. You have neither reason nor logic. I am sorry to seem to hurt you, but all I say is for your good. You MUST not, you SHALL not go. On this I am resolved. I put my foot down like—like adamant. And a time will come, Veronica, mark my words, a time will come when you will bless me for my firmness to-night. It goes to my heart to disappoint you, but this thing must not be.

When dad sets limits, what does Ann Veronica (and her real-life inspiration) do but run off in an even greater display of rebellion than was already planned. I don’t suggest that parents, knowing the extent of teenage willfulness, should avoid imposing rules altogether. I also know that Flanagan’s panic about blowjobs has more to do with very young teenagers, and not college-aged women like Ann Veronica. The parallels here are by no means exact — Ann Veronica was written 100 years before Flanagan began her fretting. But I think it is useful to consider the way that Flanagan’s rhetoric so closely echoes the hysteria that has always surrounded girls’ sexuality, hysteria she herself describes in the early chapters of her book.

6.
Teenage girls are not insensible to the world around them. They know that they are the object of speculation and worry. They want to know things about themselves, and as Flanagan herself did in adolescence, they look for any and all information. Some of them will read her book — I took Reviving Ophelia off my mother’s shelf and from it learned all about the contemporary perils by which I was alleged to be threatened. Books like these often end up being important to young women, and while Flanagan makes some very sound points on the way that spending part of your social life online can extend the pressures and anxieties of the high school day, her clear unfamiliarity with the specific nature of the online universe will make her sound ludicrous to the young people who are the subject of her concern.  The Internet is full of stupidity and bullying and horrors, it is true.  But it is also full of camaraderie and comfort, information and inspiration.  There are unprecedented avenues to empathy in the vast digital web.  But this is a luddites’ book, in which no actual teenage girls appear, and all the material seems to be taken from at least 10 years ago. (Additionally, the alarmist tone of the last pages of Girl Land belies some of Flanagan’s previous writing, in which she identifies a self-protective strain of traditionalism in girls’ enthusiasm for Glee or High School Musical.)

There is work to be done on Flanagan’s topic, but she doesn’t do it in Girl Land. And the women who do write about rape culture and get into it with virulently misogynist apes (usually online), are the kind of capital-F feminists Flanagan typically has no time for. Because Flanagan is careless with her arguments, because she assumes that it is bad enough to quote a grotesque lyric from a song, or vaguely refer to the “millions of Facebook pages” to prove that “some of the best and brightest girls have come to believe [the] poisonous message” that “women exist merely to please men,” she sounds as out of touch as Ann Veronica’s father, like any square parent from time immemorial. I know that Flanagan is right about a lot of things, but I expect her to do more than express garden-variety shock and phone in some obvious recommendations for good parenting.

Ann Veronica belongs to a sequence of H.G. Wells’ novels known as the “prig novels,” novels wherein he battled the social mores of the day. Wells was wrong about a lot of things, Lodge tells us, and he was an asshole (when a young Rebecca West gives birth to his child, he complains that it takes away from their sex life). He did not always have, even, the courage of his convictions, which could be molded according to the direction of the prevailing public or private wind. Like Caitlin Flanagan, he made some questionable pronouncements. But his way of being a public intellectual, whether through the prediction of tanks or free love, his fierce investment in public life, his accurate reading of the present even as he sometimes inaccurately predicted the future, makes Girl Land, with its lack of analytical rigor, its prim pronouncements, its dated material, its wilful ignorance about the new landscape, look like weak sauce indeed.

Image Credit: Flickr/Hannah_Vdv

Bill Marsh.  “It’s All Connected: An Overview of the Euro Crisis.”

Perhaps you, like me, came across a delightfully elegant, delightfully lucid interactive chart of the European financial crisis in the online edition of The New York Times last fall. Clicking through its various cataclysmic scenarios, watching the arrows shift and the pastel circles grow pregnant with debt, I was able to comprehend, for the first time, the convoluted and potentially toxic lending relationships between Greece, Italy, and the rest of Schengen Europe as well as the implications of this toxicity for the wider world. The reduction of such messiness into such neatness filled me with a familiar, slightly nauseating feeling of delight, a feeling I have since dubbed the infogasm. This fleeting sense of the erotic occurs only when a graphic perfectly clarifies complex phenomena through the careful arrangement of its visual data sets. The infogasm is instantaneous, overwhelming, and usually transitory in nature, leaving you oddly exhausted. Plain old text does not function with quite the the same epiphanic climax; by comparison, the written word’s magic is elusive and lingering, often revealing its fruits much later, after the article has been finished and put away.

In 1976, neuroscientist Douglas Nelson definitively described the cognitive potency of the image as the pictorial superiority effect. He and others have shown that our brains are essentially hard-wired for visuals—the very architecture of our visual cortex allows graphics a unique mainline into our consciousness.  According to Allan Pavio’s somewhat controversial dual-coding theory, imagery stimulates both verbal and visual representations, whereas language is primarily processed through only the verbal channel. While there has been considerable pushback to Pavio’s theory since its introduction in the 1970s, numerous experiments have shown that imagery activates multiple, powerful neural pathways of memory recall.

Detail from Ingrid Burrington, “The Center for Missed Connections.”

For instance, when we look at Ingrid Burrington’s hand drawn map of all the missed connections posted onto NYC’s Craigslist in May 2010, we react instantly to the familiar visual representation of Manhattan and Central Park, but we also extend our own mnemonic narratives around the graphic. We replay our own experiences of the cityspace, our own missed connections at these “hot spots” of loneliness. We remember the girl with red geek-glasses who stooped down to give us back our pen outside of the LensCrafters on 81st St. We place our own mental pin on the map alongside the others. But what color do we choose? Are there different categories of missed connections?

We turn to the key for answers. Of course:

We turn back to the map, reexamining the city with a new filter. What’s with the trio of W4Ms at 85th and 2nd? Were these all the same person, a missed encounter on repeat? And why so few W4Ws? Who was that W4W in front of the Museum of Natural History? Was she about to enter the museum, or was she already emerging—basking in the wondrous glow of science—when she spotted the other woman? (Maybe the museum never entered into it.) Hundreds of possible stories like these spin forth from Burrington’s map, and from the visible sum of these individual happenings a larger narrative of urban voyeurism emerges.  In straddling the visual/verbal divide, infographics like this map first gain entrance by using the succinct allure of imagery, but then linger in our imagination by nurturing our hunger for cultural narration.

It is no surprise, then, that our media are now saturated with such infographics, both on-and off-line, as a host of publications such as The New York Times, Good, The Guardian, Wired, Time, The Economist, The Believer, and The Wall Street Journal all regularly depend on data visualizations to provide their readers with that on-the-spot, quasi-highbrow sociological analysis. As one might expect, the output is decidedly mixed. Faced with a glut of mediocre charts and diagrams, there is now a backlash among designers and journalists against the overuse of meaningless infographics.

Here, graphic designer Alberto Antoniazzi pokes fun at the media’s ongoing love affair with the snappy graph:

Alberto Antoniazzi’s “Most Popular Infographics You Can Find on The Web”

His point is certainly taken: just because something looks good, doesn’t mean it says anything of value. And yet, as someone obsessed with the methodologies of storytelling, I cannot help but wonder about the hidden narrative mechanics behind the infographic.  Perhaps my infogasm is not as superficial or ephemeral as it might first appear.

A large part of the infographic’s intrinsic appeal seems to lie in its visual reductionism of complex information. Reductionism itself is not inherently bad—in fact, it’s an essential part of any kind of synthesis, be it mapmaking, journalism, particle physics, or statistical analysis. The problem arises when the act of reduction—in this case rendering data into an aesthetically elegant graphic—actually begins to unintentionally oversimplify, obscure, or warp the author’s intended narrative, instead of bringing it into focus.

Effectively pairing depth with breadth is not a new problem. In his sprawling history of information, James Gleick describes how the invention of the semaphore, telegraph, telephone, and the first digital computer all posed significant discursive dilemmas by offering a simultaneous increase in the ease of data delivery alongside a necessary contraction of the language around this data. “The bit” was invented in the 1950s by Claude Shannon to describe the most basic unit of information, essentially an on-off binary—the amount of information required to decide a coin flip. The more possibilities, the more uncertain the eventual outcome, the more bits are needed. As Gleick writes, “Information is uncertainty.” In this context, the last thirty years have been particularly revolutionary because of uncertainty’s unprecedented growth—we’ve been forced to radically adapt the ways we interact, exchange, and conceptualize our society’s information currency. The gigabyte—one trillion bytes of digital information—has now entered our everyday lexicon not just in reference to a computer’s storage capacity but as a metaphor (however inaccurate) for the memory in our own brains. Surrounded by a rising sea of uncertain bytes, our culture has become desperate for effective ways to visualize and synthesize all of this data, lest we become completely overwhelmed, brought to our knees by a state of total noise (to borrow David Foster Wallace’s term).

In 1983, Edward Tufte—considered by many to be the Godfather of information design—published his now-seminal The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, which began to articulate an ethos for what was then still a relatively nascent discipline. Since then, much has changed in the field of data visualization, especially once the graphically flexible web page became the standard information carrier and the rise of Web 2.0 essentially allowed anyone—whether they were a professional or an amateur—to effectively present vast datasets. But as futurist George Dyson points out, while our access to raw information has grown exponentially, our time to process this information has declined rapidly, which has placed an unprecedented premium on the act of meaning-making.  Since we no longer have the time (or at least we don’t grant ourselves the time) to generate our own analysis, sift through the evidence, or weigh competing narratives, we find ourselves inevitably looking for shortcuts. And given a) our brain’s preference for the visual and b) the current complexity of our world, we’ve learned that the very best shortcuts usually come in graphical form, preferably with lots of arrows, preferably with some kind of interactive element that makes us feel like we too are actively crunching the data. Consequently, we’ve given today’s visual storytellers considerable power: for better or worse, they are the new meaning-makers, the priests of shorthand synthesis. We’re dependent on these priests to scrutinize, bundle, and produce beautiful information for us so that we can have our little infogasm and then retweet the information to our friends.

Ever-present but often unexamined, the expanding discipline of information graphics has been in desperate need of a comprehensive survey, a checkpoint to measure the field’s varied progress. Luckily, Berlin-based Gestalten Books has provided us one in the brilliant Visual Storytelling: Inspiring a New Visual Language. Like most cool things in my life, I first heard about Visual Storytelling from Maria Popova’s masterfully curated Brain Pickings. Sometimes design compendiums can come off as uneven affairs, but Visual Storytelling is a thoughtful, curated tour de force—it effectively encapsulates a watershed moment in information design while still managing to hold up as a standalone volume.

The book presents over 100 designers from around the world (not surprisingly, much of the best design work comes for Europe), gracefully organized across five chapters: Seeing the News, Viewing Science and Technology, Looking at Travel and Geography, The Modern World, and Observing Sports (the active verbs are telling). Perhaps my favorite part of the book is a section entitled “The Visual Storyteller,” which features a series of interviews with leading designers (including Steve Duenes, head of the visual journalism section at The New York Times) about their techniques, influences, and concerns for the future of the discipline. Several of their sketches and drafts are also presented alongside their finished work and it was helpful for me to see their work in this kind of context. Pulling back the curtain on their process made the sometimes overly slick infographic feel like a very human creation. These practitioners, like us, are constantly struggling with how to represent the world around us. Such an ambitious pursuit will always remain a work-in-progress.

