Judging a Book By Its Lover

by Lauren Leto

  Transgressive

  Notable authors: Chuck Palahniuk, Dennis Cooper

  Designed to shock the reader with hyperdetailed descriptions of sex and violence. The protagonist leads a normal yet empty life that he (it tends to be a he) is able to transcend only by acting out in intensely graphic ways.

  Movie version: Serial Mom

  Modernism

  Notable authors: James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad

  Often first-person work focused on the mundane and employing a pessimistic viewpoint, colored by an anti-Romantic sentiment and a dedication to individualism.

  Movie version: Wild Strawberries

  Realism

  Notable authors: Stephen Crane, George Eliot

  Often interchangeable with the genre naturalism, realism depicts moment-to-moment reality without superfluous symbolism.

  Movie version: Before Sunrise

  Romanticism

  Notable authors: Mary Shelley, Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Exalts feelings and intuition over science and reason. For example, Hawthorne’s The Birthmark is a story about how a husband’s quest to remove his wife’s birthmark through scientific experiments eventually kills her.

  Movie version: Gattaca

  Surrealism

  Notable authors: André Breton, William S. Burroughs

  Utilizing unexpected juxtapositions to force readers to think beyond logic. An easy way to remember how surrealism combines two seemingly opposite aspects is to remember that André Breton, one of the biggest proponents of surrealism, published Anthology of Black Humor. Black humor did not exist as a phrase at the time; Breton created it as a way of describing humorous handling of taboo topics.

  Movie version: Being John Malkovich

  Postmodernism

  Notable authors: William Gaddis, Don DeLillo

  Departs from modernism by employing plural realities. A classic example would be how Joseph Heller consistently has the protagonist of Catch-22, Yossarian, remembering the death of Snowden through a series of flashbacks that occur throughout the novel before coming to a point during the actual event.

  Movie version: The Butterfly Effect

  Magical Realism

  Notable authors: Isabel Allende, Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison

  Works containing highly lyrical evocations of hybrid worlds mixing reality and fantasy.

  Movie version: Pan’s Labyrinth

  Southern Gothic

  Notable authors: William Faulkner, Barry Hannah

  Set exclusively in the American South, with very ironic and often morbid events.

  Movie version: Seraphim Falls

  Hysterical Realism

  Notable authors: Zadie Smith (ask James Wood)

  A listing of the mundane with such precision that it becomes plot.

  Movie version: Clerks

  Metafiction

  Notable authors: Italo Calvino, William Goldman

  Fiction in which the fact that it is fiction is addressed, usually as a device to tell the story of writing the book.

  Movie version: Synecdoche, New York

  The Literati

  or, Why Ernest Hemingway Once Told John Updike Literary New York Is a Bottle Full of Tapeworms Trying to Feed on Each Other.

  FOR AS LONG AS you can remember, you’ve wanted to be a writer.

  Fantasies of lounging in some dimly lit and quiet bar with men in plaid suit jackets having conversations about Proustian memories over bourbon and ice filled your mind while you sat under fluorescent lights in your high school math class.

  You arrive in the big, bright city with ambitions to live in squalor, by the light of your computer. You arrive hungry to debate the nuances between Atwood’s characters in different works, Lin’s use of quotation marks, and your own hopeful plot twists. This is the place you’ve dreamed of for debate, for discovery, for showing off the obscure tidbits of literary trivia you’ve absorbed through years of study. You are in New York City.

  Suitcase in hand. Eyes on the sky. You can’t afford to live in the city so you move to Brooklyn or Queens, or you manage to find a place in the city and you have three other roommates in an apartment designed for one (but that’s okay because everyone you’re going to learn from is doing the same, and this will tighten the bond with your new guides, the other unpublished writers).

