In this week’s installment of 6 Books, Deb Olin Unferth, author of the brilliant, laconic memoir

To After That (Toaf) by Renee Gladman

It’s a book dedicated to a book she has written: what is a cooler premise than that?

Parrots for Dummies by Nikki Moustaki

Yes, from the Dummies series, a simple how-to book: feeding, cleaning the cage, etc., but stay with me here. I found the book very moving. Her portrait of the parrot is of a tragic figure in a cage—it feels almost Kafkaesque. She captures the personality of the parrot as a beautiful, complex, panicky person who you’d do anything for in hopes that it’ll fall in love with you. And there’s also the sadness of the author, who you can tell is struggling: she has to write about clipping, though she mostly hates it. She has to talk about breeding though she thinks it’s a terrible idea. She includes pictures of birds flying in the Amazon—there, isn’t that beautiful? Isn’t that where they belong? They fly a hundred miles a day out there, while here they can move only a few feet. Which is better for them, do you think? she wonders.

Changing My Mind by Zadie Smith

This book has shown up on so many lists now that it’s almost like putting Consider the Lobster on this list. But I’m including it here because you know what? Zadie Smith is a badass.

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, by Gertrude Stein

This may be my favorite book of all time. This is the book that made all my short shorts possible, that made my memoir, Revolution, possible. I first read it riding a train to Chicago and I’ve never been the same. How to write about war and make it funny. How to write about furniture and make it sad.

A Giacometti Portrait, by James Lord

For Lord—who agreed to sit for a portrait for Giacometti—what initially seemed like a pleasant afternoon turned into an existential nightmare, as Lord discovered just what “finishing” a portrait meant to Giacometti.

Atlas of Remote Islands, by Judith Schalansky

How can descriptions of islands far, far away—islands that I’ll never visit, islands that the author has never visited—feel so lonely?

I bring at least five preoccupations to HTMLGiant:

1. The talk people talk in the places they be. For example Richard Price, in the interview that serves as his introduction to Three Screenplays: The Color of Money, Sea of Love, and Night and the City:

I often think of New York and night simultaneously. I think about New York in the night, and I think of it as this great urban, nocturnal ocean, in that all the characters, all the inhabitants of New York, are various forms of prey-fish or lantern-fish, you know, these strange fish that you rarely see except from these superbathyspheres. I’ll often indulge myself in secondary and tertiary characters. Look, here comes a Wang-fish! Here comes a goddamn dragon-fish. What the hell is that! All all my characters are floating in this fluid urban night, and they’re looking for things. Somebody might be looking for love, somebody might be looking for power, somebody might be looking for redemption of some kind. But basically I think of my people as floating . . . in an ink black sea, in the New York nocturnal sea.

2. Literature is a big tent. Zadie Smith said that, and I agree. I had an argument here with my buddy Chris Higgs about it. I disagree with half the things he says about literature, and I love the things he says about literature. I agree with them sometimes while I’m disagreeing. I want to hold competing and contradictory positions about things. I want to claim that fiction is fundamentally a narrative art, and I want to say who cares about the story, the character, the cause-and-effect chain? Give me sentences that sing. What good are sentences that sing if they don’t have a song to sing? What good is the lyric without the narrative? What good is it to write something a million people will read if I know it’s no good? What good is it to write the most beautiful thing in the world if I know it will find zero readers? What good is any of it when eventually the earth is going to crash into the sun? How can you read something like Jesus’ Son or Sabbath’s Theater or Pale Fire and not think that literature is the most important thing in the universe? Often I would rather watch television than read literature. Stephen King has an entire shelf on my bookcase. Sometimes for fun I reread Wallace Stevens’s “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” or T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” I like Unsaid Magazine and I also like the Missouri Review. I like sentences so syntactically twisted I’m not even sure they mean anymore except at a nonrational level. I like the clarity of John Williams and John McPhee. My favorite essayists are Rebecca Solnit and Eula Biss. I don’t mind if Lawrence Weschler always tells the same anecdotes. His anecdotes are moving and true. I went to a reading in Ann Arbor and cheered for three small press writers and bought two copies of Rachel B. Glaser’s Pee on Water. Then I went to the bar and argued that independent literature is an exercise in futility and that aspiration to “cultural relevance” is where it’s at. Then I went home and read Pee on Water like twelve times and felt the comfort of a connection to a consciousness in whose immersion I felt extraordinarily uplifted. Then I watched the replay of a college football game. Then I drank some Coca-Cola and thought about Haiti. I like to read Joshua Cohen and Tao Lin, Jonathan Franzen and Ben Marcus, Rick Moody and Dale Peck, Charles Bukowski and all the people at VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, especially Erin Belieu, and especially Black Box, her best and angriest book of poems. I like to read about sex, violence, murder, tenderness, wonder, kindness, religion, basketball, and the rhizome. I see colors when I hear music. My favorite timbre is hunter green.