Densitydesign. Draft for How’s My Fishing? Greenpeace “Oceans” Campaign

Most of the graphics in Visual Storytelling are terrific. Some of them are beautiful. Some of them are completely confusing. Taken in its entirety, the book feels like an honest, wide-reaching portrait of the field. But be warned: this book is strong medicine. When faced with a cornucopia of such infographic pornography, the brain begins to shut down, so in order to avoid infogasm overload, I recommend getting your dual-coding fix in small, measured doses, and then putting the book down and slowly moving away from it.

Several of the more successful examples in Visual Storytelling showed me just how nuanced the infographic’s narrative alchemy can actually be. Indeed, looking through this volume, I came to realize that skillfully rendered visuals, like any effective medium, present the reader with a layered release of storylines. An initial narrative will shift and deepen under sustained scrutiny, raising a series of questions that build off one another.

A terrific example of this is the illustration of the country’s overall democratic shift in between the 2004 and 2008 elections (also from Steve Duenes’s team at the Times):

“For Much of the Country, a Sizable Shift.”  The New York Times. (11/6/08)

More effective than any text-based narrative, this graphic quickly illuminates how and why Obama got elected. Here we can easily see how almost all of the West (save McCain’s Arizona) shifted considerably to the left. This does not mean all these states went Democrat—of the Mountain states only New Mexico and Colorado voted for Obama—but rather that the barometer of the average American voter changed significantly. The only regions that went remarkably right of 2004 were Appalachia and the so-called Bible Belt, both places which would later become fertile grounds for the Tea Party.

There are also many questions here: What happened along the Texas/Mexico border? What about eastern North Dakota? Did Massachusetts vote more conservative simply because John Kerry was not running? Or was there another factor at play? The whole narrative of the election is not encapsulated in this graphic, nor should it be—infographics are at their best when they help you visualize one particularly illuminating trend that could not be told in any other way. The most successful infographics operate with elegance and restraint, and it is this restraint—this withholding of other information so that you can see a point clearly—that forces you to ask the big questions. When firing on all cylinders, infographics are almost always the beginning of a conversation, not the end of it.

Other graphics in Visual Storytelling demonstrate the fraught collision point of art and data, a grey area that has caused a lot of tension among designers and statisticians alike. There is the startling 100 Years of World Cuisine, a powerful composition that uses various containers of blood arranged across a kitchen table to tell the history of bloodshed in the 20th century.

Clara Kayser-Bril, Nicolas Kayser-Bril, Marion Kotlarski. 100 Years of World Cuisine.

By tackling such a complex subject as human bloodshed with the metaphor of food preparation, the graphic risks oversimplifying the historical and cultural forces at work in all of these conflicts. Indeed, when pressed, the metaphor begins to unravel, or at least raise unintended questions: who’s preparing this food? Why the creepy suspended ladles? Why are the Congo Wars about to get the KitchenAid mixer? Such quandaries highlight the sometimes thin veneer that can lie beneath a visual’s initial sensational impact. Then again, maybe this graphic is not asking for such close reading, nor does it claim to explain every piece of historical nuance. Its purpose is to be sensational and help you visualize what were previously murky statistics. What it does do well: show how relatively few people were killed in the Yugoslavian conflict (130,000) compared to, say the wars in Congo (3.9 million) or even the 1941 partition of India (500,000).  Is this purpose enough to forgive the exploitative overtones of the piece? I’m not sure, but it certainly got me thinking about what infographics should and shouldn’t do.

Visual Storytelling also features a fine selection of work from Nicholas Felton, one of our more gifted manipulators of visual information. Feltron, as he is know professionally, is particularly adept at allowing an emotional resonance to rise from the coalition of what would otherwise be fairly stark data. His graphics and typography are pristinely rendered, with ample whitespace, but like all great storytellers, he knows that cultural (and personal) pathos arises from what data you leave off the page.

Nicholas Felton. “Rising and Receding.” McSweeney’s.

In “Rising and Receding,” Felton collects a surprising range of social indicators and measures their shift since the economic downturn. Aside from the 300% upturn in familicide, none of these markers are all that extraordinary on their own—people are buying more Kellogg cereals, donating more sperm, having safer sex. Pollution is down, sleep issues up. Yet this infographic succeeds because the collective collation and bare presentation of this data against the backdrop of a recession offers us a fleeting peek into intimate moments during hard times, albeit intimacy that is repeated across millions of households. Felton knows that to convey a trend most effectively, you must leave room for a dual narrative—the reader needs to process  the information on both a public level (“Births are down?”) and private level (“Could we afford a child right now?”).

Felton has become well known in design circles for publishing his own annual report, in which he collects, graphs, and maps his personal life in numbers: miles walked, number of music tracks played, pages read, shoes purchased. He undermines our expectations of how a corporate annual report should function by co-opting the form to examine the banalities of the everyday: Social Stella consumption: 157, down 46% from last year.  Occasionally he will throw in a category that is not so much a category but rather a story left untold: Burglars confronted: 1, at apartment window. These reports are so seductive because of their clinical composition and yet from this austerity, a kind of universal vulnerability emerges. We know it is much messier than these clean lines of data suggest. In his attempt to summarize a year of his existence entirely through statistics, Felton essentially points to the beautiful impossibility of this task.

Nicholas Felton, “2010 Annual Report.”

Visual Storytelling includes an excerpt of his 2010 annual report, in which he turns the lens of examination onto his recently deceased father. Many who have lost a parent are familiar with the task of sifting though a lifetime of mementos, receipts, and photographs, but Felton takes this process a step further by using all of his father’s detritus to fashion a comprehensive notitia memoriae—charting the life of a man who was born, who lived, who worked, who bore children, who loved, who died. We are more than sum of such evidence, but the evidence itself is at once heartbreaking and triumphant.

Beyond these data-driven graphics, Visual Storytelling contains an array of more abstract, artistic pieces that provide a nice counterpoint to all of the nerdy number-crunching that often dominates the field. These are not infographics per se, but they ask questions of our intense relationship to images by playing with familiar visual tropes. We have grown so comfortable with graphics in our lives that we often forget to maintain any kind of critical awareness about how infographics function, how they lure us in, how they tell their stories, how they can lie to us.

Toilet Paper magazine’s segmented fingernail feels sensual and subversive, yet utilizes a visual language of declension that we immediately recognize from our chart-heavy lives:

Maurizio Cattelan, Pierpaolo Ferrari, and Micol Talso. “Untitled.” Toilet Paper, Vol. 2

Yet there are no scales, no reference points, no key: what is growing smaller here? Is it us? Or are we the culmination of the graph? By leaving so much unspoken, the image implicitly asks us what happens when our bodies become the new pallets for information design. How will we mark out units? And what will the units be? Perhaps this process has already begun.

Maria Fischer’s Traumgedanken is a book on dreams that employs colored threads to connect and cross-reference ideas, calling into question the physical manifestation of the hyperlink:

Maria Fischer. Traumgedanken.

HTML linking is so familiar to us now that it has essentially become invisible: we rarely stop to think about the implications of these virtual threads on sourcing, intellectual property, clarity of thought. We think: there is a link, so it must be connected. But is this bit of code enough? Will association eventually replace all exposition?

This is not to say that everything contained in Visual Storytelling is a perfect culmination of the genre. Whether wittingly or unwittingly, the volume also contains several overburdened examples of information design, where the visual language of the graphic has completely obscured the meaning. Yet these failures were some of the most interesting images for me. We can learn a lot when the designer has lost the forest for the trees:

Francesco Muzzi. “La Fabbrica del Sapere.” Wired Italia.

Francesco Muzzi’s illustration of the Italian education system is graphically busy, like a Terry Gilliam movie gone wrong, but it’s also trying to do way too many things: to cover daycare through graduate school, to chart dropout rates, hours at school, and numbers of teachers, to list teacher salary, student debt, and graduates searching for work abroad. The designer makes the mistake of thinking complex data needs complex presentation, when in fact the opposite is true. One sees this same kind of visual cacophony all over the media. Readers (myself included) are guilty of succumbing to such colorful temptations: we see lots of bells and whistles, and even if we don’t really understand what’s going on, we feel as if we are absorbing (via osmosis?) something potentially deep and prescient from all that data.

Ironically, Andrew Losowsky’s introduction to Visual Storytelling, the most text-heavy section of the book, is one of the few sections that is poorly executed, suffering from some of these same symptoms of over-design:

The introduction to Visual Storytelling: So much text, so little time.

Heavy quotations, unresolved and unexamined, slap you in the face as you try to follow the meandering text columns. The physical congestion of words on the page quickly overwhelms the actual content of the words themselves, as if the act of reading was a mere afterthought. It’s comforting to know that text still needs quiet order to function well, and particularly in this age of hyper-stylized form, there’s the constant risk of gilding the lily. I often feel this kind of pummeling when I’m trying to work my way through certain webpages with multiple, unrelated threads all vying for my attention.

Fittingly, in this same spatially fraught introduction, Losowsky touches upon the dangers of graphic imprecision when he points to the epidemic of errors in infographics that depicted Osama Bin Laden’s death. These widespread mistakes, picked up and repeated across a wide swath of publications, prompted graphic designer Antonio Giner to pen the Statement Against Fictional Infographics, subsequently signed by 107 designers from 27 countries. The six-point manifesto culminates in this demand:

6. Infographics are neither illustrations nor “art”. Infographics are visual journalism and must be governed by the same ethical standards that apply to other areas of the profession.

Whether this distinction can be made in practice remains to be seen. Visuals are a notoriously slippery medium. Thousands of minute decisions (or non-decisions) go into a graphic’s formulation—everything from color to scale to line thickness to use of symbols. Seemingly simple questions of graphical form can have powerful implications.

This was never more evident than during the health care debates in 2009, when Rep. John Boehner produced a maddening flow chart of the Democrats’s health care proposal at one of his press conferences, presumably in an attempt to underscore the plan’s inefficient bureaucracy:

Boehner’s mindfuck of a flow chart.

This deliberate obscuration of the issue by way of poorly assembled visuals rubbed many designers the wrong way. Boehner’s flow chart set off what data visualizer Alex Lundry called “Chart Wars,” in which tasteful redesigns of the same graphic demonstrated just how subjective and influential the visual presentation can be. This is always true, but with data visualization, the old adage is essential: the form is the content.

Beyond political fisticuffs, poor design decisions can have serious, even deadly, consequences. During the critical days prior to the Columbia shuttle disaster in 2003, while the damaged shuttle was still in orbit, a team from Boeing was asked to make a diagnostic Powerpoint presentation to senior NASA officials predicting the extent of damage to the wing and the risks of the shuttle reentering the earth’s atmosphere. Boeing’s presentation was incredibly convoluted, hampered in large part because of the inept visual delivery of its information. Edward Tufte, a longtime critic of Powerpoint’s bureaucratic clumsiness, painstakingly analyzes one of the Boeing slides:

From Edward Tufte’s “Powerpoint Does Rocket Science: Assessing the Quality and Credibility of Technical Reports.”

Tufte points to the elaborate, meaningless hierarchy built into the Powerpoint program that here manifests in six levels of information, denoted by a range of dashes, shrinking bullet points, and throwaway parentheticals. In fact, the executive summary at the top of the slide is slowly undermined by each successive point, though this is lost in the slide’s garbled techno-speak. “Significant” or “significantly”—a vague but promising word—is used five times, each time with slightly different meanings, none of them referring to “statistical significance.”  The lack of clarity in this presentation eventually contributed to NASA’s conclusion that it was safe for the shuttle to return to earth, a decision that would end up proving fatal.