  And you say, “I have this story,” or “I want to write for this place,” and the others smile with the knowledge of how hard you, young one, are going to get broken. “Sure, I’ve applied to those too; I’ve sent stories around as well. Good luck,” your roommate says while getting ready to go out to a bar they can’t afford. But you think you’re different. You’ve got the real fire, the inexhaustible flame, not the kind that dissipates to ennui so harsh that your peers can’t find time in their languishing days to write. It’s the red-hot, bursting-out-of-your-skin, causing-you-to-smile-on-the-street-with-sudden-inspiration sort of fire of ambition. The perfect opening to a chapter hits you as you’re waiting for the subway, and you take the long walk home instead because you’ve been hit by too much energy to sit down.

  You pick like-minded people to surround yourself with, whether it’s through a living arrangement or friends you make at work or people you were introduced to through hometown acquaintances. Why are you here? “I want to be a writer”—you’ve already messed up by exposing this vulnerability. Oh, what kind? “I have a novel I want to sell.” Do you have an agent? “No.” I might know someone. I know a lot of people in publishing. By the way, have you read such-and-such new book? “Yes! It was great!” I thought it was overly droll. “Oh.” I heard so-and-so got a book deal. “Oh! Good for them!” My friends who work at so-and-so’s publisher say the editor wants to kill so-and-so—she’s an awful writer. It’s going to be such an atrocious book. “Well, what’s it about?” It’s a memoir. She got the book deal from her blog. “Oh. Huh.” Did you really think such-and-such book was great? “No, I mean, I guess I just liked the point of view.” Oh God, that was such a gimmick. Seriously. So-and-so couldn’t resist being kitschy if his life depended on it. “Oh, sure. But I think it serves his purpose well. It’s an untrustworthy narrator; that’s why it might strike you as unauthentic.” Please! We’re going to have to teach you. There are, like, only two good authors, and that’s [insert completely esoteric author] and [insert completely obtuse author]. “Yeah, I mean, I have read a couple of so-and-so and so-and-so’s works…”

  And then you step and repeat that conversation enough times until everyone in the city has worn you down enough that you can’t possibly think anyone has any talent. And you grovel in the bottom of the bottom of the bottom of submissions, sending in story after story as your hatred for the author who got a book deal for his seemingly boring and stagnant and as-of-yet uneventful life just because he had a lot of hits on his blog for a post that was nothing more than a superficial imitation of Wallace’s metamodernism grows and grows until it scabs your brain, specifically where your ambition center is located.

  And the conversations you expected about the humor in Kafka are overshadowed by deriding Lorrie Moore’s novel or talking about how someone who works for the publishing house that Jonathan Safran Foer is published by said his next work is basically nothing more than commercial fiction, and you start to realize that literature is a social event for these people, a way of defining themselves and a way of living but not a purpose. And this realization makes your hands seize up next time you’re about to put story to paper because you write to avoid this way the world works, not to try your hand at entering this contrived pecking order.

  Until finally, one day, you give up.

  MY SOLUTION FOR ALL the young writers being discouraged to the point of giving up is simple.

  Murder the others.

  Poison their overpriced vodka and soda while they’re in the bathroom.

  Shoot them in the face when they’re asleep.

  I’m talking about the people who read only to criti
cize and who talk only to condescend. Rid our planet of them. Write your story. Send it in to one thousand publishing companies and when you’ve received enough rejection letters that you could paper your walls with them, send it out to five thousand more. Carry a stiletto knife so any person who comes within five feet of you and isn’t shouting out, “YOU MIGHT BE THE BIG BRIGHT LIGHT IN THE DIM WORLD OF AMERICAN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE!” can get stabbed in the gut. Keep cast-iron frying pans in your kitchen so you can invite your date in for a nightcap, then whack him in the head when he’s not looking if he tells you anything less than, “YOU MIGHT WRITE THE WORDS THAT SAVE US ALL.”

