This is a piece I wrote about my experience visiting the Brooklyn Book Festival in 2009. I am reposting it now because the Brooklyn Book Festival 2023 is quickly approaching, and this piece gives a fascinating look back at the literary world fourteen years ago. Some of the people mentioned in the piece have gone on to become superstars, some have had dramatic reputation re-evaluations, some have since passed away, and some are still writing away, doing the work. Some of the cultural and media insights mentioned here are also of interest with the benefit of hindsight. I hope you enjoy!
Downtown Brooklyn’s Court Square feels like a college campus on a sunny summer day. That’s where they hold the annual Brooklyn Book Festival, and yesterday I attended the fourth. Here’s how it works: there are nine stages, four of them are indoors, and require tickets. These can be picked up at one of the two outdoor ticket tents starting an hour before the event begins. The other stages are outdoors, and don’t require tickets. All of the events are free. They begin at 10 AM and go through 5 PM, each lasting about an hour. This limits the amount of events you can see, but it also makes it so everyone can be occupied most of the day, if they want to be.
My day began at 10 AM with a panel on the legacies of writers John Updike and David Foster Wallace. (a ticketed event in the courthouse.) The panel included Lev Grossman, Laura Miller and David Lipsky, moderated by David Ulin. It’s a lopsided panel, so it was a somewhat lopsided discussion: Laura Miller admitted she’s never actually read an Updike novel, she could never get through one; Lipsky is writing a book on David Foster Wallace, and so is probably more an authority on Wallace than Updike, and Grossman admitted that he had a leaning towards Wallace because they were of the same generation. All of which is fine and good, but since I also know Wallace better than Updike, it would have been refreshing to see someone who really knew their Updike and sympathized with him as a writer up there too. Don’t tell me they couldn’t find one. The glut of material about Updike that’s appeared since his death has been overwhelming. Library of America officially canonized him for Christ’s sake; there have to be writers or scholars or enthusiasts out there they could have found.
All the same, it was an interesting discussion. The discussion centered around whether DFW and Updike’s legacies lie in their non-fiction more than their fiction, if DFW attacking Updike, Roth and Mailer as the great white male narcissists was simply an example of takes-one-to-know-one, whether DFW’s oversized books (his unfinished work is supposed to clock in at 500,000 words) was just a fad of the 90’s and how well their work dates. Opinions on these issues were all over the map with the panelists; one thing I did like was Lev Grossman’s assertion that DFW was the first writer to write in the headvoice of his generation, in the way Salinger or Hemingway wrote in the headvoice of their generations. I felt the same thing reading him, but I read him right after college – and since my education was strictly classical, ending with the late 19th century, I take my opinion with a grain of salt on this matter. Later on, when I read McInerney or even Henry Miller, I think I recognized my headvoice in their work too; maybe not. DFW was hyper-intellectual in a way those writers aren’t; before DFW I probably would have said Proust came closest to my headvoice, so maybe I can think of DFW like a Proust meets Henry Miller. Ha!
As for Updike, like I said, I wish he got more representation. I took away from the discussion that Updike’s best novels were the Rabbit novels (heard that before already anyway) – that he’s a virtuosic writer (heard that too) – and that he talked about things in his books that no one talked about in American popular culture. I’ll have to take their word for that, as I wasn’t around when he first started writing. What I did find interesting was Lipsky’s argument that books don’t date in the way that film or television dates. A book from the 19th century about the 19th century can still feel vital; movies from the 30’s and 40’s feel dated already. That’s true and not true, and too general a statement to stand as an argument. Too many people still think Gone With the Wind is a masterpiece (I think it’s garbage, personally – talk about dated!) – and certain writers, like Thackeray, are just not interesting to your contemporary reader unless they’re in Academia.
During the Q & A period, a 20-something Asian lady with a thick Italian accent stood up. She turned out to be the Italian translator of DFW’s works. She talked about how important he was to young Italian readers; did the Kurt Cobain compare and everything. That was really fascinating. Her question for the panelists was why they thought he got such a reaction from foreign readers, but I think she was more making a point than asking a question.