Despite the great pleasures of the infogasm, it is evident that now, more than ever, we must be cautious with our information design. Visuals are easy to make, but they are also easy to fake, and their allure can turn them into potentially dangerous pieces of evidence. Despite Giner’s manifesto for clear standards in visual journalism, infographics—guided by designer, journalist, statistician, and artist alike—will probably continue to operate in that grey area between fact and fiction, egged on by our insatiable hunger for their graphical eros. I don’t think such fuzziness is all bad—most new fields, particularly those with wide-ranging sociopolitical implications, need time to find their footing and carve out a particular disciplinal language. This does not mean such negotiation should be a passive process. We need more excellent surveys like Visual Storytelling: Inspiring a New Visual Language to help us celebrate quality, shun mediocrity, and articulate the criteria for how infographics can remain luminous and profound. Beyond just disposable feel-good fodder for the Twittersphere, data visualization is the emblematic medium of our times, and the natural evolution of its form might be the greatest predictor of what is to come.

Even back in the mid-eighties, my mother referred to the Eastowne Mall as Ghost Town Mall, though whether that was an established nickname or something she made up, I don’t know (my guess is the former). The mall’s primary feature was the Eastowne 5, a movie theater that at the time showed first-run films and during my middle-school years functioned as a prime makeout spot. I kissed a girl for the first time there, during 18 Again!, a switch comedy starring George Burns and Charlie Schlatter. Switch comedies were in vogue then. In addition to 18 Again!, you had Vice Versa (Judge Reinhold-Fred Savage) and Like Father Like Son (Dudley Moore-Kirk Cameron). I kissed the same girl some months later, during Big, but my memory is that Tom Hanks’ character magically grows up overnight instead of switching identities with a kid. I may be wrong about that; it’s been a long time since I’ve seen it.

Across from the Eastowne 5 was the Final Curtain, a cavernous restaurant and bar with a large screen on the wall overhead that showed classic movies and whose second floor housed a mysterious nightclub called Legends; next to that was the Bop Stop, a used record store run by a friendly, knowledgeable, chain-smoking gentleman named John; and at the end of that wing, tucked in the corner, was Abbey Road Books. Aside from the large, fluorescent-lit Perry Drug Store — the Eastowne anchor store, so to speak — located halfway down the mall, many of the remaining stores were vacant.

I spent a lot of time at Abbey Road Books waiting for movies to start, and on one occasion made a special trip for an event: a book signing featuring Rich Hall of Not Necessarily the News and Sniglets fame. I believe this was in the summer of 1986. I was a fan of the show and especially of Sniglets, a segment that highlighted “any word that doesn’t appear in the dictionary, but should.” Per the show’s suggestion, I’d sent in a list of my own made-up words hoping they’d land on TV or in one of the Sniglets books, and the cosmic silence that greeted my submission was perhaps the first writer-rejection I encountered. I don’t remember what my Sniglets were, but the definition of one of them had to do with sticking your toothbrush under a strong-running tap and losing your freshly applied toothpaste. It seemed a phenomenon that required naming.

Rich Hall was the first celebrity I ever saw up close. As he was led into the store (at which few people had gathered) I grew instantly nervous. It was shocking to see someone from TV in person, and I was mute as I handed him my copy of Unexplained Sniglets of the Universe for signing. He may or may not have asked my name to personalize it; I may or may not have said “Bryan,” and then shyly added “with a y”; he may or may not have scrawled the date. In time I came to feel retrospectively bad for Rich Hall, trudging through the Ghost Town Mall to an ill-attended event at an out-of-the-way bookshop to be descended upon by a quivering twelve-year-old. This was long before I’d suffered through my own dismally attended readings, hoping that whoever was there wouldn’t hear the disappointment in my voice as I thanked them for coming and began my spiel.

Abbey Road Books was necessarily windowless; it had thick shag carpet (possibly orange); in my memory there’s a narrow balcony area, a kind of second floor, that housed more books; on a shelf behind the cash-register counter was the sleeve for the Beatles record after which the store was named. One day I was browsing there and saw a book with a title I knew well: Fast Times at Ridgemont High. It had Sean Penn as Spicoli flanked by two babes on the cover. I had seen the movie somewhat recently on third-generation video and thanks largely to the nudity was an enthusiastic devotee. Initially I didn’t think much about the book. I assumed it was a movie tie-in (though I wouldn’t have used that phrase) and placed it back on the shelf. But as the days passed I found myself brooding over it, wanting to take another peek. At some point I returned to Abbey Road and looked again, now fully intrigued. I read the back, flipped through it, read scattered passages.

I didn’t have the money to buy it so I put it back. But in the days that followed I thought of it often, to the point of fixation, finally deciding that I had to have it. It was an early (maybe the first) instance of a phenomenon that has become quasi-routine: encountering a book, acknowledging it with little interest (perhaps even dismissing it, deciding I’ll never read it), setting it down again, exiting the store, thinking about it some more, returning to the store later to examine it more closely, reading the first few pages, setting it down again, leaving the store again, engaging in further reflection, thinking about it as I go about my daily life, determining at last that I must acquire it at all costs ($5.95 for Fast Times, which, by the way, is a true story, the product of Cameron Crowe’s year of deep-cover reporting at a California high school).

Another book that caught my eye at Abbey Road was Bret Easton Ellis’ second novel, The Rules of Attraction. I knew I wanted this one right away — I’d seen the movie of Less Than Zero twice and was obsessed with it. I had also read the book, a movie tie-in version with the cast on the cover that I stole from the paperback rack at Perry Drugs. Reading it was disorienting, since, as you may know, the film version doesn’t resemble the novel in the least (Ellis is fond of saying that not one line of his novel ended up in the movie, though this isn’t entirely accurate: the graffito Julian gives great head. And is dead appears in both, though the movie has it on the wall of a beach condo and not a club bathroom in Encino). But it was easy to read, I liked the style, and in addition to making me want to blow my mind on cocaine, it acted as a model for some of my earliest stabs at fiction — there was a bleak piece of stripped down, druggy prose called “Screw” (I stole the title from a Cure song; from the start I was an unapologetic thief).

The Rules of Attraction cemented my interest in Ellis. I wrote to him that year as part of an English-class project in which we sent letters to our favorite authors. He didn’t write back. Eighteen years later I saw him at the PEN Gala at the Museum of Natural History in New York. He walked by me on the way to the men’s room. I heard him say to someone, “Nice to see you.” I was on edge being at such a fancy event among so many famous writers and had drunk too much free alcohol in an attempt to unwind. I wondered what Ellis would do if I followed him into the bathroom and, as he was excreting, told him of my youthful fandom and the letter I sent. In the letter I’d asked why he dedicated Less Than Zero to Joe McGinniss, whose true-crime tome Fatal Vision had been a source of dark fascination to me in fifth grade — again, after watching the made-for-TV movie adaptation starring Gary Cole and Karl Malden. Somehow I acquired the book, and my consuming interest in it — I drew a large picture of an ice pick dripping blood, and tried to arouse my classmates’ interest in the tale of family slaughter — prompted a concerned call home from school.

Abbey Road Books closed in the late eighties, never to return. The Bop Stop moved out to Portage. Perry Drugs closed. The Eastowne 5 started showing second-run movies for a dollar. Somehow — insanely — the Final Curtain hung in there, but eventually it too disappeared. Then the theater closed, and the mall itself nearly ceased to exist before receiving a minor, ineffective facelift along with a new name: Gull Crossing. You will not find a Banana Republic or Williams-Sonoma there. But you will find a small movie theater now called the Gull Road Cinema 5.

The theater reopened in 2004. Almost a decade before that, when it was still the Eastowne 5, I went there with my girlfriend Margie. We bought tickets to see The Firm and sat in the last row making out the whole time, barely glancing at the screen. This had been a planned act. It was my idea. I was trying to do what they say can never be done — go home again or recapture the past or whatever. The movie was based on a book, of course, which many years later I read and loved.

Image by Karla Wozniak, courtesy of Gregory Lind gallery

I just had twins. One of them is human — fingers and toes, eyes and ears. The other is a hardcover — 346 pages long, eight years in the making — my first novel. The doctor gave me a November 2nd due date, the publisher a February 2nd publication date. These are very different creatures, yet they were both made somewhere inside me, gestating over months or years.

In early summer, I laid on my back on the papered vinyl chair while the doctor squirted warm goo on my belly and pressed the magic wand down. On the screen, the grey smudge of a baby appeared, looking like a faint and mysterious creature spotted through a rainy windshield. He turned away from the heat of the wand and covered a little cheek with a little hand. The doctor counted those fingers — one, two, three, four, and a thumb. He switched on the 3-D effect so we could see the face, although it looked more like a friendly monkey than a person. My husband fidgeted in his chair, later telling me that he had been uncomfortably transported to a National Geographic movie in which an archaeologist examines the ancient insides of a mummy. Monkey or mummy, there was a distinct face that might have even been smiling a little. It moved as we watched, fingers wiggling, and then legs. We saw the bottom of the feet, and the sweet knot of a determined fist. The four chambers of the heart opened and closed in black and white.

The next day, I received the jacket description for the novel from my publisher. Reading it felt like examining the ultrasound for that book — the x-ray vision that lets a reader see the black and white outline of the spine, the chambers of the story’s heart before she has cracked the cover.

To grow my novel took eight years. The first full draft was an unsmart creature that felt like it was crawling around, eating things off the floor. I could not leave it alone for a long time without worrying that it would go into a coma and never wake up again. Every day, I had to administer some kind of electric shock. I gave up on it dozens of times. Once, I spent half of a vacation on the Red Sea in Egypt sitting on the balcony of a cheap hotel room typing because I had had an epiphany about what to do with the book.  It did grow, and get smarter. But it happened in jolts and bursts and sometimes it got worse instead of better. My brain, working as hard as it could, was not a fast machine.

My body, mostly, took care of the baby. I had no idea how to grow the first eyelashes, how to expand the mysterious accordion of the lungs, but my body did. The baby only took 41 weeks from speck to human. After the book, this seemed shockingly short. My body, which usually just goes quietly along keeping me alive with ten zillion processes a day, asking for no notice or acclaim, was finally enjoying a chance to show my brain up. “You’re really working hard aren’t you?” it seemed to say to my brain. “You wrote a whole page of words? In here, we formed synapses and fingernails.” My body cannot write a novel, and my brain cannot make a baby. These twins came from very different wombs.

I began writing this book because I wanted to know my ancestors, to meet them, but since I am alive and they are not, I had to find them in my imagination. In a way, I was ‘starting a family,’ only I was doing it in reverse: first I was bringing in the ghosts, and later I would add children. My great-grandmother became a character with whom I spent thousands of hours. She was part of my very real days. I have spent years living a fictional world of my own making; I remember being there, walking around, smelling the cold winter-earth. The publication of the book is incredibly exciting and gratifying, but the real imprint on my life was made by the time I spent writing it. Long after the thrill of having a book in the world has faded, the story, the place, the characters will remain with me, part of my immediate family.

A week after his due-date, my squirming son was born. In one breath, he went from an aquatic creature to a terrestrial one. I was surprised by how fully formed he seemed — he was not so much a baby as a tiny person, complete and present. I still don’t know how my body did that, by what miraculous means those long, feathers of eyelashes were constructed, those perfect fingers. The way different genes melded seamlessly into a brand-new, never-before-seen creature.  He coughed and fell asleep on my chest, the cord connecting us still pulsing. A few moments later, it would be cut, and we would go on as separate beings, although I hardly felt that way — now that I had shared my body with this person, I would never be alone the way I once had. I had a physical companion in the world, no matter how far apart we were. That night, I tried to sleep, but I couldn’t stop staring at my baby — my baby! — lying there next to me. I felt ten trillion kinds of gratitude at once — that he was healthy, that I’d made it through labor, but mostly I just couldn’t believe that less than a year ago he did not exist and now he was so incredibly here.