  To Be Read

  MY GRANDPARENTS WERE THE first people I knew who really read. In the open, glasses on, with a reading lamp lit up next to them. They had the extravagance of several bookshelves, one in the basement for business books written by men like Lee Iacocca and classics long abandoned but still beloved, like Rudyard Kipling. In their living room was a constant, revolving stack of books around a small side table; those were the books they were currently reading or about to read. Then they had a china cabinet for books on display (favorite, notable, and emotionally significant ones) or books recently finished but yet to be carried down to the basement. They’d sit and do the crossword in the morning, my grandmother arguing with my grandfather because he used a pen on it. They were the parents I desperately wanted, as so many pairs of grandparents are for kids.

  My mother spent most of her life avoiding intellect. Jumping on a plane to Italy before her high school graduation, skipping college. When we played trivia games around the house, we couldn’t ask her outright for the answers; if we tried she’d give us a patented sigh and eye-roll. It’s only when my siblings, my father, and I started debating answers with each other that she’d step in, roll her eyes again, and tell us that the prime minister of Israel is Benjamin Netanyahu, glucose is a monosaccharide, butter in French is “beurre,” and “Somethin’ Stupid” was the name of Nancy Sinatra’s duet with her father. I’ve never seen someone who so thought knowledge was useless know so much. The first time I heard “autodidact,” it was like I finally had a word for “mother.” My mother only appreciated learning from experiences. In her mind, you figure out the producer of a record because you go to the concert. You tour the Grand Canyon to find out how large it is. You try out mountain climbing to learn the names of the equipment. She read voraciously, but no one ever saw it; she’d surreptitiously sneak a book into her bedroom at night. Her reading consisted almost entirely of biographies. It’s from her that I get my love for memoirs of the relatives of famous people. Fiction was a luxury she didn’t have time for. Learning how Esther Williams met her second husband is important to understanding the world. She could dominate on crosswords, but it appeared to actually pain her to give me the answers. She would say with a sigh, “I’m no good at that,” when I held a crossword and pencil toward her. So I’d find ways around it: “There’s this really great kind of Japanese beer, hmm…I can’t seem to think of the name,” I’d say absentmindedly, hiding my crossword under the table. She’d respond, “Asahi probably, and don’t drink beer, Lauren. It’s unladylike.” I had my answer.

  My father decided to never bother to read a book, since I had such a stranglehold on the market. My book reading was something he was proud of, his pride akin to the feeling one might have toward someone being courageous in the face of adversity. To him, my reading habits made me similar to a cancer patient who doesn’t cry during chemotherapy, an amputee who learns how to run. When feeling particularly pleased with me, such as after hearing a news report of a fourteen-year-old killing a gang member, he’d grab my hand, look me in the eyes, and say, “I’m so proud of how much you read.” Unfortunately, this pride never stopped him from grabbing the book out of my hands during events such as family dinners and church. Having to put my book away during family dinners really irked me because it was just posturing, I thought. There was no real reason for paying attention—no one was around except family, who didn’t count as people. Sometimes my dad would let it slip. I’d make it through to dessert without anyone’s mentioning the open book in my lap. However, if I missed someone asking to pass the milk or a question about my school day, my father would yank the book away, saying, “This is family time.” I’d sneer at him and spend the rest of the meal limply eating, as if the forced abandonment of the fictional world had weakened me. Church was worse. I’d have to argue my case in hushed tones, pleading for my book back, knowing full well that there were no loopholes in Mass etiquette. “There’s a book right here,” he’d say, and thump the Gospel. Indeed there was—the most boring book I’d ever read.

  My grandmother saw a kindred spirit in me, giving me Bleak House by Charles Dickens from off her basement bookshelf when I was around thirteen. I think she glimpsed a John Grisham in my backpack and decided to set me right. It was the biggest book I’d owned up to that point. Sitting and reading it, I felt like I had finally arrived, an adult with a heavy hardcover. I used a bookmark—an accessory I usually deem unnecessary—despite my appreciation of folding pages. My grandfather, who passed on when I was fourteen, would always remind me to turn the light on if it were too dark while I was reading. He’d offer his oversized glasses to try on, the product of reading in too-low light, he claimed, in case I protested.