3. Cartography. Like Lily Hoang, I’m in a graduate program in geography. Unlike Lily Hoang, I’ll never be a professional geographer. But I love maps and I love spatial sciences and I love human geography, and plan to post about all of them here.

4. Southern Baptists, Haiti, the Rust Belt, Palm Beach County, Christian Rock, William Faulkner, Tobacco Raising, Gay Clergymen, Sylvia Plath, East Berlin, Michael Vick, Orphanages, Colonialist Missionaries, Rabbit Killing, Retrofitted DC-3′s, Cockfights, Kidnappings for Ransom, Detroit, Civil War Era Architecture Still Standing in the United States, Nashville, Al Capone’s Secret Hideaways, My Grandfather’s Inappropriately Lewd Instructions to His Young Grandson (“If you get a fat one, flip her over”), Robots, Philip Roth, Vic Chesnutt, Rap/Country Mashups, The Reaper, the Sugar Industry in the Everglades, Crime Fiction, and the Question of Where We Begin. These are primary matters of daily-ish consideration likely to make an appearance under my byline.

5. What is “Experimental” Literature? Does it require an obsession with form, or is it a formless beast? What is its relationship to literature? Is it appropriate to generalize about it? Does it require its practitioners to be somehow “hip” or “cool” or to be in no way “hip” or “cool”? Does it require thematic transgression? Does it have to be wild? Can it be written by writers who have long been considered “traditional”? How does a reader’s relationship to the word “experimental” impact his or her evaluation of the particular piece of writing in his or her lap? Is experimentalism a desirable end in itself, or ought it serve something greater? Why do most pronouncements about experimental literature claim it to be the particular thing the pronouncer advocates? If something appears in a magazine of mass circulation, such as the New Yorker, does that automatically make it not-experimental? Why do readers of experimental literature so often eat their own once they achieve some degree of “worldly” success? Is obscurity a desirable virtue? Is failure? Is it possible to succeed? How would one know if one had? Is literature only about questions, or ought literature make a good faith effort in the direction of such matters as hypotheses, tentative answers, meaning-making? Why do old literary men so often end their careers by writing an apocalypse? Does any of this matter at all? Do any of us? Is a picture worth any number of words absent the meaning-making apparatus of words to describe or even enjoy the picture? Who gets to decide the answers to the questions? Why do we hold our opinions so strongly? How can I make money off these things so I can live a more comfortable life? Are you ashamed to speak of literature and mammon in the same sentence? Do you want purity or impurity or both or neither? Why do I so often see what I say and still not know what I mean?

Here is a tentative worldview I mean to embrace:

I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time,” he says. He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites. — Google CEO or whatever

The reconstruction of identity through the games people play with multiple identities cannot help but have an influence on society socially, politically, economically and culturally. Multiple Identities and avatars are a result of the decentralisation that has occurred from the use of the internet. — http://wiki.media-culture.org.au/index.php/Virtual_Identities

Something has happened here, someone has died. A trauma, a repetition, a death, a commentary. Remainder wants to create zinging, charged spaces, stark and pared-down, in the manner of those ancient plays it clearly admires—The Oresteia, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone. The ancients, too, trouble themselves with trauma, repetition, death, and commentary (by chorus), with the status of bodies before the law, with what on earth is to be done with the remainder. But the ancients always end in tragedy, with the indifferent facticity of the world triumphantly crushing the noble, suffering self.

