I like McSweeney‘s.
This may come as a surprise, because I don’t wear tight jeans. And even though I have thick-framed glasses, it’s because I’m near-legally-blind, so if I had puny little wire-frames the lenses would stick out like half an inch, and I’d be all self-conscious about it. You can call my tortoiseshell frames trendy, even pretentious, but the fact is I need them, and that they look so good on me is purely incidental, a symptom of my otherwise-already-fantastic features. (I’ve been led to believe, maybe because of the movie Juno, that McSweeney’s readers are prone to tight denim and unnecessarily thick spectacle frames. Greasy hair and a moth-eaten scarf might round out the picture. A plaid wool skirt over the tight jeans, for the ladies. Hipsters, if you will. Dirty, dirty hipsters.)
I like Mcsweeney’s. More so than my sartorial infractions, this may surprise you because I also like n + 1.
For the uninitiated, n +1 is a powerful little literary/sociological journal printed twice yearly, updated online frequently. Occasionally its editors will get some attention for, among other things, doing a little bash work on McSwy’s.
The latest barb came in last Sunday’s New York Times, in an article about Keith Gessen, whose book All the Sad Young Literary Men just came out. It was a paraphrase, and only half a sentence long, but biting nonetheless:
"As a founding editor of n +1… Mr. Gessen and his colleagues have assailed other publications they believe have squandered their eminence, or never merited it (McSweeney’s and anything else associated with the writer Dave Eggers)."
Here is a bit of extrapolation, taken from an interview Keith Gessen did with the New York Inquirer:
"When [n +1] launched, it seemed like [McSwy’s] were the ideal representatives of a certain kind of literary position, which states that 1) reading, in any form, is good, that writing is good, that literature is good; 2) all these things are imperiled, and therefore 3) that anything done in the service of these things is good. We disagree with all three parts of that, even #2. And we’ve said so a number of times."
And finally, an excerpt from the piece that started it all, from a July 2004 post in n + 1.
"As far as content goes, though, the innovation of the Eggersards [followers of Dave Eggers] was their creation of a regressive avant-garde. The first regression was ethical. Eggersards returned to the claims of childhood. Transcendence would not figure in their thought. Intellect did not interest them, but kids did. Childhood is still their leitmotif.
… Eggers’s subject reflected the Eggersards’ obsession with childhood as a way of life. From raising a child as the treasure house of one’s own moral genius (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius), to the editorship of anthologies for teens (Best American Nonrequired Reading), to a writing-tutor program (826 Valencia) — this is the substitute for transcendence in the Eggersard world."
I’m not sure I’m smart enough to dismantle everything above…
But here goes:
Attacking the first attack — that McSwy’s doesn’t deserve literary merit — I’m just going to list some of their contributors:
Denis Johnson
Joyce Carol Oates
Nathan Englander
TC Boyle
Ann Beattie
Chris Adrian
Michael Chabon
Javier Marias
Sarah Vowell
David Foster Wallace
(And more!)
There are a couple of Pulitzers in there, among other awards. Not that prizes automatically entail merit, but there are legitimate critics out there who will argue on behalf of everyone on that list. (And I will too.)
I think the worst you can say is that at times McSwy’s seems more concerned with form than with content. Some of the story structures are a little too cute, but really you get that with any lit mag.
Second:
Gessen’s arguments from the Inquirer interview appear to make a lot of assumptions about McSwy’s intentions. I’m looking for a mission statement on the McSwy’s website, but can’t find one. All I know is that the 826 programs, which are set up to tutor English and writing to under-funded and inner-city youth, are good. One might attack 826 on philosophical and psychological terms, but at the end of the day, it’s a damn good organization doing damn good things.
Finally:
At root, it seems n + 1 is arguing that the McSwy’s crew is not serious enough about their writing, because they look to their childhoods for substance and content instead of culling meaning from the world we live in presently.
Gessen and others are assertive, and even persuasive. I, too, believe that the best literature out there is more expansive than a fictionalized memoir — the characters of Tolstoy and Fitzgerald and Flaubert are all products of the societies they inhabit; their novels aren’t about personal stories, but about whole cultures.
But, sentimental as it may be, to say that A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius didn’t get inside of the Generation X-Y culture is, I think, a bit shortsighted. "Eggers’ subject reflected the Eggersards’ obsession with childhood as a way of life" — I think Gessen is making the Eggersards a bit too niche.
I would argue that, to an extent, everyone these days has an obsession with childhood as a way of life. Which would therefore bring AHWOSG into the realm of ‘serious’ literature, indicative of the larger world. Just like every reviewer said it was when it came out eight years ago.
On a personal level, for whatever reason — for various reasons — probably a dozen of my friends’ parents have gotten divorced in the last five years. And with each break-up, it really seems sometimes, from my unsophisticated vantage point, that upon divorce some adults immediately revert to their childhood selves. One friend’s mom moved to New York and began dating twenty-four-year-olds (after a twenty-eight-year-long marriage). One friend’s dad has started going regularly to eighteen-plus shows at First Ave, and frequenting the college bars he went to as a student at the U. Really I could give a thousand examples, but what they all indicate is a societal obsession with childhood. I’m not going to get into the media’s infatuation with youth culture and all that, but it’s there.
Eggers’ novel is a personal story, but his own character is a function of his encapsulating society.
Benjamin Kunkel, another founding editor of n + 1, published his first novel a couple years ago — Indecision. Its protagonist, the delightful Dwight Wilmerding, isn’t very different from Dave Eggers’ character in AHWOSG. Wilmerding is petty, childish, and irresponsible. Maybe the only difference from Eggers is his belief in transcendence, his belief that he’s better than his circumstances — but when he actually tries to escape his life, that’s when the book is at its least convincing, even bordering on manifesto.
A medley:
How about some Important books based on loose childhood biography? Death in the Family, by James Agee; Call it Sleep, by Henry Roth; The Catcher in the Rye; Swann’s Way; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Am I missing somet
hing here? I must be missing something here. I’m not saying Eggers is on the level of Proust or Joyce, but if they’re allowed to examine their childhoods, why can’t Mr. Eggers? Is it a matter of intellectual analysis? Of storytelling?
If nothing else, Eggers and his pals are making literature enjoyable for the non-reader. One can pick up an issue of McSweeney’s and not have to have read hundreds of other books to catch the references therein. n + 1 has some ambitious goals for its fiction, but the fact is they need publications like McSwy’s just to establish some ground-level interest in reading, to make n + 1 accessible — possibly even relevant — at all.
Squash the beef!
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