Slowly, my twins are making their way out into the world. My son is bigger and more and more part of the world. He smiles and reaches for things, he recognizes my voice and brightens. I imagine us growing up together, the ways we will be in each other’s lives for the duration. In a few days, the books will reach bookshelves, and from there, they will enter other people’s heads. I don’t know how the release will impact me, whom I’ll meet because of it, what it will do to the chemistry of my life. It will be a privilege to share my twins, but I still haven’t gotten over the feeling that the true miracle, the real stroke of magnificent luck, was to be there when those tiny embryos came alive.

Image Credit: Flickr/abbybatchelder

Possible hosts for Bravo’s America’s Next Top Novelist? Dream hires for the Iowa Writers’ Workshop?

Nope — just the “Murderer’s Row” of advance blurbers featured on the back of Nathan Englander’s new effort, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank. And what an effort it must be: “Utterly haunting. Like Faulkner [Russo] it tells the tangled truth of life [Chabon], and you can hear Englander’s heart thumping feverishly on every page [Eggers].”

As I marvel at the work of Knopf’s publicity department, I can’t help but feel a little ill. And put off. Who cares? Shouldn’t the back of a book just have a short summary? Isn’t this undignified? But answering these questions responsibly demands more than the reflexive rage of an offended aesthete (Nobody cares! Yes! Yes!). It demands, I think, the level-headed perspective of a blurb-historian…

2.
Let’s be clear: blurbs are not a distinguished genre. In 1936 George Orwell described them as “disgusting tripe,” quoting a particularly odious example from the Sunday Times: “If you can read this book and not shriek with delight, your soul is dead.” He admitted the impossibility of banning reviews, and proposed instead the adoption of a system for grading novels according to classes, “perhaps quite a rigid one,” to assist hapless readers in choosing among countless life-changing masterpieces. More recently Camille Paglia called for an end to the “corrupt practice of advance blurbs,” plagued by “shameless cronyism and grotesque hyperbole.” Even Stephen King, a staunch supporter of blurbs, winces at their “hyperbolic ecstasies” and calls for sincerity on the part of blurbers.

The excesses and scandals of contemporary blurbing, book and otherwise, are well-documented. William F. Buckley relates how publishers provided him with sample blurb templates: “(1) I was stunned by the power of [ ]. This book will change your life. Or, (2) [ ] expresses an emotional depth that moves me beyond anything I have experienced in a book.” Overwrought praise for David Grossman’s To the End of the Land inspired The Guardian to hold a satirical Dan Brown blurbing competition. My personal favorite? In 2000, Sony Pictures invented one David Manning of the Ridgefield Press to blurb some of its stinkers. When Newsweek exposed the fraud a year later, moviegoers brought a class action lawsuit on behalf of those duped into seeing Hollow Man, The Animal, The Patriot, or Vertical Limit (Manning on Hollow Man: “One hell of a ride!” — evidently moviegoers are easy marks).

When did this circus get started? It’s tempting to look back no further than the origins of the word “blurb,” coined in 1906 by children’s book author and civil disobedient Gelett Burgess. But blurbs, like bullshit, existed long before the term coined to describe them (“bullshit,” in case you were wondering, appeared in 1915). They were born of marketing, authorial camaraderie, and a genuine obligation to the reader, three staples of the publishing industry since its earliest days, to which we will turn momentarily.

But before hunting for blurbs in the bookshops of antiquity, it’s important to get clear on what we’re looking for. Laura Miller at Salon writes: “The term ‘blurb’ is sometimes mistakenly used for the publisher-generated description printed on a book’s dust jacket — that’s actually the flap copy. ‘Blurb’ really only applies to bylined endorsements by other authors or cultural figures.” Miller can’t be completely right. For the consultants at Book Marketing Limited — and their numerous big-name clients — blurb describes any copy printed on a book, publisher-generated or otherwise, as evidenced by the criteria for the annual Best Blurb Award (ed note: as per the comment below, this is the typical British usage). So much for authorship. The term is often used of bylined endorsements that appear in advertisements. So much for physical location. And if we try to accommodate author blurbs, even Wikipedia’s “short summary accompanying a creative work” isn’t broad enough.

What a mess. In the interest of time I’m going to adopt an arbitrary hybrid definition — blurb: a short endorsement, author unspecified, that appears on a creative work. So Orwell’s example and Manning’s reviews would be disqualified if they didn’t appear on a book or DVD case, respectively. I’ll leave that legwork to someone else, because we’ve got serious ground to cover.

3.
If you needed beach reading in ancient Rome, you’d probably head down to the Argiletum or Vicus Sandaliarium, streets filled with booksellers roughly equivalent to London’s Paternoster Row. But how to know which books would make your soul shriek with delight? There was no Sunday Times; newspaper advertising didn’t catch on for another 1,700 years, and neither did professional book reviewers. Aside from word of mouth, references in other books, and occasional public readings, browsers appear to have been on their own.

Almost. Evidence suggests that booksellers advertised on pillars near their shops, where one might see new titles by famous people like Martial, the inventor of the epigram (nice one, Martial). It’s safe to assume that even in the pre-codex days of papyrus scrolls, a good way to assess the potential merits of Martial’s book would have been to read the first page or two, an ideal place for authors to insert some prefatory puff. Martial begins his most well-known collection with a note to the reader: “I trust that, in these little books of mine, I have observed such self-control, that whoever forms a fair judgment from his own mind can make no complaint of them.” Similar proto-blurbs were common, often doubling as dedications to powerful patrons or friends. The Latin poet Catullus: “To whom should I send this charming new little book / freshly polished with dry pumice? To you, Cornelius!” For those who weren’t the object of the dedication, these devices likely served the same purpose that blurbs do today: to market books, influence their interpretation, and assure prospective readers they kept good company.

Nearly fourteen hundred years passed before Renaissance humanists hit on the idea of printing commendatory material written by someone other than the author or publisher. (Or maybe they copied Egyptian authors and booksellers, who were soliciting longer poems of praise (taqriz) from big-shot friends in the 1300s.) By 1516, the year Thomas More published Utopia, the practice was widespread, but More took it to another level. He drew up the blueprint for blurbing as we know it, imploring his good friend Erasmus to make sure the book “be handsomely set off with the highest of recommendations, if possible, from several people, both intellectuals and distinguished statesmen.” This it was, by a number of letters including one from Erasmus (“All the learned unanimously subscribe to my opinion, and esteem even more highly than I the divine wit of this man…”), and a poem by David Manning’s more eloquent predecessor, a poet laureate named “Anemolius” who praises Utopia as having made Plato’s “empty words… live anew.” What would he have written about The Patriot?

Hyperbole, fakery, shameless cronyism: though it will be another three hundred years before blurbs make their way onto the outside of a book, things are looking downright modern. In the 1600s practically everyone wrote commendatory verses, some of which were quite beautiful, like Ben Jonson’s for Shakespeare’s First Folio: “Shine forth, thou Star of Poets, and with rage / Or influence, chide or cheer the drooping stage, / Which, since thy flight from hence, hath mourned like night, / And despairs day, but for thy volume’s light.” (Interestingly, Shakespeare himself never wrote any — one can only imagine what a good blurb from the Bard would have done for sales.)

It was only a matter of time before things got out of control. The advent of periodicals in the early 18th century facilitated printing and distribution of book reviews, and authors and publishers wasted no time appropriating this new form of publicity. Perhaps the best example is Samuel Richardson’s wildly successful Pamela, an epistolary novel about a young girl who wins the day through guarding her virginity. Richardson made excellent use of prefatory puff, opening his book with two long reviews: the first by French translator Jean Baptiste de Freval, the second unsigned but likely written by Rev. William Webster, which first appeared as pre-publication praise in the Weekly Miscellany, one of Britain’s earliest periodicals.

Hyperbole? “This little Book will infallibly be looked upon as the hitherto much-wanted Standard or Pattern for this kind of writing”; “The Honour of Pamela’s Sex demands Pamela at your Hands, to shew the World an Heroine, almost beyond example…”

Fakery? The book also had a preface by the “editor,” really Richardson himself, which concluded a laundry list of extravagant praise with the following: “…An editor may reasonably be supposed to judge with an Impartiality which is rarely to be met with in an Author towards his own Works.”

Shameless cronyism? De Freval was in debt to Richardson when he wrote his review, as was Rev. Webster, whose Weekly Miscellany was funded partially by Richardson.

All of this sent Henry Fielding over the edge. Nauseated as much by the ridiculous blurbs as the content of the novel, Fielding wrote a satirical response entitled Shamela, which he prefaced with a note from the editor to “himself,” a commendatory letter from “John Puff, Esq.,” and an exasperated coda: “Note, Reader, several other COMMENDATORY LETTERS and COPIES of VERSES will be prepared against the NEXT EDITION.”

While Fielding may have been the first to parody blurbs, it was another literary giant who truly modernized them. A master of self-promotion, Walt Whitman knew exactly what to do when he received a letter of praise from Ralph Waldo Emerson. The second edition of Leaves of Grass is, as far as I know, the first example of a blurb printed on the outside of a book, in this case in gilt letters at the base of the spine: “I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career / R W Emerson.” (Emerson’s letter appeared in its entirety at the end of the book along with several other reviews — three of which were written by Whitman — in a section entitled “Leaves-Droppings.”)

Whitman’s move wasn’t completely unprecedented. The earliest dust jacket in existence (1830) boasts an anonymous poem of praise on the cover, and printers had long been in the habit of putting their device at the base of the spine. Nevertheless, the impulse to combine them with a bylined review was sheer genius, and Emerson’s blurb can be read as greeting not only Whitman, but also the great career of its own updated form.

4.
After Whitman there were further innovations. A century ago, fantasy author James Branch Cabell (unsung favorite of Mark Twain and Neil Gaiman) prefigured self-deprecators like Chris Ware by including negative blurbs at the back of his books: “The author fails of making his dull characters humanely pitiable. New York Post.” Or, as Ware put it on the cover of the first issue of Acme Novelty Library: “An Indefensible Attempt to Justify the Despair of Those Who Have Never Known Real Tragedy.” Unlike Cabell’s, Ware’s first negative blurb was self-authored, but those featured on Jimmy Corrigan were not. Marvel Comics followed suit when it issued its new “Defenders.” (A related strategy — Martin Amis’ The Information was stickered “Not Booker Prize Shortlisted.”)

These satirical strategies highlight the increasingly common suspicion, nascent in Fielding’s parody of Richardson, that blurbs just aren’t meaningful. Publishers, however, have evidently concluded that blurbs may not be meaningful, but they sure help move merchandise. Witness the advent of two recent innovations in paperback design: the blap and the blover (rhymes with cover).

The blap is a glossy page covered in blurbs that immediately follows the front cover. In deference to its importance, the width of the cover is usually reduced, tempting potential readers with a glimpse of the blap, and perhaps even accommodating a conveniently placed blurb that runs along the length of the book.

The blover is essentially a blap on steroids, literally a second book cover, made from the same cardstock, that serves solely as a billboard for blurbs. Blovers are not yet widespread, but given the ubiquity of blaps it is only a matter of time. (For an extreme case see The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, where the blover’s edge sports a vertical banality from Entertainment Weekly — “I couldn’t put the book down.” — not to mention the 56 blurbs on the pages that follow.)

Blovers and blaps… what next? For my part, I can see where Orwell, Paglia, and Miller are coming from, and I certainly wouldn’t bemoan the disappearance of blurbs. But not everyone is like me. Some people enjoy glancing at reviews, or choosing a book based on the endorsements of their favorite authors. Blurbs sell books (maybe), and they allow established writers to help out the newbies. Those are good things. And since regulating them is as unfeasible as banning reviews, as long as blovers don’t replace covers I guess blurbs are a genre I can live with. And who knows — one day Murderer’s Row might be batting for me.