Remainder ends instead in comic declension, deliberately refusing the self-mythologizing grandeur of the tragic. Fact and self persist, in comic misapprehension, circling each other in space (literally, in a hijacked plane). And it’s precisely within Remainder‘s newly revealed spaces that the opportunity for multiple allegories arises: on literary modes (How artificial is Realism?), on existence (Are we capable of genuine being?), on political discourse (What’s left of the politics of identity?), and on the law (Where do we draw our borders? What, and whom, do we exclude, and why?). — Zadie Smith

flikr (Bdiz)

In ’08 when I got a galley of Reality Hunger, it was pretty clear that the book was going to rouse a little rabble when it came out. After I read it for a grad school class, I invited David to speak on a panel discussion I was putting together and I got to speak to him a little about the book and later did an interview. David also asked me to ferry a copy of the book out to the iceberg where Zadie Smith lives to hand a copy of the book to Zadie Smith, who was teaching at my university that year. I managed to get it the book into her hands, albeit blushing heavily. (I do admire her, despite suspecting her blood might run metallic and cold.) My bet was that she was going to enjoy the manifesto, though not necessarily agree with its every platitude.

When Zadie’s strange review in The Guardian came out, I was surprised to have been mentioned in it as the “excited American writing student,” and the implication that my peers and I are dancing on the grave of the novel. (I would link to the article but it’s not up on their site anymore. Here’s something I wrote about it a while ago.) In fact, Professor Smith, I am not dancing on the grave of anything, especially not the novel.

So after reading Zadie’s essay, Lincoln Michel’s really smart review on The Rumpus and Sam Anderson’s funny but annoyed review in New York Magazine, I feel like I need to say something in Reality Hunger’s defense.

Yes, I enjoyed Reality Hunger, but it pissed me off a good deal and I found myself arguing with it. I like to think that I won some of the arguments, but I lost others. My previously held opinions were either strengthened by having to mentally defend them or changed by finding myself defenseless. In the end the work actually made me more excited about the future of the novel than ever before. To me, the book is very encouraging of the myriad possibilities of the novel. True, Shields is not so into straightforward narratives, and true, most of us still (more or less) are. But don’t let that one idea stop you from reading this book. It might make you come up with a more solid manifesto of your own.

Or, if you prefer, go ahead and fill a casket with all your dog-eared paperbacks and do the tootsie roll on the lid.

Ok….. done? Pretty good, right? I invited David to speak on a panel discussion last year and he gave me the galley to give Zadie, so I feel personally very happy that she read it because now that essay exists, which deepens my understanding of Reality Hunger. (Everyone, put your pre-orders in with a book seller you love.) However I disagreed very slightly with her perspective on the book and when David emailed me to say that her essay was on the Guardian this morning I replied to him with this:

…She assumes that enthusiasm about the book equals an act of “literary hara-kiri” and that enjoying Reality Hunger is a form of “grave-dancing.” Not at all! I read Reality Hunger as an encouragement to write a more risky, honest book, be it memoir or novel or something in between.

Also, she seems to get a little bent out of shape when thinking about your and Coetzee’s praise of “novels that don’t look like novels.” She assumes that this taste is meant to be “in some way unusual, the mark of a refined literary palate,” but I don’t think that’s what you meant at all. I think you’re just encouraging writers to bend the boundaries of the novel or story or memoir as we understand it now. She seems to believe that too, and says so in the next sentence: “But even the most conventional account of our literary “canon” reveals the history of the novel to be simultaneously a history of nonconformity.” Yes. Nonconformity. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought that Reality Hunger was encouraging more nonconformity, particularly in the realm of incorporating “nonfictional” or “true” elements or questions into the novel form. Also, when she says that “underneath some of these high-minded objections, and complementary to them, there is another, deeper, psychological motivation, about which it is more difficult to be honest,” does she think that is so contrary to what Reality Hunger advises? Because it seems to me that is exactly what your book is encouraging us toward.

In any case, I really enjoyed reading about what she thought while reading your book even if it seems she agrees with it more than she thinks. The idea of “novel-nausea” seemed to be an astute diagnosis…

Also, Hi. I’m back. It’s been a while. What did you think of the essay? Anyone else have Novel-Nausea?