I ducked outside and grabbed tickets for the next event in the courthouse right at the end of the discussion. This was Paula Fox, Steven Millhauser, Bradford Morrow and Roxana Robinson giving readings from their work, moderated by Harold Augenbraum. The topic was “The Limits of Fiction” – how far can a writer tests a reader’s patience with suspension of disbelief. I attended this one mostly for Millhauser, whose work I’ve admired for a while. He just gets better over the years, taking seemingly normal stories and stretching them into surrealist fiction. Paula Fox started first, but she didn’t read anything. She simply related an anecdote about her youth, going to Columbia. I’d like to say more about it, but I kinda lunched out for a while. (it happens) Steven Millhauser read next. He read a passage from his novel Martin Dressler. It was well written – very rhythmic and descriptive writing about going from Manhattan to Brooklyn in the late 19th century, before the bridges were built. It felt very Saul Bellows, the prose style, but I’m not sure how it related to the theme, except that he was writing about someone much different than himself. After that he read a (non)poem called “He Takes, She Takes” – a rhythmic piece about the division of material in a breakup. It was light and funny, and almost “music” as the next reader, Bradfard Morrow called it. Morrow read from the opening of his newest book (I think) – which began, “All wars begin with music” – and went into a story from the perspective of a young Asian girl who loses her father in a war, and her relationship with music, war and death. Very Proustian stuff. Up until this point most of the writing had been really writerly: you know that feeling you get, when someone switches from talking about stuff to “reading” – no one would talk like this, you think, but everyone (tries) to write like it. I don’t know how I feel about this kind of writing. I do enough of it, Lord knows, but I feel like writerly writing comes off as inauthentic when it’s read aloud. Even compared to stagey slam stuff. Unless there’s a music to the language that can take the place of the material, I’d rather just hear a voice if you’re a writer trying to inhabit a character; not a writer. Roxana Robinson managed to avoid that. She read from her novel, “Cost,” and she read from the perspective of a 22 year old junkie. I was skeptical; what could this late-middle-aged lady know about the desperation of a 22 year old heroin addict? Well, turns out she nailed it. It was by far the most gripping reading of the panel. The language was fresh, sharp, and felt real, the way the Wire feels real. I’ve never heard of Robinson before, but she managed to interest me in her work with her reading.
At noon I walked down the block to St. Francis College, where Tao-Lin, Yona Zeldis McDonough, Ben Marcus and Nicholson Baker were giving readings about the Surreal Real. I got there halfway into Tao-Lin’s reading. He was very shy and awkward as a reader; completely monotone, almost like his prose bored him, a young guy. I can’t say much about the work itself, because I missed the first half of it – seemed to be a story about two student writers chatting on GMail. I’m not really sure. But he published his stories on a blog, a publisher (Meliville House) came across it, asked him for more, and published a book of the kid’s stories. So one wonders about literature: what’s the difference between writing to be read aloud, and writing to be read on the page; can the two be separated, is language aspires in some sense to music? I don’t know. Tao-Lin was just a bad performer all around. He even answered his questions in monotone, and I don’t know if that was his normal way, nervousness or an affectation.
McDonough read about an ATM machine that kept giving money, another writer I kinda lunched out on. It was refreshing to hear her read like a professional, though, after Tao-Lin’s performance. She was followed by Nicholson Baker, who easily gave the best reading of the panel. He prefaced his reading describing how he wrote this (his latest) book. The book is about a poet who sits around the house ruminating on poetry, and Baker (who has a Santa Claus beard already) said he grew his beard out larger than usual, sat around the house, at the bottom of the stairs, in the study, wherever, recording himself becoming Paul Chowder (the narrator of his novel). His reading reflected how comfortable in the character. His first reading was about meeting Edgar Allen Poe in a laundromat, the second about how he slept with his books. Nothing happened in any of them. It doesn’t matter. I probably could have listened to him read the whole damn novel, it was that interesting and entertaining.
Ben Marcus read last. I expected something a little more experimental from him, but I was disappointed by what felt like just another commonplace opening to a domestic novel. I probably missed something, but I expected a lot from Marcus- (I wanted to study under him at Columbia for a while) but I don’t know if it was reading style, me being a space cadet or what, I wasn’t impressed with it. This may be just me, too, but it seemed like all the panelists looked nonplussed by all the other readers here. Marcus is especially funny looking, with big black frame glasses, a bald head, and something like an overall Devo-esque thing going on. Heh.
