The Memoir/Novel Debate, Revisited (in 2003)

Just revisited an essay by Katie Roiphe from three years ago which contains some interesting musings on the recent novel/memoir brouhaha.  Roiphe begins with the debate over the possibility that Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved contains autobiographical elements, and discusses the history of this in literature.  She goes on to make a series of points that seem ever-so-slightly more relevant now:

Now it seems an actual confusion between the writer's life and the book has become more and more widespread. ...  It may be that the profusion of memoirs in the late 1990s has caused reviewers to forget that there are books out there that aren't memoirs. But if a writer chooses to call her book fiction, surely the distinction should be honored. The genre does not exist as a convenient shelving system for bookstores: It means that the words on the page are, by the writer's own admission, at least part fantasy.

Houellebecq

If you're a reader of Michel Houellebecq's work, this London Review of Books article -- reviewing his latest novel and a biography of him -- is pretty much essential.

His observations, bracing at first, seem specious and grating when repeated, in almost identical form, in novel after novel. It's frequently obvious that he is simply dressing up his personal obsessions as something more significant, or cannily repackaging popular prejudices as grand philosophical positions. On the evidence of The Possibility of an Island, his latest novel, he would be the first to admit all this.

Amazon lists a May 26, 2006 release date stateside for said novel, for what it's worth.

Subjects

Finished Sam Lipsyte's The Subject Steve earlier this week.  I'd read his novel Home Land a few months earlier, and seen him do a reading at Pete's Candy Store a few months before that.  It would be tempting, at first, to write Lipsyte's work off as cynical/misanthropic dark comedy -- the sort of criticism I have of a lot of Daniel Clowes's work, for instance.  While Lipsyte does put his characters through hell -- the protagonist of The Subject Steve learns that he's dying as the novel begins, and things get worse from there -- the possiblity of some form of redemption always exists.

That said, Lipsyte's work is often darkly funny, and some of the humor is indeed cringeworthy.  Many of his characters exhibit contempt and compassion in equal measure, and his novels can be as emotionally bruising as they are spot-on funny. 

And he knows the Garden State well, which is hard to argue with...

The Word "Chutzpah" Comes to Mind

The Times has an update on the JT Leroy case, which includes the following.

Mr. Knoop, whose 25-year-old half sister Savannah Knoop was unmasked by The New York Times last month as the public face of JT Leroy, said that he had come forward out of concern for his son, family members and others affected by what he called an all-consuming web of deceit...

Mr. Knoop has hired a Los Angeles entertainment lawyer and said that he hopes to sell a movie about his experience.

 ....yeah.

Centralization

Last night, I finished William T. Vollmann's Europe Central.  This would be the fifth book of Vollmann's I've finished; none of them has been an easy read, as Vollmann is not one to shy away from the ugliness and horror summoned up by the morally wracked situations in which he places his characters.  Nonetheless, Vollmann's willingness to grapple with these situations -- and the hallucinatory quality of much of his prose -- makes him a writer (for my money, at least) impossible to ignore. 

Europe Central is set in Germany and the Soviet Union in the years before, after, and during World War Two, and unsparingly depicts the conditions of living under equally horrifying regimes.  The best that his characters can aspire to is the status of tragic hero, and the mood that he summons up at the novel's opening is never dispersed.  (Only one character shows up who isn't implicated in some way in the crimes of either regime -- the American pianist Van Cliburn -- and he only appears for a handful of pages, inscrutable, leaving the Soviet characters uncertain as to how to react.)

...and, now that I've finished it, I can finally let myself read this article on the author, which focuses on the novel in question.