Previously: To Blurb or Not to Blurb

Image credit: wikimedia commons

1.

When I was 17, I registered my first copyright. Unofficially. My three dearest friends and I were ready to share the recordings our rock band had made, but had some reservations about uploading them to the social media sites which were just then being retooled for independent musicians to self-market. Naïve about the system — and hopelessly naïve about ourselves — we expected that, without precautions, rogue musicians could present our songs as their own and claim for themselves the glory we were due.

It turned out that we owned the copyright to our songs when we wrote them, but had to register that copyright in case of dispute. So I did what is called a Poor Man’s Copyright: I self-addressed an envelope, placed one of our CDs inside, mailed it and, when it came back to me, put it away, unopened, for safekeeping. This document proved that we had created what was sealed within before the postage date.

I still have that envelope stashed away, and under current US law, that copyright will likely endure well into the 22nd century. And yet, it is hard to say what “copyright” will mean by then. Intellectual property is a dynamic concept, legally and culturally, one that is always being reshaped on one hand by changing methods of creation and distribution, and on the other by markets scurrying to catch up. The abstract line between public and private ideas — the line that intellectual property tries to police — is the very same line the Internet blurs so well.

This January, copyright witnesses a simultaneous push and pull, a drive for greater stricture on one end, and a graceful unknotting on the other. While Congress resumes deliberations on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) — the latest legislation meant to address the rise of social media, streaming services, and file sharing — scholars in the UK and most of Europe are rejoicing the entry of James Joyce’s corpus into the public domain. Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man have been in the American public domain for many years, but due to differing laws, certain editions of Ulysses and the entirety of Finnegans Wake remain protected for nearly another quarter century in the US. Hypothetically, under a SOPA regime, European websites publishing text of these newly public later masterpieces could find themselves dropped off of American search engines, or starved for funds if they rely on American companies like Google’s ad service and PayPal to generate revenue.

The copyright status of Joyce’s work has been of particular interest to scholars and fans on both sides of the Atlantic, due mostly to the stubborn and sometimes egregious permissions policies set forth by Joyce’s sole heir and executor of his estate, his grandson, Stephen James Joyce. But this month, the Joyce copyrights enter a new twilight period made all the more striking by a history of differing national laws. In the 1970s, the US went from a publication-based copyright system to a European “biological” one, with a copyright term of the author’s life plus an additional 70 years in most cases. But the US Copyright Office set up certain benchmarks by which older works would be grandfathered in. Works published before 1923 would be in the public domain, while those published in the window between 1923 and 1978 would enjoy up to 95 years of copyright protection from the date of publication. And while the first edition of Ulysses dates back to 1922, the 1934 Random House edition (the first officially published in the US) enters the public domain in 2030; and Finnegans Wake in 2035.

It is likely that the American copyright in the Wake will outlive Stephen James, an old man now without an heir of his own. And yet, despite the recent lapse of the copyrights in the EU, it is just as likely that Stephen James will fight to enforce that remaining American copyright to the very last. In 2006, D.T. Max profiled the heir for The New Yorker. In the brilliant piece, Stephen James revels in his antagonistic execution of the estate, believing he is complying with Joyce’s wishes: “I am not only protecting and preserving the purity of my grandfather’s work but also what remains of the much abused privacy of the Joyce family,” he once said. “Every artist’s born right is to have their work . . . reproduced as they want it to be reproduced.” For Stephen James, great works of literature (even those as dense as the Wake) are meant to be enjoyed singularly, without critiques, analyses, or guides. He has used his rights to the fullest in preserving his grandfather’s integrity and deterring the academy, which for too long, he believes, has piggybacked on Joyce’s genius. He once requested a $1.5 million permissions fee from a scholar hoping to make a multimedia version of Ulysses. When the scholar refused, Stephen James told him, “You should consider a new career as a garbage collector in New York City, because you’ll never quote a Joyce text again.”

It is not easy to say what exactly Joyce would have wanted to happen to his work. He was at times an eager self-promoter, asking friends like Samuel Beckett and William Carlos Williams to write essays in support of the unfinished Wake and admitting to filling his books with enough puzzles to keep professors busy well into the 21st century. But he was also, throughout his life, strapped for cash, and spoke out for “Author’s Rights” when American publisher Samuel Roth began circulating unauthorized copies of Ulysses (the book was originally deemed obscene in the US; Joyce could claim no copyright in it, since it had been “stricken from the mails”). Indeed, with the Internet reshaping how we think of intellectual property, we might learn a lot from Joyce’s ambivalence, as his body of work begins its march into the public domain.

2.

In many ways, the attitude of Stephen James Joyce resembles that of the Stop Online Piracy Act, stodgy and clinging to old ways. Introduced last fall, SOPA would have expanded the arsenal of cease-and-desist tactics that the entertainment industry has been deploying ineffectively for the last 15 years, starting with the crackdowns on file-sharers. Copyright holders would have been able to create an embargo against websites allegedly violating their copyrights by compelling payment processors and ad networks to suspend their services, with very little recourse for contesting the accusation.

Congress was set to vote on SOPA before the end of month, but shelved the legislation last week following an internet-wide protest that included daylong blackouts of sites like Wikipedia, which opposes any restriction on the flow of information. Google and Facebook, also in protest, would have been asked by the attorney general to redirect users away from sites (particularly foreign sites) engaging in “piracy,” a policy that The New York Times, in a recent editorial, likened to China’s policing of the Internet. Besides, there is little reason to believe that outwitting the SOPA measures would not have become standard behavior for many Internet users, just as torrenting and streaming have.

So how is it that we are not finding more secure ways to remunerate artists and thinkers? This is after all the most benign reason for reinforcing intellectual property laws. It seems to me that since the veritable explosion of the Internet, and since the economic collapse of 2008, the dialect movement of culture and economics has been accelerated and re-codified, plunging people on both sides back into an age-old confusion about art and money.

In November, I attended a panel discussion on the “Creative Economy,” a concept elaborated over the last decade by such economists as John Howkins and Richard Florida, who argue that knowledge will become an increasingly important economic resource in the 21st century. At one point, a woman from a major media conglomerate spoke approvingly of the imminent crackdowns and lawsuits SOPA would have brought about. I was so irked when the rest of the panel agreed that, during the Q&A, I posed a troublemaking question:

The internet is an incredible force for creativity, allowing people to share work freely, outside time and space. And yet the rhetoric around this exchange is extremely negative, invoking piracy and theft. To what extent, then, is the creative economy just another name for the capitalist economy?

That last part, of course, was meant to inflame. But it didn’t. It was evident to one gentleman, a city official, that “creators” should be compensated: “How else are they supposed to make a living?”

The Internet is at once one of the greatest products and one of the greatest drivers of a creative economy, though probably not the one that the panelists had in mind. Given the activities that it enables, it promises to drastically change the way culture is produced and consumed.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Imitation is also how we learn, and how we align ourselves with the styles and ideas we find meaningful, and thus build community. Innovation for Joyce lay precisely in imitating the “open-source” texts available to him: his access to the public domain and his ability to play with the ideas and language he found therein allowed him — at the height of modernism when art was meant to be self-referential — to wink at the knowing reader with a spoof of Homer, Vico, or Shakespeare, and to change that same reader’s conception of all the great works that came before. The difference is, without web access, Joyce had to go to the library or bookseller for his material; and Joyce had to fund the publication of his books.

But the Internet also threatens to do away with those terms (production, consumption) and the commodification of culture entirely, and this is where it gets tricky. Proponents of SOPA need only point to the act’s subtitle to defend it: “To promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation by combating the theft of U.S. property, and for other purposes.” All the buzzwords of creative economics are there. And yet the concerns of Stephen James Joyce (propriety and privacy) are not.

3.

It feels like the “Creative Economy” encapsulates two opposing economies, creativity and consumerism, and copyright law is the locus where the conflict is most evident. And yet, this conflict is more than one between abstract entities: it’s a practical and emotional dilemma for any writer who has ever tried to make a career of his or her craft. Even Joyce, who borrowed famously, claimed his work as his own, and expected due compensation.

The conflict between the openness of the creative process and the restraint of good business acumen is one embodied by Shem the Penman and Shaun the Post, the sons of HCE and ALP in Finnegans Wake. In the “Shem the Penman” chapter, Shaun scolds his brother for squandering all of his good stories in the pub:

Comport yourself, your inconsistency! Where is that little alimony nestegg against our predictable rainy day? Is it not the fact […] that, while whistlewhirling your crazy elegies around Templetombmount joynstone, […] you squandered among underlings the overload of your extravagance and made a hottentot of deulpeners crawsick with your crumbs? Am I not right? Yes? Yes? Yes? Holy wax and holifer! Don’t tell me, Leon of the fold, that you are not a loanshark.

According to Shaun, Shem will inevitably go broke because he was too much in love with telling stories, gave them out for free, has made people almost sick of hearing them. And yet Shaun senses that Shem is not naïve. He may in fact be something of a loan shark, and by giving easily up front, Shem can demand more later, when selling his book to the very people who have long enjoyed his yarns.

Joyce was commenting on a very real and persistent phenomenon, one that even my friends and I in high school had some inkling of when we thought it wise to “register” our songs: it is necessary to self-promote up until the point where one is entitled to charge admission to one’s work. The Internet illuminates this threshold between ruthless self-promotion and entitlement, while greatly enabling the former and destabilizing the latter.

None of us today will ever live to see our creative work become public domain, but Joyce lived in a time when his books were not guaranteed legal protection. In a speech he gave to the International PEN Conference in Paris, summer of 1937, Joyce reflected on the Ulysses piracy debacle and the successful international protest he organized against Samuel Roth:

It is, I believe, possible to reach a judicial conclusion from this judgment to the effect that, while unprotected by the written law of copyright and even if it is banned, a work belongs to its author by virtue of a natural right and that thus the law can protect an author against the mutilation and the publication of his work just as he is protected against the misuse that can be made of his name.

Joyce had a sense of propriety when it came to literature, that even if writers could not make their work lucrative, their visions should be respected. It’s true this did not always extend to the texts he spoofed and lifted from. And yet, author’s rights are an idea on which many of us would think favorably. This should by no means be interpreted as a mandate for his grandson’s obstructionist policies, nor for greater policing of the Internet. Rather, we are going to need a completely new online framework for supporting creators, and to get there, we might have to move beyond a tired notion of “copyright” and towards “author’s rights.”

Image Credit: Flickr/Horia Varlan

More and more, I read in pieces. So do you. Digital media, in all its forms, is fragmentary. Even the longest stretches of text online are broken up with hyperlinks or other interactive elements (or even ads). This is neither a good nor bad thing, necessarily — it is simply a part of modern reading. And because of that, works that deal with fragmentation, that eschew not only a traditional narrative structure but the very idea of a work comprising a single, linear whole — take on a special kind of relevance. Fragmentary writing is (or at least feels) like the one avant-garde literary approach that best fits our particular moment. It’s not that it’s the only form of writing that matters of course, just that it captures the tension between “digital” and “analog” reading better than anything else out there. And that tension, in many ways, is the defining feature of the contemporary reading experience.

What is fragmentary writing? To answer that, it helps to first look at how writers wrestled with fragmentation in an earlier, pre-digital context. The approach  played a major role in twentieth-century modernist literature, for example, and the very best modernists utilized fragments in particularly revealing ways. Few writers of the period, or any other, understood the nature of fragmentary writing better than Samuel Beckett, who experimented with short, nonlinear forms throughout his career. My favorite example of these fragmentary experiments is a series of thirteen nonlinear prose shorts he wrote called Texts for Nothing.