At one o’clock I wandered around a bit, enjoying some time outside, until I ended up listening to the second half of a half-hour panel about Washington Irving’s Diedrich Knickerbocker, fictional historian of New York. This was given by Philip Lopate and Elizabeth Bradley, but I wasn’t there long enough to take anything in. I realized that I was missing Colson Whitehead reading in the courtroom, so I left just before it ended, hurried across campus – er, the plaza, grabbed a ticket for the courtroom and walked in halfway through a panel of readings by Matthew Aaron Goodman, H.M. Naqvi, Achy Obejas and of course, Colson Whitehead. They were reading works that emphasized how cultural enclaves define and challenge writers. I walked in in the middle of Naqvi’s reading – a young, serious middle eastern man whose prose sounded fantastic. Too bad I missed too much of it to say anything more about it. I missed Goodman’s reading altogether. Achy Obejas read about children in Cuba during a crucial historical moment for the country and characters, and Whitehead read from Sag Harbor, his new novel about going to Sag Harbor as a kid. Whitehead was the most dynamic of the readers. He actually got up, walked up to the podium and put a little (not much) performance into his reading – just hand gestures, asides, etc… It really made the reading come alive, but I felt it was unfair to the other, lesser known writers. Or maybe they should have thought of doing that themselves. I don’t know. Most disappointing was there was no discussion and no moderator, as far as I could tell. After having just gone through an exhaustive research project into the Harlem Renaissance, and its aftermath, I was hoping for some of the writers to give their thoughts on how ethnic writers felt about the disputes that had raged on all through the last century: what is it to be an (ethnic) writer – can you be a writer first, and your ethnicity second, can the two be separated? How do you reconcile these problems in your fiction? Alas, nothing of the sort.
Around 2 PM I thought to head over to the youth center and hear Ned Vizzini read. I used to email with him a bit, and met him once at a reading at KGB where I called out New York oddball Christopher X Brodeur – another story for another time – so I figured I’d show some love and say what up. On the way I got sidetracked by the writers on the International Stage in the middle of the plaza. They were fascinating: David Lida, Meera Nair, Hirsha Sawhney and Cheryl Harris Sharman were discussing “Urban Realism and the Global City.” I came in as David Lida was telling a story about how he was “cabnapped” in New York in the 80’s. That’s when someone carjacks you and the cabbie and drives you around making you take money out of ATMs. Doesn’t happen much anymore, but apparently there were a rash of them back then. The International Stage was outdoors, and being in the center of the plaza was highly trafficked. There was nowhere left to sit, so I stood and listened to the panelists have a free-form conversation about the differences between writing fiction & non-fiction, writing for newspapers and publishing with indie-publishers, and general pop-culture topics. Hirsha Sawhney talked about a piece he wrote for a paper which remained unnamed (but was obviously the New York Times) concerning a film he had a lot of problems with (don’t remember what the film was – something I’d never heard of). He was paid $1.50 a word for it, got a great report back on it from the publisher, only to find weeks later the legal department had a lot of problems with it, and spent $10,000 in legal fees cutting the piece. The piece bounced back and forth between the legal department and the editor for the better part of a year before being killed altogether. Then Cheryl Harris Sharman asked him about a piece he wrote on Slumdog Millionaire. “Well okay,” he asked the crowd. “Who here’s seen it?” A group of folks raised their hands. (not me – I still haven’t seen it) Then he asked, “who liked it?” Almost everyone who’d seen it raised their hands again. “Well, okay,” he said again, “I thought it was an enjoyable piece of commercial entertainment too, but I have serious problems with the subtext,” which he described as such: why, in 2008/2009 would the West take so highly to a film about an Indian kid who works for a call center (from the West), goes on a gameshow (an import from the West), and goes on to live this great life because of it? Because Indians live awful lives, and isn’t the West great for offering them these opportunities for a better life. It’s a movie, he argued, that superficially makes us feel good about ourselves without really grappling with any of the real issues facing India today. It was an interesting perspective on a film I haven’t heard much negative criticism about.
