At Five Books, the Stockholm-based spy novelist Jeremey Duns offers a fascinating survey of some compelling thrillers from the Cold War era, including Yulian Semyonov’s Seventeen Moments of Spring, a Russian genre classic featuring the exploits of Maksim Esaev, a Soviet rival to James Bond; and Noel Behn's “unbelievably bleak” The Kremlin Letter, which was adapted into a 1970 film directed by John Huston, with a cast that included Orson Welles and Max von Sydow.
Over at The Millions site, Garth Risk Hallberg administers a comprehensive whipping of criticism's most notorious pleasure-killing machine, B.R. Myers, author of A Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American LIterary Culture and The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters. Myers may be a skilled interpreter of North Korean political culture, but he’s a one-man North Korea of literary sensibility. His primary bête noire is anything he deems postmodernist, and he beats on it like Camille Paglia humping a Madonna mannequin. You can discern both the style of his wooden invidiousness and the substance of his captious manifesto in a sample sentence like this one: “I would also rather join the reactionaries than those who want to reduce the printed sentence to an elongated Rorschach blot.” The only thing I regret about Hallberg’s counterstrike is his pinning it largely on a defense of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom against the perfidy of Myers’ recent review in the Atlantic; you don’t have to love the Franzen to have the Myers make your skin crawl. It's not really about the targets that Myers chooses (Annie Proulx, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLilo, Denis Johnson, Toni Morrison, Jonathan Safran Foer), the narrow shelf of writers he's admired (John le Carré, and no one else I can recall at the moment), or the crabbed virtues he dimly champions. His disapprobation and praise amount to the same thing, a vivid instance of the malady that Samuel Johnson called “the general conspiracy against contemporary merit.”
Photograph of B.R. Myers courtesy of Seoul Rotary Club
As the last wisps of Zozobra (the idol of gloom we burn every September) drift away, on the verge of diving into another eventful Santa Fe autumn ahead, it might be a fit moment to briefly take note of our city’s paramount 21st-century literary non-event: the presence among us of our neighbor somewhere out toward Tesuque, the great Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist Cormac McCarthy.
You’re not likely ever to see McCarthy onstage at the Lannan Readings & Conversations series, or signing a new novel at Collected Works or Garcia Street Books. Apart from rare interviews (and the gigantic exception that proved the rule of an Oprah appearance, shot at the Santa Fe Institute, where he likes to hang his hat and punch the clock), he eschews entirely the literary self-marketing and schmoozing that is the lot of every author this side of Salinger and Pynchon. Sightings provide occasional fodder en el mitote, both printed and word-of-mouth. How cool is it to live where you might catch a glimpse of this credible contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature—a guy who sat down in front at the Oscars with his young son, John, when No Country for Old Men won Best Picture in 2008—ambling down the aisle at Albertson’s or Home Depot? Meanwhile, it seems a modest point of pride for us that Santa Fe is a place that respects the privacy of McCarthy and his family, respects his choice to sidestep the flak a public figure often faces. If he doesn’t want to be a big deal in our midst, Santa Fe doesn’t have a problem with that. Yet I suspect I’m not alone in thinking that mere proximity, and knowing that literary history, reportedly a new novel set in New Orleans around 1980, is taking shape up the road, shines a glint of reflected glory on the least of us.
Outside the circle of a quiet life in Santa Fe, Cormac McCarthy’s reputation and influence grow. Tommy Lee Jones has directed and stars (with Samuel L. Jackson) in a film of McCarthy’s 2006 play, Sunset Limited, airing on HBO in February. (The West Coast stage premiere of the play is opening now in San Francisco.) Movie versions by A-list directors of both Blood Meridian and Cities of the Plain are being planned. Over in Texas, not far from where McCarthy lived before moving to New Mexico, Texas State University in San Marcos is opening its inaugural exhibit of selections from McCarthy’s papers in the Witliff Collections at Alkek Library.
But McCarthy himself, like many other Santa Fe artists and writers, is probably not very far away right now, working. As he recently told the Wall Street Journal, "I hear people talking about going on a vacation or something and I think, what is that about? I have no desire to go on a trip. My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That's heaven. That's gold and anything else is just a waste of time."
Illustration by David Levine via the New York Review of Books
The title of this post is from a Harold Bloom essay on Blood Meridian.
[cross-posted at Santa Fe Literary News]
The latest novel by the British writer and conceptual artist Tom McCarthy, short-listed for the Booker Man Prize, is out today in the U.S. (I like the U.K. cover design, above, much more than the groovier-looking Knopf design). I'm looking forward to finding out if it's something more than the most skillful pastiche of Pynchon ever committed to paper, which is what Jenny Turner’s review in the LRB made it sound like:
Through Serge’s eyes, the Royal Flying Corps is basically a death cult and all the more glorious for it, with the height, the explosions, the machinery, the proximity of death: ‘I liked it a lot,’ he says, after his first trip airborne. ‘It was just right … just how things should be.’ From the air, he can see the world as ideally flat, map-like,
a mandala of small roads and pathways, at least half of them unusable, criss-crossing and looping over open ground; then rows of empty trenches – last month’s, or last year’s, the year before’s; more open ground; more tracks … a mesh of interlocking trenches … The pockmarked village, road and woods.
It’s in the war, in short, that Serge finds himself, his vocation, as a necronaut, surfing death, reading Hölderlin, popping heroin, wearing a pair of women’s silk stockings over his face: a Modernist who is also ancient, a beautiful being who is also absurd, a creature of technology who also worships at the oldest shrines. ‘Serge feels an almost sacred tingling, as though he himself had become godlike, elevated by machinery and signal code to a higher post within the overall structure of things.’ Euphoric, exalted, off his face, he doesn’t think he’s killing people but ‘quickening … bringing to life’; he dreams of ‘the idea that his flesh could melt and fuse with the machine parts’, ‘like the Eiffel Tower, a pylon animating the whole world’.
Pynchon's reputation has undergone a palpable deflation in recent years, but to borrow from Flannery O’Connor, nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Long Island Limited is roaring down.