The Texts are not stories or essays, at least not in the traditional sense. They are instead focused on images/symbols and on the often-prevaricating “voice” (or is it “voices”?) behind each Text. Images and phrases appear in a particular context, and nearly every word is essential to understanding the Text. The voice of each Text often doubles back, contradicts itself, or moves from image to image in no discernible pattern, as in Text 2:

Is this stuff air that permits you to suffocate still, almost audibly at times, it’s possible, a kind of air. What exactly is going on, exactly, ah, old xanthic laugh, no farewell mirth, good riddance, it was never droll. No, but one more memory, one last memory, it may help, to abort again.

The images contained in Text 2 (though not necessarily the other Texts) could be interpreted as a series of “memories,” ranging from a woman digging through a trash can to a man “with only one leg and a half” ringing a bell. Memory often works piecemeal — after all, people don’t really remember an entire experience, instead they hold on to particular images, emotions, or impressions. In that way, the Texts resemble human memory — and human thinking. Their fragmentary nature therefore reflects the fragmentary nature of memory, and of the human mind.

Writing about Franz Kafka — another writer given to fragments, whose work served as a key influence on Beckett’s — Albert Camus declared, “The whole art in Kafka consists in forcing the reader to reread.” The Texts certainly live up to this dictum — they are meant to be looked at more than once, from different points of view. The attentive reader spends time with each Text as a distinct object, since there is not linear narrative or argument to follow forward. Meaning suggests itself indirectly, through the accumulation of phrases and images.

However, while Beckett wrote at a time when rereading was widely encouraged, contemporary media often pulls us in a very different direction. In his recent book about digital reading, The Shallows, Nicholas Carr calls the Net our society’s “communication and information medium of choice,” and says that, “The scope of its use is unprecedented, even by the standards of the mass media.” And he claims that this new medium has changed reading as profoundly as did the bound codex.

He points to a series of studies that indicate “people who read linear text comprehend more, remember more, and learn more than those who read text peppered with links.” Essentially, hypertext distracts the reader enough to change the reading experience — even a long, linear text becomes fragmented with the addition of links, because the unconscious mind is forced to devote energy determining the value of the link (and whether or not to click on it). In Carr’s telling, the Internet creates not fragmentary but fragmented reading, where the mind is so distracted that it is difficult to become fully immersed in a given text. This is a different process than what happens when we read a fragmentary work — as Carr explains, “When transcribed to a page, a stream of consciousness becomes literary and linear.” The structure of a print book — its existence as a discrete, finite object, the lack of distractions built in to the format — creates a contemplative atmosphere that allows the reader to “merge” with a text; or as Carr puts it, “The reader becomes the book.” Beckett’s Texts for Nothing, with their emphasis on contemplation, accumulation, and rereading, are firmly rooted in the quieter, more contemplative world of “analog” media. For a writer interested in engaging the digital world, however, there are different challenges and that calls for a different kind of fragmentary writing.

The most prominent fragmentary work in recent years is probably David Shields’ Reality Hunger, a book made up primarily of quotations from other texts. While most critics focused on its two most controversial assertions — that the linear novel is an obsolete form, and that writers should feel free to “borrow” text from other works, the way a DJ might sample a piece of music — the book’s fragmentary structure is far more compelling. It is intended as a “literary collage,” in keeping with Shields’ belief that, “Collage, the art of reassembling fragments of preexisting images in such a way as to form a new image, was the most important innovation in the art of the twentieth century.” Shields wants “a literature built entirely out of contemplation and revelation,” in effect, a literature that reflects the workings of the human mind. And his collection of fragments is his effort to produce that kind of work. If Shields fails in this effort — and I think he does, though understandably so — he is able to give the reader an idea of how his mind processes the written word. The breadth of his reading is evident not only from the wide range of writers “appropriated” into Reality Hunger — Walter Pater, James Joyce, and Walter Benjamin, among others — but from the obvious restlessness visible on the page.

Like Beckett’s Text 2, the fragmentary nature of Reality Hunger has its roots in human memory. As Shields points out, his interest in the essay stems from his belief that, “The essay consists of double translation: memory translates experience; essay translates memory.” And his essay resembles the way many of us remember the books we read — we hold on to particular ideas, images, and quotes, which hold the place of the larger work in our memories. I’ve read Hamlet three times in the last year and a half — and many times before then — but I can’t recite the entire play by heart. Instead, certain lines stand out (“The rest is silence,” etc.), and when I “remember” the play, it is those lines that spring to mind. In that way, Shields’ book gives us a window into how he reads — it shows us not only the works he gravitates too, but what pieces of those works he keeps with him.

Where Shields differs from earlier fragmentary writers, including Beckett, is that Reality Hunger, due to its origin in many different works, not only emphasizes its fragmentary nature, but uses it to connect with the reader. While making my way through the book, I found myself copying out Shields’ most interesting fragments into a separate notebook; when I want to “reread” Reality Hunger, I simply look at my own, private version instead. This seems at least in part to be Shields’ intention — the fragmentary style of his book forces the reader to become an active participant in the work itself. In that way, it draws from online writing styles, including blogging, which encourage readers to comment on, excerpt, or link to an existing text (which, as Carr points out, brings on even more fragmentation). Perhaps the most extreme version of this is the blogging platform Twitter, which both limits users to writing 140-chracters at a time, and encourages them to “retweet” other users’ content.

The most interesting use of the platform that I’ve seen is Masha Tupitsyn’s (print) book Laconia: 1,200 Tweets on Film, which she composed entirely on the site. The end result, however, is presented not as a mere assembly of Tweets, but as an experiment in form. As she explains in the introduction, “I avoided tweeting arbitrarily or simply churning out a collection of tweets that would result in a book. Instead, I wrote and crafted each entry as though it was for and part of a book, rather than the other way around.” One of Carr’s great worries about the digital realm is the way it appropriates and changes print forms. As he explains, “When the Net absorbs a medium, it re-creates that medium in its own image.” With Laconia, Tupitsyn attempts the reverse, re-creating a digital medium (Twitter) in an “analog” space. In a sense, Tupitsyn is appropriating a digital space into print.

What’s especially interesting about that appropriation is the way she toys with Twitter’s 140-character limit. Often, she will break multi-tweet passages abruptly, calling attention to the platform’s tendency toward fragmentation. For example, tweets 782 and 783 (each tweet in the book is numbered and time-stamped) appear this way:

Our feelings and emotions about our lives and our faces are in other people’s faces. Changing movie faces are our feelings and emotions

about our feelings and emotions.

It would be very easy to recast these tweets in a way that keeps both sentences whole:

Our feelings and emotions about our lives and our faces are in other people’s faces.

Changing movie faces are our feelings and emotions about our feelings and emotions.

This would be particularly more readable on Twitter itself, where the more recent tweet — “about our feelings and emotion” — would appear on top. But by breaking them so abruptly, by taking Twitter’s “hard” character count so literally and writing right up until it is reached, Tupitsyn underlines the digital origin of the project.

Where, at least in Carr’s telling, the Web cuts a textual whole into fragments by appropriating it, the print book (at least this particular print book) takes fragments and forces them into a kind of whole. We read tweets 782 and 783 in sequence, and the meaning is obvious. Tupitsyn plays a similar trick with the book’s content. Though the book is ostensibly a work of film criticism, it does not contain anything that resembles a conventional movie review. Instead, it appropriates what social media specializes in — quotations, personal reactions, biographical revelations, and commentary about pop culture — and turns them into something more ambitious. The different fragments are not so much about film as they are about how Tupitsyn watches film. As she puts it, the book “dramatizes the act of thinking through film.”

Reality Hunger and Laconia are very different books, but they share this desire to use fragmentary writing to dramatize the act of thinking through culture (in Shields’ case mostly books, in Tupitsyn’s mostly films). Even this desire has its roots in the digital world, where culture is constantly being repackaged and analyzed. If neither work achieves the majesty of Beckett’s Texts — to be fair, an obscenely high standard — both find an approach to fragmentary writing that pushes the form in a new direction, rather than just rehashing modernism’s innovations. They manage this by drawing on digital forms — Shields by creating a “collage” that mimics the mash-up culture that dominates online media, Tupitsyn by writing her book via Twitter. In so doing, they suggest an interesting new path for both writers and readers, one that takes the clutter of the digital world and transforms it into something quieter and more thoughtful.

It’s not that fragmentary writing is the only acceptable form of writing today — I have no intention of breaking this essay into tweets — but it is the form best suited to address the conundrum Carr is so concerned about in The Shallows. We all read online, and the rise of smartphones, tablets, and e-readers means we will be doing so even more. This means we will all be spending ever more time reading with a medium that encourages distracted, fragmented reading. Fragmentary writing — work that accumulates fragments of text and presents them in a way that encourages introspection and contemplation — seems like a logical response to that experience. And that makes me incredibly curious to see where people will take it.

Image credit: AMagill/Flickr

Last night I hustled my two young sons Jay and Wally off to bed (or at least tried to — Jay, who is two-and-a-haaaaalf, wont be hustled anywhere) in anticipation of reading the famous “Grand Inquisitor” chapter. A decade earlier I’d been assigned “The Grand Inquisitor” as a standalone text in a college class on moral reasoning. Then I hadn’t gotten much out of it. Last night I was excited to see if it had improved in the intervening ten years.

“The Grand Inquisitor” is a supremely strange chapter — one of the most unique things I’ve read in literature. It takes the form of a parable, told by the atheist Ivan Karamazov to his younger brother Alyosha, a novice monk. The parable is set in 16^th-century Portugal and it recounts a conversation between an aged high-ranking official in the Catholic Church known as the Grand Inquisitor and a man who arrives in town performing miracles that give rise to the suspicion that he’s the Second Coming of Christ.

The Grand Inquisitor should rejoice before this man, but instead he’s furious. He has him imprisoned and confronts him in his cell. The Grand Inquisitor berates Christ that he has no business returning to earth — he tells him that he lost all legitimacy as a leader of men when he made three fateful choices retold in the Bible in the Temptation of Christ.

In the Temptation of Christ, Jesus has been fasting in the desert for 40 days when the Devil appears to him with three offers. First the Devil asks Christ to turn stones into loaves in order to relieve his hunger.  Christ declines to perform the miracle. Then the Devil tells Christ to prove that he is the Son of God by falling from a high cliff, trusting that angels will catch him. Christ declines. Finally, the Devil offers to give Christ dominion over all the kingdoms of men if Christ agrees to worship him. Again, Christ declines.

The Temptation of Christ is usually understood as evidence of Christ’s divinity and his humanity — he was tempted, like a man, but resisted temptation, like God. The Grand Inquisitor understands Christ’s refusals differently, however; in his view Christ declined each temptation based on a naïve view of human nature.

As the Grand Inquisitor tells it, Christ knew that he’d assume an absolute power over mankind if he accepted the Devil’s offers – a power that he didn’t want. The Grand Inquisitor explains that there are three foundations on which the powerful rule — miracle, mystery, and authority — each of which would have been manifest in Christ had he given in to the Devil’s temptations.

So why did Christ refuse to perform acts that would have given him such authority over humankind? The Grand Inquisitor imputes that Christ refused this authority because he did not want to deny people their free will. He charges that Christ knew that accepting the Devil’s temptations would have resulted in humanity being compelled to obedience, when what Christ really wanted was for people to understand Good and Evil for themselves, and to come to faith free of coercion, through the exercise of their own reason and will.