  Grandma had my mother’s sort of humbleness toward trivia and intellect, the “Oh, I don’t know that answer” response, but, unlike with my mother, it was couched in an eagerness to share her speculations at the answer. While I was in college, surrounded by a bunch of snooty political theory and constitutional democracy majors who all lived with a singular devotion in life to know everything, it was my grandma we’d call when we got stuck on a clue in the crossword. She’d merrily tell me the answer, having finished it hours before. Sometimes she’d say, “Oh, you know this,” and try to give me enough hints so I could maintain a bit of dignity by guessing correctly. Other times she’d concede that the question was a hard one and complete it for me.

  We had a unique relationship, set by the fact that neither one of us was responsible for the other. That’s the beauty of grandparents: all the fun with none of the blame. I told her my secret when I failed undergraduate precalculus for the second time, and she told me how her math teacher made her cry by accusing her of cheating after her father had shown her an easier way of doing long division. I told her when I tried smoking; she told me about how she used to go into the ladies’ bathroom during lunch at work and practice smoking until she worked herself into a coughing fit, in order to look more professional like the male lawyers where she was a secretary. I went to her after I got sick from drinking for the first time and she made me laugh with a story about her drinking too much while eating chocolate at an awkward party. For every heartbreak I had, she had a story to match it. My grandmother was an amazing storyteller; I was in love with the way she could talk. I was obsessed with her stories, making her repeat them again and again. There was a comfort in the familiarity of her stories, how she made the same face at the same beat every time she’d tell the one about finding my mother as a toddler drinking dishwasher soap, how she phrased her description of the raw-egg-and-charred-toast-scrapings-filled drink she made to induce my mother’s vomiting, and how she began to laugh before finishing when she described my mom’s asking for more instead of vomiting as hoped.

  My grandma was the light of my family’s world. My grandfather was the backbone, a manly guide to football and how not to grill chicken. A provider and a punisher, the funniest and scariest part of every anecdote about my aunts’ and uncles’ childhood adventures. But my grandma was the softness, the solace—she was who we all went to when we had confessions; she knew all of our secrets.

  Decades of smoking and an errant gene that, who knows, maybe I have as well gave my grandmother macular degeneration, a disease that slowly takes away the ability to clearly view objects right in front of you. The deteriorating eyesight blurs everythin
g you directly look at, keeping peripheral vision fairly clear. As the disease progressed in her, her ability to read easily became less and less. She used bright lights and magnifying glasses to aid her, spending more time enlarging the words than actually enjoying them.

  We helped her through surgery after surgery, fighting for her to keep the ability to read. Macular degeneration couldn’t kill you, but losing out on reading was a fate worse than death to her. The last book my grandmother read, tellingly (in hindsight), was Christopher Buckley’s Losing Mum and Pup. She was practically blind by this time; my uncle had given her a Kindle for Easter and we all sat around it after our brunch and set the options to the largest font size and highest brightness. That was the only book she bought on the device.

  She lived for a year without the ability to read, a year spent in various hospitals, with cancer eating away at her bones. My grandma’s cancer was slow and painful, a kind of death no one should endure. Particularly not people who light up their family’s world.

  After she died, I took the books from her “to be read” stack, a stack untouched since she left her home for the hospital. I dutifully read through them all and afterward placed each one on my bookshelf for books I want to display.

  AFTERWORD

  Why We Talk About It

  YOU’RE AT A DINNER party and suddenly everyone delves into Twain. You sense the group is transformed by an instant connection, forged by the tradition of required reading in high school American literature classes. You can’t help but weigh in with your own opinion on Tom Sawyer’s funeral. In a more exasperating example of this phenomenon, two million reviews sprout up almost instantly every time a big-name contemporary author releases a book. Not many can stop themselves from saying something on the subject. But why?