I’d picked up tickets for the St. Francis Auditorium at 3 PM. Paul Auster, Francine Prose and Russell Banks were all reading in a panel with the cringe-inducing name “Literary Masters.” Still, it featured three strong writers I looked forward to hear read, Banks being the only one I wasn’t that familiar with already. Paul Auster read first, and he read the first several pages from his new novel “Invisible.” It’s to be released in six weeks. Paul Auster reads in a very measured, paced way, like a grandfather reading to a child before bed. The story was about a young poet who meets a couple hipster existentialists traveling Europe. It was interesting, but by the end I wondered where he was going with his novel. His reading voice nearly soothed me to sleep, too. All the same, I look forward to picking up his new book when it comes out. Francine Prose read next. She said she wanted to read from her unreleased book on Anne Frank, but her publisher told her not to read from something currently unavailable, which got a little chuckle from Paul Auster, who’d done just that. Instead Prose read from her novel “Goldengrove”. The prose was really gorgeous, poetic even, and since I’ve only read Prose’s essays, made me think I should check out her fiction. Still, I needed a jolt of caffeine with a reading after sitting through Auster’s austere reading voice, and Prose’s lush prose. Russell Banks came through with that. He was the only reader of the day to read a self-contained short story. Banks is an older man, with a thick Boston brogue, and the story starts with him and some buddies leaving the theater. The narrator still has some black grease on his face from doing a play on the Mason, playing an Arab character, and within the first few minutes, Banks drops an n-bomb: “My friends were joking with me about what a great nigger I made.” – which made Paul Auster, who’d been leaning forward in his seat, shoot bolt upright immediately. Banks certainly had the attention of the auditorium at that point. The story was about meeting an old love at a bar – the narrator now in his fifties, the old love in her eighties. It was a strange, strangely beautiful story, completely honest to the voice of its narrator, and read like a man telling you a tale in a bar. It was surprising: the reader I cared the least about gave the most interesting reading of the panel.
At 4 PM I checked out a discussion in the Courthouse Community Room about “Independent Media Voices.” The panel included Amy Goodman from Democracy Now!, Pamela Newkirk, Dennis Loy Johnson, Melville House publisher and Richard Nash, Soft Skull publisher. They were discussing the place of independent and amateur media in our technologically changing world. Newkirk worried that the glut of bloggers that had popped up weren’t doing much real journalism, simply spouting opinions. She was also concerned that media was being balkanized – the new bloggers simply write to the converted instead of focusing on getting under-reported information out there to the general public. Goodman talked about holding the mainstream media accountable for their growing laziness, sloppiness, and catering to the status quo. Johnson and Nash discussed the future of book-reading in the future, and Nash expressed his sincere enthusiasm about where we’re headed. He said we’re on the cusp of a publishing revolution that will be like nothing we’ve seen before it, and he couldn’t hide his enthusiasm for the future.
The last panel I attended, at 5 PM, was an open conversation between Mary Gaitskill and Jonathan Lethem. The moderator, Greg Cowles, launched the conversation with a discussion about an article by Ben Michaels (I think, Gaitskill kept changing his name when she referred to him) in BookForum. Michaels attacked literary fiction for not paying attention to economic realities in contemporary life, and since this was something both Gaitskill and Lethem did do, Cowles wondered what they thought of that article. Both dismissed the article for telling authors what they should write about, (as did Cowles) but Lethem said he sympathized somewhat with Michaels’ concerns that there were some things literary fiction didn’t talk about – and things that should be talked about, because literature should be a medium where there’s nothing that can’t be talked about. Gaitskill bristled at the article completely. She didn’t have any sympathy for Michaels’ position whatsoever. Their conversation went on to cover narrative conventions in fiction, switching between time/place (apparently Gaitskill does this nearly paragraph to paragraph in her book Veronica, which I haven’t read), literary influences, media’s influence on fiction, footnotes in fiction and generational differences between authors. Gaitskill said she’s been reading Haruki Murakami and Orham Pamuk, while Lethem said he finds it harder to find new authors that inhabit his headspace like he used to, the same way it gets harder to make new friends as you get older. He did mention Bolano, though, as demonstrating that you can do anything you want with fiction; Bolano’s been liberating for him. More often than not, though, he reads things he missed in his youth: Balzac, for example. He also said one of his main influences as a young writer was Graham Greene, in some ways the inventor of the modern novel, because Greene structured his books with the influence of cinema. Concerning footnotes, Gaitskill made the astute observation that mostly humorous authors use footnotes; there’s a sort of dry humor to them that gives the writer license to take the reader out of the story. An interesting way to end an even that began with a discussion of David Foster Wallace, a footnote fanatic, who, while funny, is to some extent problematic for Gaitskill’s argument, since DFW’s lodestar was Dostoevsky.
And that was the day. Coming out of the last panel, I heard a young lady say that Gaitskill was “the woman she wanted to be” – a touching, understandable remark, considering Gaitskill’s wonderful stage presence on the panel. As for me, I don’t know how to sum up the whole thing. Cheryl Harris Sharman from the International Stage earlier that day complained that when you write a non-fiction piece, the editor generally wants some kind of takeaway at the end; a function fiction doesn’t have to fill. In fiction you let the reader make up her own mind — and the takeaway definitely serves its function: generally it gives the reader a punch at the end of the piece, something to think about going forward — Well, I’m with Cheryl Harris Sharman here. I’m not going to provide that.
– September 14, 2009
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