What a Pollyanna, the Grand Inquisitor mocks Christ! In the Grand Inquisitor’s view people are too weak for freedom. Just look around at all the ruin and despair on earth he says to Christ. This is what results when people are left to be free:

Freedom, free reason, and science will lead them into such a maze, and confront them with such miracles and insoluble mysteries, that some of them, unruly and ferocious, will exterminate themselves; others, unruly but feeble, will exterminate each other; and the remaining third, feeble and wretched, will crawl to our [the Catholic Church’s] feet and cry out to us: “Yes, you were right, you alone possess his mystery, and we are coming back to you — save us from ourselves.”

What people really crave, the Grand Inquisitor says, is someone to rule them. This is what the Catholic Church provides he says — an absolute authority, a sanctuary from freedom — and he tells Christ to leave town immediately, lest he disrupt the essential edifice the pontiffs have built the last 1500 years.

My youngest son Wally is seven-months-old and still occasionally needs to be walked back to sleep at night. The night I read “The Grand Inquisitor” he woke up a little after 2am. As I paced him back and forth in his downstairs room, I thought about the pages I’d read earlier that evening. It occurred to me that the Grand Inquisitor’s interpretation of the Temptation of Christ effectively describes the power I hold over my two sons.

In their eyes I perform countless miracles each day. Occasionally these are bona fide feats, like last week, when I pried apart two stuck Legos that had resisted every effort of my little son’s fingers. More often, though, they’re more pedestrian achievements like reaching high into cabinets my sons cannot reach, or promising that in 10 minutes their mom will walk through the front door, and then she does.

I possess the power of mystery, too. If my two-year-old son Jay had the wherewithal he might ask, “Who is this man who claims to have given me life? Where did he learn to pee standing up? How is it that he sees me even when I put my hands over my eyes? It is beyond my ability to comprehend him, so I accept and submit to the mystery of his existence.”

And of course, authority. This fall I told Jay that on October 31 he had to walk around our neighborhood dressed as a cow. Then for two weeks after that I told him precisely how many pieces of Halloween candy he could eat each day. To him I am the greatest power on earth.

This is all a good thing. Small children in possession of too much freedom are a dangerous thing. Left to their own devices my sons would eat yogurt all day (Jay), spend hours gnawing on cardboard (Wally), and put their hands in all manner of disgusting places with no regard for the teeming germs (both of them). Just like the Grand Inquisitor said, I save my sons from themselves.

But eventually, of course, they’ll be old enough to save themselves. I imagine they’ll free themselves from the power of my miracles first. My mystery may last longer — I’m 30 and my own father still appears to me with a certain unfathomable aura — but as Jay and Wally grow up they’ll discover that there are more interesting mysteries in the world than me.

As for my authority, well, that will be a negotiated withdrawal. When they’re ready to handle freedom they can have more of it, and if I’m slow to recognize their progress I’m sure they’ll let me know.

I hope neither Jay nor Wally grows up to be like any of the Karamazov brothers (at least not as they’re depicted through page 367 of the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation, which is where I am now). Still, there is something beautiful about this expression of Ivan’s, which comes a couple chapters before “The Grand Inquisitor.” It speaks to feelings that you can only experience when you have the power to decide for yourself what’s valuable in the world:

Though I do not believe in the order of things, still the sticky little leaves that come out in the spring are dear to me, the blue sky is dear to me, some people are dear to me, whom one loves sometimes, would you believe it, without even knowing why; some human deeds are dear to me, which one has perhaps long ceased believing in, but still honors with one’s heart, out of old habit.

In America, I’ve lately come to feel, this latter is the love that dare not speak its name. We’re a nation whose hereditary upper class keeps insisting there’s no such thing (see gubernatorial scion and presumptive presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s tweets from Carl’s Jr.), and where even the concept of “class” is dismissed as taboo (see the suggestion, ibid., that income inequality is something best talked about “in quiet rooms”). But Masterpiece, safely couched in the past, and usually overseas, remains one of the public venues where the upper crust, albeit fictional, can exercise their privilege without scruple, and where the rest of us can go to gawk. Those houses! Those costumes! Those accents! (In this light, The Forsyte Saga, which launched the series 41 years ago, appears almost proto-Kardashian.)

The current Masterpiece feature, Downton Abbey, mashes both class buttons hard. In the economic sense, it centers on the Earl of Grantham and his fabulously wealthy family, and on the eighty-eleven-dozen servants who attend to their every whim. On the cultural front, it offers a whiz-bang pastiche of three centuries of English literature. Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess is a venerable type: part Trollope’s Mrs. Proudie, part Thackeray’s Miss Crawley, part Dickens’, Aunt Betsey Trotwood (likewise played by Smith in a Masterpiece adaptation)…maybe with a touch of Professor McGonagall thrown in to keep things lively. Carson the Butler surely owes some of his imperturbability to Wodehouse’s Reginald Jeeves. The central romance, between the earl’s eldest daughter and her cousin Matthew, hews closely to the Jane Austen playbook (though, two episodes into Season 2, it’s still not clear who’s Elizabeth and who’s Mr. Darcy). And Downton Abbey, the titular estate, is like a mash-up of Brideshead and Wuthering Heights.

I doubt any of this is accidental. Downton Abbey‘s creator, Julian Fellowes, has adapted Twain and Thackeray for screens large and small, and has gone so far as to nick the Crawley surname for his own aristocrats. Nor is his erudition limited to English-language literature; this is the kind of show where, when a Turkish character appears, his name is an amalgam of two of the greatest living Turkish novelists: Kemal Pamuk. (I’m still waiting for the American character named Melville von Updike.)

Needless to say, Downton Abbey is also serious fun; it’s become a surprise successor to Friday Night Lights and Mad Men as TV’s current “must-watch” show. But when, in the dead days between finishing Season 1 on DVD and waiting for the premiere of Season 2, I rummaged through my Brit-Lit shelf looking for some upstairs-downstairs action to sustain me, I was shocked by how little of the actual aristocracy I found.

It turns out that my sense of the “classiness” of the English novel is like my sense of the monolithic “classiness” of English elocution — that I suffer from a kind of cognitive foreshortening, wherein important distinctions disappear. In fact, what the English novel is overwhelmingly about, in class terms, is not the hereditary nobility but the middle classes: the downwardly mobile landowners, the upwardly mobile bourgeoisie.

Granted, the English class terminology is hopelessly confusing (sort of the way over there “public school” means private school.) But consider the seminal novels of the 1700s. Richardson’s Clarissa may moon around a swell house, but she hails from a family of arrivistes. And though Fielding’s Tom Jones lives with Squire Allworthy — a member of the landed gentry, if I’ve got my terminology correct — he does so as “a foundling.”

Then there’s the 19th century. Mr. Darcy, with his £10,000 income, could probably give Allworthy a literal run for his money, but his Pemberley estate is more the Maguffin in Pride & Prejudice than its setting; Jane Austen’s eye keeps returning to the raffish Bennets. Or take the Bröntes. We experience the grandeur of Rochester’s Thornfield Hall only through the eyes of Jane Eyre, the governess. Class roles are more fluid in Wuthering Heights, but between Heathcliff and Catherine, one is always on the way up and the other on the way down. Even Thackeray’s Crawleys, with their titles, are really supporting characters. The main attractions in Vanity Fair are the upper-middle-class Amelia Sedley and the scheming Becky Sharp. And perhaps the very greatest of the 19th-century English novels, Middlemarch, declares its allegiances right there in the title.

It’s possible to account for the English canon’s emphasis on the middle purely as a matter of dramatic interest. Unlike earls and princes and duchesses, the gentry and the striving bourgeoisie are people with places to go, with something to gain…and to lose. Still, compare the English novel of this period with the Russian — all those counts! — or with Proust’s elaborate explication of the Guermantes line, and you remember that aristocrats have plenty to lose, too, starting with reputation. (Indeed, questions of reputation animate some of Downton Abbey‘s key plotlines.) And surely readerly interest in lifestyles of the rich and fabulous isn’t a new phenomenon. In fact, I suspect that the overlay of aristocratic intrigue in a novel like Vanity Fair is an attempt to satisfy it.

But the rise of the English novel parallels historically the rise of the middle classes; these are the classes from which most of the great novelists hailed, and to whose upper reaches their profession would have limited them. Dickens, one of Karl Marx’s favorite writers, offers the archetype of Victorian social cartography. Sure, you’ve got your Lord and Lady Dedlock in Bleak House, but more often the aristocrats resemble the generic Oodle and Boodle and Noodle, who in Little Dorrit form a kind of choral backdrop to a foreground of slums and inventors’ workshops and banks and debtors’ prisons.

To really get your fill of the aristocracy in between visits to Downton, you might look to the second tier of the 19th-century canon. There’s Eliot’s brilliant but flawed Daniel Deronda; there are Trollope’s Palliser novels and some of the Barsetshire ones. (There are also glimmerings of nobility throughout the top-shelf corpus of that American interloper, Henry James.)

Or, interestingly, you could just move on to the 20th century, in whose early years Downton Abbey is set. For here and only here, with the aristocracy in decline, does it move to the center of the English novel. (I guess you don’t really miss something until it’s gone.) Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End are palpably influences on Downton Abbey. In each, a sense of nostalgia for the days of real privilege hang heavy; in each the shifting sands under the aristocracy’s castles are viewed through the prism of war. Portions of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music Of Time likewise concern the titled classes. I’ve not read At Lady Molly’s, but I might well be forced to turn to it a couple of months from now, when I’m once again going through Downton Withdrawal. Perhaps the single most Downton-y book I know of — I’d be shocked if Mr. Fellowes (er…Sir Julian) hadn’t read it — is Henry Green’s miraculous short novel Loving, from 1945. Green’s beautifully impacted idiom is short on exposition, and when I picked up Loving a few weeks ago, I found it enriched by the hours I’d spent in Fellowes’ world. That is, I suddenly understood the difference between a head housemaid and a lady’s maid.

The two most astute novelists of class currently working in England, I think, are Edward St. Aubyn and Alan Hollinghurst. St. Aubyn hails from the social stratosphere himself, and the terrific first three novels in his Patrick Melrose cycle – Never Mind, Bad News, and Some Hope – detail what’s happened to the Granthams of the world three or four generations on from Downton. Spoiler alert: the titles and the dough still linger, but the culture has moved on, leaving in its wake terrible boredom and worse behavior. Hollinghurst’s finest novel, The Line of Beauty, can’t properly be said to center on the aristocracy, but retains some of Waugh’s nostalgia (and much of the flavor of mid-to-late period James). Who has replaced the hereditary nobility, at the top of Margaret Thatcher’s England? Callow politicians and oil millionaires. Still, like a title and a castle, parliamentary clout and petro-pounds are not available to everyone, and so our protagonist, Nick Guest, occupies a familiar position: nose pressed to the glass.

In the end, this is the secret to Downton Abbey’s success, as well. The glamour of the earldom draws us in, but it’s the vividly realized characters who surround it — especially the servants below-stairs — that hold it in perspective, and so give it life. We live now in the Age of Austerity, and as a sometime practitioner of what Romney has called “the bitter politics of envy,” I feel a little weird being enthralled with this show. But then I look at what else my poor TV has to offer, and I find myself murmuring, Burgundy-style, “Stay classy, Downton!”

1.
A location scout came through my parents’ neighborhood last month and slid a letter printed on blue paper into each house’s screen door. The letter had HBO’s (fuzzily reproduced and definitely not hi-res) logo at the top and announced in all capital letters that a production team had descended on Mount Vernon, N.Y., in hopes of finding a “HOUSE WITH AN ATTACHED GARAGE.”

It happens that Chez Aronstein has one of those, and my mother found a copy of the letter when she got home from work. She called me in Chicago.

“Look, I won’t keep you,” she said, in a greeting that has become standard for our conversations, “Someone from HBO came to our house. Have you read that book called — what is it — ?” I could hear her rustling some papers on the other end, “The Corrections?”

“They want to film the TV series at our house,” she said.

2.
In a short essay written for The New York Times Sunday Book Review last month, Craig Fehrman points out that HBO has recently decided to pay attention to serious fiction — or what used to be known in the TV industry as “Stuff We Don’t Buy.”

Last year, the premium channel acquired rights to The Corrections for a full four-year series and convinced Jonathan Franzen to write the scripts. Noah Baumbach will direct at least a few episodes. HBO execs also swiped up Jennifer Egan’s 2010 A Visit from the Goon Squad as well as two of 2011’s best-received novels, Karen Russell’s Swamplandia and Chad Harbach’s Art of Fielding. In the case of the latter two, it seems as though the TV rights were negotiated along with publishing rights, so quickly did HBO decide to option them.

Writers have long been squeamish about selling their work to Hollywood directors, let alone to television (not all writers, of course). In his own famously crotchety essay “Why Bother?”, Franzen offers the familiar lament that television dumbs down cultural consumption. He argues, “Broadcast TV breaks pleasure into comforting little units—half-innings, twelve-minute acts — the way my father, when I was very young, would cut my French toast into tiny bites.” To the Franzen of 1996, when compared with television (the Internet wasn’t yet on literature’s radar as an existential threat), the so-called “social” novel simply can’t match up on the issue of popularity. Neither can it win a resource war. “Few serious novelists,” he adds, “can pay for a quick trip to Singapore, or for the mass expert consulting that gives serial TV dramas like E.R. and NYPD Blue their veneer of authenticity.” Viewed as an enemy combatant, television competes directly with novels for eyes, attention, and dollars. Franzen’s essay ends on a hopeful note for books, but the assumption remains that TV and other forms of media will win away the majority of readers. Literature gets the consolation prize of mattering to an important few.

The Franzen of 2011 had a very different perspective when speaking with David Remnick at The New Yorker Festival. Describing his involvement with the HBO series based on his book, he excitedly insisted, “We had an opportunity here — because it’s not a miniseries, it’s an actual series — I think to do something that has not been done.” I don’t assume that an individual’s intellectual positions have to remain consistent over a lifetime, but this marks a pretty significant shift — and one that characterizes what seems to be a growing number of writers. TV no longer stands as the primary enemy of fiction, as long one can write for the right kind of TV. Or: getting a contract with folks like HBO has become the new ideal.

What’s changed?

For one thing, the rise of premium cable has produced practical advantages for authors. Higher production values and an emphasis on multi-year serial dramas allow for financial security, giving them an incentive to stay involved with television projects. Moreover, HBO has demonstrated a willingness to allow novelists to maintain control of their work, offering folks like Franzen (and Egan, who turned down the opportunity) the opportunity to write the scripts. And perhaps most importantly, the popularity of shows like Mad Men, The Wire, and Homeland — all of which find a place in what Fehrman rightly dubs “post-Sopranos” cable — enables producers to make compelling cases for slower, unfolding, deliberate narratives. Slower, unfolding, and deliberate narratives comprise the bread and butter of literary fiction. Perhaps television audience tastes have simply come in line with the tastes of readers, while new content-delivery preferences make it possible to exploit the similarity. Tivo and OnDemand everything allow viewers to string together episodes of series on their own schedules — to cater their media consumption to individual attention spans.

But especially interesting about Franzen’s position with regard to the series is his insistence that TV has allowed him more creative room to explore the themes of The Corrections than did the novel itself. In the same conversation with Remnick, he explains:

Because we had so much more time to work with than there was material in the novel, it was an opportunity to tell a story at many different points in time — that is spread over thirty years — and have those all have equal weights […] To figure out how to make that work, it seemed like it could be really cool.

By his account, it turns out that television will present freedom to explore plotlines that the novel limited or foreclosed. For the reigning king of American realist fiction to confess this point — and to do it readily — marks a sharp change of direction, suggesting that perhaps we need to start thinking differently about the relationship between television and fiction.

I don’t mean to make hasty qualitative or hierarchical distinctions between TV and novels. It’s easy to say indignantly “Novels are better than TV, you sell-out jerks!” like a petulant writer with exactly zero novels to his credit. (I’m working on it, OKAY?) But I don’t think anyone should begrudge writers like Egan or Franzen for working with HBO. At the very least, Franzen sounds a lot happier than he did 15 years ago, and the fact that The Corrections will reach millions more potential readers on HBO (and on DVD) sounds like an unmitigated win for literary fiction.

Nevertheless, we do need to think about the implications of suggesting that television’s aesthetic capacities can complement, or even supplant, those of novels. For once, we might not have to ask, “Will the novel survive?” Instead, we need to ask what it means that the novel’s future depends on a relationship with TV — and whether this relationship will be a productive one in the long run.

I started thinking about all of this when it suddenly became possible that The Corrections would be filmed at the house where I grew up.

3.
For young(ish) writers, reading Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections has for a long time seemed like a kind of prerequisite to engaging in literary practice: writing, reading, thinking about novels and their future or lack of future, or whatever else. When I was in college, the book seemed a kind of talismanic object, a guidebook, a blueprint to follow if I ever wanted to write serious fiction. At the same time, 18-year-old A-J secretly worried that Franzen’s depiction of American middle-class despair and loneliness, and the concurrent self-torture about the shallowness of this despair and loneliness, obviated the need for anything I would ever come up with to describe same. (It’s possible 18-year-old A-J should have been worried about other things, sure, but this is how the story goes).

Regardless, my copy of The Corrections bears the scars of obsessive, borderline psychotic reading: highlights and underlined passages; exclamation points and YESes; check marks and squiggles (most of which have no significance to me now). As an overzealous (and, it can’t be overemphasized, really obnoxious) undergraduate I wrote a chapter of my rambling 120-page thesis (a ponderous object titled “Realistically Speaking: The Politics of the Contemporary Realist Novel”) on Franzen’s work.

I also bought a copy of The Corrections for my father one Christmas and distinctly remember telling the family it was my favorite book. I later found it on a bookcase in our living room, wedged between How to Clean Practically Anything and The Bible for Dummies, its spine un-cracked.

I started giving my mother a précis of this personal literary history, but she cut me off and asked whether she should call HBO. She added that they offered anywhere between $1,000 and $3,000 for every day they were filming. My response was something along the lines of:

“YOU HAVE TO TELL THEM THAT YOU WILL DO WHATEVER IT TAKES TO FILM THIS SHOW IN OUR HOUSE.”

The fact that our house could play a central role in The Corrections validated a long-held suspicion that our Mount Vernon abode — scene of my childhood — had something quintessentially American about it. Its “ATTACHED GARAGE,” its magnolia tree and vegetable garden, its slate walk and bay windows could stand in for Franzen’s work. He may have written a book about such a house. But I lived in that house.

[For anyone else keeping score, it’s Aronstein, unpaid freelance essayist and freshman writing teacher, 1 – Franzen, National Book Award-winning author and American literary icon, 0].

I excitedly wondered how HBO would transform my parents’ home into that of the Lamberts, the family at the heart of The Corrections. Some rooms wouldn’t need any modification at all. For example, our garage seemed ready-made for Lambert patriarch Alfred’s metallurgical lab. The production designer wouldn’t have to move anything. The boxes marked “For Yard Sale” and the 1960s-era rocking horse, the Tupperware containers packed with quilts, and the workbench populated with dusty shot glasses all fit almost too perfectly with Franzen’s vision.

Then again, how would this transformation (or lack of transformation) warp my own reading of the book? And more unnervingly, how would the depiction of my childhood home on screen, written into the scripted version of a novel I’ve read at least four times, change the way I remembered and wanted to write about my own experiences? The translation of this particular novel to the screen seemed to have more personal ramifications than those of a general conversation about the relationship between cable and novels. It had to do with my own source material for fiction — and the potential consequences of seeing what Franzen would do with the scene of my childhood.

And that idea weirded me out.

4.
The formal challenge of novels has always been to represent human experience in a way that attempts to transcend limitations of language: to create something like a shared consciousness among readers of a common text. That this shared consciousness takes place entirely in the realm of thought grants fiction its unique identity, distinguishing it from visual forms of media. What a novel leaves unsaid is often as important as what it does say, and for this reason a piece of fiction’s textual construction of narrative requires a lot of mental work on the part of authors and readers. It has less to do with the scope of a novel’s plot, and more to do with the depth of its inquiry into consciousness.

When we read, we take a mental inventory of the objects and people that inhabit our world and map them onto whatever the author offers us. No matter how meticulously an author creates an environment from words, we still find ourselves spending part of our time with a book trying to match up our own life, possessions, sensations, ideologies, misunderstandings, and relationships with imagined plots, settings, and people. We have to imagine how the sunlight glints through the magnolia tree, how a mother’s voice shouting “MEATLOAF” resonates off of light fixtures, how the wallpaper peels off the walls, how the dog howls at shadows on the ceiling during dinner. Regardless of the size of the screen or the total length of the movie/series/miniseries, visual forms of representation take away this pressure (and pleasure).

That is, in my reading of The Corrections, the Lamberts’ house has always felt and looked like my parents’ house.

What can I say? The brain is sometimes lazy. It conjures approximations of Mr. Darcy, or Daisy Buchanan, or Chip Lambert based on people we know. We try to understand a novel in the vernacular of our own experience. Our relationships condition our mental, emotional, and psychological connection with characters. And when we say that literary fiction is “character-driven,” we mean this: our private interactions with texts depend as much on the associations and imagination of the author as on the associations and imaginations of the reader. Our desire to know them — and to know them on our own terms — drives us to read.

Then again, once we see Viggo Mortensen playing Aragorn at Helm’s Deep, it’s difficult to imagine him any other way. Once Rooney Mara walks into the frame as Lisbeth Salander, all we can do is hem and haw about how her interpretation of the character either matches up with or fails to meet expectations that have been molded by books. And I worry that once Ewan McGregor puts on a midwestern accent and a pair of leather pants, I won’t be able to imagine myself as Chip Lambert ever again. Movies and television shows have the uncanny ability to restructure the way that we read novels because they gives us definitive answers about how to see them. When we say that movies fail to live up to expectations created by novels, it’s not just because they don’t comport with our individual imaginings of how the world of a novel is supposed to look. It’s because they rob us of the sense that we have a claim to a private interpretation.

Or more simply: even if I had always imagined our house standing in for the Lamberts’ house, I didn’t want the television to tell me that our house had to be the Lamberts’ house.

What makes novels unique when compared with television has little to do with having enough room to explore certain plotlines in a more detail. What distinguishes them from (even the best, most tasteful, best-acted and directed) television arises from the form of textual engagement itself. Serial dramas on premium cable might in some ways be able to increase the size of the canvas available to fiction writers, and certainly expand the reach of their work. They might demand more mental work than forms like the sitcom. But a novel like The Corrections can seem limitless to readers precisely because it leaves meanings open, leaves parts of characters’ lives only implicitly explored, allows readers to fill in the blanks.

It’s these blanks that I’m worried The Corrections on HBO will fill in.

5.
A representative from HBO came to my parents’ place. After walking around for about 30 minutes, he told them that the house was the right period, but likely too small. To film the scenes properly, they would need a lot more room for the cameras and crew.

It was likely the kind of house that they wanted, but they couldn’t film it effectively.

And, I think, it’s just as well. I’d like to write about that house one day.

Photo courtesy the author.